#and if he had it would still have been wrong for lestat to beat him up and drop him from the stratosphere.

[winepresswrath]

what louis did to lestat and what louis did to armand are connected and that's important to the story but also. it is simply not the same. nothing louis did excuses armand's behaviour, that's not how anything works, but he did not "cross a line" or "poke at armand," he weaponized armand's history of abuse to belittle and demean him. nothing armand said to louis came close- the equivalent would have been "oooh, i'm such a stupid bitch that my husband can beat me half to death and i'll keep crawling back for more even when it endangers my daughter!" it's retraumatizing and deeply destabilizing to hear that shit from your partner. and in response armand should have been like "well this man sucks when he's high and he's high all the time, so i'm bouncing" but if he'd done that we wouldn't have a story, would we?

edit: i've come back to give armand credit for "claudia didn't love you like we did/do. ps. u used her to distract from your own hurt feelings" that shit does hit in a similar way. however "the ways someone hurt you have left you contemptible and weak. they scrawled 'dirty and annoying' all over your soul in red ink and it's never coming off" is just outstanding work. timeless

[blueiight]

IWTV E4 “A Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child’s Demanding.” Claudia discussing how it feels to escape poverty to being adopted into wealth, struggling in her existence without peers even during her second childhood and how she does not even care to have the veneer of mortal manners around Louis’s family, what Charlie as her last peer meant to her, and her mortal upbringing prior to Lestat + Louis.

And I realized, what I thought was Heaven was just some nice room. And what I thought were angels were really hell demons.

Uncle Les and Daddy Louis were rich. They had nice clothes and a nice auto carriage and a funny way of being nice to each other.

I gotta go to bed when the rest of the world wakes up, so there's less kids to play with...

Daddy Lou said I had been away from people too long. I didn't know how to behave right anymore. But Uncle Les said, I behaved just fine.

Diary, his name is Charlie. He's got veins like rivers. They flow right down his arms. …Charlie's death ushered in one of the darkest eras in our lives. The oh-so-delicate balance of our oh-so-delicate household was shattered. For Claudia, all humans died with Charlie.

And, diary, you'd think a girl whose mama died in childbirth... whose daddy gave her away to a mean old auntie who beat her 'cause no one said she couldn't, who died in a fire but came back by the blood magic of two demons, well, you'd think that girl wouldn't know what funny was. But you'd be wrong, diary. And if I told you, dumb diary, that that same girl was being raised to kill like her demon parents did, to take two souls a day so she could stay in the same flat-chested, hairless-crotched 14-year-old baby doll body as her mind and spirit turn 19, 20, 25, 63, 358, you dumb, dumb diary, I bet you'd say to anyone who'd listen, "Fun? Fun? How does she even get up in the morning?" Well, let me tell you something, you stuck-up, flower-covered, three-dollar fancy fսcking paper diary, I'm doin' just fine. (diary pages read aloud as Claudia self harms at the end of e4)

IWTV E5 “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart”. Claudia discussing her life/reckoning with the fate of her premature existence.

"Dear Diary, am I gonna be a virgin every single time I do it? Won't my skin down there grow back like my hair does when I cut it?"

Who am I supposed to love? You two have each other. Who's my Lestat? Who's my Louis? I’m not human. What human would want me? Perverts? Like the uncle at the roomin' house who used to watch me pee? Or little boys? And 40 years from now... still little boys? How are you gonna fix it, huh?… (turns to Louis) [Lestat] treats us like shit and you just take it! And you, [turns to Lestat] cruel as the devil ever made, to deny me one love when you’ve got two.

[Talking to Louis in her room after the confrontation at the dinner table] I remember the night I was made, the fire chokin' me, you carryin' me out through the flame and the smokes. But then why'd you take me home? Why not a hospital? …. But I was breathin'! Maybe I'd have a handsome husband by now. Or maybe he'd be plain but with a good disposition. That'd be fine, too. I'd be sweepin' floors, makin' dinners, nursin' babies. Maybe I'd go to church. You think on that some.

How does Claudia react after her rape? She exhibits textbook behaviors.

Co-dependency.

I spend time following Louis and Lestat now that I am my own woman... with no obvious sense of why I follow them, other than meaning slowly disintegrates without them...My companions in immortality.

but wait.. u might ask: doesn’t this contradict what she said years earlier in this same episode about wanting ‘her own Lestat and Louis’? is this Louis or Armand somehow forging Claudia’s diary? or is this a rape victim shortly after the actual experience struggling with her emotional+ mental state and in that frame of mind going back to the immortal family she finds to be a more familiar sort of ‘evil’ than the unknown vampire that raped her, especially after witnessing Louis weep over the grave Grace made of him? to Claudia here, being Louis’s ‘sister’ is balm put onto a bleeding wound.

Hypervigilance over her wider situation ad an Enmeshment with Louis, as they both have endured incredibly traumatizing events (with Claudia being raped + shortly after, witnessing Louis being beaten) and are without Lestat for six years following the end of E5 picking up the pieces. it is Claudia who tends to Louis in his most vulnerable here, and Louis struggles with that, wanting to be ‘her knight in vengeful black’ in return.

She's grown very protective of me. That's what this is. It's why it's hard. She came back altered when she left us. There's a darkness in her that wasn't there before. Give her a little time. [Louis is trying to appease Lestat here in their ‘compromise’, but there is a key bit of truth in his observations here.]

Claudia learned very early on, as early as E4 when Louis asked her mentally about Charlie, how to block her mind off from Louis. and with her traumatic experiences, its all but said that hypervigilance protects her mind further (as shown in the S2 trailer when Armand comments on it). When Lestat steals her from off the train, he also threatens her:

Because if you try this again, Claudia, I won't snap your leg, defile your pocket, and zoom off on a motorbike. I'll turn your bones to dust.

Is it any wonder Claudia draws the comparison to Bruce when she talks to Louis, especially when Louis in the season finale plays the role of a honey trap to the very same lover who almost ‘killed Louis’, as Claudia [and Daniel alike] frame the ending of E5 as abuse + attempted murder, as Claudia seethes , is ‘done enduring?’ and just before she creates her own murder plan:

Or did you kill him, like you did Antoinette, and how you tried to do with Louis?

I have to wonder why, over a year from airing, blogs and reviews claiming to be dedicated to the series rehash the most juvenile questions that the episodes themselves directly answer? How can S2 spec or complex discussion occur, if callout PSAs shutting down any sort of canon-compliant discussion is the way to go? If people constantly exhibit their refusal to meet the show where its at and engage the material for what it is, where can we go from here? AMC IWTV is very didactic. ‘The absence of metaphor is striking’. Yet for all the waxing about loving ‘fucked-up gothic romance’, there is a willful ignorance in understanding where & what makes the situation fucked up to begin with. Or even an interest in understanding the basics of the setting!

[hekateinhell]

Vamptember, Day 7: Reverse AU

adult vampire!Claudia and little mortal!Lestat | M | 1.3k | tags: abuse and SA mentions/references, gore, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.

New Orleans, 1808

Winter in New Orleans makes the evenings draw on longer. 

Meaning that Claudia has to create her own entertainment lest she go mad with boredom; she takes what she wants and does as she pleases. 

How many other women can say that? 

Sitting in front of the vanity, turning her head from side-to-side, pondering which role best suits her temperament tonight.

Pity she had been a poor white’s daughter at her death, malnourished to the point of missing her menses at the mature age of twenty. Oh, how utterly brutal the beatings were when her father and brothers caught on and arrived at the wrong conclusion! 

Whore. Slut. Witch. 

Such a rabid pleasure to crush each of their skulls between her hands the night she’d returned to the dingy little shack by the river. A giggle escaping her at each agonizingly slow crack of bone, delighting in their futile struggles. Dark torrents of blood igniting the demonic thirst inside her, and finally, the gelatinous messes — more fun than mud pies — gushing as she digs her thumbs into their eye sockets. 

Eyes that had violated her long before their ever hands did. 

“Witch!” 

“And yet it’s you that shall burn at the stake tonight, father dearest! Fancy that!” 

She beams at her reflection at the memory, the blonde ringlets that cascade over her small breasts bouncing as she trembles with poorly suppressed anticipation. Not a wasteful eater, no, but she does enjoy playing with her food. 

Finishing touches, a robin’s blue ribbon in her hair, her corset cinched tight to create the hourglass figure she most certainly did not possess. 

Childbearing hips that would never bear onto her a child, the son that the Lord she once prayed to for deliverance had sent to her in her dreams. A promise that one day she would have final dominion over the male sex. 

Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. 

Holy Mary, mother of God.

It’s humid when she sets out, but then again, it’s always humid in New Orleans: a sinner’s city, a gambler’s paradise. Fragrant roses combine with the stench of urine and decay as she makes her way down the cobblestone streets, taking in the sounds of the night. A child cries, a man yells to his wife: You stupid bitch!; a horse and carriage trot by, the mud almost reaching her shoes; a drunkard’s piercing laugh. 

“Hey, pretty lady, what are you doing all by your lonesome? Don’t you know what happens to dainty little things like you in places like these?”

Sounds like a tramp but means well. He has two sisters at home; one older and one younger. Claudia reminds him of the youngest. 

��Oh, I didn’t know! I’m new to the area, you see, and terribly disoriented! I don’t mean to trouble you Sir, but it is awfully late and now I am awfully frightened… If you could please escort me to my home, I have been trying to find my way back for hours to no avail!” She knows what men like to hear.

She can be demure.

Helpless. 

“Of course, darling,” he proffers her his arm which she graciously accepts, “I know this city like the back of my own hand.” 

Perfect. 

A quick, satisfying break of his elbow and his knees soon follow before she takes her first drink of the night, the gambler’s luck running dry as his sweet blood runs down her throat. His heart pounding on her tongue, the glorious resistance she craves gradually fading. No, no! Fight me more, handsome. Fight me just as hard as I fought them! Alas, it is finished and Claudia pulls back, wiping her mouth on her lace glove. 

She stands in the shadows, still clutching the body, savoring the aftertaste. Not an evil soul, merely one made unfortunate by virtue of his sex, as she had once been.  

A hunter as shrewd as she, a woman who’d been raised to have the survival instincts of a prey animal in the jungle, shouldn’t have been caught off guard by sudden wailing so high-pitched, Claudia cringes into herself. Relentlessly loud and surely bound to attract attention!

The body hits the ground with a wet thud as another, much smaller body barrels into her skirts, clinging to her legs. 

Images flash through the child’s mind; he can’t be older than five. A brute of a father raising his fists. A mother cold and impassive, her nose in a book as her children wept for her affections, even her scolding lacked interest. “Quiet down, Lestat.” Blonde and beautiful yet gaunt — Claudia had she lived another ten years, perhaps. Lived the wretched life she was destined to have, like her mother before her and her mother before her. 

This woman doesn’t want her child, and the decision is made. 

“There, there,” she drops to her knees to embrace the boy. His hair tangled unkempt, a shade strikingly similar to hers. His face covered in dirt, the scrapes along his arms and legs still oozing blood. Delirious from terror, hunger, and exhaustion, and in the darkness, he thinks she is his mother.

Claudia swallows back her thirst. 

“I didn’t mean it!” he sobs as he presses himself flush to her chest, burrowing into her sharp collarbone. Tears, dirt, and mucus smear all over the cotton of her dress, her hardened skin. “I didn’t mean to run! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I want to go home! I’ll be good! I’ll listen, I promise!”

Yes, Claudia's decision has been made, but not here. 

“I know, dearest,” she lifts him off the ground and he settles momentarily, soft and warm. Pulls back to stare at her face, large grey eyes blinking at her. 

He touches her cheek, curious and gentle. Frowns. 

“Mama, you’re so cold.” 

There’s a second where she can feel his hummingbird heart quicken, little rosebud mouth pinching as he sniffles loudly, the tears gathered on his long lashes suspended as he holds her stare with intensity. But then it passes, and he rests his head on her shoulder.

“You need a blanket, Mama,” he sighs and drops his sticky fingers from her cheek, bringing his thumb to his mouth instead. She, too, had suckled her thumb until far too old an age. 

Back home, she cleanses his face.

He whines in his sleep, whimpering into her palm. Fragile and pitiful as the newborn kittens her brother Edgar had drowned to punish her. 

Her clothes are too big, and the doll’s clothes are too small. She cuts a nightgown three-quarters of the way short. The candle flickers and so does her confidence, but it’s too late now. His lifeblood flowing over her tongue, his little heart going and going, refusing to give up! Burst after vibrant burst, innocence devoured. 

Mama, Mama… I love you, Mama.

Claudia groans with it, the flavor of unrivaled purity unlike anything she's ever sampled before. She's never had to catch herself at the very edge of the precipice before; the shadow of a thought passes through her mind that perhaps she doesn't have to — she'll gorge herself on this one and find another to suit the same purpose: make for herself a son sculpted in her unholy image alone. 

But this precious heart! It still won't surrender! How can she trust that she will ever find another with not only the looks to match hers, but one that reflects back to her her own unbroken tenacity? 

“Mama’s here,” she tears open her bodice, exposing her breast, the dark blue vein at the underside. Makes the incision, guiding the child’s mouth to it. She will be Thetis reimagined in the spirit of the new age, submerging the baby Achilles in the River Styx to grant him immortal life, this time careful to fully saturate the heel.

The greedy thing latches quickly, reflexes of an infant still nestled in his subconscious as he takes all that Claudia has to offer.

It must be the male in him. 

“Mama’s here,” she repeats, stroking his hair, humming a long-forgotten lullaby.

Once, a poor woman’s only comfort to her daughter. Now, a little boy’s dirge.

“And you’ll be good for your Mama, won’t you, Lestat?”

[herbeloved82]

Home under the falling snow

Daniel looked outside the window and an uncontrollable shiver shook his whole body. Winter had been his favorite season for a very long time, since he could remember he had enjoyed the falling snow that would cover the ugliness of the city, at least until the dirt turned it as gray and impure as everything else.  

In his mind as a child, Daniel had thought that under the immaculate blanket, everything that was wrong could be hidden and forgotten. Then he grew up and saw how cars and the dirt of the streets beneath the white would soon pollute the snow, turning something beautiful and pure, into a mess of waste and decay. 

That had been when he began to realize that nothing beautiful could last in a world that was made to destroy everything that was weak and fragile. 

“Come back to me, my love,” awarm voice said from behind him as a powerful chest pressed against his back. 

Oh how easy it would be to lose himself in Marius’ arms. To allow the older vampire to take away his pain and substitute it with lighter thoughts. Marius always had a healing power about him, his mind the safest and calmest place where Daniel was allowed to recover and rediscover himself again. 

“I’m right here.” Daniel said, hoping against all odds that Marius wouldn’t realize how that wasn’t the real truth. His body was there, obviously, but his mind was far, far away, in streets he hadn’t visited for decades now, in cities he couldn’t even remember.     

“Your mind is not, and I’m afraid I can’t follow where it is wandering now.” 

That was always an obstacle between them. Daniel’s terror of having his mind violated and Marius’ refusal to go sneaking there even when it appeared to be the only way to calm him down. 

“It’s nothing bad, I promise,” Daniel continued. He knew Marius  constantly worried for the people he loved. For Lestat and his fledgling, for Armand, his own beloved cherub, broken and twisted into something he was never meant to be, for the Sacred Parents who were no more, for Pandora and Bianca, even when too much happened between them and their love couldn’t be anymore. Daniel knew that and he was still shocked, every day, that he could be counted among the people Marius held close to his heart. 

“It’s just - winter reminds me of home, but I don’t know where home is anymore.” 

Daniel knew if there was someone who could understand what he meant, it was Marius. Who else had lost so much, time and time again, and still kept standing, a beacon for their kind and everyone who was lost? 

