Chapter Text
He's sitting at his desk one evening, cross-referencing the historical records his researcher sent him earlier in the week, when he hears Louis’ voice slip smoothly into his mind.
Daniel?
Yeah? Daniel answers. He keeps his mental voice nonchalant, even as he feels a small spark of not at all unpleasant surprise. What’s up?
It’s not the first time they’ve spoken to each other over the past couple of weeks since Daniel first made contact, but he's usually been the one to initiate. Sometimes for something specifically vampire-related (Hey Louis, is it normal for vampires to sweat blood? Does it, uh–does it show up anywhere else??), but other times just to talk about nothing in particular, just to remind himself that Louis’ out there. That Daniel isn’t actually alone in all this.
Louis’ been obliging enough each time, calmly answering his questions about bodily fluids or telling him about the latest book he's been reading, all in that smooth, melodious voice. Honestly, he should ask Louis about recording an audiobook, if he ever finishes writing this goddamn thing. They’d make a killing.
But Louis reaching out first has happened sparingly enough that it still surprises Daniel whenever he does. A jolt, not unlike the one he'd felt when Louis held out his arm that last night in Dubai and shook Daniel’s hand—an unspoken gap, bridged.
Not much, Louis’ responding now, something light and almost amused in his tone. Before Daniel has a chance to really wonder what that’s about, he continues, It’s pretty easy to get into your apartment complex, did you know that?
And then there’s a knock on the door.
Daniel looks up. Stares. There’s no fucking way.
But when he gets up and opens the door, it turns out that yeah, actually, there is.
“Hi,” Louis says, a small half-smile on his lips, casually standing in the hallway of Daniel’s building like that isn’t an absolutely insane place for him to be.
“Hi,” Daniel responds, a little dumbly.
They stare at each other for a moment, there on the threshold; the fact that they’re seeing each other for the first time in over a month and all that's changed in that time doesn't seem to be lost on either of them.
Daniel can see the way those still unsettling green eyes rove over him curiously, taking him in—the gray hair, the lines and creases that still show his age. Vampirism’s had a weird sort of effect on his appearance. He doesn’t look different, exactly; it’s more like someone just ran a little bit of photoshop on him, or like he’s permanently got a pair of studio lights following him around. It’s like it's just made him into the most flattering version of himself.
Good, Daniel—thinks?—he hears from Louis’s mind, quiet, strangely pleased. Except, he’s not sure what Louis would even mean by that, if anything. ‘Good’ that he’s still got all his wrinkles? ‘Good’ that he doesn’t look that different from how he did when he was human? He probably imagined it.
The biggest physical change since Daniel’s turning has been to his eyes, the old green now a bright, stained glass blue, except for when they periodically shift to a kind of pale amber. Which, objectively speaking, should be sort of cool, but in practice has mostly just been a pain. Spontaneously color changing eyes aren’t exactly the kind of thing you can easily explain away; Daniel has to wear sunglasses whenever he goes out now, shades on in the middle of the night like a fucking douche. Either that or like he's going blind. Very cataract chic.
“So,” Daniel says, breaking the extended moment of silent, mutual observation. He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms. “You broke into my apartment building. Again.”
The little half smile on Louis’ face deepens. “I had Rashid do it the last time,” he says, and man, Daniel knew that guy was the one responsible. He is absolutely pumping the breaks on whatever burgeoning maybe-friendship they might have had going on after he saved his ass in Dubai. “It was actually one of your neighbors who let me in,” he continues. “Nice woman by the name of Carol? Probably in her 50s? She said she knew you.”
“It would be Carol,” Daniel mutters, rolling his eyes. He’s not particularly friendly with any of his neighbors, but he's lived here long enough to have absorbed the basics about several of them through sheer osmosis. Carol B. from downstairs is nosy as shit, and easily the most annoying person in their co-op association. You’d think that might make her less likely to let strange men into the building, but she's definitely the kind of woman to get taken in by a guy with a pretty face. And Louis’ face is beyond pretty.
