Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He’s not going back. Not for a Pulitzer. Not for a million smackaroos. Not even for another hit.

Fuck, Daniel must be insane to consider it.

Returning to Divisadero Street, where he was almost drained to death by the vampire that took him home, gave him some drugs, and told him a story.

Where the vampire Armand is now, unresponsive and in heat, with his alpha burnt up and incapacitated in the adjoining room.

Wait, stop—you have to stay, help ‘im, the voice—Louis's voice in his head had said when he was halfway down the stairwell.

Four days in and he managed to get out.

Another two since then.

The waitress brings his pancakes to the table; she goes back to the kitchen for the eggs and side of bacon, and Daniel wonders if Louis has called out for one of the neighbours yet. Perhaps he has and that’s why he stopped begging him to come back. What was it, a day and a half before he fell silent?

The coffee needs more creamer, but the waitress doesn’t look back at him.

He wonders if Louis’s calls cut out because there was no one there to feed him and he lost all his strength.

The bacon tastes like maple syrup.

And he’s not going fucking back.

The vampire Armand is in exactly the same position Daniel left him in, only his face looks greyer under the eyes and slightly thinner in the cheeks.

Curled on his side where the kitchen tile meets the hardwood, hair slightly damp around the temples, more from the heat of the airless room than anything else, but otherwise unchanged from how he was before.

The thumping sound as the vampire hit the ground replays in Daniel’s head. The little change in expression, a split second of awareness before the eyes lost focus and Daniel was throwing open the apartment door, free, out, down the stairs, feet on the sidewalk, fucking out!

Despite being in heat, the omega smells like nothing. He is a pile of limbs, cold to the touch, a mixed signal to the alpha’s brain.

Heatsick, or something like it. Too defenceless, too inert. Defective in a way no supplement can even attempt to hide.

Daniel wants nothing more than to breed him like a good alpha should. Ironic given how he’d come here to get his own ass filled.

Life’s funny like that sometimes.

Need you to fuck him through it, Louis’s voice whispers in his head, desperate. Of course, it is—he's weak, coffin-bound; for all Daniel knows, Armand is all he’s got. Just, fuck him or... it could be decades before he’s right again.

He is under no obligation to help the man, the near comatose omega who’d tortured him for days on end.

The tent in his jeans means nothing at all.

Cold and wet, like fucking a jello mold—it's like heaven on his dick.

In in in in in in in, his only thought as he drives into the omega vampire’s tight channel. Like a sleeve around his cock, tight, but without the rippled pressure of an active partner, until his balls draw up and he pulls out, squeezing the base of his dick.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Fuck him more, pump more in him. Not a conscious thought, but it’s Daniel’s only plan.

Whoever said Daniel Molloy’s got no self-restraint has never had him in the sack.

Three days Daniel fucks him, careful, like a blow-up doll he doesn’t want to pop, a hole cut into the ass of a heart-shaped silk pillow. He’s trying to make it good for him, safe, as unscary and non-threatening as he can because he’s not the only one to wake up with a loose ass and days of missing memories.

No scratches, no biting, no blunt trauma slap to the upper thigh as Daniel pops a knot and cums inside him, just a steady rut and grind between his cheeks, face pressed into the vampire's curls.

He doesn’t know if the other man even senses a thing, but he hopes he feels it.

He hopes it’s good for him.

When he’s finished, Daniel hydrates, wets a washcloth, and smooths little warm circles into the omega’s skin because some pamphlet at the sex club said it helped with trauma. He orders takeaway and pays for it with the cash he found in a wallet in a leather jacket that was hanging in the closet, and runs out to fetch the blood he ordered from the Polish butcher two blocks over like he’s Louis’s delivery boy. The guy behind the counter must think he’s got a grandma in the sausage business, but it’s all for Louis.

The best he can do besides offer himself up.

Louis is quiet during. Asleep sometimes, or wallowing in the pain of his charred-up immortal frame. But when the night rolls in and the blood is in him, stitching him back together, and the semen seeps out cold where Armand lays resting in the moonlight, he tells Daniel half stories with no leads to follow up on given that anyone and everyone he brings to his attention is centuries dead.

