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The door to Lestat’s tour bus had been ripped from its hinges as if a missile had been lobbed into it. And a weapon of war it might as well have been, the way Armand’s fangs had descended and his claws were positioned ready for combat. Armand hated this sort of bestial display; the way anger would burst through his mask of composure and begin to tear apart everything in his vicinity without his approval. Rage should be handled precisely, consciously, a tool to acquire what you need even when you hate to use it. But he had every reason now to be in a haphazard rage, and certainly Lestat was not the one who deserved to be held back from. “You are a disgusting, disreputable, disrespectful stain on everything that you come into contact with!” He shouted, muscles in his neck twitching in a synchronized flare of his nostrils.
“Whatever are you referring to?” Lestat asked, a knowing taunt dripping from his words. He was comfortably sprawled across a soft-looking barrel chair–well, soft-looking if perhaps there was not dried vomit on one of the arms, making the surface rough and scratchy. Neither of them looked too good, really; Lestat’s pupils dilated and his clothes slipping off of his shoulders, Armand covered in brown rags far more fit for an underground servant of Satan than whatever he was now. He was so angry he thought he might just accidentally set Lestat ablaze–maybe not even accidentally–and yet some small part of him still took comfort in the mirrored image of self-destruction.
“Don’t play games, Lestat.” Armand responded and it sounded like a threat. Within a second, he had crossed the bus and clutched onto the arms of the chair, trapping Lestat into it.
“Scary.” Lestat did not flinch. He only laughed, and Armand was reminded how much he hated the scent of his breath. He didn’t know how to describe it other than stale. Back then, back when they knew each other, or Armand thought they did, Lestat would have begun to hyperventilate and cry out a string of apologies if Armand tried anything like this. But now, his expression just challenged Armand to take it further. Not the performative, insecure challenge of the early days of his vampirism, but a much more sincere one. What made him so confident? Armand was still much older, still the child of a much more powerful and ancient vampire. Akasha’s blood, was it? Armand still did not know what that was.
“You need to—” Armand very suddenly felt like an idiot. Lestat loved to dangle bait in front of people, pull them back when they took it like a fish caught on a pole and flail them around with a giddy satisfaction. This anger was exactly what he wanted. Armand took a breath. He attempted to steady his hands that were clutching the chair so hard they had begun to shake. “You need to delete it.”
“Delete what?” Lestat smirked. Armand wanted to shred that condescending, pretty face of his to bits. But then he’d tell Louis, and Armand had done enough to hurt him—
“You know what!” Armand responded in exasperation. Fish on a pole.
“I don’t.” Lestat spread his hands out like he was opening himself up, confident he could handle any of Armand’s strikes. “I’m high. Enlighten me.”
He did not need to be enlightened. He knew exactly what he’d done. He knew there was a video, on Youtube and Tiktok and Twitter and fucking Vimeo and everywhere of an Armand, an extremely desperate, stupid Armand, bent every which way for Lestat, mumbling in some sort of fucked-out bliss great humiliations about love and promises and fathers. Millions of hits, he was sure, maybe tens of millions across every platform where it had been uploaded and reuploaded and edited and dissected like he was some frog with his legs being spread and pulled apart in a children’s science class–
It was a mistake. He was not supposed to–it was a mistake. 1985 was a bad year for Armand. He had separated from his little experiment after twelve years of it. Louis was developing into a greatly successful vampire capitalist, as Armand had always mocked him for, and must have been home even less than when the drugs had been what had influenced his abandoning of Armand in what should have been their shared homes. He did not mean to wade into the sea of vampire voices to find Lestat’s, he did not mean to track him down to New Orleans, he barely meant to take him out on a hunt when he saw how malnourished and dirty and so reflective of one of Armand’s old children Lestat was while he was crumpled up in the corner of a damp, abandoned house.
“You’re weak, young one.” Armand had said and offered Lestat his wrist, a dim remembrance of the many years ago when Lestat had taken it himself underground in the Paris catacombs. It was something else to have fangs penetrate him so gently after years of forced drainings, both those he experienced and those he conducted, and the flow of Armand’s blood felt like it’d been irreparably altered in the direction of Lestat.
