I will tell you another mysterious part of it

Louis knows how to make an exit just as dramatically as he makes an entrance.

Daniel's laptop is on fire. It's not a huge loss-- he may not be a cybersecurity expert, but he is a journalist who's been doing this since the days when backing up your work meant running an entire tape to record a duplicate, and he has nightly copies of every session besides today's on an external hard drive in the guest room. And somehow, he doesn't seem likely to forget today's events particularly quickly.

If he lives long enough to remember or forget anything.

The moment Louis is out of the apartment, Armand stands up. He wipes the blood off his face with his hand and shakes the dust out of his hair. Daniel is not sure whether the pathetic creature lying on the floor was a performance, or if the predator picking himself up and shaking it off is. Probably both.

The burning laptop does smell quite bad. It is, Daniel feels, rather late for him to try to run. Also, Armand enjoys a chase, and if he's going to be dinner he'd rather not be an amusement first. He also really doesn't need to add an exploding lithium-ion battery to the list of today's excitement. He drifts into the living room. "Could you put that out?" he says.

Armand flicks a finger. The vague crackling sound of melting semiconductors stops, though of course the smell lingers.

Daniel wonders whether the finger flick is just for show. It can't possibly make the difference between being able to use the mind gift and not, so either it's psychological or--

"It's so that observers are aware of the link between action and effect, yes."

Daniel doesn't answer, since apparently he doesn't need to. He's not entirely sure what he'd most like to say, anyway. Probably Armand knows better than him.

Armand drifts towards the window. He stares straight down, to where Louis is no doubt getting in a car and driving-- being driven? People with butlers generally don't--

"Louis enjoys driving automobiles," comes Armand's next unsolicited answer. Maybe to him, the difference between someone saying something with their mouth and their mind isn't actually all that significant.

Armand turns at that, head tilted, and looks directly at Daniel for the first time. "There are differences," he says slowly. "I wouldn't get speech and thought confused unless I were quite distracted, or the thought were unusually verbally formed. Someone rehearsing a speech in their mind, perhaps. More often, thought provides the landscape behind speech. Like foreground and background in a painting. They can support or contradict each other, but only form a full statement taken together."

Which implies speech is actually necessary. What's the point if you can just--

"Thoughts are one thing. They can be seen and understood. But the shaping of thoughts into words and actions, what an individual chooses to take from the mess of impulses and emotions tumbling around inside them-- that is more mysterious. And more telling."

Daniel realizes his legs are shaking. They probably have been ever since Rashid brought in the newspaper; it feels like regular human adrenaline, not illness or mind control. He takes a few steps forward and collapses onto the couch. "Can't know for sure if someone's a liar until they say the lie out loud," he says.

"Yes."

Under the circumstances, then, it feels a little bit like a mutiny against the entire situation to refuse to say anything further. Silence can be just as effective a questioning tool as questions themselves.

Armand smiles a little at that. Then he walks out of the room.

Daniel's breath sounds very loud in the empty room. He looks around. Dubai twinkles at him through the windows. If you have to only be able to see your city at night, Dubai is a good cityscape to choose. It is ostentatious in its brightness. Is Armand really going to just leave? Daniel wants him to leave, of course, or he should, but they had been in the middle of a conversation. Of sorts. He waits, trying to convince himself that any moment now he is going to go start packing.

"I was only in the kitchen." Armand is walking carefully, a bowl in his hand. "You're hungry. I hope this is the right temperature; Rashid thought to put your next meal in the refrigerator before leaving, and it's been a while since I last operated a microwave oven."

Daniel is hungry, though the full force of it only occurs to him now that Armand has mentioned it. This doesn't seem like the kind of household where dinner is eaten on the couch, no matter what the dinner is, but Armand hands the bowl to him where he sits, and it's a perfectly comfortable temperature to rest on his lap. It's some kind of stew, an oddly unpretentious-seeming dish in comparison to the others he's been served here. Presumably to Armand it all looks about as appealing as a choice between two different brands of dog food, so he doesn't bother asking what it is.