He’s a good storyteller, even with all the bullshit.

Tonight, the vampire tells him something about Armand, mentions an omega child made a commodity on a brothel floor. Explains how he’d first been mated (young) and widowed (young) and claimed again when he could not lift his head from the floor of his cell because of this thing, this curse which returned when his maker went up in flames, and how slowly the others would learn that someone, all of them would have to do it, that it would not do to have a fledgling with such strong and ancient blood carelessly debilitated when it would serve them better to tame him.

It was only ten days. Here or there with no routine.

‘They tried to punish him once and fucked it all up,’ Louis, says and tells him how they left him unattended in his catatonic heat, curious, vengeful, all of them, and Daniel eats his dumplings la-di-da, like he’s listening to the weather with a bowl of rocks in his stomach as Louis reveals that, ‘He was unable to talk with words for three years afterwards, always needing someone by his side. Delayed, they made him, cognitively low and functioning like... a child at best, regardless of the increase in blood they gave him trying to undo it. A threat to them all, they thought him. Tried to hide it when the ancients and the powerful came to town—he was still their leader, after all—but stupid is as stupid does, and Lestat took it upon himself to destroy their coven and nurse him back to the way he was.’

‘Sounds like a load of assholes to me,’ Daniel says low, muffling the growl that threatens to escape, and cranes his neck so he can glance through the doorway at the motionless lump that was lying still as he left him, still out cold.

Chapter Text

They’re subtle, practically non-existent to the human eye, to take Louis’s word for it. Still, over the course of the next two-and-a-half days, the omega Armand starts to show some signs of life.

Had Daniel not spent the majority of the last five days, awake and asleep, skin to skin beside him, hot and sweaty against the cold hard form, trying to make him warm because it’s not right that the omega isn’t warm, isn’t it?—and gazing at him from the short-to-mid distance he allowed himself to stray in the pauses between their couplings, perhaps he would have overlooked them himself.

Instead, one by one Daniel catches them. Like a curious dog, his head tilts to the side and he stares until each sign repeats itself.

A pulse comes first, under the eye, a sensitive muscle in the lower lid, and again when the alpha gets closer, thrusting, thrusting, each time marring the otherwise smooth expression on the omega’s face. It’s almost like he’s flinching, not that he truly is—he’s not even capable of moving, not yet at least.

Regardless, the sight of it distresses Daniel more than it should. He can’t say why it even registers in the first place.

Daniel shifts, pulls back, holds up his weight with his arms, and stops hunching over Armand like an alpha in rut.

The pulsing stops.

His thrusts slow, the wet slap of his balls against the omega's ass replaced by the soft squelching sound the cold, or now perhaps lukewarm, but nevertheless effective slick makes when his dick slides into it again, and again, and again.

The eye remains still.

See, he’s not hurting him, he can’t be, he’s being careful—his eyes take in the immobile form.

Cold. Hard. His—for the time being.

Daniel’s close; he wants to nuzzle into the vampire’s neck, so he does, careful not to drop his weight.

He senses it before he sees it, the twinge in the lower eyelid, crude, bad, off, off, off and it doesn’t take long for it to make him think of springtime and click that somehow, chemically it’s his fault, that the body soap he found underneath the bathroom sink must not align with the omega’s constitution, not that Daniel can smell him, or that it clashes with his own sex pheromones in a way that only an omega this sick and sensitive would be able to tell.

He scrubs it off with lemon dish soap, frantic, still hard, and quickly returns to mount the omega.

The face looks serene like it did before, and Daniel presses his forehead against the omega’s, panting as he spills his seed, relieved to see him expressionless once again.

The whispered ‘Yeah, that’s better, isn’t it? Good... good omega, that’s it, so good’ is too low for the vampire sleeping in the other room to hear.

