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“Amazing, the things the human body can do. Two children, and yet you’re gripping my fingers like a vice.”
Daniel tries to laugh. It comes out more like he’s been kicked in the ribs.
“N- nah, I didn’t, we- we ad- adopted-“
“A pity.” Armand bows Daniel further backwards- whether for a better angle or for his own sadism it’s unclear. “You would have looked stunning swollen with child.”
Daniel’s seen a lot, heard a lot, fucked a lot, even, but those words are still some of the most perverted things that have ever been said to him. His face goes bright-hot at them.
“ Jesus Christ . I- I’m a bit old to be swollen with child , Armand.”
Armand hmm s, crowding closer and placing his chin on his shoulder. Daniel’s trembling knees are now, unfortunately, quite acquainted with the small shards of glass he’s been made to kneel on- he can feel them cutting through his jeans.
“I would do it, if I could. Your sufficient apology for this mess. Taking- taking my seed, your skin flush with blood for the sampling, splayed half-dressed in- in the ruins of my marriage-“
Armand’s single explorative finger has become two slightly more vicious ones, and Daniel whimpers as they stab up towards his womb. His breath is cool on Daniel’s exposed neck, and the reminder that he’s fucking a dead man while soon to be a corpse himself is not… nearly as unappetizing as it should be.
“I’m not sorry,” he grits out. Armand does not reply. His fingers speed, pumping right-there-right-there-right-there with something like malice.
“You’re tightening again,” Armand murmurs. “What is it now?”
“H-hah, what is it? You’re g-“ he gasps at the introduction of Armand’s thumb to his cock, deftly stroking at his tip- “ngh, gonna fucking kill me for telling on you, and you’re fantasizing about getting me pregnant, that’s what it is, you f- ah! ”
Armand giggles- giggles- to himself, raking the nails of his left hand beneath Daniel’s shirt and up his body. Daniel glances down from the midnight skyline of Dubai, watching with prey-wide eyes as Armand’s fingers curl in and out of him, thumb petting at his slit. He huffs out a whine at the sight: Armand’s lithe hand slick, tinged with blood, disappearing between his shaking legs.
Armand presses his lips to his ear, his hip to his waist, and in a saccharine whisper-
“2017. In a hotel room in Michigan. You paid her one and a half times her going rate to switch the lights off and fuck her with a strap while she murmured I-love-you’s. You didn’t tell her you were transgender, and she did the same. You both fumbled through it and left with a sense of wrongness filling you, and you have not had sex since.”
Humiliation does not come to Daniel as naturally as some, so the monologue lands more like teasing. Still, “That does not get a-any easier to hear, y’know,” Daniel grouses, jerking in place at the prick of Armand’s nail at his cock.
“Just a reminder to be grateful for what I provide.”
Unpacking that particular sentiment very far requires energy Daniel doesn’t have. He wants, very badly, to ask for a change in position- he can definitely feel blood beginning to seep through denim onto marble, but he’s also certain Armand can smell it and just doesn’t care to do anything about it.
“And what,” he manages, “are you- providing, exactly?”
Armand makes that breathy hissing sound that Daniel has come to associate with fangs protruding from pretty, pallid lips, and yes, he feels them now, the tips of them pricking at his trapezius muscle, pulling him higher and higher into incoherence.
“An opportunity,” Armand says, pulling back to speak. “To finally be… interesting.”
Is that what makes you fascinating, his voice spits, fifty years prior, echoed through Daniel’s mind.
Armand can’t bear to face a consequence, is the thing, he slips around it and takes back-alleys so as to never meet it, so Daniel doubts and believes, split in half, that Armand will turn him, give him the gift, the paused death after the little one, whatever you like to call it, Armand is nothing if not unflinchingly self-serving. Would that- would he-
“Serve me? No. Unless that’s what you’d like.”
Armand’s fingers spread in his cunt, three of them now, prongs of a trident spearing his fucking heart, twisting cruelly to make the blood rush out. Armand groans through his teeth at Daniel’s mental image, fucks him a little harder for the trouble.
“You’re wonderful with words, Daniel.”
“So it’s- Daniel now? No more, hah, Mr. Molloy?”
“No more pretense to maintain. We’ve seen enough of each other’s innards.”
Daniel nods, as if that sentence was a normal thing to say. He takes stock of himself: dizzy, anxious, good, mortified, hurt, high, wanting, so, so good.
“S-so- ah- you gonna-“
Armand tuts.
“Eager, eager boy. Dessert first, then dinner.”
Humiliation spikes through his body, his spine a lightning rod. Daniel whines, hardly realizing it, hardly caring, and tips his head back, resting his body against Armand’s fully. He’s dinner. Fuck.
“Please.”
The lamb sticks its neck out to the block. Armand purrs in satisfaction, something quiet between a laugh and a groan. His nails catch on Daniel’s inner wall, and the aching drag of them pulls another hungry moan from Daniel’s throat.
“I knew you would come around. What are you asking for, Daniel?”
A crazy fucking question if he’s ever heard one.
“Anything, y- everything, it’s so-“
“Think,” Armand pushes. “Think of just what you need from me.”