"Tharid," says Armand. "A bread and meat stew. The Prophet, peace be upon him, is said to have stated that the superiority of Aisha wife of Pharoah to other women is like the superiority of Tharid to other kinds of food."

Daniel stares into his bowl. He can probably come up with a way of formulating his next question a little bit more politely than he had when he'd first found the doe-eyed servant Rashid praying Asr, but not by all that much.

Armand settles beside him. "I will say out loud the question you thought earlier," he says, "and not the one you are thinking right now, since it is easier to answer. In fact, I believe you will be able to answer it without my help. Why do I not seem more surprised, more devastated, by what has just happened with Louis?"

Daniel takes the opportunity of having his mouth full to think it over. The stew is good, the kind of thing-- well, the kind of thing you'd feed someone you were planning on eating later, if he's honest, but not much to be done about that. He tries to think of what Armand knows he knows. Or what he hopes he knows; what Armand had told Daniel on purpose.

The poor, brainwashed little coven master, sitting and watching as Lestat destroyed his life's work. He'd really like to fact-check that little yarn with the other party involved, if he can, but at the very least it's what Armand wants him to believe.

And Armand can already read all that on him, and probably see the realization dawning on his face to boot. But Armand had spoken the question for him, it's only fair that he say the answer.

"You wanted this," he says. "I was-- what, whatever the opposite of a marriage counsellor is?"

"Nothing so definite," says Armand. He's staring into space, now, his arms folded in a way that seems more like a hug than a gesture of impatience. "But I knew it was a possibility, abstractly. As did Louis. The past is not a safe place for us to go, but he asked to be allowed to go there, and I permitted it."

Permitted. Armand could have obliterated the thought from Louis' mind if he'd wanted to. He could have made Louis forget Daniel ever existed. "Did you try to dissuade him? By actually talking to him, I mean?"

"No." Armand shrugs, waves a hand vaguely at the crater in the wall. "I didn't want this. But I wanted..." for a moment he seems on the verge of something, an instinct Daniel trusts telling him to put down his spoon and lean in to listen. But then it passes, and he finishes, "...the interview to take place."

God, I wish I could read your mind, Daniel thinks as hard as he can, and Armand's lips are briefly haunted by the ghost of a smile.

Armand seems content to watch him eat in silence, or more likely, to rifle through Daniel's mind as he lets it drift around in a tangle of associations and confusions. He puts the empty bowl on the table when he's finished. Hole in the wall. Dirty dish on the table. The room feels more appropriate to the project now, somehow.

"So, what are you going to do now?" Daniel asks.

Armand is definitey holding himself now. Palms on his shoulders, elbows on his knees, chin resting on the back of one hand. "Louis is going to go to New Orleans," he says, almost like he's speaking to himself. "Perhaps I will go to Venice."

Louis was born in New Orleans, Daniel thinks.

"And what exactly do you think I would do in Delhi?"

"Same as whatever the hell you're planning on doing in Venice, I guess," says Daniel. It's hard not to feel a little defensive when someone snaps at you based on things you didn't even say. "I'm not endorsing either option, to be clear."

"Maybe I'll go to sleep," says Armand, as if sleep is a city of its own. Maybe it is. Is he--

"Not that," Armand corrects him. "Besides, how would I do it?"

The sun wouldn't do, if Armand wanted to be done with it all. He'd have to throw himself into a fire, or find someone to decapitate him. Certainly not impossible. But Daniel believes him that it's not what he's planning.

"And you, Daniel Molloy," says Armand. "What are you going to do now?"

"Me?" Daniel laughs. "I'm going to write a book, and I'm going to die. If I'm lucky, I'll be done with the former before the latter. If I'm really lucky, I won't have to do the book tour."

He says it like a joke, but a few weeks after his diagnosis, Daniel had bought a tiny run-down condo in Jersey City. He doesn't live there, but the state of New Jersey doesn't know that, and when the time comes, a New Jersey physician can legally write him a perscription for a terminal quantity of barbituates. A bit of a convoluted procedure for someone who's procured most of the drugs he's taken in his life via the perscribing mechanism of sucking dick, yes, but it's not something he's particularly interested in fucking up the quality or dosage of.

