once or twice

It is, Armand thinks, an elegant little scene. He had learned that word recently, from a website, scene, as if it were a piece of theatre, which perhaps it is, just with the same bodies as both actors and audience.

Lestat has spread out the materials on the floor, and explained their purpose, and is staring at them somewhat doubtfully. Lestat is also hovering on the edges of his mind, probing his willingness, which is very much in evidence, but also feeling his amusement, which is— well. The entire thing smells of Louis. Which isn't a complaint in the slightest. Just an observation, which Lestat clearly shares.

“You never kept dogs, I suppose,” he says, “in any of your various dens of iniquity?”

“Dogs?” says Armand. “No.”

“One must take care, when introducing a new element to the kennel,” says Lestat. “The best sign, with two dogs being introduced, or reintroduced, is for them to ignore each other. Failing that, it is preferable for them to have a common point of focus, something other than the unfamiliar presence.” He sweeps his hand across the rolled-up drape of fabric, the needle, the fishing twine. “As you see.”

Armand suspects Louis would not put it in exactly those words. In fact, he knows, because Louis had texted him. He talks a big game, but he's afraid of you, he'd said on Lestat's first day in Dubai. And Armand, though it's difficult to seem coy and innocent over a text message, Why? Louis, strict at first: Come on. Because you're insanely powerful and completely off your rocker. Then like he, too, suddenly realized the disadvantage of communication through words only, Didn't mean that the way it probably came off. And then, for the first time, Louis' mind reaching out gently to Armand's, are you okay, and getting a giddy disarray in return.

So it's true that the terms of Armand and Lestat's meeting during this trip have been— careful. A single visit a week in, two days before he flies home to New Orleans, Lestat dropped off in front of Armand's front door by Louis' driver with strict instructions as to his pick-up time. And maybe Louis is right, because Lestat certainly does talk a big game, but now that he is here he seems nervous.

The talking: his usual demands, the odd routine they've settled into. Your fingers in your hole, your fangs in your arm, Lestat sent right before getting on the plane, which Armand can do because he now owns a tripod. Your feet, he sent once he was on the ground, and Armand went out and bought a bottle of light purple polish for his toenails. The fact that he was staying in Louis' apartment did not seem to affect his appetite for images of Armand, it only meant that for the first time, he sent some back, right to Armand's mind: the top of Louis' head as he leans against him with a book. The curve of his neck, just begging for fangs. His lubed-up asshole as Lestat slides his cock in. Armand doesn't think Lestat is trying to be cruel, is the thing, so he just enjoys them the way he enjoys everything, with a touch of pain, and sends back photos of him doing it with his face artfully streaked with tears.

Besides, it’s not like he has nothing to do. The same website with the word scene led him to a discreet gathering at a cafe, which led him to a woman looking for something called a “demo bottom," which led to Armand in a stranger’s basement, leaning against a comfortable wooden X while a small group of friendly mortals practiced their single-tail on him and then cooed over his inability to hold a mark, strange and delightful enough to make up for how little it hurt. He had asked for a photo of it, him in the centre and the strangers around him conferring over grip and angle, which he hasn’t sent to Lestat and isn’t sure why. He likes being the only one who has it.

Now Lestat is sitting on his floor, blinking up at him with big blue eyes through lashes of a length that cannot possibly be real. The proposition: they hang a thick backing curtain on Armand's wall, and then Lestat sews him to it. It is, in many ways, a perfect activity. Lestat likes to look at him. Lestat likes to dress him up, likes it now when he's making demands on Armand's phone and had liked it the first time they met, washing him, pulling him into stiff tailored clothes. Armand both loves and hates to be dressed up, to be looked at, to be forced to endure, and he loves things he hates. You are brilliant, he thinks at Louis, in case that is allowed now, and feels it soak into Louis’ mind with an attractive smugness.