It’s the tips of the vampire’s fingers next. They fidget, twitching no more than four times where they have otherwise remained inert, first where they rest on the floor, and now against the off-white fitted sheet on the pull-out couch where Daniel propped his hips up on a mound of pillows to make it look like the omega were presenting himself.

Daniel catches it on the third try, too occupied before with trying to breed him, his alpha brain convinced that a good breeding is what the omega needs to cure him of his heat because his pheromones think more than he does sometimes.

The alpha threads their fingers together before he’s even aware of doing so. He can feel the omega’s thumb press against his own when the omega’s fingers spasm for the fourth time.

‘How is he?’ Louis asks mind to mind from the dark of his coffin.

There’s a faint wetness to his voice, like the blood Daniel got him the night before is stuck in his throat even when his head does all the talking.

Daniel pours another cup full of water into the omega’s hair where his head rests against the inside of the bathtub. The foam from the scentless shampoo for sensitive scalps slides down the omega’s back and down the drain. There’s too much of it. He might have to use the nozzle, but jet was the only function it seemed to have, and he doesn’t like how strongly it—

‘Same as before,’ the alpha says quietly and refills the cup yet again.

And then.... and then.... something changes.

The omega is still too weak to move. Well, his body is at least. But not his nose. Once, twice, the nostrils flair a fraction, a conscious action, like the omega is trying to get a scent on the alpha who’s fucking him—

Armand’s first semi-conscious move is to sniff him, and Daniel is drawn to the fact like a moth to the flame, his neck craning on instinct as he submits himself for the omega to breathe in.

The light pull of air against his scent gland makes Daniel keen like it’s his first rut, just as a shudder passes through the omega.

Safe. A hesitant feeling the alpha experiences as a burst of deep orange behind his eyelids, which must be the pheromones.

The action reminds the alpha of something he learned in sex-ed once, something about fucking without scenting and the danger of it, especially when it was a rogue alpha fucking a mated omega without the presence of his mate.

The omega Armand had a mate. Louis. The bite on his neck told him as much.

Or, at least, Daniel thought it did. Until he was lazily mouthing at it himself while waiting for his knot to deflate, it being only fair to scent the omega himself. The grooves in the omega’s neck were unlike any claiming bites he had seen, and if Daniel didn’t know any better, he might have thought the omega had not one, but four, five mates at one time or other.

Maybe more, but that would be—

Daniel’s tongue slowed its tracing, and he began to suck in earnest at the omega’s neck.

Well, there’s a reason the omega’s heats make him like this, and the alpha doesn’t want to consider it.

He doesn’t want to see red while he’s still inside him.

Chapter Text

The under-eye grey warms a shade with each new scenting, spreading through the omega’s limbs so that soon the sickly pallor is almost wholly saturated with olive tone. From the top of the vampire’s head to the underside of his littlest toe, a flush of colour.

Improved, if only slightly. Brighter too, like he’s only sleeping, not trapped in his heat and his own skin.

It’s nice. Comforting. Daniel likes it, and he would feel a certain kind of way about it—responsible, prideful, like a good fucking alpha even—were he not jealous of the pillows and blankets the pair were cocooned in, fearful that it was their scent-catching and comforting nature doing most of the legwork.

The alpha’s efforts overshadowed by the nest the heat hotline told him he should make in the event that the heatsick omega could not prepare one for themselves—a first-grade solution to a bad heat that Daniel couldn’t even manage to think up himself.

Like he’s completely and utterly useless. The urge to dismantle the whole thing and leave the omega with nothing but he himself, the source of his own scent, to cling to makes Daniel bite into his own forearm like he’s subduing a rogue alpha.

It’s barbaric, outdated wiring from a different century, a phonograph to his brand new tape recorder. For fuck’s sake, Daniel’s not uneducated when it comes to all of this!—or, at least, he’s not supposed to be. He’s an alpha; he submits himself to other alphas—he’s what they’re calling ‘sex positive’ in the Tenderloin these days—and something derogatory elsewhere, which he couldn’t give a fuck about—and Daniel's supposed to be ‘in the know’, not an ignorant put-a-knot-in-it alpha like his dad was, and supposedly more in control of his baser impulses than every Tom, Dick and Harry who could pop a knot outside a rut.