Not for the first time, Daniel wondered who had been there for him when he had needed a moment to rest to lay down the burden he always carried and rest? Sadly he knew the answer even if he didn’t want to think about it. 

“Home is such a strange concept, dear one. When I was young, still human, home was where the Penati laid. When I grew up and became a Senator, home was Rome and where she could reach. When I was taken and became the guardian of the Sacred Parents, home was their shrine. Then home became a person and I think only then I realized home is almost never a physical place.” 

Daniel slightly turned in the embrace, to look at Marius, and he realized his lover had now the saddest expression in his eyes and hated himself for forcing him into misery. He didn’t have to ask to know who Marius’ home was. 

Without thinking, Daniel opened his mouth once again, as his eyes closed, too scared to keep looking at Marius in case the man rejected what he wanted the most. 

“Would you be my home?” 

He felt Marius tensing behind him and for a moment the slow and rhythmic beat of his heart rushed, like Marius was still human, or at least maintained the human’s nature of being surprised.  

“It would be an honor.” Marius answered after a moment of silence. The time he needed to really understand what Daniel just asked and to realize that yes, he wanted to be Daniel’s home, he wanted to provide him with what had been taken from him by life and the choices he made. Perhaps, like that, they could both really begin to heal. 

As the snow kept falling outside and the world was once again hidden under the white quilt, Danuel turned in Marius’ arms and kissed his lover, hard. 

Sharp fangs cut into the perfectly shaped lips, drawing blood they shared. The fire burning in the hearth was the only witness of this moment of tenderness between immortals. 

END      

[emileesaurus]

i also need a distraction from being depressed about the state of loustat politics SO! may i present you with one of my fave loustat headcanons which is: Louis is so goddamn stubborn that he ABSOLUTELY continues their fights in the bedroom. he is so good at multi-tasking and he WILL fuck lestat while delivering a perfect rebuttal. absolutely brutal debate partner tbh

I LOVE THIS... You know they're both phenomenally stupid when they're horny (this was 50% of why Louis agreed to become a vampire in the first place) but Lestat's IQ plummets into the negatives when Louis actually initiates things.

This doesn't quite match your prompt, because apparently I'm in the mood for fluffy nonsense today. 500 words, PG-13ish, belligerent smoochies.

"You see? I was right: you always use sex to change the subject."

"Sex and violence, chéri. Were you in the opposite mood? I wouldn't mind breaking some furniture, I've had my eye on the most magnificent seventeenth century oh— oak— desk—"

Louis sucked at Lestat's throat without breaking skin; his pulse throbbed against Louis's tongue and echoed beneath his silk shirt as Louis unfastened his buttons. His thighs tightened around Louis's hips as he straddled Louis's lap on the sofa, and Louis felt his own heartbeat quicken in response — some useless mortal instinct that he distantly wished he could still act upon.

He sucked, slow and rhythmic, drawing at Lestat's pulse as though he were drinking, and when he dragged his fangs against the raised vein in his throat, Lestat gasped and clutched at him as though he were succumbing to the swoon.

It took all the self-discipline Louis possessed to pull away. He pressed a soft, regretful kiss to the pale mark he'd left, already fading, and contented himself with Lestat's shiver of desire.

"I'm not as easily distracted as you are, Lestat." Louis cradled the nape of Lestat's neck, dragging the sharp point of his thumbnail teasingly across the sensitive spot he'd just abandoned.

Lestat's silver eyes were dark and half-lidded, a smug, dreamy smile on his lips. He always looked so proud of Louis when he managed to be wicked — when Lestat could bring out his devious side. "And yet here we are…"

"Proving my point…" Louis echoed his tone, a habit he had picked up from Lestat over the years.

"Which was what?" Lestat batted his eyelashes innocently, which only made him look more debauched. "Remind me."

"That you use this to get out of difficult conversations." Louis splayed his palms against cool skin and felt Lestat's quiet, pleased groan beneath his hands. Was this how it felt to play an instrument? To coax a bit of music out of something beautiful? "So that you don't have to be wrong."

Lestat let out a breathless laugh, tipping his forehead against Louis's, golden hair falling in a curtain around them.

"I'm never wrong."

Louis dismissed that with a quiet hmm. "So you don't have to be vulnerable."

"I'm vulnerable now. Look." Lestat craned his neck, offering himself so shamelessly that Louis's fangs ached with the urge to sink into his flesh. His pulse raced with anticipation, with the instinctive desire to feel Lestat's heart beat in time with his own as the rest of the world fell away. "You can do anything you want to me."

It was astonishingly effective. If it were anyone but Lestat, Louis would have dropped the argument entirely. But if it were anyone else, he wouldn't have been in this situation.

"You are an absurdity," Louis whispered, and kissed him softly on the lips. "Then you admit it?"

"I admit nothing," Lestat said, sliding his arms around Louis's shoulders and nipping sweetly at his mouth. "I'm under duress."

[savagewildnerness]

Yeah… Lestat describes his childhood experiences of being ignored, hated, abused, told he is too much & wrong, not being loved or taught even the most basic skill of how to read or write….

But we can extrapolate back to baby-Lestat & imagine an infant crying before he had words & nobody responding. So rather than learning that he has influence on the world, and is loved, and his needs will be met, that his emotions can be contained & held by someone who loves him…. Through which he could then learn to feel & manage his own emotions…. Lestat learns instead that he is utterly alone. And it is a TRUE aloneness, as if a baby cries & nobody responds they cannot understand that there exists anyone *to* respond. They truly are existentially alone. It’s not just Lestat: his siblings will have experienced this too, of course… But maybe their Father pays them some attention? I’m sure Gabrielle did not!

Anyway, baby Lestat learns his emotions will not be responded to & he does not learn any way to contain, manage or deal with his own emotions. As he grows a little older, Lestat eventually learns that if he externalises his emotions dramatically enough, his Father & siblings will at best mock him, at worst, beat him…. But his Mother might pay him attention. It’s very confusing. But even being beaten, is at least being seen & existing.

And so creates this chasm in Lestat whereby he feels he needs to perform at 100% to be worthy of love… yet also feels he is definitely TOO MUCH as he was beaten for being that self & literally shown even before he was told that he was too much. And surely that’s why he was ignored as a baby too, right? He must have been too much.

And so when Louis is apathetic in his interest towards Lestat, it isn’t a hundred-plus-year vampire responding to that apathy & disinterest. It’s that baby, screaming to a void where there is no reply….

I’m rambling. We need someone who has studied psychology to do a deep dive on Lestat & attachment…! I’m sure articles people have written on that must exist somewhere…. Oh goody… another thing to google! 🤓

Certainly, rather than being FUN, as Lestat describes it, this is why teen-Lestat begins to sleep with all the girls in the village he can find… to try to fill the chasm within himself that can never be truly filled as before he even had words, Lestat learned he is Alone.

I imagine Lestat’s impulsivity as an escape-based response to sadness also stems from here - DO DOMETHING BIG AND DRAMATIC & at least you might be momentarily seen! You might, for a moment, truly exist.

Well, I’m just yammering my random spur-of-the-moment thoughts here….

But what we can say is - imagine a human with this chasm of loneliness within them then being made immortal, to feel this for eternity!

Oh, also - YES! Armand WOULD have worshipped Lestat. And Lestat knew it! And I think that aside from Armand’s beauty & that eventually Armand does grow to show care to Lestat, the knowledge of how Armand would have fawned over Lestat is a thing Lestat finds deeply alluring AND deeply terrifying.

Lestat does at least know about himself that this is what he desires most of all. And so he knows that if he allowed himself to ever fall into Armand’s loving spell he could not escape it.

Despite his bad experiences as an infant, Lestat learns (through necessity) to be his own person… with Armand there’s a very real possibility Lestat could just dissolve into nothing but a vessel for Armand to feed upon while Armand feeds Lestat by proffering unconditional love, which is all Lestat ever wanted!

I mean, unfortunately Armand early on shows Lestat he won’t really offer unconditional love by essentially raping him & then, even after Lestat nearly kills him… Armand STILL tries to get Lestat to murder his Mother & his lover!

LOLOLOLOL OMG, we’re talking Lestat, but psychologist out there - we truly need the ARMAND psychological deep dive, which would be THE MOST FASCINATING (& sad!) OF ALL! (You’re welcome, Armand.)

Hahaha, I meant to write one sentence…. 👀😰🥶

It could be her. But I am the one who is presently standing in front of you. And unlike Claudia, I am a full-blooded adult with all the right appendages. So, if my considerable considerables continue to be squandered...

…what I’ll do is: cry. 😭

[nodominion]

Reverse AU | Viktor & Rose | Vamptember

Rose had heard about the boy from Fareed when he was already being transported to their Californian compound. Apparently he’d known Lestat all his life, or almost all of it, having been raised by him since he was four. How unfair. As his living daughter she would have hoped she would be the only current child in Lestat’s life, only to find out that he’d been fostering this boy the whole time. 

It was early morning hours, still dark out, when Viktor arrived. His wounds were both internal and external, and the human hospital hadn’t done much besides put band-aids on top of acid burns. She knew Fareed and the other doctors would do far better for him, even if that meant turning him before he woke. 

They would never intentionally turn Viktor without Lestat’s permission, but the amount of blood he needed to heal was significant. Fareed and the other vampire doctors didn’t feed him straight from the vein, instead Viktor’s body was carefully lowered into a blood bath, an oxygen mask keeping him breathing. The change was instantaneous. The wounds began to look worse initially before settling into scars that grew fainter by the second. When they removed him from the tub he looked whole again, a young man who hadn’t been through a near-death experience. Rose leaned against Seth as she watched the doctors thread Viktor’s IV, his heart monitor beating slightly slower than it should be. 

Hours of human blood transfusions helped to temper the immortal blood in his system, and he stabilized as the sun rose. Of course Fareed and Seth had to take their leave, but Rose stayed with the other human doctors. It felt wrong to leave Viktor alone, especially when they couldn’t allow his guardians to join him here at the compound. 

Rose hardly left his recovery room once he was stable enough to be transferred into it. Seth had read his mind as he slept, having the room decorated with everything Viktor would know and remember. None of them were sure if he would wake with his proper memories, or wake at all. His body had been healed of any damage the acid had done, but his mind was apparently still scattered. Fareed couldn’t penetrate it at all, grateful for Seth’s skill and age giving them insight into Viktor’s limited thoughts. 

While Rose didn’t have to stay with Viktor, she felt an odd kinship with the boy. They were about the same age, a year apart, and Lestat had blessed them both with life, though it seemed as though Viktor didn’t know what his ‘uncle’ was. It was funny to her that she longed to meet with Lestat, to talk with him and get to know him and learn just how alike they were, when Viktor had known him almost all of his life and yet didn’t know him at all. She had known he was a vampire as long as she could remember, and she’d been told of his life’s journey both through the Chronicles and from her fathers. 

Yes, she was jealous, but she also was intrigued by the square jaw, soft blonde hair growing out past his chin now. Living with vampires meant she had adopted a nocturnal lifestyle but now she was awake in the day for Viktor, sleeping when Fareed began his checks in the evening. Someone who cared about him ought to be nearby if he did ever wake. 

It took nearly two weeks. Rose had been staring out of the window, running through all of the coming scenarios. Surely someone must have reached Lestat by now, told him of what happened to Viktor. From what she’d gleaned from the others, Lestat really cared about this boy. She was worrying what might happen if Lestat flew to the compound with Viktor still out of it when she heard him stir. Instantly she spun around, sitting on the chair where she spent most of her time keeping vigil over him. 

Viktor first heard music. The notes seemed to float to him one at a time, and as seconds felt like minutes he gradually formed the melody in his mind. He swallowed. His throat was no longer on fire, a surprise considering one of the last things he remembered was forced to ingest acid. His eyes opened, another surprise at being able to, greeted by a painting from his own bedroom.

“That is mine. But I’m not home.”

“No, you’re not. You’re safe now, Viktor. Healed.”

“What? Where am I? Who are you? Where are my aunts?”

“They know you’re here, but they can’t be here right now. If they could, I’m sure they would be. I’m Rose. I… I’m with the people who healed you, but I’m not a doctor like they are.”

He goes quiet while Rose presses a button on the side of the bed. Before Viktor can think of what to reply a nurse enters the room, beaming while she fills his IV with medicine. 

“Well, the little prince is awake! Sleep now, you need more rest than you think.”

Rose stifles a chuckle, reaching for Viktor’s hand as the drugs take him under again. He looks to the nurse for a moment, the movement distracting, but his eyes found this Rose at the touch. He didn’t know this girl, and yet she found it fit to act so gentle with him. Was he dying, and not aware of it?

“Don’t worry, Viktor. You’re in good hands, the best. We’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

“My uncle, he…”

“Yes, Lestat. He’s coming. Or he should be. He’s very hard to find when he doesn’t want to be found.”

Viktor wanted to protest, tell this girl that she said his uncle’s name wrong. It was Lestan. Uncle Lestan. If he was on the way here, wherever here was, then he would know what to do. He would be able to piece together the series of events before Murray had to do the unthinkable. But something was preventing him from scolding this Rose. A force was dragging him under again, to the land of dreamless sleep that he might have been more scared of if he understood what it had taken to keep him alive. 

“It’s okay. Sleep again, Viktor. I’ll still be here when you do wake up again. And you better wake up. You can’t die on us yet.”

[hekateinhell]

Lestat next episode “she’s poisoning you against me”…..He beat Louis nearly to death and dropped him from the gotdamn sky, he poisoned himself. Nice to know though that Lestat considers it to be the equivalent of throwing a dish and doesn’t see what the big deal is. Lestat’s dumb but not this stupid. Not sure what the writers are trying to do here because even after seeing Louis’ broken and mangled body he doesn’t even blink and the preview makes it sound as though he doesn’t even feel real remorse. Lestat’s a vicious little gremlin but you get the sense he truly loves Louis and Claudia and would never actually truly harm them, he wants them to stay so badly and I think even he would know that something like this is a point of no return. This Lestat has no love for Claudia and is just obsessed with Louis in the worst way possible. I’m sad cause I love the characters, I love the actors and this all just felt so OOC. Also, people saying Lestat’s actions are just as bad as when Claudia tries to kill Lestat 🥲

Sorry I know you don’t watch the show but I had to vent lol

Actually I do, because I'm a fucking masochist. I AM done after today though.

I wanted to like it! Genuinely, I wanted to be proven wrong and I wanted to be having a good time along with three-fourths of fandom! Every week I would watch with my friends and wonder what's wrong with me, what am I not getting? I WANTED TO HAVE FUN TOO GODDAMN IT.

Didn't help that you got outright bullied for expressing the slightest bit of criticism around here lmao maybe that's what gave the impression that I don't watch it, since I did not have anything nice to say at all. I tried making my own tag so people could just block THAT and I wouldn't be raining on anyone's parade, but it doesn't stop those who are committed to creeping on your page (hi babes) so ANYWAY

I mean... I AGREE. And I never saw Lestat in Samstat, and given how he swung in like Homelander in Episode 1, I just felt... but then also like... I DIDN'T WANT THIS!!! I still haven't regained full coherency as you can see, I'm gonna need 3-5 business days at least.

Because Lestat did never and Lestat would never. I've said it many times with great affection: Lestat's an idiot but he ain't stupid.

This quote has been going around today, and I've been carrying it too to comfort my Loustat friends because the girlies are hurting in a bad, bad way (and tbh so am I):

Yet I couldn't hurt him. I couldn't even conceive of carrying out such awful, cowardly threats. I could never have brought harm to Claudia. Ah, to make something out of nothing, yes. To throw up the pieces to see how they will fall, yes. But vengeance. Ah, arid awful distasteful vengeance. What is it to me? ~ Lestat, TotBT

I can't envision AMC Hannibal/Homelander-Lestat as either IWTV-Lestat or TVL-onward Lestat. Plain and simple--it is an OC. They all are.