He rolls the backing fabric open: a dyed blue carefully chosen to be exactly complimentary to the tapestry's foreground figure. He fetches some nails, and hangs it up over a stretch of wall in the living room, pinned at all four corners, taut enough that it will be easy to push a needle through. Then he undresses. There is a way that you undress when it is your job, when there is no reason to either rush or slow the process. He realizes now that he has lost the knack of it. And Lestat is staring at him too intently to do it that way, anyway.

Once Armand is undressed, it still takes Lestat a moment to figure out what he’s supposed to be doing. Armand has hung his own background, he is most certainly not posing himself, as well. That’s Lestat’s job. He nudges him with his mind, and Lestat leans back on his hands. He does, at least, seem to be enjoying the view. “Is a crucifixion scene too obvious?” he asks. “Too Christian?”

“Neither,” says Armand. “Christians have a charming habit of thinking only one man was ever crucified, and that he is their little secret. Shall I play Ibn Qurhub instead?” He raises his arms to the side.

“You are very difficult,” Lestat mutters, pushing himself up to his feet. Then he is standing in front of Armand’s naked body, looking at him critically. He runs a finger along his wrist. He feels cold, hard, like stone, like he should. Louis these days is always eating, always a little warm, a little human, and that is good too, but everything about Lestat screams vampire, and that— well. Lestat can see for himself what it’s doing to him.

“Wrists turned up a little more,” he murmurs, and Armand does it. “Head— to the side. Yes.” Hands running down under his arms, over his sides, a little tap to his abdomen. “Up.”

He means up up, which takes Armand a moment to realize— he has never before posed with any supernatural skills on display. He raises himself off the ground a little bit, just enough for Lestat to bend his knees a little and turn them to the side. Then he runs the back of his hand up Armand’s thigh, and taps a finger against his half-hard cock. “And did qui que ce soit have one of these, while he was being crucified?”

“Jesus did, sometimes,” Armand says. “There was a bit of craze for it, in my youth.”

Lestat shakes his head. “No wonder you are so degenerate,” he murmurs, “with such examples.” Then he leans his cheek softly on Armand’s chest, like cool glass. It feels perfect. It feels like nothing bad has ever happened between them. Armand keeps his arms where they are, outstretched, letting Lestat nuzzle into him and then step away.

“We must begin, then,” he says, and picks up the needle. He threads it with a good long length of the fishing twine. Armand points and flexes his toes. His erection softens and then recovers. His heart beats loudly to his own ears. Lestat is a small anxious thing on the edges of his mind. He looks lost, once he has the needle in his hand and has stepped in close once more.

“Start underneath my arm,” Armand suggests, “where there is more skin to work with, then come down my side.”

Determinedly, Lestat steps in, grabs a small fold of skin underneath Armand’s bicep, and pushes the needle though it. The needle itself hurts less than the pinch required to gather the skin in the first place, but the feeling of the twine being pulled through his flesh is— odd. A little bit nauseating. Armand breathes, slowly, deliberately, through the second punch and pull of the needle. He focuses on the strange new sensation of being threaded. He will soon get to know it, and to truly know a sensation is to love it.

It is clear from the beginning that Lestat isn't enjoying himself; what becomes clear, eventually, maybe taking longer than it would if there were an impartial observer present to make the determination, is that he isn't going to. He won’t settle into it, isn't going to find a rhythm or calm down enough to enjoy himself. The underside of Armand's arm finished, Lestat starts working his way down Armand's side; but the greater distance from flesh to wall demands larger stitches, big pinches of skin on the sides of his ribs and stomach. Armand whimpers and then keens, and those are good sounds, the sort Louis pulls out of him and then praises him for, but Lestat flinches like they're an indictment.

It doesn't make any sense. Lestat is not Louis, sure, but then, nobody is Louis. He is not, or rather wasn't the last time Armand had been naked in his presence, a shrinking violet. Where has the man gone who sneered encouragement for Louis to step on Armand's hands through his phone?