And Daniel knows when to follow someone else’s lead- when he’s desperate for what they have to give. A tremor passes through him, makes him inhale sharply and grip at Armand’s lean forearm as he pulls up snippets of thought for him-
leather cuffs, heads on laps, hands in hair, a gag big enough to drool and moan around but not enough to speak, a zing of pain through his neck, a boot pressed to his cock, an enormous hotel bed somewhere and Armand resplendent above him, Armand gently holding his face and cleaning him up, Armand pulling him between his legs and telling him to clean up our thoughtless friend’s mess like a good boy, Armand nicking his own neck with Daniel’s razor, marked with aftershave and trickling the Devil’s power down into his shirt collar, Armand fucking him in quick furious thrusts, Armand pulling the needle from his arm, Armand’s eyes dogging his every step, years and years of it, Armand writhing beneath him, Armand laughing in the moonlight, Armand atop him, beside him, beneath him, with him, always-
“Daniel,” Armand chokes, and he’s gone, flying on pain and adrenaline and the ancient, terrible presence of a predator, a wordless noise darting from his lungs, a plea. More. Don’t stop. Stay.
Armand makes a sound like a wounded animal in the back of his throat, pulls out- “No,” Daniel cries, caught in the clenching aftershocks- grabs Daniel by the hips and suddenly Armand’s lifting, effortlessly bringing him up to where he’s now levitating off the ground.
His back hits a bed. Louis and Armand’s, evidently, given that the help don’t stay here.
“You can never stop thinking, can you, sweet.”
“I-it’s a gif- t-“
Armand darts his head down and bites, a single swift spearing of teeth that has Daniel’s post-orgasm fog sharpening into a thunderclap, his body arching off the bed and his mouth dropping open with an urgent, needy sound. God, what was-
“All that, A-Armand, wha- was it real?”
Armand sits back up, a jerky motion faster than Daniel can follow. There is no hint of joyful sadism in his eyes, now, only a hungry openness. A black hole.
“Realer than anything.”
Daniel flops back onto the pillows, laughs, just once, disbelieving.
“Je-sus.”
They stare at each other, a long, yawning moment. Armand presses their hands together, palm-to-palm- little Shakespearean. Daniel tugs his back.
“And you- you fucking took it? Because, what, you didn’t feel like my memories did you justice?”
“Because you were hurting, Daniel.”
Armand’s chest rises and falls urgently, a cornered animal. Daniel stares blankly up at him, waits for the silence to end.
“I- we were not something that could be maintained painlessly. I wanted… something simpler, for you.”
“And you get to decide that, huh?”
Daniel props himself up on his elbows, knowing he looks ridiculous, powerless, his clothes half-torn from his body, his chest bleeding sluggishly, his limbs still shaking.
“Armand the all-knowing, who can just reach into your mind and figure out what you really want,” he continues. Armand blinks at him, catlike. “Unbelievable, you selfish, thoughtless-“
“And what would you have me do?”
The desperate face from the interview table is back, like he’s watching his lover slip out the door for the second time in a day, enraged and distraught and confused at how he could ever possibly lose his own game. God help him, Daniel feels his heart seize at it. Armand feels it too, places a palm over where it thuds, looks at Daniel with desperate eyes.
“ Rest.”
Dirty fucking trick, Daniel manages to think, and then he’s plummeting.
Armand’s control clouds his mind, a strangler fig wrapping around the brainstem, opium shot straight to the goddamn marrow. He feels his breath leave his body.
“ Submission suits you, beloved,” Armand says, or puts into his mind. Daniel feels his breath catch harshly. He recalls, now, with vague, blurry lines, Armand using the commands on him in less aggravated times than the interview, the quiet dark that came up around his ears and overpowered him, the tang of foreign blood in his mouth. It doesn’t quite suit him anymore. Armand makes it so.
Armand smiles down at him, the barest tic at his pretty barely-reddened lips, and Daniel stares with the awe of a worshipper faced with an angel. He shifts back, admiring the view, bringing a hand around and- god- clawing into the wound on Daniel’s chest, his fingers following the shapes of his canines.
Daniel makes a sound best categorized as a wail, grabbing Armand’s arm and clutching hard. His heart thuds in his chest, spilling waves around Armand’s fingers, and Armand’s pupils dilate fully open, evening primroses at the first wash of moonlight.
There are no words left in the moment. They drain from Daniel with his stuttering breath, his foggy mind, his eagerly running blood, with Armand’s eyes.
“Thank you, darling,” Armand murmurs, and Daniel almost asks him what for, but then a quick, cold tongue is pressing into his skin, cleaning him, catlike were it not for the starved urgency of the movement. It feels wonderful. Daniel musters the strength to tilt his head away, allowing him access to the whole of his throat.
He stares at the wall. Breathing seems to occur through a fog of incense, sticking thickly in his throat. The room’s dusk is beginning to wane. The sheets cling to him.
Thank you, Armand whispers again, a soft ripple in Daniel’s mind. Their hands are brought together again, blood-slick, now, slipping from each other.
Just do it, he says, or thinks, or something. Armand hears.
There is a bright, agonizing pain, and a soaring dread, and a final ache of adoration. Daniel falls away.