supererogatory

"Daniel. Beloved, wake up. Did you know about complex numbers?"

Daniel knows by now that he's going to have enormous orange eyeballs taking up his entire field of vision the moment he opens his eyes, but Armand's proximity still makes him jump when he blearily forces his eyes open. It's barely dusk. Armand is here, and Daniel's first urge is to grab him and pull him under the covers with him, but--

"All numbers seem pretty complex right now," he mutters. "Sweetheart, what day is it? Isn't it a Thursday?"

"Yes," says Armand, "and think about this, Daniel-- if you multiply a number by negative one, it rotates one hundred and eighty degrees around the number line, right? And so if you multiply a number by the square root of negative one, how many degrees do you think it rotates?"

Armand is showing him with his hands, his elegant fingers trying to give Daniel a hint, but they haven't come this far just for Daniel to fold now. "Armand," he says, "the rule is--"

"Oh, I decided not to follow the rule today," says Armand easily. "And besides, I didn't come last weekend, so I should be allowed to come on a Thursday today. Numbers have another axis, Daniel! Perpendicular to the real line! And to think, the seminal work was published just twenty years after I was sent away from Rome, in that very city-- not that Santino would have allowed the reading of algebra books."

It's true; Armand hadn't come to visit Daniel last weekend. And Daniel had spent the entire time pacing around, and freaking out a bit, and trying to pretend to himself that he wasn't freaking out, because it's a good thing that Armand isn't showing up looking like a bedraggled puppy on Daniel's doorstep the exact moment he's allowed through it every week. Armand can-- understatement of the century-- take care of himself. If he is passed out drunk in a frat house, or manufacturing homemade explosives for demonstrations, or even just too absorbed at his desk to spare a thought for his fledgling, that is a good thing. That's what The Rule was supposed to accomplish.

Daniel wavers in his commitment to The Rule, and Armand can see it. It's not like Daniel had been the one to impose it; Armand had agreed, too, that there was no other way that he was ever going to give a room of his own a fair try.

And he'd wanted that. On the day that Daniel had taken him apartment-hunting, and Armand had walked around the perimiter of a tiny one bedroom apartment and asked Daniel what do you think should go on the walls? and Daniel had answered Not my room, I have no thoughts. Armand, possibly the most powerful single entity on the planet, stunned speechless at the idea of his absolute dominion over two hundred overpriced New York square feet.

So Daniel has to stick to his guns, now. But not too hard. And he really, really wants to kiss Armand.

Armand sighs theatrically. "I only wish I could tell Marius of this," he says, "it would delight him, to see a cubic with three real roots pass through impossible steps to its solution--"

--which is the nuclear option and Armand knows it, because there is no way Daniel is going to send him home to jerk off to fantasies of sharing his homework with Marius de Romanus. So he grabs the back of his neck instead and pulls him in to kiss him, Armand's knees splaying on either side of his hips, their chests pressed together. Daniel was naked already, the building's heating turned too high for late fall still uncomfortable in this body, and he strips off Armand's shirt with one hand so they can touch each other, skin to skin, evaluating each others' state of hunger from the warmth between them.

Daniel is hungry, because he's always hungry, but it's not urgent. They kiss, and kiss, and prick lips and tongues with fangs until it's dripping down Daniel's neck and smeared over Armand's chin. Daniel tries really, really hard not to let his curiosity get the better of him, but when Armand finally pulls away a little, he gives up and asks, "so, what'd you get up to over the weekend?" and then hastily adds "If you want to tell me. You don't have to."

Armand leans down and props an elbow on Daniel's chest, like he's a table, chin propped on his hand. "What would you do if I said I was having heterosexual sex in the missionary position with my lab partner from physics class while her roommate pretended not to hear from the next bed?"

Daniel doesn't laugh. He doesn't. Maybe a little expulsion of air through the nose. Could have been a tiny sneeze. "Were you?"

"Not telling. But what would you do to me?"

