Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

1: Lestat

*

Sometimes a gust of wind would sneak its way into the crypts they huddled in. It upset the torches, yet never cleared the stale air as it brought with it the dark weight of the night, the rotting smells of the Parisian cemetery, and the desperate hopes of an immortal trying to escape the coven.

Armand always knew when they planned their desertions. His mind was so attuned to his Children’s he could barely hold a thought of his own anymore. He never stopped them, or coaxed them back to reason before they broke the sacred laws. He let them leave. He shut his eyes and followed their light, preternatural footsteps to their crime, until they gave him ample reason to cut their immortal life short. He let them experience that one breath of emancipation, soaking it in as it bled through the cracks of their brittle, shuttered minds, before rising and slowly catching up.

His body was not his own. An abstract thing that sometimes needed blood or pulled him into sleep. A tether to his tender will.

He could barely hear their cries as he burned them, his mind blessedly numb when flames rose and engulfed his vision. For a few nights, his silence would be mistaken as grief for the errant Child. The starving vampires in the walls would hold their pleas for mercy. Still the air would tighten around his neck.

*

When Lestat was made, he felt it like a ripping open of the heavy stone doors. The Children shivered but did not stir until the roaring soul of Magnus burst across Paris from his hiding place, leaving a single, anguished ember behind.

Armand lay awake through daytime, excruciatingly aware of his coven’s restless dreams, and of the hopes contained in the fledgling’s mind—hopes of dawn in a small drafty room with a terrifying window. He soaked up the fresh, vivid memories of daylight even as they turned into grief and acceptance, laden with so much life Armand felt like he could see the skies of his Master’s paintings again for the first time in over two hundred years.

But the whirlwind of sensations that followed enraged him. The rush of discovery, as the fledging gauged his immortal powers, rekindled memories Armand thought had died in Rome. They brought only pain. The blur of mortals in ballrooms assaulted his senses with vivid colors, and it was all he could do but forbid his Children from sating their shocked curiosity. He watched from afar, from the depths of the crypt where he could hold the leash on the coven. From the fetid air. The fledgling’s wide-open mind was like a stage from the Boulevards, taunting them, insulting a millennium of beliefs as he strutted about Paris, heels beating the dirty streets like a prancing mortal’s.

Armand waited. Ordered to steer clear until the unsuspecting fledgling inevitably broke a law. He would eventually. And as he waited, he sought the weakness in his mind.

It took some time. He couldn’t quite grasp it in the tumult of opulent, debauched nights, but on the brink of dawn, or in the early hours when days bled into night—when most vampires slept and stray mortals succumbed to weariness—when it seemed like the oldest and the youngest immortal souls in Paris were the only two staring at the lids of their coffins, he could glimpse more fathomable feelings.

An ache at the thought of nevermore setting foot on the shabby planks of the stage that, to him, had meant freedom and home. A longing for a mother he could not address in her own language, and whom he might never speak to again. Pangs of blistering resentment as he cursed the Maker who’d stepped into the fire, tore him from one existence only to leave him to fend for himself in the new, with corpses of boys like him rotting in the dungeons.

And immeasurable loneliness…

A mortal lover left behind.

Inconsequential.

As the fledgling dreamt of taking his newfound radiance to the theater where his beloved performed, Armand dared let his mind wander along—out of the darkness and into the crowd to call out to him. He could. Could find it in him to glide through the chaos of excited mortals and extend a merciful hand to the errant soul. Save it before despair hit. Bring it to his chest and hold it, pet the long golden hair, and be the one to soothe the agony of immortality.

In the secret of his closed stone bed, he found himself gasping as his fingers felt and caught on the coarse linen of his humble garments, desperately reaching across miles to how the softer, richer fabrics grazed the flawless, radiant skin. How the tails of long jackets brushed thighs, buttoned cloth hugged toned abdominals, forever perfect. He slipped his nails through the holes in his pantaloon to follow the blood of a rare kill as it hummed beneath his own dead, stony skin.

The violent thrill of the fantasy made him want to break his cycles of punishing kill and penitent fasting, even more so when the fledgling’s own dreams drifted to his abandoned lover.

Armand’s nails dug into his thigh, broke the hardened skin, as he struggled to suppress forbidden stirrings. His eyes and mind dug holes in the thick stone lid over his face and body.