Armand is staring at him. He looks-- there is no other word for it, he looks stricken. A strange echo of his theatrical shock at the table a few hours earlier, when Daniel had handed over the script. Less obvious, more sincere.

Which is bullshit. Armand knows he's dying. He doesn't get to clutch his pearls about it, not when Daniel has forced himself to think on it every day, to get used to it. He is as used to it as he can be, as accepting as he's likely to get. And he's also fucking terrified, and fear makes people lash out, so lets his mouth get away from his mind and snaps, "What? Got any helpful wisdom from the Prophet on the subject of suicide?"

Armand's fingers release their grip on his own shoulders slowly, like he's forcing himself to relax. His smile is equally contrived. "If you like," he says lightly. "Narrated Abu Huraira, may Allah be pleased with him, whoever throws himself down a mountain will be throwing himself into the fire of Hell forever. Whoever drinks poison will be sipping the fire of Hell forever. Whoever kills himself with iron will have that iron in his belly in the fire of Hell forever. So I hope your New Jersey physician prescribes you something enjoyable."

Daniel slumps back against the couch. He would have thought that there would be nobody he'd rather discuss his impending death with less than someone who doesn't have to worry about death at all. And he doesn't want to discuss this Armand, but the fact that it's Armand means that anything he thinks he might as well say out loud, and-- yeah, he's thought about it. Had nightmares about it. The drugs, his last moments. What if it's awful. What if he regrets it. Daniel's been close to death once before. What if, in the moments before his real death, he wishes for that feeling instead.

"Well," he says, "It wasn't exactly appealing to a coked-up twenty-year-old, but... I think I could deal with the fire of Hell, if I got to take your rest shtick in there with me. So if you were planning on proving to Louis that he isn't your maitre any more in the most dramatic way possible... maybe just wait a little bit?"

Those fucking eyes. Every time he looks at them it's like there's something else that wants to bubble up, memories itching under his skin. He can't not look now, because Armand is staring at him with an expression that is simultaneously the headlights and the deer. "Why?" he whispers.

"Why? If you can't figure out why someone might choose the death you offer over plenty of others, then why do you bother doing it in the first place?"

"Why would you offer me this," says Armand, "When you hate me?"

Daniel snorts. "I do?"

He's never hated an interview subject, not really. Maybe the Enron executives came closest, but the thing about an interview is, you have to be willing to at least try to actually put yourself in someone else's mind, someone else's experience. You have to bring your own good sense with you, of course, otherwise you're just borrowing their blind spots. But you do have to go there, and real hatred is simply not compatible with the project.

Which isn't to say that he's not frequently frustrated at subjects. And yes, Armand is certainly frustrating. And the most tangled web of lies Daniel thinks he's ever seen inside a living being, which is saying something. And also strangely childish. It fits, really, with what he'd done to Louis, that he can have access to everything Daniel's ever thought, and come to the conclusion that if someone feels something besides uncomplicated adoration for him, it must be hatred.

So speaking out loud has a purpose after all. "Do you hate me, Armand?" he asks.

"No," says Armand immediately. "I don't hate you, Daniel."

"Do you trust me?"

Armand hesitates. His fingers rub together nervously. "Yes," he says eventually. "I trust you to be what you are."

Daniel waves a hand. "There you go," he says. "I don't always trust that you're telling the truth, because you aren't. But that's not hatred. And I trust you to kill me gently."

He swallows. It sounds like a favour he's asking, now that he says it out loud. He's old and full of drugs with less entertaining effects than the ones he'd been stuffed with the last time Armand had drank from him. He hadn't meant to ask for this, but now that it's a possibility, he wants it more than anything. He isn't thinking about his death constantly on a conscious level, but it's always there. A terror on the edges of his mind. Theoretically, this shouldn't be that much different from a lethal overdose. But the difference is that nobody actually knows how the lethal overdose feels, do they, right at the moment that matters. The only ones who think they know are the ones who never quite made it to the threshold. Whereas Daniel knows how this feels. He remembers now. He wants it. And Armand still hasn't actually said yes.

