Chapter Text
"Hey, where'd you get those headphones?"
The girl turned at the sound of the voice, pulling one earbud from her ear.
Daniel immediately wished he'd said something else. Anything else. Because suddenly he felt self conscious about the fact that he didn't feel like an erotic figure of vampirism anymore, but just some old grandpa who wanted to know about technology. The headphones had been the first thing he'd thought of. Which was ridiculous, considering she'd been standing there for nearly thirty seconds and he'd had ample opportunity to come up with something better.
"Pardon?" she asked, her voice ever so polite and only a little wary.
Daniel cleared his throat.
"The headphones." He gestured vaguely, his white nails flashing, before carefully shoving his hands back in his pockets.
"Where'd you get them?"
"Oh."
The girl's face brightened with understanding, a pinky sort of colour dancing across her olive toned cheeks.
"Online, I think."
Daniel nodded as if that answer had been deeply important to him.
"Right."
The silence was so loud, so awkward. He should leave. Normal people left conversations after that. Instead, Daniel found himself looking at her. Ogling, even. She couldn't have been older than her twenties. Small frame. Shorter than average. Curvy. White shirt with brown cursive lettering stretched across the front.
“Can You Read My Mind?
I've Been Watching You.”
The irony nearly made him laugh. He hadn’t realised he chuckled out loud. Shit.
"What?" the girl asked. A puzzled, almost curious look on her face.
"Nothing."
A lie, too quick, he was rusty. A lame excuse but nothing else came to mind to save this situation.
"Nice shirt."
The girl glances down at it, a shy smile appearing on her face.
"Thanks. I made it myself."
That surprised him. His eyebrows rising only just, amber eyes widening under his dark shades, that looked even more ridiculous in the night.
"You made it?"
"Yeah."
She tugged lightly at the hem, rolling it between her perfectly manicured fingers.
"Lyrics from my favourite song."
Daniel looked at the words again. If only she knew. The thought hit him with a strange bitterness.
Six months ago, he would've asked what song it was.
Six months ago, he'd have flirted properly.
Six months ago, he'd have invited her for a drink and spent three hours learning everything about her before deciding she was far too young for him, far too naive and far too diffident.
Now he can hear her, everything about her, and feel her with every movement of her body.
Could hear blood rushing through arteries beneath warm skin. Could smell the living heat of her from several feet away. The awareness never really stopped. Not even when he didn't want it. Especially not when he didn't want it.
Daniel looked away first.
The girl shifted her weight from one foot to the other, somewhat uncomfortable, but still unmoving. Alive.
The realization struck him harder than it should have. Everything about her was alive. The slight flush in her cheeks from the cold. The pulse fluttering in her throat. The music leaking faintly from the earbud dangling beside her face. Life existed so effortlessly inside her. He felt a pang of jealousy in his chest, possessiveness even, that he couldn't have it.
Daniel had spent months trying to imitate what came naturally to strangers. Months forcing himself to go on walks. Forcing himself to answer emails. Forcing himself to call old friends. Forcing himself to eat tiny pieces of food he couldn't digest just to remember what being human felt like.
Earlier that evening, his daughter's name had flashed across his phone screen. He'd watched it ring and then watched it stop and then ring again and stop again. He watched the apartment fall silent again, silent and dark, because the shutters kept out the light and he couldn’t figure out how to change the colour to the ambient one on the packaging.
The guilt still sat heavy in his chest. The apartment Louis had praised when he visited the single time. The apartments furnishing that Lestat had made fun of. The apartment full of dying plants and expensive shit and absolutely nobody.
Daniel had left because he couldn't stand the silence anymore, now he found himself standing on a street corner making conversation about headphones. Pathetic.
"Are you okay?"
The question caught him off guard. The girl was watching him now, like she was the one who could read his thoughts.
Could she tell that word rang in his head. Pathetic? The word Armand used to torture him with. Pathetic? The praise he so longed to hear from someone again. Pathetic?
Her eyes were wide now, the flustered blush on her face having dissipated. She wasn’t frightened yet, by his silence that was. She looked concerned.
Concerned! Daniel almost laughed, because for one brief second, Daniel wanted to tell her everything. The thought horrified him, not because she was a stranger, of course not, he was the one who interviewed strangers for their life stories. But because she wasn't, not really.
She was every stranger he'd passed in the last six months, every conversation he'd almost started, every phone call he'd let ring out, every piece of humanity he'd been desperately trying to hold onto.
The girl's heartbeat fluttered steadily beneath her skin, not scared but concerned.
Daniel heard it. God, he heard everything. The pulse in her throat. The rush of blood through her veins. The warmth radiating from her despite the cool evening air. The unusual rhythm he had never heard before, an irregular beat. But still...
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
"Hey," the girl said carefully, sort of waving a hand around in the air, like she didn’t know at all what to do, but something was holding her from leaving. Daniel hadn't realized he'd gone still, that he was practically staring through her now.
"I asked if you were okay?"
The concern in her voice hit him so hard, he almost forgot the hunger paining his every move. Nobody had looked at him like that since before he'd died. Before Paris with his ex-wife, who was a fiance then. Before meeting Louis and Armand years before he had heard of Alice. Before all of it.
Something inside him cracked. The world narrowed. The traffic faded. The chatter of pedestrians disappeared. All he could hear was her heartbeat. Daniel stumbled backward.
The girl frowned.
"Whoa. Sir?"
He hadn't been called that in too long, that damn word, too polite, too powerful. He could feel his face growing warm at the thought of that name in a different context. But he had very little time to think about that right now. He had to try come back into focus.
Her hand reached toward him instinctively, a simple human gesture, Daniel caught her wrist before he even realized he'd moved, and it must have been hard because for the second time the girl's eyes widened. For a moment, neither of them spoke, she stared up at him with a sort of confusion and admiration, he stood hungry. In his mind he was salivating at the warmth of her skin, the pulse hammering beneath it.
His fangs protruded, lips quirking up. He lisped out a curse.
She looked mortified. The damage had already been done and he didn’t know a lick about her yet, save for the fact she made her own shirts and looked like sunshine in human form.
“Fuck.”
Daniel lunged forward.