It's clear enough that man won't be putting in an appearance. Armand pulls himself out of the languour of the pain, which isn't difficult; he had not been very far away. “Lestat,” he says, and then switches into French to say “we don't have to do this,” a small measure of submission that he suspects may be more appreciated than the current one.

Lestat responds in the same language seemingly without even noticing the switch. “I'm sorry,” he says, “you do look very beautiful like this…”

“It's all right.”

Lestat steps back a little. He traces a finger over the line of stitches he's made, gathers the little drops of blood on his finger and places it on his own tongue. Armand shivers.

“I was a very good student, you know,” Lestat says quietly, “though I wasn't permitted to be one for very long. But I was good. I would never have willingly left an exercise uncompleted.”

“I was terrible,” says Armand. “I was more likely to be passed out drunk than at my desk when I was supposed to be.”

Lestat blinks. “You, a drunk?”

“Oh, an incorrigible one,” says Armand. “Well, attempts at correction were made, I suppose. But yes, you merely met me several hundred years too late.” He giggles, partly at the thought and partly the giddiness of the stitches still holding him to the wall. “We needn't finish our assignment, I don't mind. I can show you how to be a poor student instead. Let's go out drinking.”

Lestat’s plush lips slightly open, eyes roving over Armand’s face. “Yes,” he says finally, as if he’d forgotten that Armand was waiting for an answer. Then he brushes a fingertip under his eye, where a tiny bit of blood has gathered, not quite ready to fall out as a tear. “Do you own cosmetics?” he says.

Armand laughs. “Some,” he says, gently pulling the needle from Lestat’s hand. He bites through the twine to sever it from the needle, then starts pulling out his own stitches. “I’m not pretty enough for you?”

“You are too pretty,” says Lestat, fervent enough to make the words almost uncomfortable. “Let me do your eyes for you. You ought to look like you had to work for it.”

Lestat grumbles over his modest collection of makeup: mascara and a palette of glittery eyeshadows that he has worn on certain themed occasions to the bar, a lipstick he had tried once and then forgotten about on account of whatever they put in them these days making his lips feel weird, and a blunt stick of kohl that is not the ideal tool for the wing Lestat is trying to paint onto the corner of his eye. “You should have brought your own, then,” Armand mutters, sitting on the floor now with Lestat kneeling above him, trying to move the rest of his face as little as possible as he speaks.

“I wanted to do what Saint Louis wanted of me,” Lestat says. Armand cannot tell, even in his mind, whether it is mocking or mournful.

His eyes are shut, one being pulled taut at the corner by Lestat’s finger, and it seems like it would be a thrill, and nothing more, to say, “Padrone thinks you are afraid of me.”

Silence. The tip of Lestat’s nail, trying to clean up the corners of whatever mess he’s just made of Armand’s eye. He lets one eye go and starts in on the other, and Armand cracks the finished one open a little to look at his blurry face. Lestat is frowning, in confusion or concentration or something else. “He’s projecting,” he says finally when he catches Armand looking.

Armand closes the eye again. Closes his mind, not even sure what Lestat would see if he were to look around it. Armand had spent a very long time ensuring there was nothing for Louis to be afraid of, nothing that could touch them. Even now, Louis’ fear seems like Armand’s failure. And yet, a protector can only protect by being more threatening than the threats. There was never any endearment or honorific that could hide what Armand is.

“There.” Lestat lets go of his eye, and Armand turns on the front camera on his phone to inspect the result. It’s not terrible, actually. A little excessive, but that’s only to be expected. Lestat lets him keep it as a mirror as he swipes mascara over his lashes, then pushes it away and tries to go for his mouth with the single tube of lipstick. Armand turns his head aside. “I don’t like it,” he says, “it feels weird.”

Lestat cocks his head. Pulls his hand back, then raises it again. “But you will wear it,” he says, “for me?”

Armand blinks. His lashes feel heavy. Perhaps Louis’ idea was good after all: right spirit, merely the wrong medium. “Yes,” he agrees.

