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lestat de lioncourt. ([personal profile] damnedest) wrote2024-07-27 03:00 pm
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-17 10:35 am (UTC)(link)
'He hides plenty from you, doesn't he?'

The images are different this time. Ephemeral, just impressions of things. Armand-but-not standing in the common area of their hotel back in New York, and Louis, wearing an outfit Lestat will have seen later that night. They are speaking. Armand, in an apartment, looking into the dark glass of a window and seeing Louis' reflection, speaking.

Chatty Cathys. (Doesn't matter about what. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter that Armand has been desperate, and lonely, and resentful, and these have mostly been arguments about Daniel. Daniel is not Lestat's business.)

'Slaves. We understood each other. You will treat him like that again. You will beat him again. It is your way.'

Nails on glass. An unpleasant twist of a nerve. Armand doesn't love exposing this, his own pathetic stalking. Willing to endure it if it's a knife that cuts both of them.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-19 06:56 am (UTC)(link)
Armand is sat up a little in his homely crater. He sees these visions, and some of them are other perspectives on encounters he's already seen from his own, creeping angles. Some of them are things he would like to see more of. A kaleidoscope of reasons, some of which make no sense to him. He and Louis are done. Severed. He no longer has to convince himself night after night, he no longer has to keep him safe and calm, he no longer—

He misses him. Acid bile in his throat to think of it. He is jealous of the way they are all together. Safety in numbers. Comfort in numbers.

They are all his, in their ways. Lestat, not his fledgling, but his student and protege anyway. Louis, his would-be savior, his companion. And Daniel. The infuriating Mr Molloy whose presence in those flashes he runs a psychic finger over. His. The truest of it. His.

He should stop Lestat. This will hurt and Armand is tired of being hurt, even if he's used to it. But Lestat is mon ami, not mon cher, and Daniel is haunting every edge of his new platonic friendship with Louis. That's funny. Armand will show him how funny. He gets a grip but it falters; half on purpose, half because Lestat is stronger than he expects. Collision, then fangs.

As expected:

Ow.

But this makes connection so much easier. Through his blood. He can grab the back of Lestat's hair in the physical realm, and the vicious grab follows through to the psychic realm. A grab, a shove, slamming him face-first into it through their minds, through his blood. See, feel, experience. It is 1973 in San Fransisco and Armand is following an unsettled feeling to a shitty gay bar. Something is different about tonight. Louis often hunts this way and Armand despises it, but he allows it, because Louis can't control himself otherwise. Different. He can feel it before he opens the door. He can feel it as he gets closer, and sees his companion, his lover, sitting beside a mortal, with a smile on his face that's so genuine it takes Armand's breath away.

Colorless, an echo of Louis' voice, unkind. Armand tries to put it away. Boring. Daniel, barely twenty years old, smiles back at Louis. They're practically giggling with each other. Chemistry so immediate and genuine that it makes Armand sick. Because he knows he won't be able to ask Louis to come home with him instead. The boy is a foregone conclusion. The boy is in fact still here, in Vermont.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-19 12:35 pm (UTC)(link)
The boy.

The floor slants slightly north. The boy's blood flowed that way. Armand tells Louis this; he does so dispassionately, frankly, and he endeavors to smell the char of Louis' flesh instead of the boy's rancid, drug-adulterated blood, with its bizarre allure beneath. It will be over soon. Louis' breathing is labored, horrible, pieces of himself flaking off within. Louis of course does not need to breathe to live, but he needs to breathe to speak. Lestat can hear it. Flinching all inside of him. He had been screaming. There was sunlight in his mouth, down his throat.

Now they are inseparable. He's alive? Like Louis and Claudia, Lestat thinks. Silly. Armand can still hear Louis. The boy? The fascinating boy? To this day, Armand's immediate, blind fury at Louis managing to give a fuck about the junkie in the midst of all that surprises him. He looks back at himself and wonders how tightly wound his own trigger was. What else might have finally pulled it.

Armand digs his nails into Lestat's head. Nicks the bone of his skull. Worse if he struggles.

The swirling chaos of Armand's memories. His best ones of his fledgling, when he was still mortal. A little rabbit of a boy, heart pounding frantically, frozen and trying to squirm away at once. Louis is there. Burned. Suffering. He begs Armand to stop. He calls Armand a little bitch. Shuffled like cards.