“I am not so young anymore.” Lestat responded. It was terrible to see him like this. Armand knew exactly what it did to someone to lose Louis; he had never forgotten those empty, dissociative months in the basement of the theatre, Louis’ screams echoing in his head as he curled up against the coffin walls.
Lestat rejected his blood but he allowed Armand to put Lestat’s arm around his shoulder, to carry him out to humanity and guide him into a hunt. This was all Armand had ever wanted, really. The tender opportunity to introduce Lestat to a practiced vampirism, for the two of them to be united in this eternal horror. And who could say what happened other than in their shared loneliness they got so blood-drunk they hardly knew what was going on, and Lestat began to undo the buttons on Armand’s satin shirt, and made a proposition.
“Recently, an older man introduced me to something interesting.” Armand didn’t know if older man meant a perverted human or an ancient vampire. He did not ask. “Pornographic home videos. He recorded himself fucking me until I cried.” Armand opened his mouth to ask if he was alright, but Lestat quickly barrelled over him. “It made for great footage.”
Armand was not a fan of the idea. But Lestat said it was private, just for them, proof of their reunion for Lestat to watch back himself as a reminder of their bond. The way Lestat said it sounded like he was coveting something precious, like he wanted to keep Armand, keep something of him. It was hard to deny him when his delivery was so charming, voice so silky-smooth and adoring. It was so easy to make Armand succumb to Lestat’s whims, especially when he started telling Armand what he had always known: that Louis would never be able to love him after what he’d done. Lestat then said there was simply no point in rejecting him. And Armand–who had never learned a thing–thought maybe, just maybe, if that night went alright, Lestat might really, truly claim him.
He did not.
Armand wet his lips with his tongue. They’d gone dry with embarrassment, with the way it felt like he wanted to collapse into himself under the weight of Lestat’s confident gaze. “The video of you–” Armand took a deep breath again. He’d been raised on filth, but truly, he did not like to be crass. “Fucking me.” He said finally, some sort of silly shyness in it that made the shame burn even hotter.
“Oh. That.” Lestat shrugged. “You looked good.”
Armand didn’t think he looked good. He looked tense, even through the period-accurate graininess. He was putting on a show, just like he always used to do for the never-ending cascade of artists that took him from the studio and into the bedroom, not allowing the camera to capture authenticity as had accidentally, only once, spilled out for Louis. Ever since coming across that horrible photo in Louis’ boxes–its edges burned–Armand resolved that every future image of him would be protected with the necessary fastidiousness.
But still, there was so much sincerity in the words he’d spoken to Lestat, and that was more humiliating than the now publicized fucking. The footage as it had been edited cut between Armand’s mouth around Lestat’s cock, or him digging his nails into Lestat’s back as he split him in two, and then a particularly mortifying moment where Lestat was fucking him from behind and Armand had begun to whisper: “I love you, I love you, I’ll love you forever,” words only half-coherent while Lestat pushed the camera into Armand’s face, cum dribbling from the corners of his mouth, his eyes squeezed shut while he was barely conscious of the fact that this part was being recorded. Of course Lestat would want to show that to the public, show the entire world how much the greatest enemy of Lestat and Louis’ stories–the whore they loved to hate–worshiped Lestat once you tore through all of the cobwebs of misery and disdain.
It got worse, still. Lestat had told Armand he’d turned the camera off–and of course that was cut from the published footage–while he goaded Armand into confessing where that worship came from. The camera was set to the side, an off-focus shot of Armand making himself small to fit onto Lestat’s chest. “You look like him,” Armand had said, a sort of weakness to his voice he’d never allow if he had known it’d be documented. “Your clothes, and the way you carry yourself, and the set of your eyes.”
“Who, mon ange?” Lestat could be heard to say.
“...My father.” Armand responded.
“You miss him?” Lestat curled Armand’s hair with the tips of his fingers. Armand remembered some sort of guilt in Lestat’s eyes the night he asked that.
“More than anything.” Armand responded.
“You wish he was still around, to fuck you like that?”
“...yes.” Armand admitted. The footage cut out there. It was titled as a teaser for Lestat’s upcoming documentary. Armand’s degradation, a little teaser for the story of Lestat’s life. He’d laughed when he first saw it, honestly, the audacity so great and so Lestat that he couldn’t help himself.