Strong fingers on his chin, the odd powdery sensation of the stuff being spread on his lips. Lestat puts down the tube and looks at him, still holding his face. Kneeling, his knees spread on either side of Armand’s.

“All those pretty tales you told your fledgling about us,” Lestat says. He is staring at Armand’s alien-feeling lips. “Are they truly what you remember?”

“They are,” says Armand, “the parts I prefer to remember.”

“Yes,” says Lestat, “me too,” and then Armand finds out why these modern lipsticks feel so odd: Lestat presses their lips together hard, but when he pulls away, there is no evidence of it on him at all.

Armand takes him to the usual place. People know him, now; they know him with Louis, and they know he’s not with Louis in a way that precludes his occasionally slipping off with someone else. They know he likes sweet confused boys and worldly older gentlemen in equal measure, and both the boys and the older men have vague recollections of a nice kiss in a corridor or an alleyway that seemed to get somewhere so satisfying that they had, for some reason, not gone home together.

Do you think I am a squawking fledgling? I was spending my nights in mortal public houses before you had thought to emerge from the sewer, Lestat thinks at him, amusement and annoyance, and Armand realizes he’d been projecting a vague sort of anxiety, a don’t mess this up for me at him.

“Sorry,” says Armand. “Will you choose one for me?”

“If you’ll do the same.”

And oh, hunting with Lestat is fun. Louis has his own ways, of course, but his are human ways: he reels in what he wants just by standing the right way, saying the right things, making the right eyes at the right moment. It has its own elegance. But being a vampire among other vampires is something else entirely. Well, among one other vampire, but it is enough. To sit and choose and think come to me, and have them do it. It is almost like having a coven. It is the reason he stayed, a stinking worm in the crypt, a harried manager in the theatre, miserable in all other ways but thinking with every kill that if he just got to have this, it was worth it.

It’s different, of course, when they’re only here for little drinks; no need to limit one’s self to those who want or deserve death. The first drink that Lestat chooses for him is a middle-aged Filipino woman, her mind quick and expansive and kind, only made more so by the few too many drinks she’s had. Not an obvious choice, but an inspired one. Armand likes her immediately. When he calls to her she falls into the invitation eagerly, an enthusiasm for life, not death. The kind of person that if you simply walked up to her and said I am a vampire, may I have a taste of your blood, she’d say well why not try something new? He pulls her into their quiet dark corner, takes sips of her which feel like crawling under the warm covers of a friend who will keep your secrets.

Lestat’s choice was kind. Armand’s first choice for him isn’t, exactly, but it is irresistible: an Italian tourist with the same messy blonde waves and blue-grey eyes as Lestat. Among other people.

Less subtle, then: for Armand, a professor of political science from Cairo University here for a conference, that particular cultivated combination of severity and tenderness pulling him in like a tide to shore. For Lestat, a Persian lawyer with a low, musical voice, a mind so impervious to influence that she nearly slips out of his grip, and a wedding wing practically burning a hole through her pocket. Lestat gets bolder: a coked-up curly-headed little white American who somehow retains enough presence of mind during the drink to make an attempt to steal Armand’s wallet. Armand sends him off with a five hundred dirham note tucked in his back pocket. Possibly too bold, but in Armand’s defense, they are both beginning to get a bit drunk: for Lestat, a violinist from the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra.

“Enough,” Armand says, before Lestat has the chance to retaliate. Somehow, he has ended up with multiple glasses in front of him: a half-empty martini, a shot of something he has yet to identify, a barely-touched glass of what he’s almost certain is regular old red wine. He is not certain who ordered them. It could even have been him. He ought to get to work on them, anyway, and he is beginning to have the uncomfortable too-warm, too-human feeling of being overfull with blood.

Lestat’s chin in his hand, elbow on the table, feeling Armand’s mind. It is so good, to have company in there again when he wants it. “Ah, I forgot your little peculiarity,” he says. “One of them, at least. Do you need me to help make room?”