'Why am I going away, and leaving you with them?' He feels a little lightheaded. Lestat was always such a greedy drinker. 'So you can cry over Louis loving someone else all alone? At least you'd have company with me, child.'

This is not actually deliberate manipulation. Louis might. Armand feared it for some time, and it's perfectly reasonable Lestat does as well. Louis and Daniel, in a bar in San Fransisco. Louis, screaming through his scorched injuries, for the boy, the boy, Armand, stop, Armand, please. Louis and Daniel again, in Dubai.

It had wound his anxiety higher, and higher, like—

Louis was just having some fun. This is boring. You're boring. You are so boring. Dull nights, dull weeks, dull months, dull as fuck. He hears it in his head louder and louder, sitting in their living room, in their dining room, even in their bedroom, as Louis stares at Daniel, and tells him things he'd never told Armand.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-20 08:09 am (UTC)(link)
Lestat does not need to tell Armand that he's jealous, or that he still desires possession of Louis desperately. It is evident. It has been evident, for all the years between the three of them. And it fits as the perfect, warped mirror to the way Louis has been yearning for him all this time. Yearning, but not trusting. Moving on, but never healing. Lestat like a splinter inside of him, preventing the wounds from closing.

(Even the wounds Armand made. Just a bit clever, once in a while.)

They have ruined so much. They are alike in the worst ways. Armand could cradle him like this, and comfort him, and they could both mourn their mistakes. They are both too much. Lestat too passionate, Armand too cold. For a short time, those things made them successful partners. Intensity is alluring, no matter the type.

A short short time. A transformative time. A time that left Armand's heart shattered. He put the pieces back together, even colder, even harder. He cut himself on the shards but did his duty. He even did his duty to Nicki, the first lover-fledgling Lestat left to him. What a fool. Stupid, naive Armand, who despite his age, fell for it again. Another of Lestat's toys.

Lestat, Lestat, Lestat. Trying to get away from him. Thinking about Louis, and his cruelty.

If that's what Lestat likes, then he will oblige him. He'll let him have his fill. More than. Did they tell him? The details weren't all in the book. No, they didn't. A quick check, barely-there, as he pulls Lestat deeper, deeper, deeper. Into himself. Into a memory burned into him. Into an apartment in San Fransisco, where Louis is in the bedroom and Daniel is on the floor. The door is shut, Louis is screaming, and Daniel is nearly dead.

Armand lets Lestat have the table to sit at, a gracious host, while he picks up the puddles of shiny ribbon, to spool around his fingers, and run through the points of his nails like a needle scratching a record.

Louis' voice. It fills both their heads, loud and clear. It booms over other-Louis' begging, over Daniel's terrified wheezes, it plays, and plays, and plays.

"He had a dark pull."

The tape begins.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-21 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
Louis goes on. He yells, gleeful and cathartic in his skewering. Daniel chimes in, now and then. Armand lets other things echo. Years, decades, worth of Louis' unpacking. Even if they did not speak Lestat's name for half their time together, he was still him, and there was of course the second half. Every time Lestat made a racial fumble. Every time Lestat was bad in bed. Each grievance, dissected, inflamed, remembered.

What is he doing?

Does it matter?

Daniel is on the floor, old and young between Lestat's blinks of perception. Armand observes this, and he walks slowly across the small living room space. He crouches down, and cradles the shivering mortal's face. Are you going to kill me, queries the amalgam of memory and imagination.

Armand tells him yes. Just not right now.

"I've been avoiding you," Armand says, this time to Lestat. "So you say. Is this the kind of attention you've been hoping for? Would you like something different?"
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-22 04:16 am (UTC)(link)
Armand has been physically brutalized countless before. Lestat's treatment is unpleasant, but it is also nothing. So routine and familiar as to fade into the background. Layers of horror that have grown into him like tree rings. A part of the fossilized material that makes him.

Cradling his fledgling's face, he sees something in between; watching him age in blinks, in dust jacket portraits, in lurking visits. Black curls become striped with silver, then it overtakes it, skin sags and stretches and develops cutting character. Daniel continues to shiver and sniffle, eyes wet with clear, watery tears.