Louis' head tilts, the smile on his lips tipping towards amusement now, and shit, he caught that thought, didn't he? Yeah, he definitely did. Damn.
“May I come in?” Louis asks pleasantly, instead of commenting. Daniel resists the urge to scowl, and waves him inside, closing the door behind him. Yeah, yeah, Louis’ pretty and water is wet. Whatever. This isn't news to either of them.
If Louis in the hallway was surreal, then the sight of him actually in Daniel’s apartment is full on Dalí. He watches as Louis takes in the space, eyes scanning over the large windows, the various accumulated detritus of the past decade or so and all the relics from before that. Shelves full of books and records; boxes full of old photo albums and spelling bee awards.
“You have a nice place, Daniel,” Louis says, running his fingers gently over the spines of a row of books on one of the shelves. He glances at him from over his shoulder. “Seems comfortable.”
“‘Comfortable’ feels a little like an insult coming from the guy who owns a penthouse in Dubai,” Daniel says, leaning against the arm of the couch to watch Louis’ progress through the room.
“You're welcome to take it as one, if that’s what you want,” Louis responds without missing a beat.
Daniel fights a smile and loses. “Did you just get out of New Orleans?”
“Pretty much.” His eyes linger on an old framed photo on one of the shelves, Daniel and his daughters at Coney Island, years and years ago. “Figured while I was still on this side of the Atlantic, I might as well stop by. See how you were holding up.”
“Worried about me?” Daniel asks, trying not to show how much he actually appreciates that. It's one thing for Louis to let Daniel yap at him through the mind link, another for him to actually bother going out of his way to see him.
“Maybe.” He turns and leans against the bookshelf, mirroring Daniel’s body language. Relaxed, but his eyes look him over with intent, like he’s scrutinizing Daniel for cracks. “You’ve sounded alright during our talks. But I wasn't sure if it would be the same in person.”
“Could say the same thing about you,” Daniel points out.
They look at each other from across the room and it feels, suddenly, as though the weight of those not-quite two weeks in Dubai is in the room with them too, all of the tragedy and horror, the confessions and revelations, as present as if Daniel had just walked over to his desk and pressed play on those recordings.
Daniel may objectively be the one whose life was changed most drastically by the interview—he literally fucking died—but Louis’ world was pretty seriously upended by it too. Uncovering 70 years of deception. Ending a nearly century long relationship. Telling Daniel things he’s pretty sure Louis’ never actually talked about with anyone else, let alone processed for himself. Biographer, therapist, etcetera.
There are things they both know about each other now that no one else does. It may not be the vampire bond or whatever, but. They’re connected now. Have been since goddamn San Francisco really, even if neither of them had fully remembered that until a month ago.
Louis hums, a half acknowledgement of Daniel’s words. It's not impossible to think that Louis’ been putting on a bit of a front through the mind link. A performance of well-being. Wouldn’t be the first time. For what it’s worth though, Louis looks good. Or better, anyway, than he did in Dubai. There’s something more—for lack of a better word—alive about him, more settled. Less like a living statue.
There’s something else too that Daniel doesn’t immediately place, until the moment he suddenly does: off-white chinos. A gray polo, and a navy blue jacket. No black. A little bit of color suits him.
“I was a little…concerned,” Louis says then. “That you might be different. That you might look different, perhaps.” A curious tilt of the head. “But you still look like you, more or less.”
“Vampire with a head full of grays,” Daniel comments dryly. Louis smiles.
“I don't think that’s a bad thing,” he says. And, huh. Maybe Louis really did think as much earlier, at the door, that it was good Daniel still looked his age. Proof of a life lived, or maybe of a life saved.
“Hey,” Daniel says, feeling a desire to share a piece of what they both are now with each other—the connection come full circle. “Come with me to hunt.”
Louis' eyebrows go up at that, curiosity and aversion clearly at war on his face. The curiosity seems to win out.
“Alright,” he says. “Lead the way.”
