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reve-de-sang · 2 months ago

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for @vamptember, Sept. 13: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat (posting a day early bc i'll be away)

(x) A Pygmalion AU. Vampires Armand and Magnus weigh human Lestat’s potential outside a kill room. Armand has doubts. Magnus loves chaos.

“You’ve found another one.”

“It’s uncanny how you always know.”

“It’s your pallor,” Armand said. “They dial it back down. Tonight you look very nearly pink-cheeked. He must be a healthy one.”

Magnus’s lips flinched with a suppressed smile. “Well. I don’t mind saying,” he rasped, rearranging himself in the leather club chair, tapping his cigar in the ashtray. “I have outdone myself this time.”

“Really.”

“Honestly I can’t imagine finding better.”

“Oh, not this again.”

“No! I’m quite serious. Every box checked of course. Fit. Blond. Blue-eyed. That sort of…regal handsomeness…”

Armand sighed meaningfully and swirled his snifter of blood, warm in the palm of his hand.

“But also a combination of beauty, fight, and health that I had given up on finding. Most of all the fight. They’ll generally do anything by day two, but I’ve had this one almost a week and he hasn’t given up.”

“Pride,” Armand sighed.

Magnus frowned. “Drive.”

“Mentally unstable.”

“Well. By now.” Magnus chuckled, and Armand joined him conspiratorially.

“No,” Magnus protested. “It’s just drive, honestly. He’s so stubborn. So angry. Not in the swoon—hard to imagine anyone fighting that in the end—but every other moment. Determined to live, or go out fighting.”

Armand hummed. “I’m almost envious. Sounds fun.”

“You know you prefer yours broken.”

“Fair.” Armand lifted the crystal decanter of blood from its sleek electric warmer. “Top you off?”

Magnus offered his snifter and Armand filled it higher with fresh blood. Magnus sipped and smiled, his narrow tongue licking at his upper lip. “I’ve noticed your particular brand of kill imbues a kind of melancholy to your libations. Would it be fair to say the despondent are your favorite flavor?”

“‘You are what you eat.’ The despair pleases me somehow. And you, always seeking out those cookie cutter men, hoping they’ll fight back. Is it the sadism of crushing these hardy specimens that attracts you to this pattern? Or some twisted hope one will succeed in the fight against you, though I can’t imagine how?”

An unsettling smile stretched across Magnus’s face, revealing his toothless gums save his two fangs. “I want a champion. And Armand? This one is easily the best, no contest. I mean to turn him.”

Armand went as still as if time has stopped. “Magnus.”

“I’ve never had a companion in all these centuries. Not even the companionship of a maker, as you know.” Armand nodded. “I’ve been looking for the perfect one, and I’ve found him.”

Armand stared at him; the long silence between them would have been preternatural to any human observer.

“Magnus,” Armand began. “…You say you have finally found one you can’t break. And this is the one you will make into a companion. Against his will. Yet what you describe sounds more like…a pet. That you must lock up when unsupervised, lest he kill you. Are you looking for him to kill you?”

Magnus’s laughter rattled in his thin chest. “Although I do love the idea of danger again after all these years, no. This is about perfection: I could not have sculpted him better myself were I an artist, and were I a god to give him life.

“And who knows what he will become? The dark gift itself may win him over. It has its own alchemy. I love a challenge, and I have nothing but time.”

“Do you? The centennial is approaching. Akasha and Enkil would expect him in attendance. Do you really think they won’t send your boytoy up like a torch within seconds of meeting him? And you with him, for the insult of his making?”

“Please. Once he’s in the blood I can bring him to heel. I will present him at court and he will be a jewel that all will envy.”

Armand drummed his nail tips against the crystal of his glass, then set it aside on the table adjacent his armrest. He leaned forward slightly. “We barely care for each other, but I have grown used to you, friend. This is your reality check: I know you have a very exacting standard, and this one in particular has,” Armand waved a hand, “qualities.”

“You have no idea.”

Armand rolled his eyes. “Despite that? This is a passing fancy. Take another week, enjoy it. Then put it down and add it to your trophy pile. Otherwise after all these years you’ll be like the befuddled dog that finally caught the car; I don’t think your search is one that was meant to have an end. This will not satisfy, and you may well die for it, by his hand or the queen’s.”

Magnus set his own drink down sharply. “God but life has become boring, Armand! Do you not feel it! I think I would welcome the risk of death. To feel alive for a change.” Magnus slipped his hand into his inner coat pocket for his phone, and thumbed through his photos. “Let me show you what I mean.” An odd, soft smile bent his wizened mouth as he paused on one picture. He offered the phone to Armand. “To go out with style—that’s the dream.”

Armand slipped the phone from Magnus’s hand. Considered the photo.