Listen.

Since when does Lestat listen to anyone? Why should Armand give him such grace, when Lestat has never given an inch of his own?

But that change. Barely any words. Armand turns his head over his shoulder to look at the other vampire, his expression one that Louis struggled to name, but still managed to sketchily describe; blank and apocalyptic. Is he angry? He must be. Nothing else qualifies. No amount of breaking his shoulder, his arm, any part of him, compares to the feeling of this mongrel anglo impostor daring to utter Amadeo to him, of Lestat trying to mimic a man who was a god, and to hold it over him.

Lestat slams into him. Daniel is ripped away. Falling into the dark like a brick dropped off of a ledge. There's nothing graceful about the plunge into the cold, black ocean within Armand. Does Lestat want a slave after all? Does it all boil down to this? The same brutal balance that Armand first learned when he was still Arun?

Must I repeat myself, Amadeo?

Marius speaks in Latin. He holds his Amadeo by his chin, explains to him again, how the transformation works. He will be drained again, and again, and he will be drowned so he can save himself, so Marius knows it's taken with proper strength. Amadeo has been ill, his body has not fully recovered thanks to the Gift; Marius is disgusted and angry that he managed to get himself so sick (doing the work Marius sent him to do), and he laments losing the stunning gold chip of the boy from the continent, who he can no longer send out for fear of burning in the sun.

They continue to fall.

Tell him again.

He was only ever Amadeo because he was Arun. (Maybe. It could have been Arjun, or Iren, or a dozen other things.) He could only please his god, his Marius, because of Arun. Arun's horror, Arun's suffering, over and over, choking, bleeding, violated, again and again. He is taught by repetition, he is taught by being drugged, he is taught by violence, and penetration, and suffocation, and use. His body hasn't finished growing. He doesn't understand Italian. He begins to romanticize the taste of his own blood in his mouth, because it means it isn't full of anything else, and the beatings are better than the rapes, and even food, which he throws up too often to find relieving.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-23 10:30 am (UTC)(link)
(Of course—)

There's no God, there are no gods; not at home, wherever that was, and not here, on wooden planks showing through plaster, where Armand-Arun reaches for Lestat when he's drawn closer. Lestat has always understood more about the world than Armand, whose growth and education have been stunted over and over. Maybe he understands this, and he can just bury his face in the younger vampire's shoulder, and it'll go away.

(Of course—)

Cold inside of him, colder than freezing, enough that the snow is a relief. Hidden away somewhere in a part of France he's never seen except through stories told to him. He doesn't think Lestat deserves to be beaten, but he understands why. God demands much, because God's emptiness allows him to be filled with humanity's resentment. God's falseness allows him to be shaped into anything, wielded by anyone, and with an ever-changing force.

He wants to stay in the snow, holding Lestat, trying to shelter each other. If it's cold, they don't have to move on to the fire.

Because of course Lestat has known Marius, and Marius loved him. Better than Armand, instantly, immediately, and with enough force to bring him to life. It shatters in more effectively than breaking all of his bones; in Vermont, on the edge of the lake, Armand gasps in a breath that sounds ragged, but quiet, like glass breaking slowly under a steady footstep.

"I love you," Amadeo told his maker. Loved by God, and Marius was God, wasn't he? Marius didn't look up; he never looked up. "I'm sure you do, Amadeo."

If he feeds himself to the wolves, he'll just reform after. There's nowhere to go.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-24 10:08 am (UTC)(link)
He has known that Marius is alive. An instinct, a dampening but not a total severing of the bond in his mind. To look at it would be confronting his greatest fear. He looked sideways at it, just for a moment, when he created Daniel, but this is bigger. A monolith of a thing. Reckoning with his existence being truly meaningless except to be a thing to house pain for others.

Armand shows this to Lestat, a confession held in his hands like a crippled bird. He has known, but he has not wanted to see. For centuries he has known, and now that he sees it, he wants to die. In this moment, for the first time, he truly wants to die.

But he can't, can he?

They are in Magnus' lair, they are in a dark room that the Children of Satan have put them in; Magnus will come to leave more corpses, Santino will come to beat them, and burn between their thighs, and make them recite scripture while starving, and Magnus will return and try to drag them apart, and Marius won't ever be there, because Marius burned, except he didn't, and Armand has always known that. Marius left him to this, left him to this for centuries, left him to become Armand, and now Armand—

What will he do? Will he pull Lestat from it, out of this dungeon?

