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There’s a body on the table. The body doesn’t quite feel like anyone’s body in particular, Armand can’t help but think. That’s not surprising, as there’s no head attached. But no - it is him, undoubtedly, Lestat of Auvergne and Paris and- many more places, worldly audacious Lestat. He rushes to anywhere he pleases.
There’s proof of Lestat’s identity in the outfit, yes, a dramatic ensemble of off-blacks that do not quite match, and proof in Armand’s memories, however much they might be worth. But what Armand finds himself staring at are the thick ridges of scar tissue running down his chest and beneath his low-hanging shirt - flimsy fabric so Armand tugs it down, yanks it really, popping off a button without meaning to. Such is vampire strength.
From the blood loss his skin has become pallid, grayish, even though it ought to be golden like the rest of him. Golden hair, golden head. Blue eyes like a summer day. Oh, Armand is weak.
“Tell me I should not touch you,” he says, and reaches out a hand. “Please, love, tell me to stop.”
What proportion of the soul resides here, underneath the bloody stump? It’s a magnificent soul, Lestat’s is, a thunderclap of a soul, like… like great piercing glass towers stretching up to the sky, and in them a harmony of a thousand colors.
Across the room, Fareed click-clacks away on his keyboard.
Armand hesitates before presses his palm against Lestat’s cool exposed chest, and traces the peak of the scar all the way to the end. Unquenchable Lestat, killer of wolves. Armand understands Lestat’s maker with the entirety of his bleak and vacant heart, he thinks suddenly, he truly does. He absorbs Lestat’s shimmering radiance like the fathomless void he is, Lestat radiant even when dimmed, and Armand takes, always taking, by nature unfit to yield light of his own.
It’s funny, when you think about it. I’m not hopeful there’s much more to you, he’d once said to Daniel, other than a hole.
Before long his hands are curled over Lestat’s ribs like parentheses. They’ve done this before, Armand and Lestat. Draped on his great curtained bed in brocade and red velvet, Lestat had seemed every bit the marquis he was not, and he had beckoned with infinite grace to a leering, admiring Armand and said, come here, angel, you look good to hold. You look good for me to hold.
And now Lestat is good to hold, Armand thinks, hands trembling. Good to hold and good to love. Away with the cursed black shirt.
Please, he says again, desperate. Won’t you tell me to stop?
The head and the body in communication, proof of the transcendant soul, yet Lestat offers no reply. Swallowing, Armand hooks a knee over the cold metal table, lodging himself clumsily between the limp legs atop it.
Lestat’s body is cold but firm, hardly a rag doll to be posed at one’s will, so for a minute Armand just rests there, holding, feeling down the hard plane of his abdominal muscles with one hand, pressing his mouth and nose against the base of the wet head-stump. He doesn’t bite. Lestat smells like a storm, like the earth after a storm, the soil pounded by merciless rain-bullets, scattered but whole in the end. His skin is so very soft.
Armand sighs, shifting his hips. He could rest here until the end of time. They fit so well together, Armand’s thigh wedged between Lestat’s, his gentle hands roving over Lestat’s chest, navel, hipbone.
But then his fingers fall lower, entirely of their own accord, and Armand pauses, his thoughts a hazy flurry. He closes his eyes to quiet them. Part of him wishes to strike the still body beneath him, he realizes, wishes more than anything to pummel at ashen skin until it breaks and gushes forth and the body rises like the blemished Lamb to tell him no, stop, Armand, take your filthy hands away from me. Repulsive beast, you ought to be put down.
But the rest of him- Armand’s love can be gentle, like his kills. Just look at his Master, look at Daniel, just look at Louis-
Well, one could pick better circumstances to bolster the point, perhaps, but Armand has often been gentle to Louis, even when he didn’t have to be, and isn’t that what matters? To be good as a monster, knowing you are damned nonetheless. He has let Louis hurt him. No more.
Lestat, though, the star so bright he maddens, the ever-laughing trickster with a voice like a rushing mountain stream, the beautiful unmoving body beneath him. Armand can be good to to him right now.
With sharp, urgent tugs, he unbuckles Lestat’s belt. His legs are shaking, and he is ashamed to his rotten, festering marrow to feel the slickness in his groin as he shifts so that his hand can fit between their bodies. Oh, Lestat. If you won’t love me, then let me love you.
Although the angle is awkward and it takes a few attempts, Armand manages to gash his palm and wrap the lubricated hand around Lestat’s cock. He gives it a firm stroke, then another. The belt chafes against his wrist with each motion, but that’s fine. This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me. So he hurts, and from his pain Lestat wrings pleasure.
In Armand’s hand, Lestat is stiff as befits the Undead, thick but not yet damp beyond the blood that Armand has already provided. Without pause, dizzy in his disappointment, Armand slides down, crouches. He wraps his lips around the head of Lestat’s cock, then swallows it whole, hearing himself choke with somebody else’s ears. He is good with his mouth.
