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do it again
They’re not in a coffin but they are under the sheet, soft cotton pulled up all the way over their heads. A little bit of light filtering in from the living room making its way to Louis’ eyes only as a dense impression. Armand has dark blue sheets, now. Louis doesn’t remember when he had swapped out the white. This is a bit more practical.
Humid, their breath trapped in the little bubble of cloth. There is a coffin now, is the thing, but it’s under the bed, and Armand has not invited him into it. Maybe Armand takes it out to actually sleep. Or maybe it’s just Daniel’s, set aside like a conveniently modular guest bedroom waiting for his return. Not really any of Louis’ business.
What is Louis’ business: the sticky tip of Armand’s dick, bumping gently into his thigh with every pump of Armand’s hand. The way he can feel the outlines of Armand’s dainty little fangs, the front of them and not the tips, through his top lip pressed against Louis’ shoulder. His own hardness gaining between his legs.
Helices are Armand’s latest thing. Just a few days ago Louis had been in a hotel room with Lestat in Seoul, where they apparently love him, hoping and then giving up the hope of Lestat coming to bed before he had finished what he was doing, which was using an enormous file to tune a colourful childrens’ xylophone in quarter-tones while seemingly ignoring Armand on a video call delivering a lecture on the complex logarithm. Armand is obsessed with the idea of circles that finish in different places than they started. Armand loves to repeat himself, to do and have done to him the same familiar things. He exults in monotony, the delight of a child, or of God, who says do it again to the moon every evening and every morning do it again to the sun. And yet the nights and days do not end where they started; spirals, not circles.
One twist of the spiral: that they used to do this because Louis wasn’t hard. Alexandria, Louis thinks. Oddly, he is more confident of his memories of Egypt now that he knows one is gone, because he’s pretty sure it is just the one. He ate human for a little while, after Paris, because humans were the ones who did it, who laughed along. The play could not have come off without its audience. But their dying thoughts terrified him, infected him, it was driving him mad, so back to stray cat for a while. Which has a particular effect on him, yes. Perhaps it’s purely physical, nutritional, or perhaps it’s deeper, something to do with erotic exchange, with the vampire nature, with— well, anyway, his dick doesn’t work all that reliably when he goes vegetarian. Which had been an issue, to put it lightly, to Lestat, the first time around. And it wasn’t so much that Louis didn’t care about Armand’s reaction and more that he wanted it, wanted to see what Armand would take, wanted Armand to prove that he would take it nicely. Remind him, perhaps, that he had no right to demand anything.
Which he hadn’t, of course, but what Louis hadn’t expected was a strange sort of relief in Armand. Not gladness, exactly, but relaxation. And part of it was the deprivation, yeah, he’s happy to go without if he’s told no with a firm enough voice. But part of it was something else, what it meant for Louis to not want him sexually, and still keep him around.
So sometimes Louis would lie beside him, or grab him around the waist, and say you want to take care of yourself? Armand always wanted to. Armand is not timid about sex; timidity was after all a luxury denied to him. He asks for what he wants, at least when he can locate the want in his body.
After Lestat had told him that his maker is alive and well, that he had stayed away at first out of inability and then out of indecision and finally, now, out of a hope that Armand is happy, well, that’s Lestat’s telling, anyway, Armand had wept for a little while, draped over Louis' shoulder, Daniel rubbing circles into his back. Then he’d said well, he would be very pleased, all this fuss over such stale news, and asked to please have his reward. Daniel pretended outrage over it, seriously, you think this is the right time for—? as if they hadn’t spent seventy-seven years learning what the other needs— sometimes only to deny it, sure, but learning nonetheless. Daniel laughed, admitted defeat, when Armand was happily settled in bed and asleep long before dawn with fresh tears on his cheeks and fresh marks trailed down the back of him. Relief, to be right about knowing how to take care of someone.