Even if AMC retcons it by the next episode, I just don't see any editorial justification for that to have happened on-screen without content warnings (yeah, I'm not going to let this one go). 

We talk about exposition and the art of a narrative a lot and not to sound ignorant but... RJ, BRUH. I don't blame the actors! Actors don't make the decisions on set and Sam, Jacob, and Bailey killed it with what they were given. And I have given them their props since day one.

IDK I'm sorry for anyone who got hurt today, honestly! The Doctor prescribes reading your favourite hurt/comfort fics and scrolling through your emotional support fan artists. ♥️

[doveprose]

꧁༺𝖘𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖈𝖔𝖚𝖗𝖙༻꧂

“ I told you that you were free to decorate, Helene. I did not in the slightest imply that you should blind me with lights, “ he’s not quite as irritated as he is making it seem, but there is still a hint of concern dripping from his tone of voice.

The brunette stops short before she drapes another strand of golden tinsel over the doorframe, turning to look at him with a something between a pout and a scowl at the absurdity. He is being difficult for no reason at all, apparently.

She knows very well that he is not opposed to festive decor and she is also too aware of the fact that she doesn’t have that many lights up at all this year. Her foot taps against wooden floors and her hand raises as she points a solitary finger in his direction.

“ You and I both know there aren’t enough blinding lights up in this room for you to be making all that fuss, Lestat. Why is the brat so offended this time, hm? because so far, there’s but one string of lights and it is draped around the tree, “ she counters with a huff of a breath, completely unprepared for his antics as it is a few days from Christmas and she wants harmony.

Lestat simply gives her a look in that moment, before he goes to say something back and begin a huge debate, as he is ever so good at doing, but he prevents himself from doing so. Part of him realises that, yes, he is being dramatic, but other parts of him are so aghast by the decorations due to the rarity they were ever present in his life growing up.

A melancholy sweeps over him and though he would never admit to the emotions he had berated Louis for many a time, he felt them now.

“ Forgive me, cherie. I have not seen such splendor before. It was never something that we did, in those days, ” he can feel his once beating heart mimic the motions of something very similar, but it is mere imagination on account of opening up and finding himself vulnerable. He has been as such many a time before her, but to the extent whereby he allows a tear or two to roll down his cheek, not so much.

“ Oh, Lestat.. if it bothered you so much, I would have taken it all down. Do you want me to remove the tinsel and lights? ” he snaps his gaze to her immediately as she asks this question. A very uncertain look about her due to fear of having wronged a creature like him, and he shakes his head vehemently.

Helene is confused, having assumed him telling her the issue was an effort to get her to understand that he genuinely didn’t like the decorations and thus, could not cope with seeing the place so brightly lit or colourful.

However, he seems mournful, of a time that had long since come to pass and he reaches for her hand, tugging her closer before wrapping his arms around her delicate waist. He couldn’t have pulled her any nearer.

She conjures the ability to graze her fingertips softly against a cheek as cold as ice, to swipe away evidence of his tears while a smile dances daintily on his lips. It blooms one of his own, to let the woman know she had truly done no wrong and he was simply reliving a childhood filled with despair.

Helene presses a kiss, filled with love and utter care for the male, against his forehead as she stands a few inches taller on her toes to reach that height. It seems to calm him instantly, for the breath he then releases is smooth and not wrought with hurt.

“ Do you want me to sing for you? would it help? ” she asks a question she has never asked before, because in the time they have known one another, he has always been the one to ask if she would do such a thing. Now, however, she is offering.

“ Non, Helene. But if you will, would you dance with me? ” his eyes are glistening specks of blue as he looks upon her face, a moment or two passing before she settles her hand upon his shoulder and her other, placed in his own while he leads her around the room in small circles, spinning every now and then to chuckle at the joyful laughs that escape her.

[halloowqueen]

“Shhh, they’ll hear us.”

@pastelmoongoddess | ficlet meme

STARCOURT

" Nom de dieu! " the vampire curses at her, anger boiling in lifeless veins, but sizzling up all the same as she tries to tell her to be quiet in the middle of their debate. He never is capable of silence when things get heated and it's one of the biggest differences between the two of them.

" Really? Honestly, Lestat, you needn't yell and scream at every opportunity just to seem high and mighty. Careful of your temper, too, your brat is showing, " she remarks, a displeased look about her expression. He isn't exactly being very reasonable under the circumstances.

" Do not test me, Helene, " he is still angry, huffing and by all accounts puffing his words in a last ditch effort to find some stability once more, but he is vexed. For a moment, he forgets what it was they had been fighting about in the first place and then realises his anger is misplaced.

Lestat allows his gaze to drift away from her, eyes much less of a ghost-white indicating pure wrath and settling in to being their usual bright blue. Still gorgeous, she notes, admitting to herself that even in his angry state he is very much like a marble statue, but he knows this anyway, so giving him any kind of ego boost isn't necessary.

" Or what, Lelio? What exactly are you going to do? Yell at me some more? Pull a Louis and burn the place down? " as she says this, a hint of a chuckle escapes her, but the silence that follows besides the rumble in his chest that soon makes itself known as a roared response, freezes the woman in place and she barely has time to blink.

" That's in very poor taste, " he scolds her, talking through his teeth as he is almost showing them in his fury, fangs protruding whilst he looms over her shorter form. " I don't think even a sorry will remedy that one, Helene. "

Her eyes soften some when she realises what she had said and how, such a joke was cruel, given that it had been an attempt on putting him to sleep indefinitely and she knew it was wrong to use it as humour. It had been a long time since that day, but the wounds were fresh.

" Lestat, I'm sorry.. forgive me, that was too far even for me. I wish that had never happened to you, " she's upset by her own error in trying to fend off his anger which in turn just made things that much worse and he seemed to grow even more angry the more she spoke.

" Apology not accepted, " he hisses, closing in a little more and trapping her against a wall with one arm, his eyes digging down into the depths of her soul as he did nothing but stare her down for a few moments. " You should learn to hold your tongue. I should teach you a lesson or two about that. My kind aren't all forgiving. "

Her breath hitches in her throat as he says this, fearful, uncertain of what he means and putting every possible worse case scenario together in her head, looking up at him expecting the absolute worst to follow, but he does not even make a move, nor say another word.

" Lestat.. " she breathes, his name soft-sounding as she tries to smooth things over and get out of whatever trouble she had gotten herself into. She hadn't though, but he was making damn sure she believed as much.

" Be quiet, Helene. Enough talking.. they'll hear us, remember? " his tone was playful, yet also a warning that should she try his patience again, there would be some form of consequence meeting it halfway.

" But, I.. " she squeaks out, staring up into his eyes that were once more turning lighter, more pale and ghostly in appearance; his annoyance returning. " Why are you angry again? You're like a child, " she tells him, frowning in distaste of his childish behaviour.

Lestat chose not to dignify that with an answer, rather, his thumb came to rest against the side of her neck until she felt the coolness of both his hand, and the ring that he wore there, which prompted a panicked shiver. It was sharp, but she knew that already, which made her fear that much worse and her breathing became unstable.

" You enjoy riling me? Why, Helene? " he is genuinely curious with that one, finding her responses to him thus far to be the sort of thing most would say when looking for a fight, and he didn't like her tone, either.

" I don't, at all. You're just very touchy and you take even the tiniest bit of a jab to heart. You know that about yourself, I don't know why you need me to reaffirm it for you. If you were anything other than a big baby we would not have started fighting in the first place, " she tells him, worry over her words hidden in her tone and yet she knew she was only telling him the truth.

" Careful— I might just have to give you a warning, " his eyes dance with fury but his touch remains gentle, even if the cold metal against her neck is making her heart beat a mile a minute. He hears that, too, and smiles down at her with that same knowing look about him.

" Go ahead, " she offers, an open response to both his warning invitation and the fact that being able to hear her heart pumping so rapidly is increasing his hunger. She is in a roundabout way telling him he can, if he needs to.

" Non, Helene. You know I never will. Never press me to, " his jaw tightens because while that is true and he would never bite or drink from anyone undeserving of pain or even death, the sound of blood travelling so quickly, so loudly through her veins does entice him momentarily, but he draws back away from her instantly. " Non.. "

" Here, " the brunette simply outstretches her forearm to him instead, aware he is capable of feeding without the inevitable death following when he has full control. " You need to feed, at least a few drops, Lestat, you're not in any danger of killing me. I trust you, " she nods as if to confirm those words for him and herself.

Lestat looks down at her face, then her arm, as if to say, he has never known anyone to so freely offer themselves up as a meal before. However, this is quite different. This was not sacrifice, this was along the lines of one good deed in favour of another, an I owe you sort of deal. He would definitely owe her, after this.

" Helene, " he almost purrs her name in his hungry state and takes her offered arm, turning it, holding her hand and her arm to keep it steady before taking a bite. A soft gasp leaves her at the contact, the feeling of sharp and quite painful teeth pushing through her skin.

His eyes briefly glance up at her face as he feeds, a whole lot of adoration the only emotion he finds then, as she had so fearlessly given herself like that. He stops after a few mouthfuls, catching a stray drop on his bottom lip with the tip of his thumb and glancing at her again.

" Merci, " he says, voice low and content, giving her a smile, that one she knows so well. " J'ai besoin de toi, " he adds, with a large smile, allowing her then to rest against his body should she feel faint, even in the slightest.

[gulfportofficial]

Gp Gp gp 

I wasn’t going to pre-share this on tumblr bc it really should be in context but it’s just taking me so fucking long to finish this and I want GP readers to know what’s up.  Anyway, tw for rape trauma; gulfport scene 

He slid his fingers under my pajama bottoms, against my skin. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. “So very beautiful. I love you, you know.”

“Don’t tell me, show me!”

He kissed me again, messy and deep, and rolled me on top of him. His hands felt me all over, excitedly, under my shirt, over my ass again. He both fondled and held tight and there was something so very sweet about that, that he hid himself beneath me, as if he were sheltering, nesting. He buried his nose in my collarbone and inhaled. I gripped his body back and ran my hands along it.

He wriggled down and pulled my pants down with him, kissing and caressing me as he did, then easing my thighs apart to nestle his face between them. I giggled and he spread my legs a little wider. He kissed there. He sunk his teeth into the very top of my thigh.

It hurt. It hurt a lot and I gasped and felt my skin prickle and come alive and I waited for the delight of it to take me over. But it didn’t. Instead it burned so much that it was if my spirit pulled back from it and I jolted out of myself and sailed away.

It was such a shock that my stomach lurched up into my mouth. With it came the memory of human acid burning there, when I’d had a real body, and fear came too. It was dark all around me and a smell rose and smothered me and I caught glimpses of tattered gold hair.

I whimpered. “Louis,” I said. My heart beat hard. I thought it was my heart. “Louis?”

“Hmm?” he said.

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Can what?”

“I don’t think I can have sex, I don’t want to have sex. Please stop.”

When I said it aloud I was sure I’d throw up in earnest and I had to turn my face to the side in case I did. How could I have done something so stupid? I’d said that when I could have endured it. It would have been momentary! And he’d insist on knowing and I didn’t want anyone to know!

I couldn’t even resolve my face. I wasn’t inside it. I couldn’t make it sit spitefully to protect myself, I didn’t know how it read to him. His movements seemed small and unconcerned and painfully out of step with my apocalypse. He smiled somehow and he shifted himself out from between my legs and wiped his mouth and after a moment he leaned up and kissed my cheek. I could feel my thigh hemorrhaging open and pulling me down with it and I knew I would bleed to death now, bleed to human death as I had already done, but this time I would wake up even more monstrous than before, and he kissed my cheek!

I could hear myself making a sound. I tried to stop. I had to be healing, surely. I had to be.  

“Too tired after all?” Louis said, in a normal, impossible voice. He lay down next to me and pulled the covers up.

My voice sounded stupid. “You’re not mad?”

“No?”

“Well, I mean, I… I mean, I started things.”

Louis frowned. “I did too, but it doesn’t matter.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “What’s the matter? Are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine, I’m…”

He was making his concerned face. The one I knew so well, with his brows together and his lips in a neat little line. Predictable. I tried to anchor myself to the familiarity of that face, my annoyance with that face, to tell myself that it was really him, only Louis, and that I knew how to deal with him. But then he reached out and stroked my hair back from my face and the touch was so gentle that I felt it like a blow. “I want to throw up,” I blurted.

Louis blinked. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry?”

“I want to yell at you,” I said desperately. “I’m not yelling at you!”

“Thank you?”

“I’m going to… I don’t know that I can… Louis!”

“It’s alright,” he was saying. “It’s alright. Can you tell me what’s happening?”

He absolutely was angry with me. I wanted to shove him away from me and slice him open and tell him how dare he feel anything about me at all. His eyes blazed but he spoke so gently. So gently! It made me furious! It felt like a trap. Like he was trying to worm his way into me.

“I didn’t want to say that but I didn’t know what else to do and now it feels bad!” I said, uselessly, desperately. My voice was so high.

“Didn’t want to say to stop?” Louis said.

“Yes!” I said, and now my voice was even worse. It was ragged and too loud and I prayed my mother wasn’t awake or nearby enough to hear it.

“But it’s alright,” he said. “I don’t mind at all if you want to stop, everything’s alright.”

He wouldn’t trap me with that either. I’d tear his face off before any trap snapped shut, see if I didn’t. The muscles in my hand were ready to do it. They would do it! He’d be sorry! “I didn’t have a good reason!” I yelled. “I just! I got in my head and… listen, it’s fine now, it’s fine, you can start again.”

“No, I…”

“Do it!” I said. “Stop looking at me! Do it!”

“Lestat,” Louis said. He swallowed. His eyes seemed to shimmer for a second or two. Then he blinked. “Lestat, I don’t want to do that and I’m not going to.”

“Then don’t be mad!”

“I’m not… Lestat, you are allowed… you wanted to stop.”

“And I said you could start it again, just get down there!”

“No, I don’t…”

“Stop being angry with me, then! I said you could do it!”

“I’m not angry at all, or if I am it’s only that…”

“Don’t make me wait for it! Whatever punishment you have for me just hurt me now! Otherwise get down and do it!”

He moved his body up. Suddenly. One fluid motion and then he was covering me. I bucked against it and I would have pushed him off, but he cleared his throat and it made him wheeze and that forced a whining sound out of my own throat because paradoxically as much as I wanted to kill him I also didn’t want him to suffer any hurt at all. It stopped me as surely as if my back had been broken in place, and I couldn’t speak.

“Mon petit Monsieur,” Louis said. The closest he’d ever gotten to a pet name. “I’m so very sorry. If I’m… I’m very… of course I’m not angry with you.”

I felt myself choking again. His eyes were red-rimmed for some reason, like he was trying not to cry. I felt the smell of that blood in my throat, the real promise of real violence, but he was speaking still and I had to listen. It hurt to do so. “Louis!” I said.

“Please, please understand,” he said. “You have done nothing wrong. I am not angry with you, not at all.”

“But how are you…” I said but I didn’t know what I was asking. “Louis! How are you…”

“I’m…” Louis said. “Oh mon petit, come here.”

For a moment the impulse to break him open at the throat overwhelmed me. But then he moved his hands up to my hair and I buried my face against his body and he folded himself around me all the way. I dug my fingernails into his skin, but he didn’t seem to notice. I couldn’t even be angry now. All I could do was press my face into his naked chest like an animal.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, from somewhere out in the world where I couldn’t see him. “Mon dieu, I’m so sorry. I’m…”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said.