"Yes," says Armand.

They stare at each other, silent, Dubai twinkling from the window beneath them.

Daniel lets out a long breath. "Thank you," he says.

Armand's lips open and close twice before he actually speaks. "I'll-- it will be good for you, Daniel," he says, and his voice is the shakiest Daniel has ever heard it. "You don't have to worry about it any more, I'll-- would you like me to help you not worry about it?"

"No!" Daniel splutters, and Armand flinches, and he feels suddenly bad for him in a way that he hadn't when he'd been standing over the pile Louis had made of him on the floor. When was the last time Armand experienced death, real death, of someone he knows well enough to actually recognize as a fellow living being? Well, the scare with Louis, probably. And look at how he'd reacted to that.

"You're not helping with it already, are you?" Daniel asks, and Armand shakes his head, and Daniel thinks he believes him. "Well," he says, "I-- I am less worried about it. Just from knowing. So. Thanks again. Do you want this to be a defiance thing? Or should I tell Louis, before..." he almost says you, but somehow that doesn't feel quite right. Killing Daniel was a solo project in 1973. Now it's a joint effort. "...before we do it?"

"You can if you like," says Armand, "but I think you'll find him... unreceptive to the idea. There is a part of Louis that takes the threat of the fire of Hell much more literally than I can. That he attempted the act himself means only that he believed he was deserving of it, which is what he wished to forget."

Daniel's still not sure he believes that Louis asked for that, but perhaps he does believe that Armand thinks he had. "He did say he would kill you if you harmed me," he says. And he hardly needs to say it out loud, because his mind is blasting it on all channels: he doesn't wany either of them to die. The idea that they'll both be here after he's gone, forever, probably fucking it up over and over again but still trying, is oddly comforting.

Armand manages a small smile. "And so the circumstances from your point of view hardly matter. He may try. But I think you already know, Daniel, that Louis has never done, and is not capable of doing, anything to me that I do not consent to."

Which would make Daniel worry again that Armand was planning on dying, but he'd already said he wasn't, and Daniel believes him, and his truths are rare enough that Daniel doesn't want to make him repeat himself. More likely, he's hoping Louis will knock him around a bit and they'll end up in bed together again. Which doesn't actually seem like an impossible outcome. "I think there's probably a rule somewhere that if two vampires have kinky sex over your cooling corpse, you definitely go to hell," he says, and Armand actually smothers a tiny giggle. It feels like a victory.

Which still leaves the question unanswered: what is Armand going to do? A single willing victim, waiting hopefully at least a year down the line if not several, does not a post-divorce plan make.

"I don't know," says Armand quietly. He turns himself away from Daniel, into the couch, like he could fade into it, arms crossed, eyes closed. "I don't know, please stop asking."

Daniel hadn't said anything, of course, but he tries to do as requested anyway. Don't think about it. Don't wonder. Whatever Armand does next is none of his business. The vampire next to him is his euthanasia provider, not his friend. He really doesn't care.

"Okay," he forces himself to say. "Well, I'm beat. I'm going to bed, and I'll figure out flights tomorrow." If Armand is right that Louis is going to New Orleans-- and Daniel thinks he probably is-- then there's no need to rush out of the penthouse. For either of them.

"All right," says Armand softly. "Goodnight, Daniel."

He can't say it back. It sticks in his throat on his way out. He can't say anything else, either. He ends up patting Armand on the shoulder as the stands up, the same stupid inadequate gesture he'd offered to a daughter being stood up by her prom date. Goes to his room, shuts the door, scrubs the lingering dust off of him in a scalding shower.

It should be impossible to sleep, after a day like that. But when his head hits the pillow, for the first time in years, the faceless specter of oblivion doesn't haunt him into wakefulness. It has a face now, a face more well-known and soothing than it ought to be. Sleep comes without terror.