In the real world, he curls his arms over the other vampire. He strokes his blond hair, and he kisses his temple.

Lestat was the first person he ever chose. The first person he gave his body to without being ordered, or instructed, or gifted. Lestat rewrote so much pain in Armand, some of which he didn't even know had been there. And then he left. This is what happens. Armand is left, or sold, or simply forgotten about. He left Armand, he abandoned Nicki, he ruined Louis, and Armand still holds him, because he still deserves thanks for having treated Armand tenderly, even if it was only one time, even if it wasn't genuine.

It's fine if it wasn't genuine. Lestat cannot justly be expected to give him anything genuine when his own maker wouldn't.

Armand le Rien. Armand l'Erreur.

'You want me to go away.'

Spare Louis further paranoia and pain. Set Daniel free. Take the cold ocean inside of him, take his ancient blood, his attention, his protection, his bored threats, and go away. His maker, happier with Lestat. His companion, happier with Lestat. His fledgling, happier with Lestat. Armand feels cold. Colder than that. More. Deeper. Darker. Ice on ice, to the marrow. He holds Lestat so closely.
Edited 2025-01-24 10:14 (UTC)
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-25 10:36 am (UTC)(link)
Slow. Ice moving across the sea. Blunt force that Armand feels atom by atom. He watches them pass. He feels his chest begin to collapse; the weight of it lists towards his damaged shoulder, where structural integrity is already compromised. He hears the deafening change of electric power, he feels the death of a little creature. Heartbeats, far and wide. A radio in a houseboat. A phone playing an ASMR video of hair brushing and indistinct murmurs.

Lestat.

Lestat, Lestat, Lestat...

He watches more atoms move. Atmosphere, then fibrous material, and biological matter. His nails rend clothes and pierce flesh and grasp a fistful of internal meat. Aiming for the mass of the lungs, colliding with curved ribs, grazing the liver, finally stabbing diamond-razor points in. Slow, to Armand, who feels it like his hand sinking into something warm and familiar, but outside, it is instantaneous.

He did such a nice job at karaoke. Armand heard every note.

Charcoal sticks and bottles of perfumed oil. Silk hair ribbons, black to match Armand's hair and his disposition. Nicki's hands, cleanly severed off, kept in a box with plush lining and oiled every day to keep them from drying out too badly. The whip Louis favored when he was in his most intense moods. Daniel's second best-seller, and the forty-something portrait of him on the back of the dust jacket. Totems that Armand thinks of. Other things he has held so lovingly. A flower. A phone. The colored glass keychain in his coat pocket.

His shaking is like sobbing, it is like laughter. Frayed completely. Armand is five hundred years old. There is starlight touching them now that is younger than him, visiting from dead cosmic bodies. And yet it means nothing. He is pointless, and yet he must exist. He is. He is chained to his master-maker for eternity, lives in Lestat's memory like a curse, he is written on the inside of Louis' skull, he shares a heart with Daniel. Look how he persists, despite being nothing.

"No."

Bright like a bell. A pleasant sound. His face is still half-mangled, but there is a curved flash of teeth, little fangs and all. His nose is bleeding. His mind feels strange.

'Put yourself into the sun before it's too late, child. We will do this forever.'
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-27 03:16 am (UTC)(link)
Armand's own laughter continues. Through the outburst, through the breaking of his wrist which makes his voice twist, wounded, but uncaring. His clawing is so firm that the removal of his hand leaves behind further damage, and a torn-out nail. Stolen blood will mend Lestat, but only as quick as his system can distribute it to where the damaged tissue is.

He feels strange. Pain on a delay. Lestat's efforts are impacting him more than they should, lingering longer than he expects, pushing him harder, disorienting him further. He can't think of why; his mind is a downward spiral. Why shouldn't Lestat be good at everything, for no reason at all? Doesn't have to wait, doesn't have to learn, just gets to be Lestat, a perfect, beautiful, anglo vision of every talent, so desired he must run across the globe here and there, crying as though everything is so hard for him.