“Why would you–” Armand finally removed his hands from the chair. He had dug his fingers in so tight his nails had created little holes, stuffing exposed like Armand felt his own organs were. “That night was–I thought it was, didn’t you think it was special?” Armand’s voice broke somewhat. He hated this. He hated how Lestat managed to make him feel like an insecure child begging for the attention of his father, his owner, when he’d disappear for weeks at a time with no explanation.
“If it was special, I would have opened my door the next time you came crawling back.” Lestat stood up from his chair. He wobbled over to the counter, paying no mind to how he stumbled into Armand’s shoulder on the way, and crushed up some sort of pill he took from the cabinet. It was so like Louis in his worst years, hardly aware of where he was, or what conversation he was having, Armand standing around with his stupid mouth hanging open like a miserable, useless housewife.
“Please take it down.” Armand tried again. Even as they had this conversation, the view count would have been climbing, the link exchanged back and forth, Armand exchanged–
“Even if I did,” Lestat said with a snort of the pill’s remnants from his hand. “It’s probably been downloaded by tens of thousands. My official accounts are far from the sole uploaders now. You should be proud.” He wiped the drug residue from his nose. “Even if everyone hates you, they still want to fuck you. You’ve stayed good for something, petit diable.”
Daniel–and Armand hated to be thinking of Daniel now–would have called this revenge porn. Lestat was angry at what Armand had done to Louis. Lestat wanted to humiliate him. If all of the people calling him a liar wasn’t painful enough, now he was a freak, insults like “daddy’s slut” flooding algorithms worldwide. This was such a juvenile era; humans had always been obsessed with spectacles, but never before had they had access to the vulnerabilities of others in such an all-encompassing way. Armand wondered what it would have been like if Marius had been alive during the advent of the video-camera, of all of the other things he might have had Amadeo do–but, well, he might have done exactly this.
Arun, Amadeo, Armand–Dawn, Beloved of God, Soldier–no matter the form, in essence, he was always a commodity for the entire world. His body was never his. Nothing was ever his.
“Louis will be hurt.” Armand said, and that might have been his most pathetic sentence yet.
“You choose funny times to be concerned about Louis’ anguish.” Lestat leaned back onto the counter with a piercing glare. “Are you scared he will be hurt, or scared he will come to hate you even more? All of your complaining about picking lint off the sofa, and then begging me to fuck you, of all the people.”
“I would never beg you for anything!” Armand shouted. “You were the one that started taking off my clothes, who said we were both lonely–”
“I was lonely because you took him from me, as you take everything. I fucked you just to smell him.” Lestat spat, dismissively fiddling with a button at the end of his sleeve. Armand almost thought he was going to cry. “And you have begged for my attention for centuries. You are here now, begging still.”
Hook, line, and sinker. Armand knew that. He knew it. But Lestat was begging for his attention, really, with this entire stunt. And Armand–molded for Lestat as he was, and always would be–could not resist it.
“In the video, you only put in the times I was on my knees. You on your back, you saying you loved me–all of that was cut out.”
“I never once said I love you.” Lestat denied. But Armand was certain he had–absolutely certain–but Lestat had rejected the idea so confidently and so immediately that a seed of doubt took root. But he did know he had fucked Lestat, too, and that was nowhere to be found in the footage. “And I have an image to preserve. The idea of the gremlin being on top of me–it’s not conducive to my perception by the public.”
“Image to preserve?” It was Armand’s turn to laugh. Gremlin. Right. What he meant was Oriental. For the same reason all of his public sexual recollections of Louis were that of a supreme patriarch and his agreeable housewife. It was funny if you had any idea of Lestat’s private preferences.
“I don’t understand your anger.” Lestat closed the distance between them again, lifts in his shoes making him taller than Armand. It was so obvious he’d planned for Armand to try and ambush him. But it couldn’t be an ambush. Lestat had always known how to wrap Armand around his finger. “You’re a whore, aren’t you? After everything your fledgling published in his book, about your little roleplay, and the whips, and Arun, I figured this sort of thing would excite you.”
