great degrees and variations

This was not supposed to happen.

Armand had stayed in Dubai because he couldn't figure out where else to go. Everywhere is tainted. Even places he's never been are tainted, because it was Louis who had made the whole world seem possible.There was nothing that couldn't belong to him if he tried, so he held it all lightly, knowing he could always get it back. Without him, the idea of other places even existing is laughable.

Dubai is tainted too, of course, but he has been living in its rot for long enough. When he had stumbled out of Louis' penthouse, Daniel's blood thick on his tongue, the easiest thing to do had been what anyone would do: get a hotel room. And then an apartment, when it occurred to him that paying rent every month would take less effort than indefinitely extending his stay in a hotel. It is a place to store his body, which obstinately continues to exist despite there being no discernible purpose for it to do so.

And for a while it had simply existed, alone. He ate when he was hungry because he had not decided to stop, and such a decision was beyond him. The rest of the time he lay on the floor and marveled at all of the things that mortals seemed to find it necessary to do. Popping up and down like they're on springs: asleep, awake, standing, kneeling, prostrate, eating, again and again and again. Passing around money like they're tubes. It goes in one end and out the other.

Vampires are black holes. Blood goes in. Blood goes in. Blood goes in.

So Armand had existed for a while, pouring blood into the maw of himself. And then--

--there are different kinds of equilibrium. Lying on the floor of an unfurnished apartment is one kind of equilibrium, a physical kind. Perhaps, for a creature with any experience at all of existing alone, it would eventually settle into a mental kind, too. But Armand had never been such a creature. And eventually the effort of remaining there, alone, as if he himself were reason enough for an entire room to exist, became greater than the effort of putting himself in some other state. Some other room.

Which is why he is here, now, at a bar in Al Rigga that he has come to know well. Another reason Armand cannot leave Dubai: places like this are the closest a vampire can get to walking among peers in a room full of mortals. Fellow exiles, of one kind or another. There are tourists here, of course, and casuals, but the regulars know what the place is for and that they're welcome here. To be welcome here means to be unwelcome elsewhere. It means always having something to hide.

He doesn't hunt from here, because it would be more trouble than it's worth to have to find another room to situate his body in when it is not lying on the floor of his apartment. He drinks wine slowly and does more or less what he had been doing before: listens. There are more frequent interruptions, of course, and more of the thoughts that he can listen to are about him. Not too many. Most of the surface-level thoughts here are about categorization. Westerner, Filipino, Emirati, Indian. What those categories mean for what can happen between mortal bodies of this city and decade. It is still novel to be so easily categorized, a comfortable majority on many streets, at least until he opens his mouth and a Brit comes out. To change his language or accent would be a kind of effort that has exited the realm of possibility. His Arabic is poor, his Hindi archaic if it consented to rise from his throat at all. French scarred, Venetian useless. He could say I am hungry in Portuguese, but it isn't even true.

So he speaks English when spoken to. It is still easier than any alternative he can think of. Sometimes people speak to him, sometimes he even speaks back, but it is all just the inevitable consequence of the physical need to be somewhere at all times. That is what is supposed to happen: Armand is supposed to exist.

At the moment that something besides his continued existence finally happens, Armand is talking to someone. An Emirati man, to whom Armand had been the second choice. His first choice had been a Westerner with a blue handkerchief hanging out of his back right pocket, as if Dubai were simply a version of America stuck a few decades in the past. Perhaps he was right; the Westerner had left with someone who was going to give him what he wants. Armand cannot do the same, because he doesn't want anything. This man would like to fuck Armand. Armand doesn't not-want it in any way that might lead him to avoid it. If the man asked him to come home with him he would. Another room to put his body in, temporarily. Then he would come back to this one.

What is not supposed to happen: Louis de Pointe du Lac is not supposed to walk through the front door.

Armand stands up. He does not know whether he had been in the middle of saying something, or the other man had, or what it might have been. It doesn't matter. He walks towards the exit, human speed, face down. There is nothing else to do.

And then, the voice. "Leaving on my account?" Louis says. It takes him a moment to realize it is not in his head. It's in the room, in the air, where anyone can hear it. "Still doing fucking everything on my account?"

He stops. He is only a few steps from the door. Louis is leaning against the bar, one leg on a stool. Louis is here, and he is not supposed to be where Louis is. His mind is as locked down as it ever gets. Armand has to pull himself back from the edges of it. Don't look. Not for you.

"I did not come expecting to see you," he says.

"Yeah," says Louis. "And leaving because of me isn't any better than coming because of me."

The cruelty of it hits Armand like a blow. This is worse than just having to leave. That he is to stay away from Louis, he understands. He can do it. But that his absence, his choices, his existence, is not allowed to be about Louis; that is impossible. To hold Louis as lightly as Louis had always held him-- Armand would give him anything, still, but that is something he does not have to give.