“Nothing’s wrong now, and you have done nothing wrong. I’m… oh, I’m…”

“It’s alright, Louis,” I said. “You didn’t do anything either.”

“No,” he said. “No it isn’t that at all, I’m...”

“Louis,” I said. I tried to say it firmly but I couldn’t make it sound firm and it didn’t stop him.

“Lestat,” Louis said. “Please. You do not have to do this if you don’t want to. I’m so sorry you don’t seem to know that.”

“I know it, Louis!” I said, and as panicked and plaintive as my voice was, it could have been so much worse and I have no idea how I managed to restrain it. My mind raced in utter desperation and the speed of it had made me violently sick again. My voice seemed to say all of that, though it was also hard to say anything. “I just got confused. Don’t go on about it.”

“Mon petit monsieur,” Louis said, “please, it’s perfectly alright.

I didn’t know what to say to that. “Don’t call me that,” I said.

“You don’t like it?”

I love it with all my heart. “No, I hate it.”

“Then I won’t say it. But please, I must... you don’t owe that to me, or to anyone, and I’m so…”

I wrenched myself up out of his arms. I looked him dead in the eyes. “You don’t have to do any of this,” I said. “It’s fine.”

Louis gave me a skeptical look. I glared at him. It should have destabilized him but it didn’t. He just put his hands to the side of my face and sighed.

I let him have his hands there and I tolerated the sigh, as difficult as that was – they were concessions, concessions to the greater goal – but I wouldn’t have him doubt me. “It’s fine, Louis,” I said. “Stop fussing.”

“It is not fine at all.”

“It’s fine! I just… I tripped myself up. I did it because I’m an idiot. There’s no more to it than that.”

“And it has nothing to do with what we discussed yesterday, or with the fact that your mother is here?”

That hit me in the chest like a cannon. I don’t know how I didn’t gag. Perhaps I did. I jerked away from his hands at any rate. I sat up. “Shut up!” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with anything.”

Louis frowned again. “I’m not going to press it now,” he said. “I’m not equipped for that. We figured that out, I think. I’ve got the subtlety of dynamite on this matter, and I apologize.”

“But you do have an opinion.”

“Yes.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh in his face or punch him in it. Both options felt equally hysterical. “Suppose you just tell me your opinion, Louis.”

“You know what it is.”

“Say it,” I demanded. “Say whatever stupid thing it is you think.”

Louis cleared his throat. Then he cleared it again. His hands had followed my body when I’d moved, but he’d taken them away now to cough into them. How insulting.

“Louis,” I said.

“No, I…”

“Louis,” I said, and my tone, I hope, conveyed how exactly how little I wished to fuck around.

It did, evidently. He met my eyes, and his expression was not, I thought, altogether kind. “There is…” Louis said. “You must know this. There is a relationship between your assumption of desert on certain traumatic issues, and your desire to have people love you by any means necessary. And it is culminating in... in this behavior.”

“What traumatic issues?” I said, furiously, but we both knew I knew exactly what he meant. The fury was more desperate ritual than it was actual accusation, but I hoped it would protect me anyway. I drew it around myself like a magic cloak. I suspect Louis observed that, because he spared me and didn’t answer my question. At least not directly.

Still, what he did say was almost worse. “You must listen to me,” he said, reaching out his hand again. I slapped it away but he went on. “Please. Please listen. You do not need to… there is no requirement for you to have sex you do not wish to have.”

“I know that!”

“You don’t know it,” he said. “You are demonstrating that you don’t. And you must know… that I don’t… surely if nothing else, everything that’s past must make you understand. I’ve loved you even when I couldn’t stand you. You are so dear to me, don’t you understand that?”

“Oh sure,” I said, my chest heaving against the bile. “You know, you don’t always have to mention that you couldn’t stand me.”

Louis ignored that. “You don’t have to do anything to secure this. You don’t have to favor me.”

“I’m not favoring you!” I said. “I like fucking! I don’t know what happened just then!”

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

“Shut up, Louis!” I said. My intestines would crawl out from between my teeth if he didn’t stop. “I know all of that! I just confused myself. It’s not important like you’re making it. Shut up.”

“I am sorry,” Louis said.

“Stop being sorry!” I said. “It’s my own fault!”

“How could that possibly be?”

“Because I shouldn’t have said anything,” I snapped.

Louis’ face collapsed. “And I wouldn’t have known,” he said, and just like that I wanted to weep.

It’s actually strange to me, upon reflection, that I didn’t. I suppose it was too great a feeling for mere tears. Tears would have required some clarity or some human feeling and I had none. My chest had filled with one impossible sob but I could not and did not release it. Maybe, I thought, he might actually not have known.

“I can’t tolerate that,” Louis said. “I don’t want that. Please. I must tell you that… please know that my love for you is not conditional upon… that you are not required to… you don’t deserve to have to... I know you think you… please…”

He had nothing to say. He’d already run himself aground. How typical of him. How feeble and uninteresting and pointlessly intellectual. My mouth was sour and I wanted to leave, but some part of me was compelled to stay and make the point. “No,” I said. “I would have wanted to again soon enough.”

Louis frowned again. He wrinkled his nose up. He opened his mouth but then he shut it again.

“I would have,” I insisted.

“That’s… well…” Louis said. “Ah. That, I think, is a problem.”

“That’s not a problem!”

“Shh,” Louis said. “Shh, it’s alright.”

“Stop trying to make me calm down, Louis! I’m perfectly calm! It’s not a problem! I know my own mind and I’m telling you, it’s fine!”

Louis took another pause. He seemed to gather himself. “If that is how you feel,” he said, “then we’ll stop and start again when you do wish to. There’s no reason you must… play through…”

Did he play golf? For some reason that question was stupidly pressing and I wanted to ask it. I think he does sometimes actually. But it wasn’t relevant here. “Why are you trying to make this some big and stupid deal, Louis!” I said. “I just got a little in my own head! I shouldn’t have said anything. I regret saying anything! Because now you’re making it into an event and it just isn’t one!”

“Is there perhaps a little truth in what I’ve said?” Louis asked me, in the softest voice I’d ever heard. It twisted my guts into knots again just to hear it and I turned my face away.

“No,” I said.

Louis’ tone didn’t change. “Will you please consider,” he said, “just consider, that’s all I’m asking, that some of your instincts on this matter are a little wrong?”

“No!” I said, furiously. “I absolutely will not. Because they are not.”

“But don’t you…”

“Shut up, Louis!” I snapped. “You’re so full of bullshit. If you’re weak and stupid enough to beg for love you cannot be fussy about the way people give it to you!”

Louis looked straight at me, but he didn’t need to. The moment I said it I knew what a fucking idiot I’d been. What an absolute buffoon. With that one pathetic statement, I’d managed to say something so imbecilic and so revealing that he’d won against me with in this patronizing, aggravating, nauseating argument without even having to do it himself. I bit down on my lip, hard, and tried to roll away. Even my own blood made me feel sick.

Louis wouldn’t let me get away. He caught me by my waist and turned me back around until I was facing him. I fought him every inch of the way. My hands were in fists and I had opened my mouth to bite him like an animal, but I didn’t. Because then I was facing him and his expression arrested me. He didn’t look like somebody who had won. He didn’t even look like someone who disapproved of me for being this much of an idiot, though I was one and he might reasonably have disapproved. “Lestat,” he said, his eyes huge and bright and imploring, “Lestat. Please let me tell you this. You did not deserve it. You never could have.”

The sob in my chest was still stuck there. Aching and with no noise and I did not weep. I thought it would choke me not to weep. And then all I could think of were the worst of his implications.

“Louis,” I said. “Louis is this… yesterday were you… was this… did you cry because you didn’t want to and you didn’t know how to make it stop?”

Louis looked surprised. “Excuse me?”

“Louis, was it?”

He smiled, in a strange, incredulous way. “No, that was much worse,” he said, dryly. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s think about you at the moment.”

He said it like he was joking. I think he did it to comfort me. But it didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t the time to joke. “Louis, please,” I said.

“That’s not relevant now.”

“It is! Because if it wasn’t that then what was it?”

“It’s not necessary to explain.”

“Please try. Please. I have to know. I can’t… I can’t bear it, Louis. Please.”

“Well, perhaps it’s similar.”

“Oh darling!” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

“Shh,” Louis said. “Be calm.” He brushed my hair back again and I let him. He stroked my face and I let him do that as well. How strange it was to have him pet me like this, how strong it made him seem. I couldn’t have bitten him now if I’d wanted to, I was that spellbound, and how afraid and how safe that made me feel.

And how panicked that combination made me. “Louis!” I said.

“Shh, it doesn’t matter.”

“Louis, please…”

“Look,” he said. “Do you really want to know about that? Is that what you really want to talk about now? Wouldn’t you rather just try to rest?”

“No.”

“It’s morning.”

“Louis,” I said. “No.”

He thinned his lips, but I kept staring at him. I might have even made my own eyes wider, sweeter, on purpose. In fact I think I did do that because it made him frown in that particular way he does when he is annoyed by me but too sympathetic to say it. I didn’t relent though. I kept at it until finally, he said., “would it really ease your mind to hear about it?”

“Yes.”

“Alright,” he said. He sighed.

“And?”

Louis moved and shuffled down so he was lying beside me. Even this momentary absence hurt me and I reached out my hand for his. Thankfully he took it. He held it over his heart and I shuffled down too. “Alright,” he said. “Look.”

I looked. I waited.

“I am sympathetic to this concept of… reciprocal desert, I suppose,” Louis said.

“Louis,” I said. “You are correct that it is morning. And that I’m very tired. Please pontificate less and explain more.”

He gave a desperate little snort at that. It was painfully adorable and I felt a stab of real affection at it. It was the first thing I’d felt in some time that wasn’t fear or nausea and I clung to it. I squeezed his hand. “I’m listening, chéri.”

Louis closed his eyes. He took a breath through his nose before he opened them again. “Look,” he said, once again. “I’m not sure you understand how… little sustained sexual experience I had before you and I became acquainted… how little sustained experience I had with sex I even enjoyed.”

That both surprised me and didn’t. It wasn’t news, but it also wasn’t true enough for him to say in this candid situation. When I’d met him he’d been depraved. “What about all your sex workers?”

“My what?”

“Your whores, Louis. It’s the term people use now. It’s polite.”

Louis appeared to take that in. “Look,” he said, “the fact that I enjoyed… enjoyed… liked, ah… that I… I enjoyed… ahem… Jesus fucking Christ, I beg your pardon. I…”

I waited for as long as I could, but it seemed that he wasn’t going to make it. “Louis?” I prompted.

“… that I enjoyed the, ah, culmination.”

“Oh, you liked getting off. You liked when you came. Sure.”

“Yes,” Louis said, sharply. He flushed, but then he pushed it back and forced himself onward. “Yes. Obviously. I had a human body, as base as it was. But the fact that I liked… that aspect of… ah… look. It did not negate that I could seldom bring myself to be… present… during the act itself. And there were some… brief exceptions in my youth but as I had aged that had become… increasingly difficult.”

“Then why keep doing it at all?” I said, probably stupidly. “Why didn’t you just jerk off?”

It was stupidly. Louis looked at me in exactly the way I deserved for speaking so stupidly. But he went on. “Because I didn’t… look. It isn’t that I didn’t want to… have… look.”

“I’m looking, Louis,” I said. And please, dear God, won’t you finally tell me what I’m supposed to be looking at.

He cleared his throat again. “When I fell in love with you,” he said (and I loved hearing him say that, because no matter the circumstances I always will), “when I decided to follow you as I did, you were so new to me, you were like nothing I’d ever felt. I told myself that it was entirely because you were my first vampire. That you were spellbinding to me only because of that. I knew that this was not true, but it is what I told myself.”

“But what do you mean?” I said. “I mean, thank you, because… well, I mean, just thank you, it’s nice to know that I’m actually somehow unique to you instead of just, you know… your symbolic supernatural end, but I mean… that doesn’t seem to warrant all of this anxiety, it’s just nice to know but…”

“Alright,” Louis said, again, cutting me off. “Some of the reason I decided to go with you, that what I felt for you was so remarkable to me is that…”

“I’m delightful.”

“You are but...”

“But what? I’m delightful.”

“You are,” Louis said. “You are also another man.”

It was not something I had expected him to say. I hadn’t known what to expect, certainly, but this absolutely wasn’t it and I found I had to calibrate myself to hear it properly. To do so felt like threading myself through time, as if my body were in multiple places at once, and it was already so difficult to stay inside it. Because it hadn’t even occurred to me, but it felt so uniquely strange and so very deliberate that it had not.

I doubted he could hear any of that when I spoke, however. “You didn’t like women you mean? Is that what you mean or are you still talking about that choir boy thing where you’re not allowed to like any of it?”

“I’ll never know,” Louis said. “Was it about the people I did it with or only about myself? Original sin or very specific? I don’t know. I’ll never know. The man I was no longer exists.”

“Well then why does it matter?” I said. “I’m not trying to be hard, I just don’t… I want to understand.”

“Because this intimacy I have with you now,” Louis said, “it makes it difficult to read things against how they used to be. Particularly… some sexual things.”

“What?” I said.

I knew I was out of sync with myself but this did seem genuinely confusing. Louis frowned again. He flushed again too, but that just seemed to make him angry with himself. He looked down, away from me, and he bit his lip. “When you would… when you’d push me. And dominate. And demand. When it would be a part of a fight or part of some despairing series of events. When it hurt me. I think it gave me permission. To do something I had always wanted to do.”

“You mean…” I said. “You mean you’re allowed because you’re not wanting to, you’re letting me.”

“Yes,” Louis said, looking up. “That’s what I mean.”

I sucked in a breath. Part of me knew how wrong it was of me to press my advantage like this, to use his sympathy to draw these confessions out of him, but another part knew I’d never hear this any other way. As painfully and embarrassingly candid as he’d been in the therapist’s office, this, I knew, was too personal even for that. This was about him, not us. And I’d known, I wanted to say. I’d known I’d played this part in your self-flagellation all along, but never known how to ask it.

“But isn’t this just…” I said. “Aren’t you just arguing that you asked for what I did to you? Because I don’t agree with that, I don’t think that’s right, the logic doesn’t hold. If I “didn’t deserve it” then you didn’t either and I’m not going to accept that you did. There aren’t different rules.”

“No,” Louis said. “I’m parsing something quite complicated here, and it is not the same. I have made conditions. There are certain things I will not permit you to do. Certain ways you are not to speak to me, impositions, including sexual impositions, that I will not let you make. That problem of mine, it does not… it does not permit all else.”

That was enormous. It was patently unfair that he said it in this moment because it was so enormous and I was already so weak. But it was also necessary that he said it, because it was true. I swallowed hard but I did not let myself react. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I know.”

“I will not accept things as they used to be,” Louis said. “I was about to say that I cannot, but that is not the truth, and that is the crux of what I am saying here. The truth is that I will not. I have learned, I think, to consider that I might value the fact that I do not want to. But I also hesitate because I fear it’s… Bartleby the Scrivener in a very particular setting. Because if I’d prefer not to, I’m not sure I can prefer anything. Does that make sense to you?”

I was too tired to figure out what that meant, or which part of this I was most upset by. All of it, certainly, but also by each part of it individually at the same time. My heart clenched and unclenched around each particular and it made it hard to look at him. But I made myself do that anyway. Because it didn’t matter how I felt. What did matter was finally hearing what he had to say, because this would be the only chance I would get to hear it.

And I loved him, of course. I know you think that I don’t, but I do, and I loved him then, more than I ever had, loved him in the marrow of my bones, and if it hurt him then it hurt me too, and I wanted to know. “No, Louis,” I said. “It’s good to have wants. They don’t automatically lead you to complete existential failure.”

