Chapter Text
1. The Food for Thought Breakfast Show
Despite being the two oldest guys in their zip code, theirs is a tech-loving household.
Armand is obsessed with technology, the more digital and app-involving the better. He has an app on his iPad that connects to their fridge for some fucking reason, never mind that the only things in that fridge are blood bags and a jar of mystery stuff that Armand is conducting an experiment on. He also adores all things hardware, and Daniel is pretty sure their address is known to local delivery drivers as ‘the guys who probably run some blender-based money laundering operation’. Armand loves opening shit up and seeing what makes it tick, then playing with the entrails. Daniel finds that unbearably endearing.
(Daniel also tries very hard not to think about how Armand’s love of tech and electronics is probably the first thing he’s found by himself; something entirely his own, not inherited from a maker or a lover. It’s fucking beautiful, yeah, but also heart-rending, and isn’t that just Armand in a nutshell.)
Personally, Daniel has always liked technology. Well, up until the whole ‘disruptive tech’ bullshit. But he’s always been into anything that makes his job more efficient and gives him more cross-references and backup, and the recording and record-keeping tech has always been his friend.
Now he’s an even bigger fan, especially in this post-Covid world — he can do his publicity interviews remotely, which means he gets to stay home with his sweet gremlin while also being an asshole on camera. Win-win!
Or so he naively thinks as he’s setting up for the latest one, still savouring the sobs of his agent begging him to behave himself.
He doesn’t do interviews from his office, because that’s his space, and he doesn’t want any nosy media fucks getting an eyeful (he said, being a nosy media fuck himself). Instead, he does them from the sofa in their living room, which Armand persistently calls a parlour, and Daniel caught it from him because he’s a massive class traitor, apparently.
He sets up on the coffee table, sticking a few hardbacks under the laptop to give it more height, gets out his tabletop mic and the ring light Armand bought him after the first time Daniel did an interview from home and Armand looked at his apparently lighting-deficient setup like he’d just decided to go skinny-dipping in the Hudson river with a fresh paper cut on his dick.
(Daniel had to draw the line when Armand started looking up professional photography studio equipment and measuring the room for shoot-through umbrellas.)
He’s just dragging the power cord to the outlet when Armand breezes in, and no, there’s no other verb for it — he walks like some ethereal creature, dressed all in black, a long, flowy type of hoodie evoking a cloak. The cotton workout bottoms are skin-tight around his calves. Daniel misses the socket three times before he finally sticks the plug in it. Which is not metaphorical or Freudian at all.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he says, getting up and walking over to where Armand is digging through some papers on the bookcase.
“Mm,” Armand says, leaning appreciatively into Daniel’s kiss, but then he’s back to his excavations. “Beloved, have you seen the sketches I was making last month?”
Daniel looks around, trying not to feel automatically guilty just because he’s the slob in their relationship and has a long and documented history of shoving shit into random places when he’s trying to clear out a working space. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.
“Uh, which ones?”
Armand pulls out a magazine holder and flips through the papers there with lightning speed.
“It was a Saturday? We were sitting here, watching the television. I had my drawing clipboard, you were yelling at the interviewer to ask follow-up questions instead of moving on. The sketches were an A3 format, but I folded them in half and put them away somewhere. It was a social media allegory rendered with mannequins — you called it a creep-a-palooza?”
“Oh, that stuff, yeah.” Daniel points. “Bottom shelf over there.”
Armand is there in the blink of an eye, the air in the room stirred by his vampiric speed. Daniel never saw him use it until well after their reconciliation; he’s always so composed and collected, and the world always pauses and holds its breath for him. There’s a sappy sense of joy and endearment that Daniel feels whenever he watches Armand zoom or express raw, unhidden excitement in any other way.
With a sound of triumph Armand pulls the sheaf of loose pages off the top of a box, and yup, that’s the mannequins on parade. Total nightmare fuel, that. Daniel loves him so fucking much.
“Wait,” Daniel says as something dawns on him. “Wait. No. Don’t tell me you’re actually working on this.”
Armand looks very pleased with himself. “I am.”
“So there’s mannequins in our home right now.”
“They’re… in my studio,” Armand tries for diplomacy and, like any authoritarian dictator, he’s very bad at it.
“Yeah, that’s still our home, pal.”
“The boutique two streets down was going out of business, Daniel, it was a perfect opportunity,” Armand says, like he’s about to ask Daniel to please be reasonable.
“I better not find those things staring at me when I wake up,” Daniel tells him, because he loves Armand, and he loves his bizarre, ethereal art, but Armand has a very special sense of humour.
Also, mannequins have been a particular brand of nightmare for Daniel ever since that one time in mid-70s when he was off-again with Armand and had a bad acid trip backstage at a concert and fell into a line-up of mannequins for the band’s outfits — as one does.