Daniel’s better than this. Even for a shitty kid from Modesto, he’s better than this, which is why the mix of the juvenile alpha urge to dominate and parallel sense of his own inadequacy sits heavy in Daniel's stomach, eased only slightly, without rhyme or reason, as he thumbs the omega’s cheekbone.

Armand's skin there, while still cool to the touch like the rest of him, feels more supple than it did before. Less unyielding, Daniel’s noticed, having taken to watching him while he still can, holding him tight, direct and close before it all changes.

Perhaps he should be grateful for the soothing effect. It’s clear whatever survival mechanisms the sick omega has going for him have wormed their way into the alpha’s subconscious, because it was already getting harder and harder for Daniel to leave the omega’s side the longer his heat went on, and now his entire mood ebbs and flows on some invisible string the omega has managed to wrap around the alpha with no conscious effort.

It won’t be long now... and then they will have no more need for Daniel’s help.

Whatever little of it he did give.

The omega doesn’t know where he is when he opens his eyes, or how he got there.

He is lying on his stomach, naked. Of course he is, he thinks without words, although he does not register why—he never has words at times like these.

He is trapped in his senses, like he has been many times before. How long it will take him to come out of it, Armand does not know.

He sees sunlight. He feels its warmth on his skin, but it is coming from under him, not above him where it streams in the cracked-open window at the far end of the wall to his right, and it takes some time for him to reacquaint himself with the concept of simultaneous and non-direct cause and effect, the fact that the warmth he feels is not the light, that the light in fact is not touching him at all.

Slowly, Armand realises that his head is moving up and down, his chest too. His left arm is wrapped around something solid and squishy at the same time, something that rises and falls with the top third of his own body, something warm and pleasant enough that he doesn’t scramble to pull himself away from it.

His eyes shift from the window to two inches in front of his face, where a pinkish-tan nipple and a few strands of short, curly hair meet his eye line.

Heat.

He thinks he remembers it now.

He probably doesn’t.

He thinks that he might.

He remembers something floating on a rocking sea, a gentle, wet pressure against his throat, and sweat like Riccardo’s close enough to taste.

There is someone with him.

The omega is sitting up before he even makes a conscious decision to do so and sees a human he recognises as Louis’s fascinating boy, sleeping with his mouth open, and all around them are mounds of off-white and dandelion yellow that used to be mustard, hills of soft-coloured fabric saturated with a potent scent so familiar despite the rest that it makes his head fuzzy.

Armand does not understand what any of it is, what any of it means or why it is there. The last time he saw a similar sight—and this he is not sure of—was when Marius had first disappeared for longer than a week and Riccardo had had to bed him at a time when he could still, he thinks, remember it.

He must make a sound, or maybe it is his faint, fragile scent returning, because suddenly he can’t see for all the red in his eyes, and the human is jolting awake and sitting up and staring at him with parted lips.

An alpha, baring his neck in a way that makes Armand cry even more for reasons he can’t explain, and the wind blows softly through the open window, and the omega suddenly feels stripped bare by the sudden cold.

Hands on his arms, careful and tentative.

Like he might hurt him, like he wants to keep him, like—

Gathered up like the hay he took to feed the horses in a time and place Armand has no recollection of and never will.

How he comes to be sitting in the alpha’s lap is beyond him; he is so disoriented that he’s shaking, but he isn’t lost—what he needs is... what he needs is...

‘Let it out, it’s okay,’ the human says, and Armand can feel the boy’s jaw move up and down as he murmurs other strangely soothing words to him that he can’t understand, can feel the boy’s hair against the side of his face. ‘You’ve been so good through all of this. Wait, let me just—’

A shift in their positioning. A circular motion and damp fabric on the centre of his back, and Armand can only hold onto the alpha, his fingers running over the warm skin of the other’s back.

Safe. The omega feels safe.

He presses his blunt teeth into the gland on the alpha’s neck.

And the alpha lets him sink them in.