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

Armand seemed infinitesimally pinker in the face than before, but it might have been a trick of the fire in the establishment’s hearth. Armand shrugged one shoulder slightly. “…Oh.”

“Yes, that was my feeling on the matter.” Magnus sucked on his cigar.

“May I?” Armand asked, thumb hovering over the screen to flip through Magnus’s gallery.

“Please do.”

He was silent for a moment as he browsed—there really were quite an array of photographs—swiping slowly, pausing occasionally. “…You really are quite perverse, Magnus.”

“I know.”

Armand pinched his fingers to zoom in, out. “Such a risk, banking on him coming to heel.”

“Well not entirely to heel, I hope.”

Armand ran a thumb over his lower lip, grazed one fang. He swiped leisurely through a few more pictures with his other hand. “…Would you like to bet on it? His passing at court?”

Magnus began to smile once more—the evening was possibly a record for smiles within the past century. “A wager. Life gets more exciting by the moment.”

“You have only three weeks until the centennial gathering. He has his charms, yes, but he will be completely green, will likely be an unruly child, and probably offensive and derisive about our culture. What is his provenance, by the way?”

If anything, Magnus’s smile increased. Unsettling. “Poor. Rural. Family was rich a generation ago, so they have pretensions to grandeur, but lost everything back in the crash like everyone else. So by our standards, and certainly Akasha’s: quite uncultured. He’s currently an actor.”

“Jesus, and you know how emphatically I say this, Christ.”

“Isn’t it delightful?”

Armand’s look was withering. He slid through a few more photos. “The terms of the bet will be—oh my.” Armand stilled on a picture. Casually crossed his legs.

Magnus glanced at the phone. “Oh you’ll like that series.”

Armand slanted his eyes to Magnus. “Are there videos?”

“Private folder. Possibly another time.”

“Hm.”

“Actually had to give him a transfusion after that. He cries so beautifully; I’d gotten a little excited. Took forever to hose the room down.”

“You’re so elaborate,” Armand sighed, actually raising his eyebrows at the next few pictures. “I don’t know where you find the energy.”

“Give that back,” Magnus smirked, holding out his hand for the phone, and Armand relinquished it.

“The terms of the bet,” Armand restated. “Now: obviously you are going to die on November 1, and will thereafter be unavailable to make good on the wager.” Magnus laughed. “So we’ll need to bet on something just before that. Ah.” Armand smiled. “The ball, of course. October 31. Akasha and Enkil won’t be in attendance, so you won’t die immediately, but you will still be a laughingstock.”

“And by what metric would we judge that?”

“True, you’ve never been popular,” Armand mused. Magnus was unoffended—he took pride in his black sheep status.

“So…Marius and Pandora. If they take a shine to him, you’ve won the bet,” Armand’s mouth twisted, sour.

“Oh, Armand.”

“Shut up. He is an insufferable gatekeeper when it comes to Akasha. This is perfect. We’ll leave it to Marius: if Marius chastises you—or worse—then you’ve lost. If he simply shuns you or is ambivalent, then you’ve lost. Your fledgling is to be a “jewel,” remember? To win it must be nothing less than endorsement.”

“Stakes?”

“Hmmm. If you lose, I think I’d like to spend the rest of that evening and that following day in the private company of your fledgling. He does have…qualities.”

“But it would’ve been our final hours together,” Magnus said with dry sarcasm. “How sad.”

“Better make the preceding days count.”

Magnus chuckled. “Fine.”

“And if you win?”

“Well, obviously I would live,” Magnus said. “And I would have the best companion of our kind. And the triumph of showing up all the pompous vampires who have unanimously looked down on me since my creation. Present company excepted, of course.” Armand gave a nod. “So I don’t know that I could want for anything more. Winning would simply be its own satisfaction.”

“How boring for me.”

“Perhaps I will call in a favor at some later date?”

Armand drummed his fingers on the tight leather of his club chair. “Nothing extravagant. But yes. If you win.”

—-

Just as the sun was rising, Armand received a text from Magnus; no words, only a photo. Magnus’s fledgling lay dazed on a bloodsoaked bed far more richly appointed than the white-tiled kill room featured in many of Magnus’s photos.

The pure blue of his fledgling’s eyes had iridesced in the vampiric change to take on an additional slight pale violet quality. He seemed to have been washed and groomed before his turning, though he had previously been beautiful even disheveled and abused. Armand knew better than to think Magnus had applied a filter; of course his fledgling’s complexion had now become luminous.

“Congratulations,” Armand texted, and lay down to sleep.

#vamptember #iwtv #prompt: dead dove do not eat #lestat de lioncourt #magnus #armand #implied graphic non-con #speech in « » denotes telepathic speech #admittedly not hardcore dead dove #essence of dead dove #a soup flavored by dead dove. like a bay leaf.#my fic

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