paint me with black wings

The whites of Armand's eyes, so nearly crowded out by the enormous amber iris, look dry and irritated for just a few seconds after taking the contact lenses out. Louis lingers in the doorway of the ensuite, watching him do it, waiting for the moment it happens, the moment it clears. His gloves are off, sharp nails requiring him to arch his fingers to catch the lenses with the pads when he touches his eyeballs. Armand looks him in the face for it, showing him this tiny bit of vulnerability his body has not yet figured out how to fortify itself against. Then Louis retreats to the bed, allows Armand the privacy to come back to himself that he doesn't know he needs.

Daniel is asleep. Louis can feel him, three thick walls separating them, his shallow but regular breathing, the slight rattle of it in his throat. If Armand is helping him sleep, it's a gentle effect. Maybe he isn't. He doesn't have any reason in particular to want Louis' interviewer well-rested. Though he does, perhaps, have an interest in having him asleep.

Armand comes to bed and it is Armand again, beautiful and brittle in the way that only very hard things are brittle. Daniel is here to give Louis back a ductility he had lost. Heat, pressure. The odyssey of recollection, the slip of memories against each other than have not moved in a very long time. It feels good, at least for now. Good enough to share. "You done good today," he offers.

Armand looks up, sets his tablet down on the round table beside the lamp. "Did I?" he says with a hint of a smile. "I lingered."

Louis does smile at him, half his mouth pulling up. "You don't need to listen to this shit. If you don't want." It's a lost cause, of course; Armand is no more capable of ignoring what is going on than Louis would be if their positions were reversed. He will always be listening in from the next room, and Louis will always ignore him, because he is determined to tell this his own way. It's not the story that hurts Armand, not actually the Lestat of it all. It's the fact that Armand can listen in, and Louis can know he's listening, and it doesn't change his story at all. That he is ignorable.

If it were Armand being interviewed Louis would listen in, certainly. But he would do so with the knowledge that his presence changed the tale, a quantum god collapsing the possibilities of the past. That Armand is no such god for Louis is the knowledge Louis would spare him from. But if Armand doesnt want to be spared, he's welcome to it.

"You think you deserve a reward?" Louis asks, which really means, do you want one?

"Yes, maître," Armand says immediately. Louis hadn't bothered to check up on his thoughts during the interview, but what could he have been doing but waiting, anticipating?

"And am I choosing the reward, or are you?"

"I am." Armand gets up, slips purposefully past the grilled sliding doors to the wall, and Louis lies back for a moment. Armand doesn't like to choose. He prefers, almost always, to hand everything over to Louis. So Louis doesn't need to watch the little performance he's putting on, running his fingers over handles, feeling the weight of leather and wood. He's already chosen: he wants what Louis wouldn't choose, wouldn't offer if it were up to him.

Louis lets his mind drift once more to Daniel. He's sleeping more deeply. That is probably Armand. Louis would be just as happy to have the reporter know exactly what's going on in here, to smile politely across the room at him as he tries not to think about it during the next session, but there is a thread of true fear in Armand's mind when it comes to Daniel that Louis has yet to fully understand. Even in sleep, Daniel's mind strains. It reaches towards nothing, or something nonsensical, the logic of dreams guiding the desperate roving intelligence of his waking hours. It is more true to him, perhaps, this way. An addict trying to find a high that feels as good as the very first one. It's not a logical pursuit.

Armand returns to the bed and drops the single-tail onto the mattress beside Louis. He stands with his hands behind his back, looking down at him, waiting for the verdict.

Louis stretches, slowly, casually, drawing it out. He folds his hands behind his head, looks up at Armand, looks down at the whip. "Better undress, then, hadn't you?" he says finally.

As Armand does, Louis pushes himself up and walks around the perimiter of the caged portion of the bedroom, considering. Does an addict always chase their first high? Must the first one always be the best? The most novel, sure. Daniel is dreaming of something convoluted to do with his first daughter, a long piece about the Iran-Contra affair, and a public park from his childhood. Whatever had gotten him started chasing stories like they were drugs, isn't it better now? Isn't this, here, with Louis, different enough to erase the primacy of the inciting event? He's perfectly willing to publish a book the public will interpret only as evidence of his declining mind. Isn't that an answer?

The incomprehensibility of Daniel's dream makes Louis feel agitated, and he tries to push it away. He runs his fingers over the small pommel on the whip in his hand, kangaroo leather thatched into little diamonds. Armand is standing one step up from the bed, looking at it hopefully.

"I'm going to enjoy this," Louis tells him, as if it's a warning and not a benediction. Lestat was wrong: not every vampire fears loneliness above all else. Armand fears being humoured, that he's the only one who needs it, that Louis is just playing along. But then, being humoured is just the first step on the path to being abandoned, so maybe Lestat was right after all.

And it's true: he does love this part. Armand nude, trembling a little, trusting. Looking right into Louis' violence and rage and wanting it. But not like Lestat had wanted it, poured out onto mortals while he sat and watched like a play put on for his amusement. Armand wants it for himself.

That doesn't mean he's going to get it on the bed, though. He should know that. Louis gestures to the grille enclosure. "Choose where you're holding," he says. "I see hands moving, we're done."

That's the deal. Armand can say no, no, stop as much as he likes, he can writhe and stamp his feet, hell, he can shout red if he's feeling particularly modern, as long he stays holding on to the bars. Every moment, Louis wants to see him and know he's there because he's choosing to be. No ropes, not for this.