“Excite me?” Armand straightened his back to match Lestat’s embellished height as much as possible. “You’re not Louis, Lestat.”
“Evidently.” Lestat sighed.
“Hundreds of years of devotion,” Armand started, “And you still call me a whore. I have only ever done what you asked–”
“Spreading your legs as a disloyal, dissatisfied housewife is not doing what I ask. Hundreds of years and you still pretend letting me put my fingers in your mouth makes up for all of the cruelties you have committed against me, against Louis. You are horrifically predictable, the way you think your mediocre fucks count as apologies." Mediocre fucks, Armand thought, that Lestat seemingly could never get enough of.
“You have no right to talk about cruelties committed against Louis.” Armand shoved a finger into Lestat’s chest now. He had seen the recent press, paparazzi catching Lestat outside of a club, while he angrily pushed Louis by his shoulders and yelled an onslaught of insults about how Louis had embarrassed him, how he didn’t understand how to behave properly for Lestat’s image. Louis had kept his composure, then, stone-faced and calm, and some part of Armand–even though he knew he wasn’t allowed to be–was proud of him for not folding in the face of Lestat’s viciousness. Armand could not say the same for himself now.
Lestat grabbed the hand Armand had been shoving into him. Armand wanted to pull it back, but there was so much heat in the touch, the tension of the moment overcoming the chill of the vampiric body. Something unexpectedly came from Lestat’s mind, then. Lestat’s words from just a moment ago, spreading your legs, echoed in Armand’s head, images of Lestat’s own body pinned down, by Magnus, and the slew of men he’d allowed to do the same to him on this very tour, and someone with suspiciously familiar grey-blonde hair and blue eyes, which Armand could only know as their memories mingling together. Of course. Lestat only knew how to reassert his own manhood through the degradation of others, and Armand, punching bag for the vampiric and human world alike, was the easiest to put on the chopping block.
“I see.” Armand took on his own satisfied expression now. He got it. Really, he should have gotten it the moment Daniel had informed him–and, well, maybe he was in on it–with the link. Some part of him felt it was fun to regain the upper hand, but another felt that same sort of caretaker’s pity he had always felt for Lestat, the desire to clean up every mess he’d ever left behind him. “You’re in pain. It’s easy for you to direct it back to me, hm?” Armand reached a hand out to run his fingers through a strand of Lestat’s hair. “And you wanted me to come after you, because not even Louis will service you as I always have.”
Lestat swallowed. There it was. Months onstage, half dressed, rolling his crotch against the mic stand, singing songs about his own rape—everything, a cry for help. And he wanted Armand to answer it.
“It doesn’t have to be so grand.” Armand said with something like sadness. All of these schemes, all of this debasement, because Lestat could not handle being lonely. Armand was lonely, too. He was hardly speaking with Daniel, the idea of vampiric fatherhood too overwhelming to bear most days. It’d be a miracle if Louis ever spoke to him again. And Lestat knew that. Knew how easy it’d be for the two of them to be wrapped up in one another again. It made Armand feel warm, almost, to still be wanted, even as a last resort. Abandonment after abandonment, but now, he was wanted. He figured he might as well embrace being this pathetic for eternity if this was the reward. “You’re getting money from it, aren’t you? You’re…monetizing me. The feelings I gave over to you. You must understand why I find that painful?”
“What does it matter?” Lestat squeezed down on his hand. His eyes were coated in some sort of grief that Armand did not entirely understand. More images, this time purposeful ones, of the days they spent in the theatre–when everything was simple, when Armand thought he had truly found some sort of goodness for himself. A life. “Didn’t you want your father back?”
Armand’s lips crashed into Lestat’s then. Armand and Lestat, the commodities, both whores in their own right, devouring each other with all of the grace of hungry dogs. Those blue eyes panged in Armand’s head again—what did Lestat know about those eyes—but it mattered less than this, than something that felt very much like winning a hundreds year long war.
“Louis—” Lestat began, a hand pressing Armand away with hesitation, but not rejection. “Louis could be very angry.”
“Yes.” Armand said, a heavy breath mixing with Lestat’s own. “We just won’t record it this time.”