Work Text:
Gabrielle came into vampirism with all the unnatural grace of a creature that already knew its place in the world and what it had come to decide that it wanted and deserved from it. This was rebirth, and not just birth, with all the memory and pain of her past life carrying into this one, and she was hungry from the very first moment when the transformation overcame her. All her human hunger had now been granted an eternal life to satiate it; endless, bottomless hunger carved into her by a life lived in isolation and denial. She was hungry from that very first moment, and her hunger, I would later find, would only grow instead of being tempered by the passage of time and acquisition of knowledge.
And I knew what she wanted from the moment she—a vampire freshly made—put her hands on my hips and pushed me backwards into the bed. Such intimacy, that. We used to sit politely at opposite ends of the bed in my room at my father’s castle—her at the head, me at the foot—whenever she managed to discover something tender for me in her impenetrable, walled-off heart; when my body swayed towards hers, her eyes had used to lose all their light. Now, she threw open the doors of her fortified castle where she’d secreted away all her private wants, and drew me in lips-first into her unending warmth, into her awfully soft bed. It had only taken giving her a monstrous form for her to touch me as if she loved me, truly did, and didn’t merely do it to account for maternal sympathy that she lacked and couldn’t admit to, and had to pretend to still be in possession of.
I was immediately cocooned in silky warmth, limbs tangling in the sheets, and her now-hard and unyielding body followed me into the dark, secret, pillowed space of her room, pressing me beneath her weight with a force and strength she didn’t realise that she now possessed. She kissed me with a newborn fledgling’s fevered appetite, and she seemed, at the same time, pained and completely intoxicated by touch, smell, taste, feel—perhaps most of all by the sparking sensation of the slide of our lips and teeth against one another. I’m hungry, I told her, half-amused, half-desperate, jaw aching with the need to sink my fangs into her supple flesh. We must feed, I told her when she pressed on, hands roaming over my body.
And she did not hear me.
My mind raced, confused. She had heard me perfectly well when I had spoken with my mind before I’d given her the Blood. And Gabrielle kissed on, mindless, until I placed my broad palms on her ribs and pushed her back. “Mo—Gabrielle, I’m hungry,” I repeated. She’d always hated mother, and I wanted to give her the kindness of being not-mother at least in her afterlife.
I remembered how I’d hungered for the blood after Magnus had forced his down my throat. Why was she not hungry?
She paused. She said, “But Lestat, I’m hungry, too,” and I understood that it was the same, life-long hungering for the flesh that she’d admitted to boldly before she let me go and bade me to seek a life of my own in Paris, finally apart from her—and for the moment it overpowered her base desire to quench her bloodthirst. I wanted to laugh suddenly—Paris had brought her back to me, and me to her. I looked up at her beautiful face, the harshness that had always lined its defiant features, and how the Gift had sharpened those stern features, as she spoke again, “I’ve been starved, kept prisoner so long. Did your suffering blind you to mine?”
“Of course not,” I whispered. My mind raced. I thought—quickly then, before the death throes catch her, while her body can still feel, perhaps for the last time, what it means to be mortal. But Gabrielle had already lifted her skirts and climbed into my lap, eyes rolling back in her head as she brought our thighs and groins together. Impatient, drunk on every sensation, claiming my body for hers, as I had claimed hers in turning her—and why not? I was the only son she’d cared to claim as her own, and she’d chosen eternal damnation by my side over mortal death and solitude in the abyss. I reached up and felt her through her armour of silk and jewellery, and then peeled her clothes from her body with animal desperation when she rocked her body against mine, pressing down, down, down with brutal force, thighs clenching tight around my body until it hurt, until I thought she could grind me to dust with the force of her desire and desperation. She couldn’t help hurting me—my mother was too new to this body, trying with her newfound might to satisfy all her wanting in this moment. The reality of eternity had not settled into her mind yet and mellowed her as it had mellowed me.
Not mother anymore, I corrected myself, as soon as I had the thought. Gabrielle. The body beneath my hands was not the same body that had held me and birthed me, and then died to accept my Gift. Mother no longer, but lover, perhaps.
So I touched her like she was lover instead. When my skin found hers—the pale expanse of her bared neck, her naked breasts, the hollow of her navel, the shy dusting of hair at the neck of her thighs which was barely visible above the dress pulled down so that it was pooling around her hips—she shivered, long and hard, and cried out softly, pushed down harder where my trousers were getting tight and wet, pushing me up against the cloven softness of her womanhood. I might have said, please or yes, don’t stop, or supplied her with other incoherent petitions and she took the words to heart; she moved, painting a picture of loveliness itself given flesh.