Armand wants it so, so badly. He could offer a wrist, but he realizes that only belatedly, once he has already come around the table to sit next to Lestat. Then, somehow, he is sitting on him instead, his back to Lestat’s chest, Lestat’s hands patting down his shoulders while he drinks from a spot low on the back of Armand’s neck.

Lestat is good at this. He does it gently, fangs quick, mouth gentle, no pain at all. It would be irritating to have it like that all the time, but it is perfect right now, to squirm in his lap in the corner of a bar and not even bother to turn away the furtive, jealous glances of other patrons. Lestat takes enough for Armand to feel comfortable again, though in this case he’s only going to replace the lost blood with alcohol. He licks the wound closed, and Armand sighs contentedly and stays where he is. Somehow they had both gotten drunker in the exchange of blood, which shouldn’t be possible, but there it is. Armand drinks the shot, which turns out to have been gin.

“I’m not, you know,” says Lestat suddenly, his voice low and a little wobbly. “A shrinking violet. Or perhaps I am, but it’s not…” Armand settles back for firmly against him, eyes closed, glad that Lestat has chosen this moment to get maudlin, when they can’t see each other’s faces. When he can just speak softly right into Armand’s ear, as if in his head.

“What was it, then?” he asks.

“Your little noises,” Lestat says, “the pain in your eyes. And all I could hear was her voice. Doing it again. Hurting you, again.” He shrugs, a slight movement against Armand’s back. “I know it is not the same. You are not Louis. And it is different, hurts that are… desired. It is only that I have had a great deal of time, in recent decades, to contemplate the notion that all I ever do is hurt the ones I love. And I have found very little evidence against it.”

Armand cannot think of anything to say to that.

Lestat reads something from him anyway: a question, perhaps. “You would be doing me a favour, I suppose, if you were to tell Louis,” he sighs. “Not that he desires what you do. But I frustrate him sometimes, I think. An excess of gentleness cannot erase cruelty.” And that, Armand does know from experience.

“Don’t think I’ll remember,” Armand says.

“Write it down,” Lestat suggests, and Armand manages to pull out his phone and send a message to himself. There are notifications on the thing that he cannot be bothered to read. The shot glass is full again. Didn’t he just drink that? He drinks it again. Hurt the ones I love, Lestat had said. The ones I love. He cannot think about the phrase for too long. He hopes the sentimental part of their drunkenness will pass soon.

“Are you truly frightened of me?” he asks now, while it lasts. Somehow he has ended up back on the bench beside Lestat, presumably so that Lestat has his hands free to hold a drink. That’s good, Armand is a few drinks ahead of him.

There is a sudden odd knocking on the door of his mind, a request for admittance. He locks it out. “Answer it,” he says to Lestat, annoyed.

Lestat seems surprised by his vehemance. “Do you wish me not to be?” he says. “You went to great pains once to ensure it.”

Armand does not remember taking any pains in particular. He had only done what seemed obvious to be done. He should probably not say that. Something else, then. “Don’t be afraid,” he says, staring at Lestat with what he hopes is an imploring gaze.

Apparently he miscalculated; Lestat bursts out laughing. “Your face,” he gasps. “That’s what the angels say, isn’t it, don’t be afraid, when they come down from heaven to let you know something horrifying is going to happen to you?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Angel? Why not?”

“It’s—” taken. Like Arun, only one mouth is permitted to say it. Unlike Arun, he’ll never hear it again.

“All right,” says Lestat into his silence. “All right, gremlin, mon petit diablotin, I won’t besmirch you with such an insult. Kiss me again.”

Armand does. It is last call. Somehow, there are more drinks to be finished. They finish them, and then are ejected into the bar into the warm night air, and Armand pulls him against a wall and kisses him some more. Surely, he thinks, the lipstick must be gone by now. Surely Lestat could press just a little harder with his knee in between Armand’s legs. Surely this is exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, and they can stay here forever.