Armand is holding the new shape of his history close to him, like he’d held the old. He sees the shapes of things now, their symmetry, their cyclicity, points out which of their laws were made by God and which not. Louis cannot help him hold it and he doesn’t want to, but Armand carries it well. He always carried himself well.
“You want to tell me how it feels?” he whispers into Armand’s neck.
Armand shakes his head, a tiny movement of his curls against Louis' cheek. Armand’s no is always provisional, and sometimes it means make me, and sometimes it means if it’s really what you want, and Louis had once wanted to scorn him for so rarely having a real one, a true line in the sand, when he actually has the power to enforce such a line if he could just decide where it is. It has always been hard to find scorn for Armand, and perhaps there’s a reason for that. He could make Armand tell him anyway. Pleasure and pain come to him in colours, in textures, in associations, like the whole world gets pulled into Armand’s body in ecstasy and processed into his sweet moans and his thick blood. Louis likes to hear about it, like being told of a hallucination he wouldn’t want to experience for himself.
If Armand had begged not to be forced to speak it, of course Louis would make him. But he hadn’t, and his free hand is clutching at Louis’ arm like he is trying to pull him impossibly closer, needs more of him. It feels good to be needed, had felt good even when they did this with Louis’ cock soft and uninterested. “You want me to do the talking?” he murmurs.
Armand makes a soft little sound, definitely in the affirmative, either that or in reaction to how he’s pressing his chest into Louis’ side, rubbing his nipples on Louis’ arm. Which wouldn’t really have been allowed back then, on the other branches of this spiral; that’s not exactly taking care of himself, is it. Perfect.
“Trying to rub yourself off on me? Did I say you could do that?” He presses into Armand’s chest, making him do it harder. “Need some punishment that bad, huh?”
Despite all attempts to poison every trace of it in his veins with violation, Armand is an artist. He has specific aesthetics, exacting taste, developed sensibilities. So like all artists, Louis knows, he must constantly balance the essential, generative inner conflict between the base and sophisticated, the universal and the personal. Which is to say, he would absolutely not admit in his lucider moments that he likes basically all the same clichés as every other corybantic little masochist. The word pun-ish-ment, spoken low and deliberate. Yeah, that gets him. It’s almost too easy, except it never stops being fun. Not in everything, but in some things, Armand can draw Louis into his exultation in monotony.
“Need me to make you put your hands behind you,” Louis says. “On a wall, pushing your chest out, or I could tie them— but I don’t need to, do I? You’ll hold still for me, no matter how much it hurts.”
Wet slapping noises of Armand’s hand on his cock. He always drags his fangs down his palm before touching himself, regular as spitting. Louis can’t quite tell where his other hand is, but there’s a good chance he’s rubbing over his hole with it, trapping his body between his own fingers. “Warm you up with a cane, maybe,” says Louis, “get your whole chest aching with it. Leave a few bruises, deep, make sure you won’t forget the lesson for a few hours at least. Get you crying for me.”
Armand whimpers softly, almost like it’s actually happening, the early stages of it, anyway. He can’t really cry without help, needs the permission of something to cry about. Louis had almost been surprised when he cried over his maker, but then, Louis and Daniel had gone to great lengths to set up the scene for him just like a beating. That just means they did a good job.
Shit, Louis is so fucking hot for it. He presses his hand into his groin, not enough pressure not enough of anything. It feels so good to want like this. It feels better because he knows what it feels like to want nothing. “Need to work over your nipples with something that can really aim with a hard swing,” he continues, pants really. Armand’s chest is pretty, yeah, more muscle than you’d expect from the dainty way he holds himself with his clothes on. “The tawse, maybe. You want that, all the attention on your nipples ’til you’re wailing and begging for it to stop?”
Armand moans something that might be “mhm.” And yeah, it’s not the way they used to do this, but why the hell had Louis thought he was going to just lie there and watch Armand tug himself off as if he’d eaten nothing recently but rats and kittens? Louis is already pushing his trousers down his hips, but for his mouth is still going, isn’t it, and he ends up saying “Alright if I join—” and then cuts himself off, gets himself free of his clothes.