Louis has never before asked him for something he cannot give. It's shocking, and then anger starts seeping through him like water soaking through thick clothes. It makes the room warmer, the lights brighter. His body more present than it has been in a long time.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he snaps. "I forgot, you don't want anything. You're an island, a self-made man. Everything you have, you earned for yourself. And I suppose you lay down for the johns yourself, too, in your first line of work? What an enterprising businessman."

A blowout fight in the middle of a gay bar. It would be, Armand has to admit, a more fitting end to the era of his life defined by Daniel Molloy's presence than the one he'd gotten.

And for a moment he thinks he's going to get it, because Louis looks mad, as well he should-- they hadn't spent eight decades learning how to get to each other just to miss the target now. Except then the rage diffuses, spreads out through Louis' limbs and turns into something else hard and fierce. His eyes snap to Armand's, and Armand wants to look away but can't. "Never said I don't want anything," Louis says. "Came here wanting, same as you."

Armand hadn't come here wanting anything, but Louis doesn't know that. And he does want now, and Louis doesn't need to be able to read his thoughts to know it.

Which is how the next thing he knows Armand's face is mashed against the tiled wall of the far bathroom stall, Louis' wonderful strong hands shoving his trousers down to his knees and grabbing handfuls of his ass. All language and memory have escaped him. A rough slippery finger over his hole, and then the crinkle of-- he turns around to see Louis tearing open the packaging of a condom. The condom he'd planned to wear with whoever he ended up fucking tonight, some mortal he doesn't need wondering why the semen leaking out of him looks more like blood. Which he's rolling over his cock like Armand is just anyone. Which is what Louis wants to be to Armand.

Fine. Fine. Armand shoves him back, turns himself around and repositions so his hands are braced on the toilet tank, stepping out of one leg of his trousers and underwear to be able to spread his legs wider. Then he grabs Louis' left hand to drag it to his own throat, and orders, "squeeze."

Louis does what he's told. Vampires don't need air to live but there's still an instinctive panic that comes of being deprived of it, and of all the things that Armand had liked Louis to do to him, this is the only one Louis found genuinely distasteful. Armand had realized why only while watching the images cascading from Louis' memory during his interview with Daniel: Lestat, pinning Claudia to the wall, his hand wrapped around her delicate neck.

If Louis wants Armand to not give a shit about him, he might as well get it now. Armand presses forwards into his fingers, gasping, while Louis' other hand slides the strange smooth tip of his latex-coated cock until it catches on Armand's body.

Then he shoves in hard and painful, which should be good, but the alien smoothness of it is horrid. He is being touched by Louis everywhere except inside, like he's not good enough for that any more. He squeezes his eyes shut. A public toilet is hardly the dirtiest place he's been fucked, possibly not even the dirtiest place Louis has fucked him, but the comparisons don't make it feel any better.

"Feel good?" says Louis, snapping his hips into him. It's what he would say to anyone.

And Armand, Louis' Armand, would say yes. He would lose himself in all the things that make his stomach turn and feel them until they reveal their true selves and make him feel good. He could do it.

But he is not Louis' Armand any more. He is not allowed to be. He is supposed to be, impossibly, someone who doesn't care about Louis. And the rage at that impossible demand pushes up from the core of him, and he can't find the trick of making things feel good any more. And then perhaps the demand isn't impossible any more.

"I would have been grateful for this horrible piece of rubber five hundred years ago," he snaps, his voice weak from the hand still on his throat. "In the absence of a fresh wave of the French disease, I fail to see the purpose. And it feels awful."

Louis stops. He lets go of Armand's neck, and pulls his cock out of him. Armand stays frozen in place, his fingers on the cold ceramic of the toilet tank, his eyes shut. If he opens them, blood will leak out. He has ruined it. Louis was here, he got to have Louis again, and he ruined it. He waits to hear the stall door slam, to be left alone. At least he can clean himself up in privacy.

"All right," comes Louis' voice, "relax about it," and then Armand gasps at the unexpected contact as Louis pushes back in again. His cock, skin to skin. And his hand, back under Armand's jaw, not squeezing the air from him but pulling him upright and holding him still.

"Better?" Louis asks, and Armand is so confused and relieved he can barely stay standing, let alone nod, but either he manages it or Louis knows that it is.

Louis drives into him slowly at first at then lets Armand lever himself down to snap their hips together harder and faster, skin-slapping noises and little moans echoing off the walls. Some people come in, use the bathroom, and leave, and Armand blocks their thoughts from entering his mind. He doesn't care. His body, which for so long had been merely an obstinately animated thing that he must drag around and store in places, is once again him. There is a purpose to having a body and it is this, being lost in it, hearing Louis' blood flow through him as he gives and takes his pleasure.