"I'd do whatever you wanted to you, sweetheart, thought that was pretty clear by now. Is this your way of saying you want something done?"

"Hm. Maybe later. I haven't finished telling you--" Armand is levering himself up, undresses the rest of the way, and reaches for Daniel's cock-- "that it's finished. They probably told you in school, Daniel, even in your enlightened age, that there are some things you cannot do to some numbers, missing bricks, no square root of a negative, no logarithm. But they lied. We have a set of numbers closed under every arithmetic operation. It's complete. The seal of the numbers."

Daniel tries to remember what they had told him about numbers in school, he really does. But Armand's hand is slippery on him, with lube or spit or blood or pure enthusiasm, and then he sinks down onto Daniel's cock with a sigh that's too much like relief. And then he's thinking about Armand, Armand lying in the coffin underneath the little twin bed in his apartment surrounded by books and movies and whatever he decided to put on the walls, deciding to get up and break into Daniel's apartment.

Armand is, apparently, able to think about at least two things at a time. Or perhaps these two things are actually one thing, for him. "And now we finally have the tools to describe cyclicity." he says. "Things that rotate, that come back around, both the same and changed, over... and over again." There is no possible filthier way he could be illustrating this concept.

Except apparently there is, because then he is bringing a hand up to smooth over Daniel's stomach, and brandishing the razor-sharp nail of his index finger like it's a knife, giving Daniel time to see what he's going to do before he does it, to stop him. Daniel doesn't stop him. He lets Armand make two shallow slices into his abdomen, one horizontal, one vertical, as he says, "In rectangular coordinates, rotation is unwieldy. All that trigonometry." Daniel can't help the little whine it punches out of him-- he's used to some of it by now, fangs in his neck, his arms, his thighs, slicing his wrist to press into Armand's mouth, but having the delicate skin of his belly sliced open is different, and it hurts.

"But that's just because it's incomplete," Armand continues. "A heart would look so unnecessarily complicated, wouldn't it, outside the body. But inside, where it fits, pumping life, it is obvious. It belongs. The trigonometry was only ever a shadow of the complex exponential. Put the heart back in the body and let it work. To rotate a distance of one unit from the origin, we need only the base of e." And his nail sweeps around, cutting a circle into Daniel perfectly equidistant from the centre of his bloody cross.

"Fuck!" Daniel grits out, feels the blood running down the sides of his torso. He can't move. All he can do is snap his hips up a little, meet Armand's thrusts and let him do whatever he wants to him. Always that.

"There are so few things we know for certain are beloved of the divine." Armand catches one of the rivulets of blood and brings it to his mouth. "And yet here is one of which we can have no doubt; there are certain irrational numbers that God must love. The base of the exponential that is its own rate of growth. The ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. The ratio of two quantities when their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger."

Daniel is desperately trying to keep up and, admittedly, not quite making it. "Halal numbers?" he says stupidly.

"No. Mustahabb. Things that are beloved are by definition unnecessary, extravagent. Supererogatory numbers. If mortals ignored them they would still be there, still be beloved." Pinprick pains in his flesh, fine work.

He's labelling, Daniel realizes. The four intersections of circle with cross marked with the very tip of the pointer nail, starting at the far right and proceeding counterclockwise: 1, i, -1, -i. "Any point on the circle can be described by its distance from the axes, the cosine of its angle along the real line and sine along the imaginary line. But no need. It's all captured by the exponential, e raised to i by the angle..."

He hopes there isn't going to be a test later, though it's entirely possible. At least if there is, he's got a cheat sheet on his own stomach. Armand is still talking, cutting labels and formulas in with flicks of his nail, riding Daniel slowly. The rocking of his hips would be almost soothing, in some alternate reality where Daniel has his dick in Armand and somehow doesn't feel the urge to fuck him hard enough that he actually stops thinking for a moment.

Armand had showed him that, in Dubai. Do it. You remember how I like it. You do. A flood of blood and tears and understanding.