Too late; a stutter in his rhythm.“Yes, Padrone,” Armand intones, breathily, “you may masturbate with me.” A mean pinch and twist to crack his faux-solemnity into a giggle. Enough lip from you, then. Louis wraps his hand around his cock, finally.
It had taken a while, to enjoy his own hand as much as anyone else’s. Self-pollution, they’d called it when he was a human child, hands above the covers, there’s a good boy— easier to have someone do it for you, and sure, that’s a sin too, a worse one, but at least you don’t have to feel yourself doing it, and it’s not like there was ever any shortage of volunteers, was there? So yes, he’d told Daniel that Paris was his formative sexual liberation, but of course Paris really means Armand, and it had been Armand’s shamelessness that made him feel for the first time like anything that felt good, was good. Armand trusts Louis’ desires implicitly; whatever Louis wants to do to him is, by definition, desired. Some books he’d read around the turn of the 20th century had something to say about that, but of everything that had ever gone wrong between them, it had never been that stuff. And it feels good, that much trust. Feels good enough to trust that if what he wants to do to Armand can be good, what he wants to do to himself— quite a bit more conventional— can be, too.
But of course, even with Armand— well, there was another willing volunteer, wasn’t there. Just as easy, or easier, to push him down and say mouth. And then Armand was gone, and Louis was alone in a quiet room, an empty bed, nobody watching. And then he’d tried it, not just as a replacement for something else but carefully, on purpose. Here is how you can make yourself feel.
He strokes slowly. He likes to be gentle with himself, almost hesitant, like a new lover, which perhaps he is. Alone in his bed it leaves room for thought, for memory, for fantasy, for— well, they make some interesting supplements to those things, these days. Here, with Armand twitching and panting against him, it leaves room to keep hold of the situation. “Slow down,” he says, and Armand does, with visible effort, you could make him edge himself that way and he would do it, but perhaps— “Stop for a sec. Will you let me try something?”
Armand doesn’t even dignify that with an answer. He pulls his hands off himself and holds them under his chin, one finger pressed against the corner of his lips, a little blood trickle from a split in his lip, a tiny smile.
Louis reaches down to grasp both of their cocks, considering. He’d— well, sure, he’d seen it in a pornographic video on the internet. Maybe that’s the cliché Louis would prefer not to admit to, the divorcé lying alone in bed scrolling through videos, but there is something to it, something that is new to him beyond just the catalogue of flesh, which is not new at all. To be able to peek into a potential future, a way that your body could be that you had never considered— and if it turns out to be unappealing, to simply close the tab. You can wander farther, when the way back is so clear and easy. And sometimes, you wander somewhere you’d like to stay a while.
He holds a hand under Armand’s mouth. “Spit,” he says, and gets a palmful of thick, ancient blood to spread over himself. He uses it to pull his own foreskin not back, but forwards, over the head. It takes some massaging to get it far enough but he knows it goes, he’s tried it, thinking yes, this would work, maybe, if the other guy were cut and not too big and patient enough to stay still and let me get it right. Physical characteristics aside, only one of his paramours has the patience for any more avant-garde kind of experimentation.
Louis works himself through it, stretching the skin out, the kind of careful preparation you only can do to yourself. It’s not so much pleasurable as purposeful, which is enough to keep him hard, that and the way Armand is trying to keep himself still but still letting through little twitches, his hips wanting to turn over just a little more to grind into the mattress. He doesn’t, though; he watches curiously, patiently, keeping his hands folded where he’d put them.
“You ever been inside before?” Louis asks, and Armand frowns, confused, of course he— but then Louis reaches over and starts to fit them together, the slick heads pressing together, Louis’ foreskin sliding over to envelop the tip of Armand’s cock, not so very far, but enough to make his meaning clear. And Armand’s eyes go wide, understanding what he’s inside of, and he blinks, shakes his head, almost shocked.