In the past two weeks, Daniel has gotten better at sleeping through the dawn call to prayer. Louis had adjusted his schedule from fully nocturnal to something approaching a typical college student for Daniel's benefit, but had still never appeared before noon, so it was to his benefit to try to sleep as late as possible.

As if there is a background process running in his mind even as he sleeps reminding him that things have changed, the day after Louis leaves, he snaps awake at the first sound drifting through the window. There is no question of returning to sleep. The trial, Louis gone, probably to seek Lestat, and Daniel here alone with--

He is suddenly terrified that Armand might be gone. Louis had told him to go, after all, and he hadn't exactly seemed settled, when Daniel had left him the previous night. He pulls on some clothes with shaking hands, trying to convince himself that needing some way of contacting him is the only reason it feels so urgent to see him.

The glass in the living room is untinted, the crescent of rising sun casting the room in a faint glow. Armand is here, standing to face the western window. Daniel pulls up short, his heart hammering, irrational panic subsiding.

Armand turns. He's changed his clothes from the plaster-coated ones he wore last night, and his hair looks damp from the shower. "Good morning," he says, and perhaps Daniel is imagining that his relief is mirrored in Armand's voice.

"Sorry," says Daniel. It does seem fair that a man ought to be able to pray the morning after being served divorce papers without being subject to the looming threat of metaphysical interrogation. "I'll...come back."

Armand shrugs. "As you prefer," he says.

In which case-- Daniel does prefer. He prefers to drift into the room, curl himself up on the couch, and watch Armand pray as the sun slides up from the horizon. Standing, then bent, then kneeling, and again. His voice is soft.

He only realizes that he's nearly fallen back asleep when he is pulled back by Armand saying his name. "Are you hungry?" he asks. "There may still be mortal food ingredients in the kitchen, but nothing is prepared. I can have breakfast for you delivered, or if you prefer you can go out. There will be a few places nearby just opening."

Daniel pushes himself up. He needs to get out of this penthouse, he decides, if only to figure out whether everything that happened inside of it was the product of his fevered imagination. If he can go for breakfast, and come back to find the place still here, then he can believe it.

"Very sensible," says Armand, amused. His fingers worry the tassels of the rug under his arm, and then he says, "May I come with you?"

Okay. Or he could go for breakfast with Armand, the vampire who had tortured and nearly killed him at fifty years ago and is going to politely allow him to finish writing a tell-all memoir about his ex before killing him for real, and see if any of that still makes any sense in the light of day. "Sure," he says. "Why not."

There's an elevator directly to the penthouse, no risk of running into any other inhabitants of the building on on your way down. But it leads to the public lobby, which is staffed by a doorman who greets Armand and also Daniel, as if it is normal for him to exit his apartment with strange men. Probably because it is. Daniel mutters alaikum as-salam and tries not to think about what conclusion he's going to draw when Daniel is the only one ever to return to the penthouse in Armand's company. Well, hopefully. Actually, maybe he could try to talk to the guy on his way out, fact-check--

"He's not thinking about you at all, I'm afraid," says Armand as they emerge onto the street. "He's worrying about the twinge in his knee after his most recent cricket league practice. Just as he likely has very little recollection of anyone else who was entered or left this building in my company."

"Convenient," says Daniel. The sun is up now, the street the blue-grey of early morning, still fairly cool out. His legs feel stiff from too many days of sitting in front of his laptop, and it occurs to him it would be nice to go for a walk. Armand seems content to lead him in one, turning them down a side street at a pace that is perfectly comfortable for Daniel, so must feel like crawling to him. But then, when you're going to live forever, there's also not much reason to rush anywhere, so perhaps not.

It begins to feel like a different kind of assignment, one from earlier in his life. Dubai looks slick from above, from a car driven by a silent uniformed driver, but just after dawn on foot, the city is made up of the cogs in the shiny machinery which Daniel has made a career of seeing through. Ninety per cent of the workforce in the Emirates are migrants, and the streets Armand leads him down are filling up with people who do the kind of work that means getting up early, dragging themseves to the metro station to start another day. The shops that are open are mostly tiny places, with signs announcing that they serve coffee or tea and Indian food if they say anything in English at all. Just as Daniel is beginning to feel fatigued, Armand gestures him into one.