“However,” Louis said.

“However what?”

“However,” he said, “There were elements of that dynamic that I suspect… produced… something I… possibly enjoyed. Sexually speaking.”

I held my tongue. That was difficult to do, since I had two equally weighted thoughts, and one was a delighted “really!” and the other was “no fucking shit, Sherlock” in a sarcastic manner. Neither would have been appropriate.

Louis went on. “I don’t like the relationship it was part of. And that’s not a criticism of you, or not only of you. But… but.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’m with you.”

“Are you? Do you?”

“Perhaps not, but I’m following the line you’re drawing. Can you… do you mean you want me to… what do you mean?”

“I mean I’m not sure I know how to do it without the penance built in,” Louis said. “I’m not sure I know how to enjoy sex at all without some elaborate punishing construction I’ve built myself to make it acceptable. Some Kafka’s penal colony of my own making. And so part of me sincerely wonders if, by insisting upon this different relationship – and I do insist – I haven’t spoiled sex for myself forever.”

“Louis,” I said. “That’s absolutely fucking certifiable.”

“Is it?”

“How is it that I am the crazy one if you’re the one who thinks these things?”

“Well, you’re not…”

“That’s absurd. You’re insane.”

“Are you sure?” Louis said. “Are you really sure that the concepts are not mutually unintelligible?”

“No, I’m not letting you do this,” I said, before I caught myself. “I hear it. Shut up. I’m not letting you make some intellectual mess of an argument you think I’m too stupid to understand. Well, I do understand, and it’s your argument that is stupid, not me.”

“I don’t think that…”

“You’re absolutely fucking filthy, you depraved slutty idiot. You’re the horniest person I’ve ever met. Nobody and nothing on this earth could have stopped you from liking sex. These past few months should have proven that. You’re just a little bit anxious about it at the moment, and that’s absolutely alright, but I assure you it will just be temporary.”

“I beg your pardon,” Louis said. He was clearly affronted, and I knew I’d gone too far, but I wasn’t about to let him derail things.

“Nobody is punishing you!” I said. “There aren’t all these traps you imagine! It’s alright to like sex. It’s alright to like sex with a man! You’re allowed to… you’re allowed to be alive and to like to fuck and it doesn’t excuse anything! You haven’t done anything wrong, Louis!”

Louis stared at me. “You put it so… you’re so certain.”

I knew what he meant. I knew how much he wanted to say something arch about having told me so. But I wouldn’t talk about that now. I wouldn’t! “Don’t you dare get bogged down in if we’re allowed to be alive as we are,” I said. “I am too tired and I love you too much to entertain that. You are allowed, because I say so.”

“I wish it were that easy,” Louis said.

“It is that easy,” I said. “I love you with the whole of my ugly little heart, Louis. And so you are right to be on this Earth, if only for my happiness.”

“Yes, but then that begs the question of whether you… whether any of us…”

“Shut up,” I said. “If you’re going to argue that I am not right to be here, I will weep. I am too fragile for that this morning, so don’t... If you’re going to make me discuss… if you’re going to make me… if you’re going to bring up… if you do love me at all, then please grant me the kindness of saying that you’re at least glad I’m alive.”

He held more firmly on my hand against his chest. “You will never know how glad,” he said. “But that…”

“Then shut up,” I said. “I’m almost already crying. Shut up.”

I meant it. I’d fought so hard not to cry all evening, but it felt so close to me now that I even felt myself sniffling, like a sad little child. It is possible that a tear or two did fall, actually, but I certainly didn’t acknowledge them. Even then I refused to let myself be that pathetic.

But “please don’t,” Louis said, so tenderly. He had let go of my hand, but both of his were upon my face again, softly. He kissed my cheek, high up on the bone, like he’d done to the girl at the bar. “Please don’t cry, monsieur,” he was saying. “Everything is alright.”

“Then don’t do this,” I insisted. “Just… we are here, Louis. We’re here, and I want to be here with you, and I want you to want to be too.”

“I do want to be here. Very much.”

“Good then,” I said. “That’s enough. Please let it be enough.”

He didn’t answer that. He did stoke me though. Softly, feather light. I still felt like crying. I shut my eyes, though I found I had to open them again to implore him.

“We can do better,” I said. “We can do those things when we want to do them, we can talk about them and manage it like adults. I’ll fuck you exactly like you want me to and if it’s awkward for a while then, well, it will just be a little awkward for a while. We can tolerate that, can’t we? We have the language.”

Let’s do it now, I almost said. But thankfully, I didn’t.

“I don’t…” Louis said. “I don’t find that easy. Discussing such… fleshy concerns. As you know. It’s not my forte, I’d say if I were you.”

What a way to say it. “I know, chéri,” I said. “I know you don’t. But some things are worth doing, even if they are hard. Haven’t you said that? Aren’t you saying that to me?”

“I wish I didn’t feel this way. It’s hypocritical of me, really, to let my own shame restrict what I communicate and what I do not, when I say what I say to you about yours.”

“Yes, well. It’s always easier to dictate than to do.”

He winced. “I am sorry,” he said, and he looked like he meant it. But I wasn’t going to let that be the end of it that.

“Why are you still ashamed?” I said. It felt so strange to ask him that. A bedtime confessional, mirrored throughout time. Lovers like us and like I had been, stretching back centuries asking the same questions. “Is it all because it’s lust or because it’s your vampire life? Or is it because… is all of this also because we’re both men?”

“I think some of it is,” Louis said. “I know what you’re going to say about that, that it’s a stupid, mortal hang-up that I shouldn’t have, and you’re right of course, but there it is just the same. A stupid human anxiety that I have always felt and that somehow still dominates my un-life.”

“You don’t really believe you’ll go to Hell for it,” I said. “Not you.”

“I never think anything so specific. This… sense of punishment is far more global than that. The sense of having made disorder in the world. Of being at odds with it. Of being so fundamentally incorrect that I have brought all of this upon myself. I don’t know.”

“Oh Louis,” I said. I moved up on my pillow so I could kiss him. He did let me. There was an edge of reluctance to it, or of despair perhaps. But he did let me.

“Oh Louis,” I said, again, stroking his cheek with my thumb. “Oh my love. You make everything so dramatic and symbolic when sometimes it’s just small and sad.”

He pressed his lips together in a resigned way. “Perhaps that’s so.”

It was polite of him not to point out my hypocrisy. Though it’s also possible he was too caught up in himself to notice it. “We’re still consumers,” I said, following him there. “And you’re still a Catholic.”

“I am not. You are, I’m not.”

“You absolutely are,” I said. “Don’t be stupid. You know you are. Don’t you know that?”

Louis didn’t answer me. He seemed far away, contemplative. But then he turned his face back to me, set his sparkling eyes upon me, and for some strange reason, I held my breath. “In San Francisco, I did try,” he said. “It was the writing, and the music, and that it was entirely new to me, but also it was… I wanted to go where I could love men. Where it would not be entirely out of place to do so. A lot of things were beautiful there, and I was so past caring about any of it. It was easy to be convinced. I tried to let myself be convinced. And sometimes I succeeded.”

“I know that,” I said. “You met Daniel in a bar. It was 1976, Louis. You talked to him in a bar in the fashionable part of San Francisco in 1976. Do you think I don’t know what kind of bar it was? That I don’t know what you went there to do?”

“I went there to kill someone,” he said. “To murder someone in order to sustain my own cowardly life.”

“That’s not all,” I said. “And you know it isn’t and you just admitted it too. You went there to kiss boys. And you think it’s the same thing, but it isn’t. Because it’s alright to kiss boys, Louis. God doesn’t think like you think about it. That’s a mistake. We were taught something that is not true.”

“Perhaps,” Louis said. And he looked strange and embarrassed, but then he smiled. He looked at me and he smiled. “You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”

His gaze was one of admiration, and ordinarily I would have liked it. Ordinarily when he looked at me that way, awed and trusting like that, I felt pleased with myself and pleased about the world. But it seemed wrong now. It seemed not truthful.

“You think I never…” I said. “I made up my mind not to care, don’t you see? I wasn’t going to let something so stupid as people’s opinions stop me if I was in love. It’s not because I never… of course I was afraid.”

I’d expected that confession to have more impact than it did. It made a lot of impact upon me to say.  But Louis spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “It’s just that you always seemed fearless. As if you were daring people to try something. As if you thought it would be funny if they did.”

“People died for it, Louis,” I said. “Even in Paris. Let alone in the country.”

“Of course I know that, but…”

“And my father… said… he told me… when I…”

I couldn’t finish that. But it seemed I didn’t have to. I suppose Louis had heard me at last, because he curled his hand into mine and squeezed it. I squeezed back. His fingers felt warm to me, and I didn’t know why they did. His eyes were so wide when he looked at me. Quietly. Waiting. I felt the need to be soft with him, and I felt, again, the need to tell the truth.

“So I understand you,” I said. “I’ll admit that I do. I’m not going to say what you think I’m going to say this time. Not anymore. I’ll admit it instead.”

Louis kissed me this time. He moved forward to do it and I held my breath again, it was that sweet. “It’s you,” he said. “You. You were not fearless, but instead very brave.”

“No, I was just in love. There was nothing brave about it. It wasn’t a choice to be in love.”

“Of course there was something brave about it,” Louis said. “Isn’t that what we’re doing here together, discovering just that? Doesn’t everything we’ve talked about tonight tell you? To love another person, to commit to loving them truly and honestly is an act of such bravery, just because to be in love is to accept that you not only want to be alive, but that you have designs on how you want to live?”

“You really think so, don’t you?” I said. It made me grin. No doubt incredulously, though I would have tried to temper that, just a little. Nobody else could have made it that dramatic, but that wasn’t his fault. “You really think it’s brave just to be in love.”

“Yes,” he said, seriously.

“You really think that?”

“You’re brave to be here with me,” he said.

“Oh, stop.”

“You’ve been brave all your life,” he said. “And I want to be brave as well.”

My grin fell right off me. That declaration had pierced my heart and I couldn’t be anything but serious. I must have stared at him. I must have gazed in utter wonder. I could never love somebody as much as this, I thought. Nobody could ever be so gentle and so earnest or sway me so fundamentally as he did without even trying to. Certainly, nobody else could have made me admit any of these soft and vulnerable things. Nobody else could have made me want to admit them.  

“But you’re already brave, mon cher,” I said. “Everything you’ve told me is brave. I’m more proud of you than you’ll ever know. And I want to fuck you like you want to be fucked. I don’t want you to regret any of this, what you’ve said to me.”

“Well,” he said, and he then grinned himself, suddenly, and it startled me. I’d forgotten he could do that. I’d forgotten his face could even move. “Perhaps we can negotiate.”

“Negotiate what, Louis? I told you what I’d do.”

“Because you like it as well, don’t you?” he said. “Being put in your place, during sex.”

I felt like I could blush. My heart felt hot enough to make me. It’s even possible I was blushing, though perhaps not very likely. I certainly spoke like the sort of person who blushed, however. “Louis!” I said. “Louis!”

“Oh, isn’t it true?”

“No,” I said.

“Not true at all?”

“Shut up!”

“What a sweet little discovery that was,” he said. “What a sweet little thing you are.”

“Just you shut up right now.”

He smiled so indulgently. “As you wish.”

I scowled, but I didn’t really mean it. “Well maybe you make me feel like I could be sweet,” I said. “Like maybe I’m not all over evil after all.”

“And you make me feel that I could be interested for all eternity,” he said. “Even if nothing else was interesting, I could always be discovering more about you. You can change, you know. I once thought you couldn’t, but you can.”

I didn’t even have the wherewithal to be embarrassed at him saying that. Obviously, telling you about it now I am so embarrassed by it I have earnestly considered not telling you, and the fact that I am telling you has begun to make me wish I still had the capacity to make earnest suicide attempts with the possibility of success. But I wasn’t embarrassed then, not at all. This is all so saccharine and I so very soft that it seems that it could barely have happened. And it did happen. Worse was about to happen. But somehow, in that time I was not ashamed of anything. I just stared at him, stunned and in love until he kissed me.

I kissed him back. We pressed our bodies together and entangled each other in our arms and kissed and kissed and kissed. I gasped from it. When we broke apart, his face was pink and warm and his arms were still around me and I wanted to stay there forever. I felt as if I had already half bled into him, but I wasn’t afraid. It made me honest in a way that hurt. “Louis,” I said. “I do like it but it… it makes me…”

“I know,” Louis said. “I know.”

“I didn’t even say what it was!”

“You’re so…” Louis said. “You’re just so… I want to be… more careful with you.”

“You’re careful already.”

“No,” Louis said. “Listen to me. I will. I will be careful with you. You’re so dear to me.”

I couldn’t say anything to that. I think my face must have done something dramatic, because Louis smiled at me sympathetically and touched me and told me it was alright. “Be calm,” he said. “It’s alright.”

“I know it is,” I said. Snapped, really. But he didn’t react to that.

“It was brave of you to stop,” he said. “I know it was hard for you. I’m glad you did.”

Oh, but I had no chance coming out of this alive. My heart had cracked and the liquid of it lit my chest up from the inside and my eyes welled and I had to blink my tears away again. “Louis…”

“I know,” he said.

“No, but Louis…”

“I do know, monsieur.”

“Your petit monsieur.”

“Mon petit monsieur.”

I buried into him. I pushed my nose into the crook of his shoulder. “Is it really brave just to be in love?”

Louis seemed to hold all of his breath inside his body for a moment. “Yes it is,” he said when he let it out. His arms were around me, strong.

“Are we really in love then?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Louis said. “We are really very much in love.”

So you can say what you will about our thoughts and prayers. Don’t you see it? Don’t you understand? Between us, we earnestly believed we could clean up the gulf.

[thanklessindubai]

"You... wanted to thank me?" Armand looked confused. Like he'd just been woken up and wasn't all there yet. But... he'd mostly had that look before Lestat sat down.

Anyone who'd known him casually over the past fifty or more years would think there was either something really wrong with Armand or that he'd finally taken his meds. He had that drowsy, well-fed, 'Post Thanksgiving' look. Oddly loose. And there was something on his jacket... Not lint... Dust? He was almost impreceptively dusty. Smelled like an old book.

And his hair was slightly tousled. Not an all-out mess, but it was usually so quaffed. And his posture, and his skin, and his voice -- all together, it made him look like he'd been neglected. Not like a neglected person, but like a forgotten object. There was a little pain in his eyes and he was trying to squint past it. Completely unselfconscious.

A friend -- if he'd ever bothered to make one -- almost wouldn't have recognized him. Still, he was smiling... But was that a good sign or a bad sign?

"Far be it from me to catch you out, but I cannot imagine you came all this way--" he gestured around him, "-- just to bury the hatchet. You could've called out for that and I would've heard you." Then he added, unnecessary but sweet just the same, "I will always hear you." He let that sit for a beat, but then the moment of sincerity passed. "So! Either you're here to kill me, or... You want something."

He grinned fondly as he said it, a slight shaking of the head as if to say, 'you dickins.' And he wasn't pissed about it, not in the slightest. He seemed intrigued.

"So what is it, Monsieur Rockstar? Am I to die? Or is it some new adventure? I'm afraid I'm too busy consulting these days, or I would adventure with you. But!" He reached out and -- horror of horrors -- boop'd Lestat's nose. He has to be on drugs. "I accept your thanks. More because the past is in the past where it belongs."

He raised his glass as if in a toast and took a sip. Then lemon-faced and spat it back into the glass. Tried to discreetly wipe his tongue on his cuff.