It’s special, to find something new to Armand. It’s not the first time he’s managed it, and a few times he had help from simple human ingenuity— the vibrator, the violet wand— but this is different, because it’s just bodies. It requires at least one foreskin, of course, but also— well. It’s not the kind of thing you would do with a quick fuck. With an indifferent master, with a rent boy, with anyone whose body you do not want to touch gently for its own sake.
The discomfort of the stretched skin fades, once he’s got something to anchor it on. He can clasp his fist around Armand inside of him and push, and goddamn that’s good he can feel their slits rubbing together, getting slicker inside the little space he’s made of himself. It’s not really enough on its own but maybe that’s part of the appeal, it’s limited only by patience.
Which Armand has quite a lot of, usually, if he’s told to, but to be fair, he had been pretty damn worked up before Louis ever even got his cock out. He can’t really be blamed (or he can, but perhaps on another occasion, throw it in with the nipple thing for punishment) for how he’s pushing into it, one hand having migrated down to hold the base of his cock, the sheet thrown off of their upper bodies so he can see how they fit together in better light. Tiny little thrusts with nowhere to go but— a harder push and the slip is sideways, the stretch almost painful again but Armand’s moan swallows the pain, or maybe just lends him some of whatever alchemy Armand does with it. Louis shifts his grip, holding them together more firmly, and does it on purpose: slippery circles of their cocks around each other, and Armand jerks and can’t quite reproduce the motion on his own and comes, a nearly shocking warmth spreading over him.
And then he’s off, gone, not really even thinking about Armand, just letting his body do what it wants to do. What it wants is hard and fast and undignified, and that’s— different, too. It’s easy to let go when Armand is still under his thumb, always something less in control than Louis is, but this is something else, Armand recovering his composure while Louis writhes and pants. And he doesn’t care, is the thing, he’s too busy writhing and panting, the only thought he really needs just to choose where on Armand he’s going to come, his belly or his groin or the sweet inviting vee in between his thighs. And even that’s not really a choice because Armand is pressing in, his softening cock bumping Louis' hand as it moves and he comes where Armand had come on him, reciprocal. He has to pull his hand away right away, the sensitivity too much in the moment where not enough abruptly becomes enough and then too much, so he grabs Armand’s upper arm with it instead, bruising, holding him like Armand is a tether to the ground he might otherwise float away from.
They used to smoke, in these moments, like everyone used to, which was nice. Then that went out of fashion, but at least they still had blood, the tip of Armand’s finger or his delicate wrist in Louis’ mouth, really too rich a food to be used so casually, but he did it anyway. Who knows what the poor mortals have to occupy themselves with these decades, in the moments after orgasm. It seems to require aloneness, in a way he had never really noticed even as he was participating in it. A cigarette, a drink, a deep unnecessary breath even, are all things that can be superficially shared but only really experienced alone. Instead, now, he absent-mindedly rubs his own spend into the skin above the base of Armand’s cock, more for the feeling on his fingers than anything else. Smooth, hair surely removed not too long before his turning; at Amadeo’s request or Marius’, he has never asked.
Armand sighs and nuzzles his nose into Louis’s neck. “Will you really…?” he asks.
An odd memory, to be coming to him now: for the first little while, when they were learning each other like flipping through the headings of a book before settling in with the first chapter, Armand would always say thank you afterwards. He would say it more after something rough, when he was bruised or bloody or tear-stained, kissing the hands that beat him and saying thank you, thank you, I wanted it so much, needed it so badly. Then once it had occurred to Louis to wonder whether that was perhaps simply his routine, the reassurance, if it was what he’d done with his first master, and Armand stopped. It wasn’t like Louis was complaining about it, either way. It was just a thought. And then he’d avoided thank you unless specifically told to say it, until their first time of this twist of the spiral, in a toilet stall at the back of a bar. Perhaps Louis would like to say it, now.