He is interrupted by a tap on his shoulder: one of the bartenders locking up, a hip twentysomething who always makes Armand unaccountably nervous. “Come on, boss,” he says, “I know you’ve got somewhere better to do that.”

He does. He does. Armand grabs at Lestat’s shirt. “Lestat,” he says, “come fly with me.” He has not flown with someone in so long. He has not kissed someone while flying— “Lestat!” he gasps, realizing. “I have never been fucked in the air. Never!”

Lestat grabs his face. They’re stumbling towards the Creek, away from the busier streets. “You poor little thing,” he says. “You poor deprived little…” they take off messily, too far from the edge of the water, visible under the streetlamps of the waterfront walkway, and Armand is too drunk to even be aware of what’s going on in his own mind, much less make modifications to other peoples’, but who cares? He’s a vampire. “I love being a vampire,” he says, and shoves a hand down Lestat’s pants.

“Wait,” Lestat gasps, and Armand decidedly does not wait for anything with reference to what he’s doing with Lestat’s cock, which is fine because Lestat manages to pull his phone out of his pocket anyway. They drift and jerk around erratially in the air. Lestat swipes away a slew of notifications and opens the recording app. “Say it again.”

“I love being a vampire,” Armand giggles into the phone, an insane thing to say, unthinkable, but there it is, in Lestat’s hand. In Armand’s hand, Lestat’s cock is strangely soft. Come to think of it, Armand is also not hard. Come to think of it, there’s probably more alcohol than blood in his body at this point, which—

His foot catches the edge of the top deck of a ferry. His body, momentarily confused about whether he is flying or walking, drops out of the air like a rock, and lands in the cool dark water underneath.

He could have pulled himself out, of course he could have, he just doesn’t get the chance, is all, because Lestat does it first. They hold each other sitting on the brick walkway, shaking with laughter, Armand spitting water out of his mouth and shaking it out of his hair. “I fell in the Canal once,” he says, laughter taking on a hysterical edge, “Riccardo was whipped for it— Lestat, I do adore you, I adore you…”

Which is the position they’re in when a car pulls into the parking lot, and a very annoyed-seeming angel emerges from it and loads the two of them into the back of it, and that is the last memory Armand has of the night.

Vampires do not get hangovers. Surely. Not exactly. Armand does not wake up in the kind of searing pain he vaguely remembers, from a previous life, as a feature of human physiology. He is merely very confused, and feels like his head has been stuffed with cloth, and his veins sucked dry and clamped shut, and his mouth filled with sand. Also, he is not at home. The comforting press of colour and pattern is absent. He is surely not where he thinks he is. And beside him is surely not Lestat de Lioncourt, waking up in what seems to be a similar state.

His phone is on— the nightstand. The nightstand of the guest bedroom of Louis’ penthouse. Armand is naked. He vaguely remembers being damp, at some point. He vaguely remembers wondering why his phone touted water-resistance as a feature, when he bought it. He flips it open: it still works.

Missed notifications, beginning after the time Lestat had arrived at his apartment yesterday:

Unknown number: Hello sir, this is Ahmad, Mr. de Pointe du Lac’s driver. I am here ready to pick up Mr. Lioncourt.

Louis: Ahmad is knocking on your door. Sorry to interrupt if you’re occupied.

Vampire Namaz: Asr

Louis: Can you send Lestat out? It’s the end of Ahmad’s shift.

Louis: What’s going on? I had to send Ahmad home. Would it be easier to talk? Pick up the phone.

Missed call: Louis

Me: REMEMEBE TO TELL LOUS LESTATS THTING

Louis: I’m sorry to do this, but you’re not picking up, I’m calling your mind

Louis: Are you drunk right now? I’m coming over

Louis: Where are you?