@thanklessindubai asked: ❛ just . . . start from the beginning. ❜ (confrontation meme)

"We don't have the time to address the vast multitude of your grievous sins." Disgust plays across the plush of lips as the first whiff of something long rotted lingering long after its course has been run.

"And, painful as it may be to say...that is not why I am here." Better judgement and pettiness would delegate his feet carry him through opulent doors to the waiting limousine and all the creature comforts home would provide but forgiveness is a contagion he has unfortunately contracted. To a degree.

A wave of a hand to alert the bartender for a drink and refill for his personae non gratae. Mulling the thought of what he is to say next. Armand deserves nothing but the pit he has dug himself and Lestat would be content to leave him to it save for the creeping humanity he has come to taste and, in modicum, appreciate in Louis' honor.

"I came to thank you for that night. For giving me voice to our paramour en commun." It is a small win, he supposes, for Armand. Lest attempted mariticide nullify a marriage it is only the elder who holds the title paramour. Of which a turn of the golden band on display of his ring finger might remind him.

"An unexpected benevolence but appreciated none the less." Superiority perhaps unearned, he leans back in his chair to study the gaunt frame he is intimately familiar with. A few pounds heavier than the last he saw it wasting away in a shit hole of an underground lair. Not much improved from the late night trysts gaining favor for power. It gives him semblance of satisfaction to see the haunt in his eyes, yet again having lost everything.

Yet...the meager satisfaction blooms and withers in the same breath exhaled. Bitterness still writhes at the back of his throat like ready made bile waiting for a moment to strike its blade in deep but he knows the sorrow of losing Him too. The profound ugliness it mirrors in the soul. He could not wish it on anyone in good conscience.

"Though well deserved, I know the despair you feel. My Louis cuts to the core does he not?"

[liebxsleid]

💭 - worst memories (for both)

Send me a “💭“ and your Muse will experience one of my Muse’s Memories

“Antoine, look at me. S'il vous plaît...”

Lestat could have begged all  he wanted, but you chose to keep your face to the ground. There was no way you could face him when you had let him down. When you yourself had been burned from all of your beauty. No words could describe how much pain you were in, not even just in the physical sense. This was a night you had known was coming. He was leaving. All finances were in order, rooms signed over to you. All of which meant nothing at all if this man was not there with you.

But was it not your fault, that he had to go? Red started to blur your vision, the beginning of tears. All the better a reason to hide from your lover, no. Ex lover. Quickly and fiercely your hands wiped at your face. Ears now deaf to the pleas of the blond. All he wanted was one last look at your face before he boarded the ship. Something that should have been so easy.

No warning at all for the pain to come. Lestat had forced you into his arms, embracing you tight as he could. And oh god, did it hurt. You could feel your burned skin cracking, the pressure soothing to your emotions but hell to your body. To muffle your cry of pain you pressed your lips to his. Finally you looked at him. Gray, looking as if he was in just as much agony as you. Quietly, a last I love you. Then it was over. He was gone. Absently you even watched the ship sail towards France.

A mutual break, but one that would leave him lost and regretting the years to come.

--

Anna had called you over, something important. She would not say over the phone, the shakiness in her voice appearing almost difficult for her to speak. Even when sounding so troubled, you swooned the slightest as her velvet voice requested you bring no one with you. Leave anything breakable at home. Please, hurry. Time was a fickle, and quickly fleeting thing. She even said so. Which was nothing right. 

You knew Anna. The woman was sunflowers and daisies in the summer. Even at her most stressed she was the loveliest damn thing you had ever seen. Lately she was distant, physical appearance seeming thinner. She would disappear for a day or so at a time. Secretive in where it was she was going. But you trusted her. If something was wrong, she would tell you. Would someone who had said, “Please, do not worry.” Lie to you?

A sinking feeling filled your chest, and the apartment door seemed heavier than usual. There she sat, back to you on the sofa in the middle of her living room. Long blond hair was draped back over the piece, thin as always. Not so. Strands seemed more fragile now. Before you could even speak she had beat you to it. Hand raised to silence you.

“Before you come over here, I want to you take a breath and hold it.” Her words, quivering. Ones that told the listener that the speaker had been crying for some time, enough to sound ill. The hand she held up was almost grey in color. You drew in a sharp breath, per her request. And held it as you made your way around to face her. Bright eyes widened in horror of what you were seeing.

This was not Anna. In her place was still a beautiful thing, but sickly. An already thin body was dangerous in how much it seemed to have lost. In the hand remaining at her side was a handerkerchief. What should have been a pale yellow, crusted in reds and browns. Remnants of the source caught in the cracks and corners of Anna’s lips. You who had nothing to fear in your long life found yourself tremendously afraid. Her eyes told you the gist of it. She did not have long.

Then she smiled. You, taking a seat next to her had pulled her so gently into your arms. Hand carefully rubbing her shoulder. Shivering. The poor dear, was cold. Having lost so much strength in the coughing fit she had before you had showed up. As if she was not scared at all she told you the news.

“Tiffany. It’s terminal, carried on this way for too long.” Knowing you wanted to silence her she kept talking, faster now, causing some strain in her voice, “I begged them to let me die at home. On the condition I am not alone when I do. You’ll stay with me, won’t you?”

[tiny-ruby-seeds]

The Nature of My Game

Michael Langdon x Dean Winchester

AN- This is what I do on my birthday. 

I post strange crossovers with (not so much if you think about it) crack ships. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but... Damn do I like this crazy thing and I hope you guys will like it too! Especially my fellow AHS & SPN lovers and my fellow Pisces whose birthday is tomorrow (you know who you are)!

Graphic made by me, picture taken from Pinterest found here with credit to their owners

Trigger Warnings-  Blasphemy (It’s Supernatural and American Horror Story yo), Demonic Shenanigans (death, destruction, souls get barbequed... That stuff),  Language, Violence, Mentions of Blood/Gore/ Dismemberment (I mean cannot you guys not see it happening with these two? Don’t lie), Mentions of Solo (Male) Masturbation, and Slight Knife Kink

Word Count- 4206

***

It was first time in the past few minutes that the bar had fallen silent. There was an almost eerie quality to it after the carnage of a few moments ago, save for the terrible wet fleshy smacking sounds that rang over and over of the records clicking and changing in the jukebox in the corner. Soon that terrible sound went silent as the jukebox hummed.

A silence that was almost ringing between the two men (left alive) in the bar. The one closest to the jukebox surveyed his ruined clothes (he may have worn a red velvet dinner jacket it but blood had a tendency to dry to a disgusting dark brown if not washed) before looking to the bar around them.

Now, he hadn’t been keen on coming here in the first place. Had sighed and rolled his eyes when his companion insisted on dragging him into this place that stank like stale beer and made his stomach turn when seeing some over greased concoction that seemed to coat his veins just looking at it. But now…

It was filled with the scent of blood as patrons everywhere around them were slaughtered. Blood, a few limbs, and viscera covering the floor mixing with the bar peanuts and odd bits of silverware. Normally he didn’t mind the sight and smell of destruction, in fact, he would have dared said it was an improvement but right now was not the time to admire the chaos. This would be a problem soon enough.

“Was that really necessary?" He asked suddenly; voice silky, cool and calm above the notes that were starting to filter from the jukebox.

He could hear the drums of a famous band his caregiver (dear sweet black-hearted Ms. Mead, long gone) had once loved. He could hear the slight accent from the singer even as he sang the word he had once sung with her as a child.

“...Please allow me to introduce myself

I’m a man of wealth and taste

Been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man’s soul to waste…”

Maybe later the Antichrist, Michael Langdon, would chuckle at the irony that of all songs it was this one that the old jukebox decided to ring out and sing. Maybe later he would admit it was rather amusing that amidst the carnage of the bar that the jukebox was still rather untouched, as though it were a living thing thinking that playing that song would save it from any further damage save for the splatters of blood and gore (Seriously, that idiot had it coming thinking he could aim a shotgun at them both and that one of them wouldn't break his bones, snap tendons, before tearing his heart out). All of it would be funny later. Right now… Annoyance reigned supreme. It gleamed in his icy blue gaze, drew taunt in the line of his shoulders and the grip of his hands tightly behind his back, and all over his handsome (although slightly blood splattered) features framed in ginger blonde hair.

He had a reason to be annoyed, even angry. After all, this bar had been full of hunters before they had walked in and it was the blood, guts, and limbs of hunters that decorated it now. It had just taken one of them saying the wrong thing for his companion to finally explode. A companion who was already of short temper thanks to the ancient mark branded on his arm.

A companion was currently on the floor, resting slightly from pounding the remnants of blood, bone, and gore into the dark hardwood floor. Michael had no time to marvel at how, a few moments ago, that had been some poor bastard who had made the mistake of trying to make a break for it out of his hiding spot. Needless to sa,y he didn’t stand a chance when pitted with Dean Winchester. The man’s green eyes turning jet black before he all but threw himself at him as soon as Michael shouted at the former hunter to stop him (Good to see he can follow orders when it suits him, The Antichrist thought grudgingly).

There was a terrible dark chuckle answered Michael’s question, as Dean looked up. The once hunter was smeared with more blood than Michael was. It was all over his face, across the stubble of his chin, his black shirt, and red button up, even starting to stain his blue jeans, and it certainly covered the ancient jawbone fashion into a blade, the first blade in fact, in the man’s hand. It seemed oddly fitting in a way, the once hunter now Knight of Hell didn’t have the Antichrist’s distaste for getting his hand dirty.

No… He lives for it, Michael thought.

He was born for it.

"Nah but admit it, Princess," Dean said easily, a terrible grin crossing his face. “It was fun as hell.”

Michael felt his jaw tighten feeling a flash of anger in his gut. He couldn’t allow himself to think of how it had been a physical effort to pull his eyes from the newly turned demon as he watched him work. Even as a hunter, the older Winchester was something to behold. Movements sharp, precise, that mark of a warrior trained to hunt monsters But bearing the Mark of Cain…Dean turned killing into an art form. A primal dance that was hard to pull away from even after the newly turned Knight of Hell just fucked Michael’s plan off into the sunset.

Michael couldn’t let himself think of how this awful, horrifying, utterly beautiful being was how Dean was supposed to be. Nor could he allow himself to think of how the hunter’s dirty blonde hair was just a little too mussed from its normal look and he fought the itch in his hand to correct it. But he couldn’t ignore the simple fact that blood on the other man’s face seemed to bring out the deeper hazel hues hidden in his sage colored eyes.

Dean meanwhile couldn’t help but watch as Michael sighed, starting to pace the room, appraising the damage. If Dean didn’t hear it in the other’s voice he could see it clearly from how the blonde was looking over the carnage, eyes lingering in disdain on bodies Dean knew he could add to his ever-growing kill count thanks to the mark:

Michael wasn’t happy.

Of course, he wasn’t, this wasn’t the way he liked to do things, hadn’t been since before when Dean was the hunter. Of course, it would be the same when the tables had been turned.

Dickhead Antichrist is such a damn hypocrite, Dean thought as he wiped the blood off his face, smearing it slightly but it was enough to get rid of that sticky feeling as it was starting to dry.

A few of these bodies had their hearts torn clean out, the blood belonging to them had trickled down Michael’s plump lips in a way that had made it really damn hard to focus even with the mark screaming in his veins, Kill Kill Kill! Not to mention the pile of ash that was at the corner of the bar that had once been of the fuckers who thought an exorcism would do anything other than burn their ears.

He fixed the Antichrist, his so-called lord, with a glare. Trying not to notice how Michael seemed to blaze even brighter when he was angry. Not for the first time… Dean wondered what the hell was wrong with him after all… It was so very hard to look away even if he wanted to.

Stupid damned prince...

"What the hell is wrong now, Lestat?" The knight of hell finally snorted after a few beats getting to his feet once more.

That little dig was one the former hunter turned knight knew Michael hated. Dean didn’t want to give the other the satisfaction of thinking he cared or anything in the like (because he didn’t damn it), but he was pretty done with this silent treatment. Only watching Michael paced the room doing… Well, whatever weird demonic shit he was doing. Was he destroying their souls? Or did he have to burn them for that? Did have to eat their hearts? Who knows?

“Oh, whatever gave you the idea something was wrong?” Michael replied coolly without missing a beat.

Smart ass.

Dean fixed him with one of the looks he had learned from watching his once little brother (once, it was easy to say once now, Demons didn’t have family at least that’s what he told himself). The phrase that's bullshit showing on every feature.

“Cause you’re acting like a little bitch, Mikey.” He said with a smirk (if Michael hated being referred to as an Anne Rice vampire, he despised that nickname even more). “You can't tell me you didn't like every damn minute of that. Here I was thinking you were a better liar than that.”

Michael stopped in his pacing, turning to Dean. His face was expressionless but his eyes… Dean wasn’t sure if it was because of the slight trace of sunset crimson (how the hell Michael could wear makeup and look like that while doing it was always beyond Dean) or the blood splatter on his face but his eyes seemed to shine. Even in the dim light of this shitty bar.

“I’m the one acting like a ‘little bitch’?” The Antichrist snapped. “Odd… I wasn’t the one who fucking started this temper tantrum because of something some Neanderthal with half a brain said.”

The smirk on the demon’s face sunk into a dirty look as something deep within him whimpered at Michael’s tone. Not this crap again, Dean thought. Hating the strange instinct he had developed since waking to serve the Son of Satan before him. Damn Knights of Hell and their damn Knightley bullshit.

“Dick was asking for it,” Dean said with a shrug.

“Oh?” Michael said turning to him full. “And he told you this, did he? Got on his knees as begged you to gut him when you insisted going to the bar after his outburst earlier? I must have missed that as you were suddenly breaking a bottle over his head, as I had made it very clear to you to leave it alone.”

The knight shrugged.

“Didn’t see you doing anything about it,” Dean said. “You think I'm gonna let some backwater bitch say that crap to me?”

Or say that crap about you, a terrible little thought in Dean’s mind added but he locked that up. Not wanting to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Meanwhile, Michael had fixed his knight with a glare that Dean half wondered if would cause him to burst into flames for a moment. He's probably still thinking about it so… Fuck it.

“You do realize I just had to whisper in the right ear and I wouldn’t have had to?” Michael said coldly. “There were some here who were thinking of getting revenge for a failed hunt he had been on and it wouldn't have taken much for them to seek it.”

“Cause that wouldn’t have taken too damn long.” Dean snorted, doubtful.

“It certainly wouldn’t have caused the entire bar to react when you decided to flash black eyes when started slamming his head against the bar repeatedly. Causing us to kill every one of them when I had made it very clear we were trying to keep a low profile-.”

“Yeah but that was awesome and you know it.”

“Dean...” Michael said as though he were dealing with an idiot child, something that grated on Dean’s nerves a bit up there with that annoying look on his face.

The knight tried not to think of how Michael hadn't ever called him that before. By his name. It was always Winchester, Hunter, or (quite recently) Knight or something like that. As if Dean were just another piece in the Antichrist’s game. This was probably the first time that silky voice had said it (his name, his) and something in him… Wanted to hear Michael say it just a few more times.

Just a few more.

Just one more.

“... Must I remind you again of what we are trying to do now that I have reclaimed the throne?” Michael continued.

Dean rolled his eyes, that feeling dashed with the reminder of the plan. Of course, he knew about the damn plan as Michael had all but beaten him over the head with it.

“We’re trying to take over hell, trying to get rid of the trash Crowley left behind, trying to start the Apocalypse up again,” Dean said, mimicking the Antichrist’s tone mockingly. “Blah be-blah blah blah.”

Dean could see a tick in Michael’s facade as he simplified this grand elaborate plan to just a few sentences. It was a small chink in the armor of Lucifer’s Kid but it was fun to see nonetheless. Just as he was about to try to put another chink in that armor, suddenly the Antichrist spoke.