Who cares. They've all fucking suffered.

'Not enough to have it given once honestly?'

Armand has told him before. Meant it before, and was so desperate he accepted an anemic return. He doesn't learn. Lestat, saying I love you, an obvious lie. Louis, saying I love you, an obvious lie. At least Marius didn't pretend. He would never say it. He accepted Amadeo's devotion but never returned it.

'Did Louis ever say it? Has he ever given it to you, trusted you enough, even to placate you? Or have you just watched him love Claudia, and his mortal family, and Daniel?'

Splinters of it. Louis refusing to send the girl away, agonizing over her despite her endless horrid behavior; sitting with Daniel in Dubai, smiling at him, holding one of his books. Always someone else. Always looking away. (Claudia, Daniel, a fucking hallucination of Lestat.)

Broken and bleeding, Armand lifts himself up like a creature far behind the simple dead nature of a vampire. He looms towards the younger monster, the elegance of his drifting at odds with the horrible menace radiating off of him. He collects all the venom he has into something to offer up with hands so used to worship.

'Here, then, maybe you'll be the first person to try to get away from me and have it stick: I love you, Lestat.'
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-27 10:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Tempting to turn it into a mental shouting match. He could. He could snap No you didn't at Lestat's assertion of love, he could shout over him that he's spent the whole of his existence dedicated to cleaning up problems made by other people, no small number among them Lestat's own doing, if he's grabbing for anything it's putting away the toys that the likes of Lestat and Louis have knocked over while having tantrums because life hasn't gone their way.

But he's too angry. Past the point of arguing.

"You look ridiculous."

Offered aloud. He looks like a Mardi Gras float that's been run off a bridge.

Fitting.

Armand's head tilts (looks like it hurts to do) (it does), then, and he says nothing else, out loud or through their minds, but there is an implication all the same. Will I?

All of his compacted anger slams down onto Lestat. Compressed and hardened into a wall of power and force. He will crush him back down onto the ground without moving his hands, without touching him at all. No hand movements to illustrate his point or help focus him; he no longer needs the guidance to visualize it, these centuries since he accosted Lestat on the streets of Paris, and he doesn't feel the need to show off to that degree. He's not a performer. He's wearing dark neutral colors and a boring coat. Not a single feather.

Maybe Armand didn't choose Daniel. Heavily maybe; perhaps he knows he didn't. He lashed out. He wanted to take something from Louis. He wanted to shut Daniel up. But night by night he grows more certain that he likes it better this way. It's not how anyone else was made.

There will probably be an argument about this encounter. Armand wonders how it will go, and with all the energy he has, grinds his proverbial, telekinetic heel into Lestat.
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[personal profile] beigest 2025-01-29 06:10 am (UTC)(link)
The great, invisible hand that slammed Lestat to the pavement now wraps harshly around him. It raises him into the air, and then throws him back down again. Armand's eyes shake. Pupils fixed, bigger than usual but not fully blown out, trembling, shimmering.

Again.

He feels blood leak from his nose. Not the way it should be, from Lestat's violence. Something is a little bit wrong, though he's not sure what. Lestat, too, should be different. He should be in pieces. Armand's blood is potent, but Lestat has a strong heart and his own dominant bloodline. It should have run out of steam already in the frantic effort to reconstruct his lungs.

(I have the blood of Akasha in me, and he fed from Marius, or was given something by Marius, Marius who knows everything of them, of their origins, who decided his Amadeo was sweet but too stupid, not worthy, never worthy. Pieces of a puzzle. He can't quite, he can't quite—)

'You think you're going to take my fledgling from me? You think giving him months of space is abandonment? What then, of how you have treated yours?'

Like a knife, he delves into Lestat's mind. Flips through quickly, finds all the pages about Gabrielle, her reckless making and utterly unknown fate, about Nicki, who Lestat gave to Armand, about Louis, who Lestat also fucking gave to Armand, and Claudia who Lestat ran out, tried to murder, Antoinette who he used like a shoe, and what's this? What's this? Another? Does Lestat even remember that one's name?

Again.

Armand finds that ribbon, and winds it around his fingers. His internal voice is cold, and cruel.

'Do you want to die, like I want to die? Or do you fear it, the end you've carelessly sent so many to?'

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