There are only five tables, and a front counter with a sleepy-looking teenager. Daniel has started feeling slightly off-balance, which isn't all that unusual-- his doctor had recommended he install guardrails around his apartment sooner rather than later, a piece of advice he had ignored before promptly flying to the other side of the world to interview a bloodsucking murderer-- so he sits down at one quickly, while Armand talks to the teenager in what Daniel is almost certain is Hindi.

By the time Armand joins him, Daniel has gotten control of most of his central nervous system, if not his actual mind. Despite this being the most normal place Daniel has been in the past two weeks, the fact of sitting here across from Armand, surrounded by real people going about their regular lives, makes it seem even more surreal than anything that happened in the penthouse.

Armand tilts his head. "You seem to think me a terrible recluse," he comments.

Daniel sits back, and tries to gather his thoughts. That Armand can speak Hindi is not particularly shocking, though he is a little bit curious as to whether he sounds in it like an attempt to navigate a New York Starbucks in the English style of Thomas Malory. But yes, perhaps he had assumed Armand to be a recluse. And that, he realizes, was very intentional: Armand has just spent two weeks trying very hard to present his entire life as rotating around Louis.

A memory, one of Louis', from the recording just a few days ago: him and Armand arguing about morality in a Parisian café, Louis' end of the conversation being interrupted so comprehensively by his own persistent hallucination of Lestat that the interruption by a presumably not hallucinated existentialist philosopher seemed like a minor detail. Louis, so enthralled by the galleries and salons and his own place in them, not even wondering how it is that Jean-Paul Sartre came to know his new lover by name.

Armand is smiling at this thought. They're served karak chai-- both of them, Daniel notes with interest-- and the kid asks Daniel "meat or vegetable?" which is about the level of choice he feels up for at the moment. He chooses vegetable, and drums his fingers on the table as he stares at the vampire across from him. Armand picks up his cup and smells it, as if that were its purpose.

"Enough help, I think," he says, placing the full cup back down on the table. "You're getting lazy. Any question that you can ask out loud, I will answer."

"Do you believe in God?" Daniel asks, with a immediacy that surprises even himself.

Armand does a thing with his jaw, Daniel has noticed, when he's irritated or unsure. Slightly open, a twitch to the side. He's doing it now, eyes boring into the food being placed on the table equidistant between then. Some kind of vegetable dish, as Daniel requested. A plate of bread. Armand pushes them towards Daniel.

"You didn't promise a yes or no answer," Daniel points out, more gently. "It's a prompt, not a quiz."

More silence, more of Armand watching Daniel eat. Daniel is good at awkward silence, usually, but something about this one makes him nervous. Maybe it's different because there's actually no reason he needs to know the answer to what he's just asked. It's not for the book. It won't help him get a leg up on anything. He just wants to know.

"Your thinking is distracting me," says Armand eventually.

"Sorry," says Daniel, sincerely, though he doesn't exactly have a plan to stop.

A rueful smile. "I will speak chronologically, then, and not thematically, and leave that area to you," Armand says. "My first memory of being taught namaz was on the caravan journey from Delhi. Since it seems clear to me from later events that I was not yet near puberty, the fact that I remember daily prayers being new to me is hardly conclusive on any points of fact of my earlier life. But I remember the two men who taught me; they had been soldiers, I think probably deserters. I suppose it is reasonable to conclude they were probably not particularly honest or courageous men, but they were kind to me, and tried to explain what was going to happen to me as gently as they could. They seemed to me like gods. So when they said that their strength came from God, and strength in God came from prayer, yes, I believed them. I believed them ravenously. I wanted to know everything there was to know, which in that milieu wasn't much. I was--"

Armand stops. Suddenly he grins, an expression far too bright for the subject matter. And he looks at Daniel, expectant. Like Daniel's supposed to say something. Daniel has an awful feeling that he knows what he's supposed to say.