Nicki luring the beautiful vampire in. Nicki wracked with grief and uncertainty. Nicki kissing a path down his lover’s neck to his most delicious sin. Pushing fingers into the luscious mouth. The horror of his delicate throat torn open in uncontrolled passion.

Armand sought the mind that haunted Lestat. He rose from his resting place to see the boy with his own eyes. The plain, mediocre violinist who aroused such sweet longing in the powerful fledgling’s dreams.

The young vampire was right to stay away from this tormented soul, Armand quickly realized. Such a dark pit of fractured thoughts and feelings. He encouraged the fall with his powers, but he couldn’t help cut the ties out of pure selfishness. For no matter how dark the thoughts the boy harbored, he was no evil-doer. No matter how strong the urge to tear him, limb from limb… It did not matter.

Lestat did not belong to Nicki anymore.

*

The coven grew restless, but Armand could not relinquish this light in the dark, no matter how bright and painful. He let it burn in fascination, loathe to be the one to put it out as was his duty. He could not predict its inclinations and guide the radiant soul to his fold as the fledgling himself never thought anything ahead. His actions were a succession of whims and impulses, responding to the agitation of the city and the choppy ebb and flow of news and concern for his mortal family. One thought leading to another. One dream to the next. One skill to the next. One thrill to the next as he found new ways to overpower the criminals of Paris every night.

Armand drowned in borrowed sensation, the commandments of his kind tearing through the sensuality of it all like a dull, poisoned blade. Allesandra, his companion since Rome, laughed. Her encroaching madness was as cruel as her collectedness had been when Santino crushed the last shards of willpower in Amadeo. Now as then, she would not utter a word of guidance, only sneer at the erratic thrashings of Armand’s abused heart. She even mocked his unrelenting observance of the old rituals.

But.

She would leave him alone and watch over the Children when he retreated to the innermost galleries of their dwelling, where the exhausted penitents got closer and closer to finally dying of starvation. He would lean his head on the stone and urge them to rest, pray God would deliver them from these abhorrent ties to Hell. Rest, the soft word his master, his savior, his maker had whispered, close to his throat when the little sinner slave boy had tried to starve himself to his end.

Still, the vampires would not die, so he sang to drown out their cries. He opened his wrist and let the smell of his own blood, Marius’s unspoiled blood in his veins, drive the vampires in the walls mad with thirst as he breathed it in like a lover.

Lestat could be drawn by it. The power it contained. It could lure him down to Armand when no sweet talking could. Yes, Armand thought as his tongue caught the drops before they dripped from his sickly, grubby wrist, Lestat could come to him, take his hand, feel the beauty in its monstrosity, fresh coolness against ancient coldness. He could make Armand’s skin sing with his obscene candor. His exploring touch, a reverent kiss. He’d turn Armand’s wrist and ghost his mouth up the thirsting veins—. Armand gasped as he felt his fangs come out and his whole body sway.

Trapped in the vision of the blonde prince, he sank his fangs around the rapidly healing cut and moaned as his own pounding heart pushed blood into his mouth. The swoon of self-pleasure overpowered him. He fell into a confusion of kissing and drinking as his sleeve rode down, his hair falling over his skin, and he imagined sinking his bony fingers through the gorgeous blond curls, impeccably groomed, made more eerily beautiful by vampiric magic and mortal perfumes. He licked up his arm, teasing more tingles over his veins before sinking his fangs into the meat of his palm like he would pierce the artery on Lestat’s neck.

He let out a frustrated whimper as his blood started to nauseate him. He healed the wound with his thumb, massaged it like a lover would. Tenderly. With the care his maker provided before turning him. Wanting him to be, if not flawless, at least unmarred as a companion.

Blood glided down his nose to his mouth, teasing his lip and scent, surprising him with an unwanted memory of the last tears he’d shed. Over his… brother… Riccardo… With a shudder he schooled himself, spitting the blood to the dirt, catching the terrified thoughts of the dying vampire on the other side of the stone plaque.

His body was hardened. Tense with sin. He could ignore it. He could return to this place of blank death where his foolish desires were but a distant, forsaken dream.

He pressed his palm against the cool stone, resisting the urge to burn all the poor souls lying in the wall, hoping they’d soon come to reason.

And then Lestat made another.