***
Louis says that he ate before he stopped by Daniel’s place, an arrangement made with a trusted contact in the city. Daniel asks whether that means some guy who runs a blood bank or some guy who lets Louis chomp on his neck whenever he’s in town. Louis smiles but doesn’t answer, the fucker. Regardless, he falls into step with Daniel as they venture out of his neighborhood, and as Daniel scans the dark alleyways and dead ends looking for a decent target.
He settles on a guy walking alone on a side street with his airpods going at full blast, distracted. Starts following him from a few feet behind. Louis casually matches his stride, like they’re just two friends headed out to a bar or a show. They pass by a deserted alley and Daniel decides to go for it then, darting forward and dragging the guy into the dark. He pins him up against the side of the building. Ignores his weak struggles and tears into him.
It's a messy kill. Daniel’s still getting used to the whole process of feeding, even a month in; he's always just a little too eager, overexcited at the first taste of blood and desperate for the next. Jonesing for it. He can keep it under control most of the time, when he’s going about his business, but as soon as he tastes blood, all bets are off.
Feeling Louis’ eyes on him as he feeds, knowing that he's being watched, doesn't help him feel any less frantic about it; by the time he's done, it looks less like the guy’s neck was bitten by a vampire and more like it was gnawed on by a dog.
“Staying under the radar?” Louis asks, eyeing the corpse on the ground with a small frown.
“Haven't had the cops knock on my door yet,” Daniel says, a little defensive, wiping his mouth. “And I clean up after myself.”
“Fair enough,” Louis says. “Seems like you’ve got it figured out.” There’s something in his tone, not quite wary, but something, that makes Daniel think he’s not just talking about managing to stay out of trouble. It has to be the killing itself—the fact that Daniel isn’t really agonizing over the morality of it. Of course it is.
Daniel opens his mouth to respond—a crack about being a growing boy who needs to eat, ready on his tongue—when he catches another quick flicker of something in Louis’ mind: the image of a man being snatched away on a damp, humid night, the air wet with the remnants of heavy rain. The brief sound of his yelp immediately cut off by the fangs ripping into his neck, the noise trailing into a low gurgle, choking on pain and blood. Brown fingers tipped with glass sharp nails digging into the man’s shoulder to hold him in place; blood welling from the indents punctured into his skin.
Daniel can’t tell when the memory is from, but something about it feels recent.
Hmm. Daniel looks at Louis—the mild expression on his face, the slight pinch between his eyebrows. Maybe his words have more to do with himself than they do Daniel.
For once, Daniel closes his mouth.
Louis, meanwhile, wanders over to the other side of the alleyway, where a couple of pigeons are picking at a stale bit of pizza crust on the pavement. He bends down and swipes one of the birds up. Bites into it. Daniel watches with mild distaste, neatly distracted from his earlier musings.
“You know, I've tried the animal thing a couple times,” he says, as Louis drinks and the pigeon squawks. “A squirrel or two here and there. Not the worst thing in the world, but I gotta say-–New York pigeon just feels like a bad idea to me, man. Like the kind of shit that'll turn you into The Fly.”
Louis wrenches his teeth out of the bird, his fangs covered in blood. Unfortunately, even knowing the source of the blood doesn't make it an entirely unappealing picture.
“No worse than the ones in Paris,” he says, licking over his teeth and tossing the dead bird on the ground.
“If you say so,“ Daniel replies dubiously. But the mention of Paris has Daniel’s mind wandering back to the interview, drifting to the thought of him and Claudia in that little apartment in the 9th arrondissement he’d talked about, Louis drinking up birds on the balcony, while Claudia puttered around inside. He wonders if she used to tease Louis the same way, wrinkling her nose at her father’s eating habits. Louis' old enough to be his father multiple times over.
They clean up, get rid of the dead body. There’s something strangely satisfying about doing all of this with someone; the hunting, the clean up. Being sort of guided in it by someone. It’s almost as if Louis is his m—
They head back to Daniel’s place together.