You have the worst sense of humour, Armand, he thinks, except the truth is Armand's humour would fit right in at the press club. "An eager black hole," he says.

"Yes," Armand agrees. "And it seemed for a while that they were right. I was sold to a Portuguese captain, and things happened precisely as my friends had said they would, and I prayed as they taught me. He tolerated it, the captain, probably because it amused him. But to be allowed to keep something is always valuable, no matter the reason."

To keep something. Armand's fingers, which had been lying deathly still on the table, twist around each other. He is wearing a single ring with a large stone in it; the same one he had been wearing on the day Daniel had forced him to cast off Rashid. The day that he hadn't been planning on taking off the gloves. He had never worn it again, not for the performance of domestic bliss with Louis. Something older, then. Something else kept.

"In the brothel in Venice," he continues, "There was no time for such things. And besides, even a rudimentary estimation of prayer times require that one be able to see the sky."

And then Marius, thinks Daniel, probably so loudly that it is distracting again.

"And then Marius," Armand repeats. "You must understand-- when he removed me from the brothel, it seemed to me that it must be the work of the divine. It was quite a while before I understood that he was not the very God I had been praying to. It is difficult to discuss theology with the belly, as it has no ears; and my belly was, for the first time in years, full."

"Cato," Daniel identifies. "Doesn't exactly seem like Marius' style." He pushes the mostly-empty plates to the side of the table. He wishes he were recording this, but it's just an instinct. Nothing he's going to write. And he's aware enough to realize that if he's being told the truth, it's probably only because he genuinely has no use for it.

"All art and literature were Marius' style," says Armand, "and faith was not. He desired that his boys be able to read everything, know everything, without taking any of it particularly seriously. So Cato, yes. Latin was the first language that I learned to read in. Marius provided me with as much religious reading material as I desired. Much of it Christian, but not exclusively. When I was a teenager, an Andalusian freedman produced a new translation of the Quran into Latin, which was popular among Italian intellectuals. It would have seemed an unimaginable bounty to the boy in the caravan, but prayer was another matter. It disturbed Marius, I think. I do not think it would have disturbed him any less had I been found praying a rosary."

Praying, Daniel thinks, implies that you need something you don't already have, or want to be something you are not already. Quite the insult to a pederast with a saviour complex.

"I wanted to please him," says Armand simply.

"I'm sure."

"And then the coven in Rome," says Armand, "and the coven in Paris. It might have seemed strange to you, that they would send me out as a coven master, when I was a recently captured heathen myself." Daniel doesn't really know what he's talking about, so it doesn't seem that much stranger than anything else, but now doesn't seem like the time for clarification of the practical details. "But I assure you, it was an assignment I earned on merit. Merit and love. Yes, I loved the old rituals. Santino took Marius from me, but he gave me what Marius could not, or perhaps just refused to. A higher purpose to vampirism. Not one to be abstractly believed in, but one to be acted."

"Seemed like a pretty Christian satanic cult you were heading up there."

Armand smiles. "Perhaps, to a Christian."

Christian isn't the most flattering thing Daniel's ever been called, but it's certainly far from the worst. Actually, eager black hole was probably the worst, if only because it hit closest to the bone, but now he's not sure about that one, either.

The teenager reappears to take Daniel's plates, and Armand hands over a fifty-dirham note, which is received with an expression that says it's enough of a surplus on the bill to leave them the table for a little bit.

"And then Lestat," says Daniel.

"And then Louis. Lestat left the coven rituals altered, yes, but not destroyed. Louis..."

"I really hope you're not about to try to put the blame for how the coven ended on Louis."

"I'm not," says Armand, although he sounds annoyed enough that Daniel thinks maybe he had been, just a little. "I am attempting to return to the subject of prayer. It was Louis' suggestion, when we moved here. I do not think he intended it entirely kindly, but he did intend it honestly." And Daniel knows Armand is a liar, he knows it's entirely possible and indeed likely that he's being manipulated right now, but he really can't see any nefarious reason for the wistful little smile on Armand's face when he says, "Whatever you believe about the love Louis and I shared, please believe at least that we did, frequently, understand what the other needed. Even if we were not always willing or able to provide it."