The main thing, the one that had rearranged Daniel's insides more than any dietary transition ever could: once, forty years ago, on a quiet night in a tidy brownstone that Daniel had never quite understood how he came to possess, Armand had let Daniel go. He had given him a human life, one full of fumbling and fucking up and constantly wondering what he was missing so hard-- but also full of sunlight, and bagels with cream cheese and lox, and a cold beer when you're tired from a long day, and the stunned gratitude of the realization that you made a whole person who isn't you at the first dad, you're not the boss of me! Not every bad thing in Daniel's life was Armand's fault-- he'd fucked it up plenty on his own-- but every good thing was. Every temporary, frail human thing that he never would have encountered if Armand had given him what he'd begged for.

And so as Armand had taken him on his first hunt, as they'd cleaned up the mess in Louis' living room as best they could and packed up the few things that Armand wanted to take with him, Daniel had felt it knocking on his chest, asking to be let in. He has given you a gift. To hoard a gift, take it and pass nothing on, is usury. Knock. Knock. Pay attention now, or beat your heart for your sins later. Let him go.

Nobody had ever let Armand go before. Rejected him, forgotten about him, strung him along, yes. But despite all that, or perhaps because of it, Armand has never, never been alone. Marius to Santino to the Children of Darkness to Lestat to the Théâtre to Louis-- to Daniel, if Daniel lets it happen.

He'd said it in the airport, Armand scrolling through real estate listings, talking about fitting out a house with all the necessary blinds and shields. You know, you can get a place of your own if you want.

Marius de Romanus chose his boys, fed and clothed them, educated them, did whatever else he pleased with them-- and then they grew up, and left, and the most promising were provided with the funding to spread the good name of their benefactor at the universities in Padua or Bologna. That was the deal, the gift. For all except one, who had received a different gift.

And Daniel, for all his emotional failings as a parent, had been pretty good at the practical stuff. He knows how to read a university viewbook, how to trail behind wistfully on a campus tour, how to choose a student rental that’s shitty enough to be character-building but not too shitty. He knows how to love someone so much it feels like your heart is going to break if they exist outside your very ribcage, and let them become their own person anyway.

He'd been afraid that Armand wouldn't understand, would think he was being cast off. But he should have known better. Despite having never received that gift, Armand had known to give it to Daniel. Of course he can recognize the gift when it comes back to him: he had grown it in his own soul in secret, watered by nobody but himself.

Now, Armand comes on Daniel's cock with his hands smearing through the bloody mess he'd made of Daniel's stomach, and Daniel hopes like hell that he can figure out some way to make that thing scar. Sometimes he misses Armand so much, just a subway ride and a promise away, that it feels like standing in sunlight. And that's good. Daniel can feel that, if it means giving Armand what he's never been offered before.

"Use me," Armand gasps, "make me feel it, make it last--" which it won't, of course, there is absolutely no amount of pounding into Armand that won't be erased by the time he sits down in a lecture hall tomorrow, but Daniel gives it his best shot anyway.

Armand lies on top of him afterwards, heavier than he looks, smearing the blood on Daniel’s belly into his own. It’s still a Thursday. He should send him away. This could easily become a slippery slope until they’re simply living together, just another situation that Armand did not choose and sticks with out of inertia. He’ll send him away in a moment. But for now there is this time, another thing that is extra, never asked for or expected, more precious because of it.

"You can go on exchange, as a student," Armand says quietly into his skin. "Did you know that?"

Daniel doesn't point out that Armand doesn't need the permission of an exchange program to go anywhere in the world, do anything he wants. Or a coven, or a master, or a lover. "Oh?"

"I was thinking," Armand says lightly, "of applying to the University of Padua. For my second-- my sophomore year."

The mess on his stomach aches. The idea of Armand being gone aches worse. The idea of him being in Italy feels like being cut into again. This feels unendurable, but he knows it is not. He has endured it before. He pulls Armand in, holds him tightly. If he is going to be gone for a whole year, surely they can have this Thursday. "That sounds great," Daniel whispers.