Armand spills first, blood on the floor, on one leg of his trousers, and Louis holds his hips harder and makes him take it the way he knows Armand loves. Because they are not just anyone, after all, Armand thinks in the delirious silence of the moments following Louis' orgasm. They know each others' bodies. Perhaps they cannot really claim to know each others' minds, even now. Especially now. But are their bodies not like well-loved books?

Louis lets go of him, and Armand stands up. He opens his eyes and focuses only on pulling up and fastening his trousers, so that he can lean on the wall behind him. His legs are shaking.

When they're both zipped up, there is nothing to do but leave, or speak to each other. Armand does not want Louis to leave.

"Thank you," he says stiffly.

"Likewise," says Louis, equally stiffly. And then, "I'd give it to you, if I could go back in time."

"What?"

"The condom," Louis clarifies. "I guess if I'm going back in time I could just kick the shit out of them instead. But if not, I'd make all the men in the brothel wear a condom."

"Oh." The image of Louis forcibly rolling latex condoms onto tumescent Venetian gentlemen is kind of funny. And if he had, Armand would never have fallen ill in his master's house, and would have died a Venetian gentleman himself, resentful of the mortality he did not know to appreciate. "Thanks." And then, silence.

They both startle when the door to the bathroom opens again. Someone enters, and Armand stares somewhere in the vicinity of Louis' shoulder while they both listen to the man piss. Armand had most recently heard the sounds of human bodily functions up close when the last of Daniel's mortal fluids left him in the bathtub of the penthouse that belongs, now, only to Louis. Louis must know about Daniel, by now, but surely if he hasn't said anything yet, he isn't going to. Which is good, because if Armand had had the words to say what happened and why, he would have stayed and said them to Daniel.

Pissing done. Washing sounds. And then footsteps, that stop just outside of the stall that Louis and Armand are standing in with two pairs of feet visible below the crack of the door, and a drunken-sounding laugh. "Khuduh!" yells the man loudly, and then clatters out of the room.

Somehow, the air is infinitely easier in the ringing silence that follows. Louis has a thumb pressed to his lips. "Do you know what he said?" Louis asks.

He's not a complete shut-in. "'Take him'," says Armand. "More or less."

Louis taps his thumbnail against his teeth. Then he calls "Already did!" into the echoing stillness of the tiled room, and Armand feels something like a snort escape his throat. For a perfect moment he meets Louis' eyes, and they're both smiling.

It doesn't last long. Because, well, it's true. Already did. It's done. And now--

"Do you come here often?" asks Louis, like a pickup line in reverse.

Armand rubs his fingers together, presses his toes against the confines of his shoes. Bits of him are trying to escape, but he doesn't want to go. "Yes," he admits finally when the silence gets to be too much. "I live close. Near the Corniche."

"Sounds nice," says Louis. Hands in his pockets, leaning back against the opposite wall of the stall. He looks like he used to look to Armand, sometimes, in Paris, like he belongs in a photograph instead of behind one. There's a way people can look only when you don't know them too well.

Armand's apartment is not nice, but he only has himself to blame for it, so he just says, "I suppose."

He wonders if he looks that way to Louis now, too. The artificial sharpness of something unknown. Or if he just looks like a pathetic mess. He would assume the latter, if it weren't for the fact that he'd been a pathetic mess in Paris, too, and Louis had seen something else.

"Okay," says Louis. "Well, maybe I'll see you here again."

If he comes again, he almost certainly will. And then what? Armand wants to ask. Wants to fall to his knees. But whatever he'd done right tonight, what had made Louis stay, was in the moments Armand didn't care. Or pretended not to. So he says, "maybe." Louis seems pleased with that.

He turns to go, like the bathroom stall is a grand guest house to be taken leave of. And then he turns back, jerkily. One hand hesitantly to the back of Armand's skull, his lips pressed briefly to his forehead. Armand is not sure which of them is more surprised by it. Then he is gone.

When the sun comes up, Armand finds himself at the Deira souk. He cannot think of exactly what he means to buy, only that if Louis imagines his apartment he will imagine there being things in it besides Armand, and he must make that true. He has furnished rooms before, had not found it difficult, but now every object he sees strikes him as equally necessary and laughably useless.

He grabs some at random and returns home with a wooden chair, a prayer rug, a blender, and an odd kind of mop that sprays cleaning solution in front of itself as you push it along. He places his items in the corner, cannot think of what to do with them, and returns to lying on the floor in this room until it is time to go back to sitting in the other. But then, something had happened in the other room that was not supposed to happen. He can no longer know for certain what he might do here.