That seems true enough. Daniel had lain on the floor, immobilized beside a corpse, while Louis moaned in his coffin in the next room and Armand stood in the corner, seeking Lestat with his mind. Holding back just enough to keep himself in control. Not willing, but knowing. "What do you mean, he didn't intend it entirely kindly?"

Armand leans his chin on his hand. He seems on solider ground now, which is what makes Daniel suspect he's about to hear something he doesn't like. "What was the word he used?" Armand asks sweetly. "Metronomic. That I might be aware of my own desire for ritual, and accept such a desire intentionally, disturbed him. For different reasons, I think, than it disturbed Marius. For Marius, such a desire was foreign. For Louis..." he shrugs. "Obligatory namaz implies that, whatever the goal of prayer might be, it is an ongoing and constant effort. So allow me to ask you this, Daniel. When a Catholic feels that they can no longer go on as they have been, to which sacrament do they turn?"

Daniel's mouth feels dry. He drinks Armand's tea, still sitting on the table between them. Thinks of the fifty year old magnetic tapes, burned in the garbage can. Of his laptop, smouldering on the table. Finally he says, "Confession."

Armand makes an elegant little gesture with his fingers, a sort of and here you are. "Louis is still young," he says, "and his sleep schedule is usually a good deal more regular than it has been for for time here. He wakes at isha and sleeps at fajr, and much of the time in between is my own."

Daniel shakes his head. Something about Armand's whole don't-need-to-feed, don't-need-to-sleep thing strikes him as false. Clearly he's not falling asleep or wasting away, but he wonders if there are other vampires as old as him, and if so, if they have similar schedules.

Armand narrows his eyes. "I do sleep sometimes," he clarifies, as if he doesn't know that's not really what Daniel meant.

"Okay," says Daniel, consciously deciding to leave that issue aside. "Metronomic. So... you do sleep, allegedly. You pray. Do you swim, or did he make that one up?"

A soft, musical laugh. "Yes. I enjoy swimming. It was one of the first powers that Marius showed me, when he gave me the gift-- he dropped me into the sea near the Lido, and left me to swim back to him in the harbour of Venice. I had been terrified of the sea, for reasons you can probably imagine. And in a single moment, I learned that it had no more power over me."

Daniel could point out that dropping someone into the sea to cure their fear of the sea is still kind of a dick move. He could also point out that he had asked a question about belief, and received an answer about ritual. But perhaps that is, in itself, an answer. And now Armand is smiling, and Daniel thinks he wants him to keep smiling.

"Five prayers, a catnap, a dip in the Arabian Gulf," he ticks off on his fingers. "Still leaves a few hours of daylight, doesn't it? Any other activities Louis wasn't invited to participate in?"

Armand leans forward. He's gazing at Daniel in a way that-- yeah, if this were any other situation in Daniel's life, he would interpret it as flirtatious. Amused, certainly. He seems to consider his answer for a few moments, then says, "I enjoy the mall."

Daniel blinks. "That mall?" It wouldn't exactly have been his first guess, but now that he thinks about it, it doesn't sound implausible. Armand clearly enjoys beautiful things, including his own clothing, and he comes from the exact kind of background of mixed deprivation and luxury that tends to make people appreciate the latter in a way those who haven't experienced the former don't. Still, the image of him hanging around the mall like a teenager avoiding their parents is a little bit funny.

"You've never been to the Dubai Mall, have you?" Armand asks.

"Wasn't really top of my list."

"We can go there together," decrees Armand. "At night, of course, when it’s closed. Unless you need to fly home immediately? You do have a book to write, after all."

He should go home. He is dying. He has a book to write before he dies. He does not have time to hang around at the mall with a vampire.

"No rush," says Daniel.

It’s a lie, of course. But for now, it feels like the truth, so he stays.