This.

Louis can't dig out Daniel's first high. Perhaps Armand could get at it if he tried, but for Louis, it's buried under too many layers of memory and myth to see. And that's just Daniel, a measly seventy years old, not really a very complicated man when all is said and done. With Armand? He has no hope.

What he knows is that there is one. It's not the only reason, Armand isn't chasing it every time they do this, but it is there. Louis knows the shape of it only from how he has learned from long experience how to walk around it, how to keep him here, when Armand lets him.

Don't let him lie down, no hiding his cries or his tears in pillows. Hit him with things that thud, heavy paddles and floggers with many strands of thick leather. Let him get lost in the shock of the force of it, being driven forward, the build, the burn, rather than the sharp sting of a thin welt. Don't hit his legs. Let him say stop, and keep going.

He's breaking a few of those rules tonight. But not too many. And Armand does deserve a reward.

Louis cracks the whip. Above Armand's back, not onto it; just to scare him a little. He's kind of curious how far under he's put Daniel, and if it'll hold once his mind is elsewhere. He'll find out tomorrow, though; he's not going to go casting his mind around now, not with Armand naked in front of him, holding the bars he's chosen above his head, legs spread sturdily underneath him. He's leaning his cheek on the grille in front of him with his head just turned enough to see that his eyes are closed. He looks relaxed, then startles at the sound of the crack, then bites his lip and smiles a little at his own reaction.

Louis pins that smile in his memory like a rare butterfly. Then he hits him for real.

One of the rules, never broken because it is for Armand and not for Louis: he must not keep quiet. Because the fuck am I doing putting my back into this, Arun, if all I'm doing is giving you more screams to bottle up? Louis had asked him, in the early days, Paris, Armand draped over the edge of his bed with the imprints of Louis' belt on his ass, a too-solid Lestat sighing heavily and rolling his eyes from a perch across the room. Armand may not be easy to read, but this much is clear: he has taught himself not to howl at the mundanity of the world, at its cruelty, its arbitrary pains and useless distractions. It is too much to hope that drawing taut the line between experience and reaction can permanently cut through his artifice, once the pain is gone. But while they are doing this, if Louis is going to connect desire to action, let his body express itself honestly, then Armand will have to do the same.

The sounds he makes aren't loud, but Louis knows they are honest, because he can feel Armand's mind and because he has never heard him sound like this at any other time. There are moments where Armand uses every tool in his significant arsenal to appear pitiable and guileless. Sometimes it even works, or at least Louis wants it to, pretends it does, which is surely close enough. If Armand could recreate the whimpers and punched-out little cries that he makes when Louis is hitting him to use to his own advantage, he would. But he can't do this alone. It is only ever a joint effort.

Louis paints him first with gentle welts and then with hard stripes and then with blood, and yes, a joint effort, because the cries feel like they're coming from his own body as much as Armand's. Louis could not make that sound and come back from it. If there are cries like that inside him, they are buried under gravel, or dusted fine as ash on a theatre floor. But Armand can do it for both of them.

The begging starts to flow as the blood does. Stop, please. It's enough, I'm sorry, and then more quietly, absently, stop, oh, demon, I hate you, and finally maître, maître, I adore you.

Louis stops when Armand stops asking him to, when he is beyond asking. His back, ass and thighs are a maze of stripes, and the moment Louis pries his fingers away from their grip on the bars above his head, the shaking of his knees becomes so overwhelming that it is all Louis can do to guide him to the bed and let him collapse face-first onto it. Louis' arm aches, though it's hardly the moment to mention it. He's not even sure Armand would hear him if he did.

His quiet sobs continue as Louis kneels on the bed in between his legs, bends his head, and laves his tongue over the bloodiest of the wounds. Armand's blood tastes electric like this, sweetness infused with a spice that burns its way down his throat like good whisky used to. Louis bites his own tongue and runs it up Armand's back, giving back as he takes. Blood to blood.

And this-- this is the part he hates. The reason it takes something special for him to give Armand the sting of the whip. He loves the blood, yes, and the cries, and the way later Armand will come back to him and look at him like he is something miraculous, a saint, an angel, the shining one come to free him from the net of the Flatterer with the pain of the lash. But he hates this part, now, when Armand moans and shivers and is completely absent. Louis is a body, a tongue, a maître, as irrelevant in his specifics as Armand is to Louis when he talks of Lestat and Claudia to Daniel. As irrelevant as Armand in the brothel, in the painter's workroom. Just a body doing what needs to be done.

But Armand allows Louis his odyssey of recollection, so Louis will allow him his own. He must trust Armand to come back to him, as Armand surely trusts him. They have been doing it for longer than the mortal in the guest bedroom has been alive. Is that not proof enough?

As the sun rises, Louis listens to Daniel arguing with his editor about the book. The journalist had dreamed of gunshots and frightened children. Louis stays for a little longer in the bloodied sheets and sends Armand, sweet and fresh and pressed back into the outlines of himself, to show him Claudia's diaries.

Notes

Reading The Vampire Armand at the moment, unfortunately a few decades too late for That to have been the literary whipping scene with a formative effect on my psyche, but here we are.

shining one come to free him from the net of the Flatterer with the pain of the lash: from The Pilgrim's Progress, which actually was.