And when a small shudder passed through her, so sweet in a way that her pleasure spilled and enveloped me, she eased her assault on my carnal senses briefly so that she might sit back and observe me as she stripped me bare, seeming to derive enormous pleasure from the simple act of taking in my strong, bare body beneath hers as she’d never witnessed it since my passage into manhood. “You take after me,” she told me. “My hair, my eyes, my neck, my hands.” She pulled off her clothes and settled over my body again, so that we were both skin-to-skin now, no barrier separating the unity of our bodies, and tangled and touching so closely that I imagined us as an eight-limbed creature sprawled in her bed.
And I thought—yes, yes, like that, put your hands on me, please, mother. There was no place for me and her, only—I, we, us. As it had always been from the very beginning, when my father had forced me into her, and she’d accepted the duty of bearing a child, and had expelled my male form out of her, helpless and resentful of the physiologic processes of her body.
As if she had heard me, a hand found my strong jaw, moved it from side to side as if she was memorising my features all over again with her new vision—then the masculine rise of my throat, the muscled shoulders, the smattering of scars everywhere, touching all the things she lacked as her other hand drifted to her cunt where she touched herself idly. I realised that she was comparing her body with mine, as her hand moved lower—to my hips, and then finally my aching, heated length. I held my breath as she touched me there, head tilted to the side thoughtfully. “But here,” she said, taking in the morphology of my cock, “you’re like your father.”
The sight seemed to hurt her; I didn’t know what to say to soothe her sudden anguish. It didn’t matter, in the end, because she soon took me into herself with an expression that was both ecstasy and sorrow at once, and these feelings permeated my body and spread to all my limbs as if we were still connected by the cord that had nourished me in her womb. I could tell she hated it to have me inside her this way, in this manner that reminded her of her own womanness so acutely, but also loved the way it brought our bodies together, overcoming any possible separation that had ever existed between us. I would have told her she didn’t have to do all that—her blood flowed in my veins now as surely as mine flowed in hers. But take me, take me, take me, seemed to be the unspoken command that the rhythm of her body conveyed, asking me to understand how she had let my father take her before, and I allowed myself to become the receptacle of all her joy and all her pain. Because there was pain too—as she rode me, she pulled my hands away from her skin and touched herself all over, in exploration, strangely seemed to find it surprising that her newly strengthened body still retained all her old morphology: her anguish that strength did not mean man, that vampire did not mean man came across plainly.
It was foolish but I almost apologised—I could not say why. Perhaps she sensed the pity in my eyes, and unable to tolerate such gentlemanly goodness from me, she put her hands on my mouth and rocked her hips. “You’re too loud,” she told me, body flush with the blood she’d taken from me, and I found myself touching all those blushing places with reverent fingers, as she drew pleasure from my body as if it really belonged to her. “You talk too much.” I blinked up at her with apology. And then I was coming undone, and she followed soon after, sighing, holding me inside her long after as if she was reluctant to part with my cock after all. But she lifted herself from my body eventually, and laid down beside me. It took me long minutes to come back to myself, overwhelmed as I was from the fever of sensation and the numbing effect of the aftermath of ecstasy.
I turned over, cold in bed, later. She put her hands—also cold, now dead—on my back, and a shiver ran through me. Then I understood that perhaps she meant not so much as to comfort me as to comfort herself. “Mother,” I said, and she drew her hands back as if scalded. I said again, “Mother,” although it was difficult, and it hurt me too, even if she couldn’t understand it, “you want impossible things, all the time. I don’t know if I can give them to you. I try my best.”
“And have you never wanted an impossible thing?” she challenged, but she seemed melancholic, now.
“Don’t be sad,” I said, reminded of Nicki’s despondency. “You can have me again, if that’s what you want.” It was all I could offer her, right now.
“Did you enjoy yourself?”
“How could I not?” I asked her.
She put her fingers on my chest, where my flesh didn’t swell the way hers did, and drew them down between my thighs again, running fingers with possession over my male anatomy. I gasped softly. “Stay by me,” she said. “Don’t leave me ever again, Lestat. That’s what I want.”
I wanted to tell her, But you asked me to go. But I only nodded silently, and watched her touch and touch and touch me all over. I thought, perhaps, that she might unwrap my meat form and draw it close around herself if she could, walking around and enjoying male pleasures that had been denied to her by dint of her flawed birth. But you gave me this form, I also thought. You gave me the maleness in you. I did not ask for it. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d kept it for yourself.
I kept those thoughts to myself too. I couldn’t place blame on her that really belonged to my father. And we had just been freshly reunited, and her just now saved from the threshold of death. Tonight was a night for celebration, for laughter, for happiness.
So I held her through her death throes when they came. I spoke to her in soothing voices, calming her when the terror came. I was still holding her when the rapture came too, and marvelled at her beauty and wide-eyed wonder later. I might have asked her if this was the calm and triumph she felt when she had finished conquering a birthing each time. But the knock came on the door before I could speak—the doctors, the nurses, Nicki, whom we had all forgotten were still waiting outside—so I helped her dress, and she helped me dress. And we flew out into the dark world through the window of her room, leaving all mortal virtues behind us, lovers together in the Savage Garden.