“We’re trying to avoid the attention of those who would seek to thwart us before we set out what I was born to do… Righteous Man,” Michael replied.

Dean didn't just hear those two words, he felt them. Felt them as strong as the knife in his hand, tasted them as clear as the blood he felt on his tongue, heard them as clearly as the souls he had ripped apart what felt like a lifetime ago some days and felt like yesterday during others. He hadn't been called that in years but… Hearing it was like kicking a Pandora’s box of pain open, tearing open a scar that was barely healed.

Dean fixed Michael with an angry glare. The urge to attack starting to flicker in his veins.

“Or… Does something in you want us to fail?” Michael lilted suddenly

“Shut up.” Dean snapped.

The Mark branded on his arm started to ache as it started to awaken once more.

“It does, doesn’t it? You want them to find us, don’t you? That’s why you are not hiding it anymore aren’t you?”

“Shut your damn mouth.”

Dean could see red glowing at the edge of his vision. Knight or no, the mark was craving blood.

“After all… Any word of you would bring your beloved little brother running now, won’t it… Winchester? Do you think they would save you from what you have become? What you are? Your brother and that sweet little angel friend of yours… What were their names again? Castiel and Sa-.”

Michael didn't finish as, at that moment, Dean crossed the room in what seemed to be just a few steps. The hand without the blade going right to Michael’s throat, finger’s clenching. Instinctively the Antichrist’s arm raised and Dean felt the sharp edge of a blade Michael had claimed in the fray. In the hands of a normal human, it would be an annoying little pain. But in Michael’s hands though, with the power he possessed...

The hunter turned demon’s eyes locked onto the Antichrist’s, sage burning onto cerulean, as a war of instincts clashing in his mind. One crying KILL KILL KILL as the other screamed NOT HIM NOT HIM NOT HIM. Dean wanted to scream above the din in his seemingly empty soul for both of them to shut up but… He knew it was useless. Nothing every stopped it before and Dean was started to believe there was no force on earth that could 

“Ya gonna keep going, Princess?” The knight said with a terrible smile despite hating this, eye’s flashing black, raising the first blade as though to stab the man before him through the heart.

It would probably do nothing to Michael, it might do everything, but Dean was having trouble caring even though something in him knew he wouldn't be able to do it. Something would stop him before he tried. Something always did.

“I’m doing this cause I like doing it. You may be my king or whatever but don’t you think I give a damn about you or your little kingdom. I’m just here cause a regime change sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.”

To his surprise… Michael didn’t sputter, didn’t choke. Rather his blue eyes seemed to set alight, a slight smirk crossing his face for the first time since Dean had insisted that they go into this small hole in the wall bar. Dean wondered what it said about him that his black heart seemed to stop for a moment when he noticed it. Before he had the sense of danger that followed Michael like a shadow.

“Really?” Michael managed to get out, voice breathy, the sound going up Dean’s spine.

What was he-?

“Is that what you are still are telling yourself when you follow me, Dean?” Michael asked, silky voice honeyed. “I am to take that staring you have been doing as nothing more then forced devotion to your lord then? Defending him when someone slanders his name even among the the unwashed masses...”

That grin fell away from the former hunter’s face, replaced by an angry glare.

Damn it… He had thought he was being so careful sneaking glances when he could of the lithe man before him. Had thought the man was so focused on his plans of world destruction. Had thought he beat the bastard (the one who started all of this shit) into a pulp before Michael had heard what he had said to Dean… About him.

Dean really couldn’t be blamed for the way he was drawn to the man before him… Michael was far too damn handsome for his own good. The hunter had thought so when they first met the Son of Lucifer not long after his father had risen, and as a demon, as a Knight, it was far far worse.

Every awareness of him was heightened, maybe because Knights of Hell were created to serve their lord and thereby his son but it was true all the same. Dean could hear every sweet breath that left the Antichrist’s too soft lips, could feel the silky waves of hair when the blonde would pull those locks back on occasion, could almost sense that too hot skin when his lord would change in their shared room (because of course they had to share a fucking room as something in him felt the need to protect Michael even though he had the feeling Michael didn’t need protecting). Even he knew choking Michael like this wouldn’t do anything to him other then annoy him…

And give Dean an excuse to touch that golden sun kissed skin that he had craved touching since the day they met.

Dean had hoped that Michael was done. That he wouldn’t keep digging. He couldn't know could he? No, he couldn't, Dean was careful. Besides, Michael may have that night vision of the soul but his soul was too corrupted and black too see right? Dean’s answer came in the way that smirk became a full blown smile.

“... Not the sounds I have heard you make the shower when you think I’ve gone or when you think I'm asleep. When you moan my name… Should I call them false prayers of thanks to your savior?”

The blade almost tumbled from Dean’s hands in shock.

Son of a bitch!

Dean jerked his hand away from the man’s throat as if Michael had burned him, stumbling back from the Antichrist snarling as if the other man had struck him. Yet he didn’t have an excuse for that one ready. Wasn’t prepared. Rather he was kicking himself.

He had sworn he had been quiet.

Had sworn that Michael had gone.

Dean you stupid son of a bitch, He thought. Self hate was an old friend of his… Even as a demon. And he could taste it’s bitterness. He went to tear and stalk away when he felt something on his cheek. 

Long clever ringed fingers tracing the stubble on his face. It’s strange… But… The dance of those fingers across his face… They felt like home. The silence in his head, the ringing urge to kill... It was a barely even a rumble of thunder in a oncoming storm He heard Michael chuckle and looked up to see the devil’s smile… Yet there was something in it. Something that made something in him he thought was dead with his humanity stop.

Something fond, something almost sweet… Something that blazed and Dean suddenly had the urge to burn.

Michael was suddenly stepping closer and closer into his space. The scent of that spicy, musky cologne mixed with the metallic tang of blood washing over him. Dean was finding hard to breath as the Antichrist started to trace down his chest with the edge of the knife. As the fingers on his cheek started to leave scorching paths up his jaw, going to the small hairs on the back of his neck. A bit of tenderness followed by the threat of pain. Yet Dean had a feeling in Michael’s hands… It would be like heaven and hell rolled into one.

Michael was close now, so close that Dean could feel the heat of him. And the former hunter could feel his breath catch when the Antichrist forced his head down slightly. Dean's eyes slid closed as he could feel the Michael's breath dance across his lips, felt his nose nudge against his own.

“Pity you insist on being a fucking thorn in my side as your false lord would have been tempted to answer those cries for salvation.”

Dean's eyes snapped open, seeing that smug smile on Michael’s face.

“You bastard son of-!”

“Now now Dean, you went against my wishes. Do you really think I would reward such misbehavior?” Michael said, pulling his hand away. “Perhaps you will do well to remember. In the meantime do insist that if you must attack like a rabid wolf you do so when the occasion calls for it. Regardless of how... Amusing it is to see a wolf tear apart the sheep.”

Dean was tempted to snap back, tempted to grab that hand and put it back on his face, when he noticed Michael’s too blue eyes lingering on his own lips. Unconsciously, he couldn’t help but wet them, tasting the lingering bits of beer and whiskey. Trying not to wonder if Michael’s would taste like that red wine he had ordered (cause Michael would order wine in a dive bar, the high and mighty prick) or the blood of those hearts he had taken bites out of like candy or a mixture of the two. Something in Dean craved to find out but knew he couldn’t…

Not until his lord gave him leave. Although he didn’t give a shit about everything else Michael spouted or believed in or everything else… This was something that would be so much sweeter when he did.

And damn am I going to make that little shit pay for it when I fucking get it.

He swore he saw a spark in Michael’s eyes at that thought but it faded as soon as he tried to focus on it.

“Come,” Michael said. “We have work to do.”

“Yeah yeah,” Dean muttered.

The knight glanced over to the jukebox, the telltale clicking sounds making it clear it was changing records once more.

“Actually hang on…”

Dean put the First Blade in his belt as he strode over to the jukebox, he reached over grabbing a nearby unbroken chair (probably one of the few in the whole place), a grin crossing his face as the first few notes of a new song rang out. He could hear Michael sigh, could feel the Antichrist roll his eyes. He was betting through that the other man was probably eyeing him, could almost feel it with his demonic senses like he could sense everything to do with his lord. And for some reason, he wanted Michael to watch.

Dean pulled the chair close, pulling it so it would be easy to lift up and then…

Wham! Wham! Wham!

The music became disjointed, off-key with a loud sound of metal twisting, glass breaking, wood cracking as Dean took the chair to the jukebox. The sound of the new song sounding terribly discordant and broken.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

Soon the jukebox was sputtering.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

Wham!

And with a few crackles and a few fading notes… The jukebox died.

“Do you feel better now?” Michael said with a chuckle.

“Oh yeah, that one from the Stones was the only decent song on that damn thing. I looked, everything else sucked. Lead on boss.”

Cause if you insist on being a tease then I'm gonna check out that ass of yours. Dean thought.

Not for the first time, he wondered if Michael could read minds as he tilted his head slightly. But he shook his head and led them out of the bar nonetheless as suddenly flames erupted behind them the scent of burning cloth, wood, flesh, and alcohol following them as they made their way to the door.

As they did Dean couldn’t help but think, Maybe this pain in the ass Antichrist ain't too bad after all. And Dean could swear he caught Michael trying to hide a smile as they stepped into the night...

---

Tagged: @sojournmichael (HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOO!)  @youshouldbescared and @eternally-jkatherinehale 

Trivia- Title and lyrics song from Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil”

[madshelley]

gimmie a quick rundown of which scenes break your heart the most, i'm not sad enough and need the pain.

I love you and this is both the best and worstthing anyone has never asked me, because apparently, I have no clue what a “quick”rundown means.  I also tried very hard tonot make this entirely about Armand and… I failed about midway through. Butin my defense, can you ever be sad enough? No, you can’t.

SO HERE’S THE TOP JUST-A-BIT-TOO-MANY LIST OFHEARTBREAKING VAMPIRE MOMENTS™:

- Louiskilling the Marquis, and both his and Lestat’s reactions to it. Louis draggingLestat to his abusive father’s bed and forcing him to speak forgiveness,despite the fact that Lestat is having an obvious meltdown (“He threw up hishands and let out a terrible roar of desperation.  ‘Damn him! Kill him!’ he said.”/“Lestatdanced like the maddened Rumpelstilskin about to put his foot through thefloor”/ “Never had I seen him so weak and at the same time enraged”), thatLouis, in his lack of information, mistakes for impatience and indifference.Damn dysfunctional vampires with a thing for miscommunication.  If only there was a scene with the two of themdiscussing this in a later book, it would probably make the list too. But,alas.

Rest of the list under cut because of excessively long post that no one’s going to read:

 - Louisdumping Lestat’s ‘body’ in the bog.

“This is Lestat. This is all oftransformation and mystery, dead, gone into eternal darkness. I  felt a pull suddenly, as if some force wereurging me to go down with him, to descend into the dark water and never comeback”.

          For no other reason, but that I feelthis is the prime example of Louis’ tendency to be unable to take control ofhis life and stand up for himself and what he wants, ending up being a passive observerof the most tragic events of his life, lamenting them only when it’s too late.Oh, Louis.

-Armandlying to himself about his relationship with Marius.

“A love so strong hecouldn’t allow me to grow old and die. A love that waited patiently until I wasstrong enough to be born to darkness.”

-I don’t normally care about Madeleine, but thisquote shatters my heart on a daily basis, considering the context in which IwtVwas written.

“And cruelly, surely, I said to her, ‘Did you love this child?’

I will never forget her face then, the violence in her, the absolute hatred.‘Yes.’ She all but hissed the words at me. ‘How dare you!’ She reached for thelocket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was consuming her, not love. Itwas guilt- that shop of dolls Claudia had described to me, shelves and shelvesof the effigy of that dead child”.

-Armandleaving Louis, unable to bear the loveless, cold partnership anymore, indespair and suicidal. Especially this part of the farewell speech:

“AndI believed I would gather you to me and hold you. And time would open to us,and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave youhappiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain.My power would be your power. My strength the same. But you’re dead inside tome, you’re cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I’m not here, beside you. And,not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don’t exist atall”.

Armand,the break-up line master. Jesus Christ.

-“Hebent down, pressing his head against my chest and holding my hand so tight thathe caused me pain. The room was filled with the flashing red light of thesiren, and then it was going away.

‘Louis,I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,’ he growled through his tears. ‘Help me,Louis, stay with me’.”

- Theway IwtV ends in general, with no silver lining or sliver of hope. Lestat andArmand are dying, of old age and despair, Louis is continuing his existencelike a bloodless empty shell, seeing no possibility of recovery or light at theend of the tunnel, and there is no comforting cosmic reason anything is everhappening at all.  Life is pain and youdon’t even die. No wonder IwtV is such a downer to the non-initiated.

- LittleLestat being beaten bloody by his father and brothers.

-“Andwhen we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that wewould go down and down and down. It was what I wanted rather that what theywanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would godown! We were supposed to go down”.

- Armandbegging Lestat and Gabrielle to take him with them and them refusing. I’m notgoing to go into details, I feel this is an obvious one.

Exceptfor these gems:

“Maybeas the years pass, desire will come again to me. I will know appetite again,even passion. Maybe when we meet in another age, these things will not beabstract and fleeting. I’ll speak with a vigour that matches yours, instead ofmerely reflecting it”.

and

“Armandwas a small boy in the doorway, holding the backs of his own arms”.

Theconsistent implication throughout the series that Armand gets cold when he’supset does things to my heart.

- Armand’sadmonition to Lestat that fledglings are bound to despise their makers, simplybecause it’s not true, or at least it doesn’t seem to be in most cases. IsArmand projecting because he’s practically almost incapable of verbalcommunication at this point in his life which makes a hindered mind gift seemlike an unsurpassable obstacle in his mind? Or is he projecting because, onsome level, he knows his relationship with Marius was abusive and probablydoomed? (Spoiler alert: probably both.)

- Mariuscalling Armand his mistake.

-Lestat hearing Armand crying after he pushedhim off the roof:

“Maybe I imagined it, his lastinvitation, and the anguish after. The weeping. I do know that as the monthspassed he was out there again. I heard him from time to time just walking thoseold Garden District streets. And I wanted to call to him, to tell him that itwas a lie I’d spoken to him, that I did love him. I did.”.

- “Uglyfights, terrible fights, finally, Armand broken down, glassy-eyed with silentrage, then crying softly but uncontrollably as if some lost emotion had beenrediscovered which threatened to tear him apart”.

-“Evenin moments of the greatest jeopardy, I knew we would meet before I would befree to die.”

Tell me again how Armand’s suicideattempt in Memnoch was out of character.

-Lestatbelieving that Daniel would have left Night Island with him if he had askedhim. So much theoretical pain.

- It’sa pity that Daniel leaving Armand isn’t technically  ~a scene, because that would make the top ofthe list.

- Everyscene in which Lestat is “haunted” by Claudia in TotBT. It’s not hard to seehow he made the connection between her and the Raglan episode, even with himnever straight-up admitting it to himself. Remember when Lestat still feltcrippling guilt for his worst actions, even subconsciously? Good times.

- David’sturning. But this is not the time to complain about this, it’s canon heartbreakappreciation time!

- Armand’ssuicide attempt in Memnoch the Devil. I’ve already elaborated on this way toomuch, but let’s take a moment to appreciate Lestat screaming Armand’s nameafter him. Take a moment. Thank you.

- Louisobjecting to Lestat being chained to the floor, but being completely dismissed.