Vampire Namaz: Maghrib

Missed call: Louis

Missed call: Louis

Louis: This isn’t funny. I’m driving around on Baniyas looking for you Armand please cut it out. I know you don’t care if you get caught out in the sun but Lestat will die. Maybe you don’t care, I don’t know. I can’t lose someone else. Please

Vampire Namaz: Isha

Vampire Namaz: Fajr

“Fuck,” says Armand.

Beside him, Lestat is scrolling through what must be an even more dire series of messages. “I don’t think we even got that far,” he mutters glumly.

They don’t have any time to formulate a plan: at that moment, the door swings open and two blood bags land on the bed. Louis is leaning one shoulder against the door, arms crossed, looking unimpressed.

Armand hates bagged blood, and this stuff is cold to boot, but it doesn't stop him from immediately guzzling it down. Beside him, Lestat is doing the same, like they're two housepets being fed on the same schedule.

“I'm sorry,” says Armand as soon as it's empty. It's a despairing feeling, offering the apology, because he knows how it seems. He's always sorry once something might affect him, might give him less of Louis, and he's never sorry until then— except he is, he's sorry in the pit of his stomach where the panic of Louis' last text has lodged. “I was stupid, I didn't think how it would be for you, I—”

“It was my fault,” Lestat cuts in smoothly. “It is I who should take the blame, mon cher. I was the one who failed to carry out the planned activity. Armand accommodated my whims.”

Louis runs his tongue over his teeth. “I can see that,” he says, gesturing to his eye with a finger. Armand glances in the reflective surface on the outside of his phone, and realizes that he has a massive black halo of kohl and mascara encircling each of his eyes. The lipstick, thankfully, is gone. Possibly Lestat had licked it off.

“I didn't accommodate his whims,” he forges ahead. “I remembered what it felt like to get drunk enough not to care about the things you care about. And I wanted that again, so I took it, and what I stopped caring about was you.”

Lestat is sitting with his legs crossed, staring at his intertwined fingers in his lap. Louis looks odd. Thoughtful.

“And?” he asks. “You have a nice time?”

Armand thinks about it. Without the knowledge of Louis' panic, the memories he does have of the night would be pleasant. “I suppose.” He frowns as another returns to him. "I think we tried to have sex and, ah, couldn't. That's about when I fell in the Creek."

Louis scoffs a little at that. When he looks up this time, it’s at Lestat. And he has a little smile on his face. “And here I was so worried about you burning,” he says, “I didn’t even think to worry about Armand drowning.”

“I was the more sober,” Lestat admits. “He had already given me his blood. I ought not to have let him fly over the water. The blame and punishment ought to be entirely mine.” He looks up at Louis like a worshipper gazing upon a saint.

Lestat is not stupid. Well, he is very stupid in some ways, but not this one. He knows what he’s throwing into the air, and it’s Armand’s turn next.

You would worry about me drowning? Armand wants to say. Armand could not drown. He could not drown even if he spent the entire day at the bottom of the Creek. Instead, he presses his hip in close to Lestat’s. Then he looks up at Louis through his lashes.

“Oh, please, padrone, don’t punish him,” he begs. “He couldn’t endure it. The brat prince ought to have a whipping boy.”

Silence, for a moment. The breathless anticipation of having either fucked up, or the exact opposite of that.

Louis looks up at the ceiling. His cheeks are hollowed out in a way that seems like he is biting the insides of them very hard to keep from laughing. “I should have known this would happen,” he says eventually.

“You really should have,” murmurs Lestat. His hand is under Armand’s shirt, rubbing into his lower back.

Finally, Louis comes and sits down on the bed with them. His face cracks into a smile. Now all three of them are smiling. “Okay. Fine. Armand gets punished for the pair of you behaving like children. Except Les has that meeting with the Etihad Arena guy up from Abu Dhabi tonight, so. Either something simple now, or you come back for a proper punishment tomorrow night. Your choice, Arun.”

