Work Text:
Lestat leads him backstage, holding him delicately by the hand like a man leading a blushing fiancée when the theatre is empty later. He pays no mind to Nicki’s absence—he is volatile lately and Lestat lets him do as he pleases even if Armand is certain that the lack of a guiding force puts Nicki closer to the fire or to insanity everyday. The performances had gone well—they always did. Now, all that remains of the night’s doings are their bloodied clothes and bodies. Lestat had licked his face clean, earlier.
The bowels of the theatre are soft and warm, like the old lair of his coven. But there’s a decided fragility to its contours—a certain humanness that stands at odds with its current occupants and their landlord. Its sprawling backrooms remind Armand of more entrapment, but if he’d have preferred a place with more windows, he keeps the thought to himself.
He watches Lestat flutter about the place like a bird, seeking a basin and a rag after leaving him seated at a table. His thoughts have been turning from the theatre these days. Lestat seems disinterested in it since his mother left him behind. Disinterested in everything, perhaps.
“Have you tired of the stage already?” Armand asks him, prodding that soft, gangrenous wound in his chest. It feels like a justice done for his part in disbanding his coven. Armand never had any love for it but he cannot claim there wasn’t comfort nonetheless in its rigid entrapments. The coven is free to wander far and bend the rules as they see fit now.
Still—he also has more of Lestat left to him these days, and Armand has always been insatiable in love. He would’ve killed Lestat and sucked his very bones dry of blood, if it had come to murder, but the feelings unearthed by his infatuation with this boy don’t seem very dissimilar with the passing days.
“The stage bores me,” Lestat says, while Armand is thinking about how the fat stripped from his body could’ve been used to make perfumed soaps—new frivolities—like those that the coven uses now.
“Did it only interest you when you could use it to rub the coven’s faces in the dirt that soiled our lair and remind them that they were low creatures?”
“Mon ange,” Lestat says, “does it not seem tiring, this off-stage theatre and pretence? I leave the theatre behind when I leave the stage, but you don’t seem to understand when you must shed its skin. If you dislike it you can say it whole-heartedly without drawing a confession of mutual dislike from me.” He urges Armand to sit on the table, upon his return, dipping the rag in the water. A knowing smile is ready on his lips. “But of course that would be untrue. I’ve seen the pleasure on your face during the nightly feedings.”
Such insincere insipidities spilling forth from him. This infant vampire talks down to him like Armand hasn’t spent centuries killing upstart fledglings like him. “You are the theatre, Lestat,” he says. “You may have grown bored of it lately, but you carry it with you everywhere you go. My children were disillusioned, stray mongrels. A mere babe could have coaxed them from their prison.” His maker had called him darling, angel, love all those centuries ago, ignoring his protestations, cutting Armand off at the knees when he railed against it. And here came Lestat, insinuating himself into Armand’s life with the same infuriating paternalism.
Lestat presses a pale thumb into the creases between Armand’s eyebrows, smoothing them. A mocking smile now. “Hm. Hold still, my firecracker.”
He has never let a vampire touch him with such presumption, address him with such contempt. He cannot say why he permits it, but Armand lets the fledgling bring the rag to his face. He’d put vampires into the ground for lesser transgressions. He asks Lestat as he tucks Armand’s hair behind his ear, “Was it this colourful conceit that drove your mother from the comfort of your loving arms?”
“It was envy of me that drove her from me,” Lestat says, with a tight smile, a crack in the facade of indifference. He runs his fingers through Armand’s hair, caressing it lovingly. Curls them lightly as he tugs his head back and runs the scrap of cloth over the vulnerable, intimate crevices of Armand’s neck, making him shiver. “Can you imagine the agony—when your child possesses all that you might have ever wanted? When he borrows his flesh from you, leaves none of the man behind for you to hold and to take?”
“She nonetheless had a man’s appetite,” Armand says with distaste, thinking of his own maker, how she had held herself with his arrogance. “She was ill-mannered. Uncouth. She fancied everything was made for the taking. She never liked being denied.”
“Mon cher imbécile, you will forgive a vampire her appetites when her very nature betrays her to eternal hunger,” Lestat says softly. He runs his hand down the centre of Armand’s neck and his chest, exposed through his unlaced shirt. “You’ve lived underground too long. It’s fortunate that you’re immortal. It will certainly take a lifetime to reacquaint you to the customs and pleasures of the mortal realm.”
“Vampires exist outside the influence of mortal influence. I don’t care for their fleeting lives and principles.” Armand follows his hands intently as they dip down. His fingers part the edges of his shirt further, moist palm coming to lie on his sternum. “Lestat.”
“You and I—it’s not so scandalous as my mother and I coming together,” he drawls. “Ma belle—permit me.”
Armand’s lips part. “Does it thrill you, piling humiliation upon humiliation? Does it make you feel like a man? Are you certain your mother didn’t part ways with you because you weren’t man enough for her in the end?”
Lestat drops the rag and presses a finger into his mouth, hard and fast. “You talk too much. But what does it make you if I’m man enough for you but not my own mother, chérie?”
Armand gags slightly around the fingers Lestat forces in, pressing right up against the flesh of his soft palate, managing only to expel them with some effort. “You seem to have already arrived at your conclusions,” he says bitterly. “Gabrielle taught you no manners.”