It’s better down here, almost, with the neck-stump out of sight, when he can imagine pale eyes in variegated blue, pink bitten lips saying, yes Armand, that’s so good Armand, you were made for this, weren’t you, you whore.
Comme ci, comme ça, ha! Each time I would have you begging for it, Lestat, invariably, you’re not fooling anybody.
But when Armand pulls away, he sees that has not accomplished much, if anything. From Lestat’s cock he has licked away his own palm-blood, yes, and replaced it with saliva-blood, but there is none of Lestat’s, no evidence of his arousal. Has he been drained too far for a wet pleasure? Oh, he has! Poor, poor creature.
Armand’s entire body is tremoring so hard that he slices into the vein of his wrist much deeper than intended, and blood spurts out in an uncontrollable gush. Well, that’s all the better, then, the more the merrier. Quickly, Armand brings his leaking wrist to the top of Lestat’s neck, right above the protruding bone, and pushes it flat against the stump, where the esophagus ought to be.
Drink, my love. Take, eat; this is my body.
The blood pulses thickly out of him, and with it, hope blooms someplace in Armand’s chest as it is wont to do, a sickly and fragile creature. He groans, feeling himself weaken. His knees clatter against each other.
But then, for a fleeting, ruinous second, Armand’s wits flicker back into existence, and he yanks back his wrist as if he’s been burned, a cry perched beneath his chin- this is stupid, Armand you poor fool, how is he meant to swallow without a head?
With a broken sob, Armand brings his wrist back to his mouth and bites into it, further deepening the wound. His other hand yanks open his trousers, the cheap-but-comfy trousers that Daniel had tossed to him the other day with a smug smile, and grabs weakly at his cock. He is a wet mess, down there. He’s stained through the layers of his clothing like a woman.
Armand cries out as he wraps a hand around himself, his own hand filthy with his own blood, and immediately he thrusts upward, into the unforgiving clasp of his fist. A child’s whimper escapes his mouth.
Fareed must be able to hear, but Armand cannot bring himself to care with this body here, before him, and pressure on his cock, Lestat broken and helpless and enthralling, the vessel of a soul that maddens him and has maddened him since he first brought Armand to heel beneath his effortless ruination. Underneath Lestat’s ravaged jeans, blood glistens on thickly muscled thighs, and the realization comes that it’s Armand’s blood that cradles him so beautifully, so lovingly, and- and before Armand can come to a conscious decision, he’s pushing himself back up, aligning his body with the headless not-corpse on the table. Tell me to stop, he thinks desperately, pressing his fist to his mouth to suppress a whimper.
His cock slides easily into the space between Lestat’s legs. Armand’s hand drops away. He pants, open-mouthed, gasps into the soft flesh of Lestat’s throat.
If Lestat’s soul has truly lingered here, he must hate Armand with all his golden heart, and maybe it won’t be so awful, Armand thinks as he groans weakly, cock rutting against the coarse fabric of Lestat’s jeans, to be despised. Not if it means he has found a way to burrow into Lestat’s shining will and plant himself there like a tapeworm, slick and loathsome and curled irradicably inside.
And finally it’s this thought, of all thoughts, that shakes free the final dregs of Armand’s willpower, the blood thirst crescendoing inside him, and with his small fangs he clamps down into the oozing stump of a neck, hard. Lestat’s sweet elixir floods his mouth, a nectar burning down his throat and through his body to the very tips of his fingers.
Normally Armand prides himself for being a clean eater but now he simply cannot hold himself back and so he bites again, teeth gnashing without resistance into the gaping cross-section of Lestat’s neck, and the blood coats his lips, floods down his neck. He’s dizzy with the fever of it. He’s so dizzy that he doesn’t realize he’s about to come until his hips jerk forward once more, and he shudders his release, spilling into the crevice of Lestat’s thighs.
Repulsive beast, you ought to be put down. Armand melts into Lestat’s slack embrace.
For too long afterwards he floats, distantly observing the blood cooling, leaving sticky messes at his face and groin. It is easy, with his eyes closed, to replace his shameful reality with a night of shared passion, a tranquil image of laying in his lover’s bed, their legs intertwined as he sifts through long blond hair. To imagine that he is not here alone.
No, not alone - not quite. Across the room, Fareed click-clacks away on his keyboard. Diligent Fareed, always so engrossed in his work. Armand ought to award him.
As his eyes flutter open, and he pushes himself upwards on weak, quivering arms, it occurs to Armand that maybe Lestat will hunt him down in a fury, if he lives. He is as adept at living as Armand is not. And Lestat is good, yes, he is a good monster, but what monster amongst monsters does not have a breaking point etched into his very making?
Maybe, when Lestat lives and hunts him down, he will pin down Armand’s slender shoulders with broad, lovely golden hands and steal back what has been taken from him. It is not the worst thing in the world to be raped, Armand considers, as the shame hollows him out from the inside. When you are beautiful and immortal, as they both are, it is bound to happen from time to time.