It’s an obvious choice, except. Armand pulls out the calendar on his phone, disappointment blooming. “I can’t tomorrow,” he says, “I have— something.”

The pair of them stare at him.

“It’s… an interview,” Armand admits, and the stares turn to incredulity. “Not— no! It’s just for a thesis. A magister divinitatis in… Illinois? One of those states like that. She’s writing on Islamic religious practice among night shift workers, she contacted me through the app. I was very clear that I am not a night shift worker and the app is for vampires.” Armand shrugs. “She said my unique perspective is valuable for her research. I assume she thinks I’ve been driven mad by late nights at the Amazon fulfillment centre, or something.”

“Oh. That sounds… great,” Louis grins. “Well, better be now, then. Go on, over my lap, show me you’re sorry and we’ll make it right.”

They don’t usually do it like this, the veneer of punishment. It would be silly, most of the time, to pretend that it’s not a reward for both of them. But now Armand really is sorry, and it feels good to have something to do to make it better. Louis delivers a workmanlike spanking, and Lestat pats Armand’s hair and whispers pauvre chéri in his mind when Armand starts to cry. It doesn’t take very long, because Louis and Armand are expert partners in getting Armand to cry. It’s possible the whole thing really does hurt Lestat more than it hurts Armand; it is, after all, supposed to be his punishment too. Armand remembers vaguely, in a haze of contentment, that there is something he is supposed to tell Louis on Lestat’s behalf. Perhaps he will remember it later.

It is Lestat who settles them all down to hold each other, afterwards, firm and kind about it as if they were precious hunting dogs. Armand with his back to Louis’ chest, Lestat with an arm slung over both of them, staring into both of their eyes in turn.

“What does Arun mean?” he asks.

Armand just nods. He feels Louis’ throat work, somewhere in the vicinity of the crown of his head.

Not all that long ago, Louis had told Daniel about the first time he’d heard Armand speak it. Had told him of Lestat, the Lestat who lived in Louis’ mind to torment him, laughing at him. Lestat as the part of Louis that is hard, that has been hurt, that thinks idiot, don’t let him fool you. A loud bark of laughter in a silent room.

“The first name Armand remembers having,” Louis says with a steady voice. “Means, trust me.”

The real Lestat, the one who lives outside of Louis’ mind, runs a finger from Armand’s forehead down his nose. “That is an exquisite gift,” he says, and then seems to consider the matter closed.

Louis gets up first. Fajr is not salvageable, but Armand can be home before the end of the window for Dhuhr. Louis would let him shower the makeup and creek water off here, probably, but he finds he wants to do it at home. His own home, his alone.

A servant awake during the day has washed and dried Armand’s clothes for him, and he puts them back on. By the time he leaves, Louis is nowhere to be seen, which is fine. He feels a little bit like a ghost, walking through these too-familiar halls to be seen off at the door that used to be his. But then, being a ghost is a type of being alive.

It is Lestat who sees him off, kisses him in the front hallway. He says, “come to America, and I will fuck you properly in the air.”

“You have a meeting with Etihad,” says Armand, “you’re playing a concert in the Emirates.”

“Come to America sooner than that.”

“I don’t like America.”

“You do. You like shopping, drinking and getting fucked. You just haven’t gotten to know her well enough yet.”

As he enters the elevator, Armand’s phone lights up with a text message from Lestat. It’s a little early for him to be craving pictures. If he’d wanted to preserve an image of Armand’s flushed ass, he should have taken his own; it’s too late now.

It’s an audio file. Armand presses play on it and the memory suddenly blossoms inside him, like it had been waiting there all along.

The sound of air rushing into the microphone. Then Armand’s voice, unsteady and jubilant: I love being a vampire! It echoes in the four small walls of the metal box.

He plays it again, and again.

I love being a vampire!

I love being a vampire!

I love being a vampire!

Notes

"We drank too much once or twice." - The Vampire Armand

Thank you to CloeLockless for Lestat's new pet name for Armand 💙