“Fortunate then, that, you have tutored me through her deficiencies.” He doesn’t turn, but a candelabra flickers to life on a table near them.
Armand turns and watches the small flames dance for a minute, and Lestat watches Armand watch it, running his nose along the line of his jaw. “I thought my company imposed upon your civility.”
“But look how I enjoy you in your wickedness.” Lestat examines his wet fingers and rests the hand over his heart and squeezes his chest. Armand gasps when he finds his nipple and twists it painfully. “You were so desperate in the theatre box tonight.” He latches onto his neck and takes a small sip, nudging Armand’s legs apart as he settles between them. “So willing.”
There’s an unwelcome stab of pain in his chest—willing, sweet. His master had called him such things too. “Lestat,” Armand says softly, “I’m not Gabrielle.”
“Of course, not. Ma poupée, have you looked in a mirror?” He places a hand on Armand and cocks his head with comedic exaggeration, comparing the shades of their skin. “Dark as night, light as day.” Armand grinds his jaw. “Non, don’t be so hard. You’re sweet as she never was,” Lestat breathes against his mouth, and kisses him. Armand closes his eyes, letting him in.
“You fuck me like I’m a woman,” Armand says when they draw away, because Lestat isn’t paying attention to what he’s saying, rarely pays attention, always does as he pleases. It would suit him better if he didn’t sound so breathless, and if he wasn’t so hopelessly taken with this aggravating boy—his audacity, his curious love of vampirism, how he always shone golden in a crowd of jewelled throats and powdered faces. “I don’t like it.”
“By all means,” Lestat says, grinding up against him, making him writhe—Armand thinks shamefully—like a blushing virgin, “you can be on top if you think it’ll make you feel less like a woman.”
Their couplings are unimaginative, primitive. It’s nothing Armand can’t place in the vast repertoire of his experience before, in the course of his life in Venice, which he remembers only as fragments of a dream or a nightmare now, fragments that he cannot be sure he didn’t conjure out of thin air in the nights he spent dreaming of liberation from the ghastly world of his coven and its tiresome rituals. He may carry himself with his maker’s command and his expensive tastes, but Lestat is just a child, after all, and he fucks like one. A child putting on a plucky exterior in the face of an unforgiving existence looming before him, denying with his entire being what Magnus did to him, because it makes him feel more like a man. But after two centuries of deprivation, even this child’s bumbling, arrogant touch is sufficient to reduce Armand to loose-limbed obedience. His own little poupée, Armand thinks bitterly, as Lestat hooks his fingers into the edge of his trousers and takes him in hand with possession. Perhaps Lestat is not amiss when he pours such endearments on him. He blew in like a wild northern wind one evening, and Armand, who had lived underground so long, had mistaken the sweet scent for freedom.
“You can try,” Armand says, “but you won’t find a soft and wet cunt waiting for you down there.” The language of the brothels in Venice live on in his memories after all.
“For someone who despised her as you did,” Lestat says, “you should know—she was neither soft, nor wet and willing.” He lets go of his aching length and caresses further down instead, moving his fingers back and forth as if he’s really trying to find—or pleasure—a cunt. Armand rests his head on his shoulder, flexing his jaw as his fangs descend, aching everywhere; sinks his claws into his back, when Lestat finally pushes a finger in him. “But she always took me like she could make my cock hers if she rode me hard enough.”
The vision is striking. With a moan, Armand sinks his fangs into Lestat’s waiting neck. There’s pain, there’s humiliation—but most of all there is pleasure, and Armand has never refused its comfort when it was there for the taking. Lestat uses his own wrist’s blood to ease the burn and stretch—a trick that Armand had taught him, and it pleases him that he’s been listening, and puts it to use now to fuck him properly with his fingers.
The boy is his, his alone for now, and it is a precious thing. Armand knows that. He will treasure Armand as long as he keeps discovering in him the things he loved and lost—his not-a-woman mother; his volatile, loving Nicolas; the teacher his maker failed to be. Armand has given him all of them, alone, all these months. If he intends to keep Lestat, he needs to keep giving them to Lestat, keep living this theatre off-stage, this pretence, as long as he can endure the indignity before it becomes intolerable. But Armand has never discovered a humiliation he wouldn’t endure to keep the hearths of his heart burning—hadn’t, even in Venice.
So when Lestat finally gives him his cock, he pushes him back and rides him the way he imagines his mother might have, knows that Lestat does see his mother in him—lover, teacher, caretaker—for a moment despite the dark skin, the eyes, the elongated organ between his legs that betray the illusion. He surrenders to Armand completely as he rarely does in their fevered bouts of pleasure-making—and all it takes is the imagined taste of his mother in Armand’s place, finishes just like that, before getting on his knees to put his mouth on Armand, drawing out his pleasure from him in excruciating bouts, almost womanly in their rise and crest and rise and crest.
“I can’t take any more of the stage,” Lestat admits later, leaving small bites along his thighs while Armand is still shivering from the orgasm wrung forcefully out of him. “I don’t like seeing Nicki in the front, with his animal eyes, and his ungodly compositions.”
“Then you will not have any more of it, my love,” Armand tells him. He cradles Lestat’s head, as he imagines his mother might have in weaker moments. “I think the theatre box has suited us well enough these past weeks.”