Armand laughs, like he’s completely charmed by this.
“Daniel, you are a grown man and a vampire!”
“Hey, I’m not scared. Just severely creeped out.”
Armand laughs again, in that adoring way of his, and presses a kiss to Daniel’s cheek.
“Don’t worry, beloved, when I’m done with them they won’t have their heads. They won’t be able to stare at you.”
And then he leaves the fucking room, the floaty swagger in his step suggesting he thinks he’s handled this like a pro.
“Oh, yeah, you’re right, that’s so much better, thank you!” Daniel yells after him, then turns back to his laptop and lighting setup.
Interview. Right.
He sets up his webcam as well, because the one integrated into his laptop made Armand turn up his nose, and three hours later a sweaty, underpaid delivery driver was at their door, a brand new, state-of-the-art webcam in a box that said Armand Molloy on it, so Daniel couldn’t even get properly mad about the whole Amazon thing. And now Daniel is trapped into using this webcam, because A) Armand is really good and picking out tech, and B) it’s steeped in the sweat and held-in urine of the oppressed working class.
Since he still has a few minutes before he needs to connect, he fiddles around with the bookcase in the shot, moving things around to make himself look more intellectual. After a moment of thought, he also displays a framed picture of himself and Armand, because he’s a conniving asshole who knows it will guarantee more clicks, but also because he’s always eager to show his beautiful gremlin off.
Fifteen minutes later, the interview is in full swing.
It’s a culture-and-literature corner type of thing: two presenters plus three talking heads, including Daniel. It’s way too many egos for one screen, and Daniel is having the time of his life.
“Look, Joe, it’s a free country, he can do what he wants—”
“Genres have to mean something, for god’s sake, Janice! He can’t just market this stuff — bestselling though it may be — as non-fiction!”
“Hey, I still tell my publisher that putting it in the fiction genre was basically false advertising, Joe.”
“What I’d really like to know, Daniel, is how someone with a brilliant career like yours—”
“—just marketing, calm down, it doesn’t even matter that—”
“Look, I think this is ridiculous, no disrespect to Daniel, but the issue of the book bans seems much more pertinent—”
“I’ve got a scar on my neck to prove it, Mike!”
“—sacrificing a legacy of daring, groundbreaking reporting for the sake of—”
“—exists for a reason!”
“If I can just interject here—”
“—basically erotica—”
“—move past the genres thing, Joe, and focus on—”
“Calm down!”
“—which would be a terrible idea!”
“Look—“
American TV at its finest; Daniel has never felt more patriotic.
He’s just trying to stop his fangs from slipping out as he readies to pour more gasoline on this fire (it would make a hell of a viral clip, but Armand would probably not handle it well), when a sharp, shrill beeping sound starts going off. It takes Daniel a second to realise that the source of the sound is his own fucking home.
Yeah, speaking of fires…
The people on his screen are still busy cannibalising each other verbally and haven’t noticed, so he quickly mutes his mic. Which is when the goddamn sprinklers go off.
See, the thing is, despite Armand’s frequent use of fire in his art, they still have smoke detectors and a sprinkler system — they are vampires, after all, with a New York Times bestseller-shaped target on their backs. Apparently, taking out the Vampire Armand’s one and only fledgling is a badge of honour for some younger vamps eager to prove themselves, and Daniel won’t lie, that makes him feel hella precious.
When he looks back at the screen, all the other people are quiet and staring at him. He unmutes his mic.
“Uh, sorry, guys, I gotta go take care of that,” he says, then drops the call.
He’s up from the sofa and just making his way out of the parlour when the sprinklers and the alarm shut down; there isn’t that much water, but Armand is still going to be bitchy about it. The fact that the alarm and the waterworks died down reassures the sharp spike of anxiety inside him — he can feel Armand through their bond though, and there’s no sense of panic on his end. More like frustration and… well, well, could that be guilt the ancient vampire Armand is feeling there?
“Forgot to turn off the sprinkler system before we started beheading the mannequins with fire, did we?” Daniel says, slipping his hands into his pockets when he meets Armand out in the hallway; yeah, he’s making an absolute meal out of this one.
Armand presses his lips together.
“I may have… miscalculated,” he hedges, ever the liar — though these days he lies about petty shit like this; Daniel finds it insanely adorable, especially with how bad at it he is.
“Uh-huh,” Daniel says, packing all his scepticism there.
If Armand presses his lips any further together, he’s gonna swallow them.
Daniel loves him more than he’s ever loved anything in his life.
“Go grab a mop, I’ll get a rag.”
Armand’s lips come out of hiding and his eyes brighten up — somehow, that makes this whole ordeal worth it.
“Get the microfibres, beloved. The non-fluffy ones absorb water at a much higher efficiency rate—”
“Armand?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Get the mop.”