***
Back at the condo, they eventually wind up out on the balcony, watching the warm New York night go by. Private outdoor space is hard to come by in this part of the city, and the small balcony had been one of the things that had drawn Daniel to the building in the first place, fresh off of his second divorce and in need of a new place to live. He’d thought his daughters might like it. He probably shouldn't have bothered.
Daniel fishes out his pack of cigarettes, and offers it to Louis, who takes one with a bemused little smile. Despite all that 20th century-era smoking he and Armand talked about during the interview, Daniel realizes he never once saw either of them smoke while he was in Dubai. He wonders if they just didn’t care to do it anymore, now that it was mostly out of fashion. A habit formed more for the sake of familiarity and appearances than actual desire.
He flicks his lighter and offers it up; Louis leans in, lights his cigarette over the dancing flame. Daniel watches him inhale, his eyes tipped shut, cheeks sucked in. Watches him lean back and exhale. Belatedly, Daniel lights his own cigarette, and the two of them lean on the railing, smoking in companionable silence.
There’s still something a little bit surreal about Louis being here in Daniel’s apartment—the sight of him a little too extraordinary for the mundanity of the same four walls Daniel’s been looking at for over a decade. Never mind the fact that Daniel’s technically an extraordinary thing himself now; Louis still feels like something different.
It’s surreal, strange, but a good type of strange. Really good. Daniel knows part of that feeling has to be the fledgling in him, clinging to Louis in lieu of any other guidance. His voice on the tapes, his voice in his mind, and now him, here in the flesh.
It’s actually a little embarrassing when he thinks about it like that—he’s been clinging onto Louis this past month like a fucking barnacle. Inwardly, he cringes.
“Hey," he says, breaking the moment of quiet. “I’m uh—sorry that I’ve been a little…” He makes a face, gestures vaguely between them with the hand holding his cigarette. “Needy, this whole month? Tugging at your brain all the time. Making you feel like you had to worry about me.”
Louis looks at him sidelong, gaze assessing. He takes another drag from his own cigarette. Blows out a plume of smoke.
“I haven't minded,” he says eventually.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He turns his head to face Daniel fully. “It's—I think it's helped me too, these last few weeks,” he admits. “Having that. Having you.”
Daniel looks at him; the way he ashes his cigarette over the rail and brings it back to his lips, the sight of him smoking next to him not unlike the very first time they met at Polynesian Mary’s all those years ago.
The handsome cut of his jaw. His startling eyes. Maybe going out for that hunt wasn't such a good idea.
Except, it's not just the rush of human blood working its way through Daniel’s system making it hard for him to keep his eyes off Louis, is it? Same way it isn't just the fledgling in him making him want to listen to those tapes over and over again. It's just fucking Louis.
The truth is, he's always kind of looking at him like that. Thinking about him like that, deep down in the back of his mind, even when he kind of wishes he wasn’t. Thinking about the low sound of his voice and the shape of his lips. Thinking about what he might taste like, in every sense of the word.
He can tell that Louis picks up the thought.
See, when Daniel was human, he at least had the benefit of plausible deniability—sure, Louis could read minds but hey, maybe Daniel got lucky; maybe Louis didn’t hear the way Daniel was fucking ogling him in his brain at any given moment. But now, he can kind of read Louis’ mind too—enough to pick up a subtle reaction to Daniel’s thoughts in his head. Shit, which probably means that Louis’ now picking up on the fact, that Daniel picked up on the fact, that Louis picked up on the fact, that—
“Daniel,” Louis says, sounding a bit like he’s trying not to laugh.
“Yeah?” Daniel says, like a wince.
Louis just looks at him, expression fond. And then he stubs out his cigarette on the railing and pushes up into Daniel’s space. Leans up, and tips Daniel’s face down to meet him. Kisses him.
And Daniel—
Well shit. Daniel kisses back.