Or perhaps he would like to say— the other thing, the one Armand had given him, the final severing of whatever cord held them together that is different from the one they are weaving now.
In the religion of his childhood, there is no such thing as a true union which ends. There is only nullity, a void, a union that never existed in the first place. A circle that is simply erased, and if you ever perceived its orbit, you were deceived. And Louis was deceived, sure, but that is not all he was. Standing on one repetition of a helix, you can still see the other branches. They existed, as they were, as surely as they exist now as they are.
Instead of thank you, instead of I repudiate you, he just says “You ever known me to make empty threats?”
Armand just hums contentedly. Louis can feel the shape of his smile. They lie with their arms around each other, a long moment, but not an infinite one.
“I do think about it,” says Armand eventually. “I would like to see him. I don’t know under what circumstances.”
It would be a lie for Louis to claim he hadn’t imagined it. Setting it up for Armand, like they’d set up the news in the first place. And then, what, chaperoning? Hovering in the background like a team of lawyers, or pub bouncers? It’s a fantasy, mostly, a fantasy with a sharp edge but fundamentally soothing nevertheless. That you can smooth the jagged pain off of anything, just by being there. That if you do it right, any situation can be brought under control. But it’s not real, he knows that. Knows it from experience.
“Yes,” says Louis. “That was how I felt. With Lestat.” So many years of thinking of him, of imagining what it would be like. After killing him, and after leaving him. And then, both times, it had happened with its own logic, nobody’s ideal, nobody even in control, despite all attempts.
Armand pulls back, a tiny, rueful smile on his face. “Do you know,” he says, “when I think about it, all I can imagine is climbing on top of him and— he used to tell me no, when I asked for it for myself, like I wasn’t old enough to ask when I was old enough to— just climbing on and taking what I want from him, his blood and member and saying dirty old man, you don’t get to say no to me—” he breaks off. He’s flushed, blood dark under his cheeks, biting his lip and laughing a little. It’s sweet.
Which kind of works for Louis’ fantasy, doesn’t it, Marius protesting that they’re in company, Amadeo, be reasonable, Louis crossing his arms like the bouncer, do you think you’re the one making the decisions here? He’s not broadcasting the image on purpose, really, but hell, they’re both thinking of it, and then they’re just staring at each other, matching bashful grins.
“Yeah,” says Louis. “Maybe a bit more workshopping on that scene before opening night.”
“Quite a bit,” Armand agrees, and pulls them back together, tucking his chin over Louis’ shoulder, his nails scraping lightly down Louis’ back.
Soon they’ll disentangle, and pull their clothes back on. Louis will suggest a date to see each other again, and Armand will probably do something bizarre like add Nipple Torture as an event in his phone calendar. And then Louis has a meeting with the production company, because his saying that the lights sucked at Lestat’s last concert has somehow made their artistic direction into his problem, and Armand has a meeting with his team for something called a hackathon, and they won’t think of each other, except sometimes, when Armand sees a dog that he thinks reminds him of Lestat and wants Louis to know about it, or Louis sees some public signage that could be mistaken for something vulgar and wants Armand to pretend he’s not laughing about it too, or something else that draws the thought of each other close, but not too close, circling each other, radii never too wide to reach out and touch.
End Notes
- The titular phrase (God, who says do it again…) is an adaptation of G.K Chesterton.
- Technically, this started as discussion of this picture{.external-link} of Eric Bogosian.
- Thank you so much to everyone who has commented on telenovela or my other fic lately… unfortunately the end of that fic coinciding with life and also ao3 working out the kinks of rate limiting means I might need to declare comment bankruptcy (hehe remember comment bankruptcy… from livejournal…) but I appreciate you all coming along on this ride of me putting stuff in documents when I feel like it and it getting out of hand.
- A lecture on the complex logarithm, if Lestat even cares...
- It may shock you to learn that I do not actually have a reference for what a quarter-tonal toy xylophone would sound like. However here's some quarter-tonal piano music :::