It’s a good kiss, slow, lingering, Louis’ plush lips clinging to Daniel’s; the soft damp hint of the inside of his mouth where his lips are parted just a little, the taste of warmth and cigarette smoke. When he starts to pull away, Daniel follows, helpless not to, chasing his mouth, catching his lips in one more lingering kiss before they break apart.
“Okay…” Daniel says into the space between their mouths; they’re still standing close, Louis only barely having backed up. Daniel belatedly remembers to stub out the cigarette still smoldering between his fingers. “So, is this what we’re doing now?” Louis raises an eyebrow.
“Do you not want to?” he asks. His fingers have drifted from Daniel’s jaw to the back of his neck, nails trailing lightly over his skin in a way that’s incredibly distracting.
“Do you want to?” Daniel counters. It earns a small twitch at the corner of Louis’ mouth.
“I wouldn’t be doing it, if I didn’t,” he says, tone precise, almost mocking, as if it’s absolutely absurd for Daniel to think he could make Louis do something he didn't want to do. Which—yeah, that’s fair.
“Right, yeah,” Daniel says, and Louis smiles like he picked up the thought or maybe it's just that fucking obvious, and he kisses him again.
They kiss for a while, there on the balcony, Louis letting Daniel crowd him up against the railing, the kiss slowly deepening, mouths parting against each other. Louis licks into his open mouth, teasing, coaxing, and god, Daniel should’ve known he’d be like that. Always fucking goading. He kisses Louis back harder, nips sharply at the plush bottom lip that’s been driving him crazy since 1973, revels in the way those fingers slide up into his hair and tighten a little like he likes it. Like he wants Daniel to do it again.
He does do it again, kissing him, nipping at him before pulling back, and nosing at his jaw, the long, tempting curve of his neck. Daniel's been thinking about this part of him for a long time too. More, in the past month, for obvious reasons. He kisses him there, sucks the warm skin into his mouth, worries it between his teeth. He can feel the thump of Louis’ dead pulse, and he opens his mouth wider over it, feels it beating against his tongue, heavy with blood. Louis just tips his head back slightly to give him more room, a soft little noise in his throat and god, god. Daniel crowds in closer, sucks harder on Louis’ skin, his dick starting to firm up against the seam of his jeans, the base of his fangs aching with need.
A car honks in the distance, an especially loud and prolonged note, whoever it is leaning on the horn, and Daniel dimly remembers that they’re still on the balcony. Outside.
Shit. Daniel’s apartment is on the seventh floor, not even remotely close to high enough to be totally obscured. Hell, fucking Carol might decide to go out on her balcony and then look up in horror at the sight of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Molloy mauling that nice young man half his age that she let in earlier. Never mind the fact that it's actually the other way around. Yeah, he doesn’t need to deal with that.
Daniel reluctantly pulls back, forcing himself to ignore the way Louis looks after, head still tipped back, the patch of skin on his neck temporarily reddened from the pressure of Daniel’s teeth, shiny with his spit.
“We should probably go inside,” he says. Louis lets out an amused little breath, tipping his head back down, but still sprawled out against the balcony rail.
“So forward, Daniel,” he says, raising both of his eyebrows now. And oh, that’s not—Daniel wasn’t necessarily trying to imply—
“Not that that’s a bad thing,” he finishes before Daniel can scramble up a defense and oh. Okay. Okay.
They go inside and Louis kisses him again in the living room, open-mouthed and aggressive, his whole body leaning up into it. He licks at Daniel's fangs where they’ve involuntarily started to lengthen in his mouth, a soft, kittenish thing and Daniel has to stop himself from thinking about him doing it harder, cutting himself on the sharp points. The blood that would flood his mouth if he did.
Louis pulls back just far enough to nod over Daniel's shoulder, towards the hallway. “Your bedroom over there?”
“Yeah.”
“You wanna show it to me?”
And the thing is, Louis has been in Daniel’s head. Louis has been the voice guiding him for almost 50 years. And maybe that’s more intimate than anything else.
He still absolutely wants the rest of it though. No fucking shit.
“Yeah,” Daniel says. “I do.”
***