- Theentire The Vampire Armand. I can’t let myself elaborate too much on this, as I’lljust be reciting the entire book. I can just open it to a random page and itwill probably be a Top Heartbreaking Vampire Moment:

 Armand’sobvious exhaustion at the beginning of the book, that no one seems to respect. Himscolding himself and admitting to David he feels he’s going mad. A child silentlywishing for death so hard, that Marius heard it amongst the mental voices ofthe entire city. Armand’s entire “relationship” with Marius. Armand having a breakdownat seeing religious imagery, not yet being sure why he has that reaction. Meetinghis parents, especially the broken Ivan. The “Bridge of Sighs” metaphor, Jesus.The ashes of the Palazzo boys. The whole Riccardo horror. Armand trying toconceal his scarred face from Benji and Sybelle, putting all his energy intothe illusion. The shattering feeling of betrayal about the turning of Armand’s “children”by Marius, and Armand’s conviction that it was meant as punishment. Louis beingunable to conceal his relief and joy to see Armand alive. Armand’s bitter, hurtdismissal of his relationship with Daniel as doomed from the start. Armandadmitting that Sybelle and Benji had to coax him out of depressive episodes attimes. Man, did Anne go ham on the pain in this one. Why, mom?

- Specialmention to that one time Marius beat Armand out of “frustration” at him fortaking too long to emotionally get over his visit to Kiev, probably his mostblatantly abusive moment in the book.

“‘You’ve had enough time to grieve and to weep,’ hesaid, ‘and to reevaluate all you’ve been given. Now it’s back to work. Go tothe desk and prepare to write. Or I’ll whip you some more.’”

“He smacked me across the face. I was dizzy.”

Nice going, Marius.

- Secondspecial mention to this little passage, because no one ever talks about it andit makes my heart bleed:

“ I looked off, wanting the quiet, dreamingof bowers suddenly, not in words but in images, the way my old mind would doit, wanting to lie down in garden beds among growing flowers, wanting to pressmy face to earth and sing softly to myself”.

- Thirdspecial mention to this, but only out of context:

“For all the wrongs done you, andthe loneliness you’ve suffered, and the horrors that the world put upon youwhen you were too young and too untried to know how to fight them and then toovanquished to wage a battle with a full heart”.  

- SeeingDaniel in Blood and Gold after all those years. The shock of the degree inwhich his mental stability deteriorated, not objecting to being kept by Mariuslike a child. The terrifying possibilities of how he might have ended up therein the first place. The even more terrifying possibility that it might havebeen the news of Armand’s “death” that pushed him over the edge. How Armandmust have felt about this ‘relationship’.

- I am definitely not done, and yet I’m going to stop ‘cause even I had enough.

Tl;dr: Sad Vampires.

[5hfanfiction]

When the Night Comes - 13

Chapter 13: Rendezvous

Year 2016 – Miami – The Safe Zone

            “Alright,” Camila said awkwardly as she happily made eye contact with the emerald-eyed girl. “Last night, Lauren and I talked about where we could start on how we might just win this war.”

            “Mmhmm… yes, ‘talked’.” Dinah said sarcastically as she made eye contact with Normani. Normani must have told her everything she saw.

            “How does talking turn into such sinful activity?” Ally whispered to herself. She was obviously still shaken up from what she had seen.

            Camila rolled her eyes and said, “Okay, Lauren and I had sex. That’s it, end of story. Can we move on now?”

            “Are you in love with her?” Ally asked the petite brunette seriously. “If you are, I have to give Lauren twenty dollars. So, please say no.”

            Lauren looked over at Lucy who was sitting in the corner of the room by herself. She knew that she was listening to the conversation but she seemed unaffected by the things being said. She really doesn’t remember anything. She doesn’t remember anything about her, not anymore. How? Lauren thought to herself.  Lauren returned her attention to the petite brunette, awaiting her response.

            “Yes,” Camila admitted to Ally. “I am in love with her.” Camila looked at Lauren and smiled at her. Her heart skipped a beat when Lauren smiled back.

            “Shoot,” Ally whispered to herself, clearly disappointed that she just lost twenty dollars. “I’ll get you the money once we’re not caught in the middle of a war between two armies.”

            “That’s fine,” Lauren laughed at Ally. “You don’t have to give me any money.”

            “If she doesn’t want it, I’ll take it.” Dinah raised her hand up to catch Ally’s attention. Clearly she was in a better mood than she was the day before. Normani talked her into giving the group a chance. Dinah was unwilling at first but after a few hours of non-stop talking, she finally gave in.

            Normani gave Dinah a stern look as to say that it wasn’t the time to be playing games. Dinah cleared her throat and sank back in her chair. It was as if Normani was Dinah’s boss whom she was scared of for some reason. Lauren noticed the exchange between the two and thought nothing more of it than a little fun between two new friends.

            Lauren interrupted the irrelevant conversation and said, “Camila, tell them where we think we should start.”

            Camila’s attention went from Normani and Dinah over to the beautiful emerald-eyed girl as she said, “Cliff. He’s the only lead we have at the moment.”

            “What makes you think that Cliff knows anything about your family?” Dinah asked as she moved forward in her seat, shifting a few more times to get into a more comfortable position.

            “Last time we saw him he was a little shaken up about something,” Camila recalled, her eyes became unfocused on the other girls in the room as she wandered around in her mind trying to remember any more details about the night they caught Cliff. “He even refused to go back to my parents. He said something about being punished, didn’t he? It’s just all a little bizarre. Then my parents were a little too happy to see Cliff back. Until then, they didn’t even know about him. He was just another werewolf to them. They’ve never been the kind of people who were accepting of anything other than human.”

            “Don’t you have a million supernatural things working for you?” Lauren asked the petite brunette.

            “Not for me,” Camila corrected the emerald-eyed girl. “They work for my family… and yes, they do have a lot of supernatural beings working for them. There are ghosts, zombies, werewolves… you name it and they have it.”

            Normani shifted in her seat and decided to pitch in the conversation, “Do they work for your family due to mutual belief? Or do they work for them like slaves?”

            Camila looked at Normani and she wondered about the answer to that question as well. She didn’t know the answer. She had always thought that it was due to mutual belief but after giving the subject more thought, she wouldn’t be surprised if it was the other option. Camila took a deep breath after much thought and said, “I would believe now that it’s more along the lines of slavery, despite what I’ve been told over the years. I thought that they respected them even if they didn’t necessarily like them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been forced to work for them after all this time.”

            “Okay,” Lauren was sorry she asked. She didn’t mean to make the slayer think more about the secrets that her family might be keeping from her. She knew already that the slayer was sad, disappointed and confused about the whole situation. The slayer lived her whole life thinking she was on the good side, but now all of that seemed different. What had she been fighting for all these years? “How do we find him?”

            “What makes you think he’s not already dead?” Dinah asked the group. It was a pessimistic question but it was a valid question. The group’s only lead could be nothing if the Cabello family had already disposed of him.

            “We’re just going to have to hope that he isn’t.” Camila said as she swallowed. She was nervous. She didn’t know what else to do if Cliff ended up being a dead-end.

            “Where should we start?” Ally said, smiling. She placed a hand on Camila’s and made sure that the petite brunette knew she was on her side. It was true. Ally was on her side. She would do anything for the petite brunette, even if the road was not as clear as she wanted it to be.

            “I may be able to help,” A deep voice said behind Ally. It was a man, tall, dark and a little big around the waist. “My name is Robert, former wizard for the Cabello family. I am here in courtesy of an old friend.” As Robert introduced himself, he looked over at Lucy who was still sat in the corner, now unfocused on the conversation happening between the girls. He said nothing about the “old friend” being the girl in the corner, but he knew he needed to help her even if she remembered nothing. He promised a long time ago that he would. Four hundred years later, he still didn’t plan to break that promise.

            Camila looked at the man and realized it was the man in her dreams. It was him. She decided not to say anything as to not appear crazy around the other girls. Instead she stood up and asked him, “What do you know that can help us?”

            “I can help you track whoever it is you are looking for,” Robert said as he focused his attention on Camila. “I just need you to find a very old book.”

            “Where can we find this… book?” Camila asked, not even bothering to ask the man any further questions. At this point the slayer was desperate.

            “A vampire named Lestat. He was the last to have the book. I need you to go to his estate and retrieve what is rightfully mine.” Robert informed them. He wasted no time. He understood the situation that the group was in and he knew that they needed to work quickly if they wanted to save Miami.

            “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Lauren said, biting her lip in anger.

            “What’s wrong?” Camila shot Lauren a worrying look. She was also a little turned on after Lauren bit her lip in anger.

            “Remember that guy we met at the parking lot?” Lauren asked the petite brunette, trying to help her recall a memory from a while back. “That’s Lestat. He was the vampire that turned me into a vampire. Bastard…”

            “Do you know where we could find him?” Camila asked, a little anger brewing up inside of her. She was angry that this vampire took Lauren’s life away from her and made her into something she never wanted to be. At the same time, she was a little thankful because that’s what allowed the two of them to be together. It was selfish of her to think that but it was true, where would she have been without Lauren right now? Would she still be working for her family who turned out to not be so good after all?

            “He found me once,” Lauren sighed. She was about to regret the words she was going to say next. “He can find me again. We just need to get word around with all the vampires. It’ll make its way to him. I really don’t want to see him but if it helps save the city, I’ll do it.”

            “I’ll get started right away.” Normani said as she got onto her feet. Immediately, she walked out of the room and did just what she said she would.

            “I’ll help her.” Dinah followed the dark-skinned vampire.

            “Is it just me or are those two getting a little too close to each other?” Ally pointed out. She knew that there was something going on between the two. She always had a knack for sensing when two people are falling for each other.

            Lauren smiled and said, “I think it’s good that they’re finally getting along. I think it helps lighten the mood up a little. I mean, Normani is the only that can somehow control Dinah’s temper. It helps get things done as well.”

            Robert cleared his throat and interrupted the conversation. He stepped forward and made it clear he had more to say as he raised his hand to say, “Now that those two are off to do that, I would like to share some valuable information with you.” Robert pointed at Lauren and looked straight into her eyes.

            “What is it?” Lauren was taken aback.

            “What if I told you that there was a way to reverse your vampirism?” Robert smiled. He wanted to help the emerald-eyed girl. He had a special place for her in his heart after all the things that Lucy had said about her in the past.

            Camila diverted her attention to Robert as her eyes opened wide. She then looked at the emerald-eyed girl and smiled. There was hope for Lauren. For once, there was hope for the two of them. Camila almost jumped in excitement when she saw Lauren smile at the words that Robert had just said.

            “What do I have to do?” Lauren asked, joy filling her body.

            Robert’s facial expression became more serious than before. He took a deep breath and said, “First you must kill the one who created you, then you must drain yourself of blood. As blood pours out of you, a spell must be casted on a stake. The stake will then be plunged into your heart, killing the monster inside of you. But be warned, not all rituals end successfully. Once you turn human, every wound inflicted on your body during your vampire life will remain. It doesn’t matter if the wound was inflicted hundreds of years ago or just yesterday. Once you turn human, you will feel each and every single one of them. For some, the pain is too great. For some, it is not. Those that you have turned will turn back as well. They too will feel the pain of all their wounds.”

            “I’ve lived for a very long time,” Lauren recalled all the times that she should’ve died. “Is there a way that I could avoid all that pain? Or at least, dying from it?”

            “Seeking a healer might help,” Robert suggested. “Of course they can only cast a few spells before having to recharge. Considering you’ve been alive for over five hundred years, your chance of living is very slim.”

            “How did you know I’ve been alive for that long?” Lauren asked, surprised that the wizard knew.

            “Like you, I’ve been around for a very long time as well,” Robert told her. “I’ve heard of your work.”

            Lauren remained quiet and waited to hear more about what the wizard had to say. She was not in the mood to recall all the bad memories again.

            Robert was quick to realize that the emerald-eyed girl was not going to talk about her somewhat evil past. So, the wizard continued, “We may be able to resurrect you if you do die in result of the ritual. To do so, we’re going to need to sacrifice someone in order to keep you alive.”

            “You know, maybe it’s better if I stay a vampire.” Lauren laughed it off. She was clearly disappointed that the only chance she had of becoming human again was such a difficult task.

*

            “Master,” A tall, pale vampire said, trying to get his leader’s attention. “We’ve gotten word from Lauren Jauregui. She wants to see you.”

            “She wants to see me?” Lestat asked with excitement in his voice. He sat in a throne-like arm chair with his feet up on a long wooden table. In his hand was a knife that he used to clean under his fingernails. “That can’t be. What does she want?”

            “That was all we heard, Master,” The tall, pale vampire said nervously. He was afraid what the Master would do. The vampire knew that the Master didn’t like a lack in information. “I promise you, Master. That was all we heard.” The vampire bowed to his Master, afraid that tonight would be his last night.

            “Very well,” Lestat said as he laid his knife down on the table. “Send word that I would like to meet her.”

            “Where would you like to meet her, Master?” The tall, pale vampire asked as he stood straight. He tried hard to be as proper as possible as he remembered all of the Master’s rules.

            “Set up a meeting somewhere far from here,” Lestat stood up from his chair. He fixed his maroon suit, making sure he looked proper and clean and then afterward, slicking his hair back. “Tell her to come alone.”

            Lestat dismissed the vampire and smiled. He smiled because he was right all along. He knew, deep down, that the emerald-eyed vampire would come seeking for his help one day. Now, it has happened. There was no other reason for wanting to meet other than him giving her something she needed. Lestat thought and decided that he would make Lauren work for whatever it is she sought out. They needed to make up for lost years. They could have been so good together if only she had stayed. She was supposed to be his vampire queen and he was supposed to be her vampire king. Together, they would have caused terror around the city.

*

            “You’re Ally, right?” Lucy asked, her eyes focused on the wall instead of the girl stood right in front of her. Lucy was sat on the ground, her knees up to her chest and her hands in her lap.

            “Yes,” Ally responded, surprised at the sudden contact from the other girl. “What is it?”

            “Where am I?” Lucy’s eyes slowly made their way to Ally’s.

            “We’re in the Safe Zone,” Ally explained as she sat down beside Lucy. “It’s a place where people come to retire from their jobs as demon slayers.”

            “Is that what you are?” Lucy asked. Her head was full of things that didn’t make sense to her. She couldn’t remember anything. Every memory that she had before she appeared from the portal was gone. She couldn’t remember who she was, where she was from and what she was like.

            “Yes,” Ally answered. “You were a demon slayer once too. Do you remember anything from the past?”

            “No,” Lucy closed her eyes. She tried to recall any memory that could help her remember but she came up with nothing. “I can’t remember anything. All I see is darkness.”

            “Do you remember that girl?” Ally pointed at Lauren who was sat down with Camila.

            Lucy tried to remember. She had a feeling that she was supposed to remember the emerald-eyed girl but couldn’t. She closed her eyes and searched deep in her mind but again, nothing came up. Lucy sighed and said, “I can’t remember her. I feel like I should. Who is she exactly?”

            “I feel like you should talk to her about that,” Ally said sadly. “I’m sure she’ll tell you everything you want to know. She’s known you longer than anybody here.”

            “Are they together?” Lucy asked, her eyes dropped down to her hands.

            “I think so,” Ally answered as best she could. She wasn’t too sure about the answer as well. “They had a lot of complications in the past. It’s kind of hard to tell where they’re at on the relationship scale really. One of them keeps denying it then running off. One of them would shut the other one out. They’re confusing, okay?”

            Lucy laughed as she watched the two on the couch. Her heart became light as she watched the two get comfortable with each other. “At least they found each other at a time like this. I’ve been listening to your conversation and it seems like we’re living in some dark times. To see that there’s a little bit of light in everybody’s lives, it’s a refreshing thing to see.”

            “I agree,” Ally said, smiling at the two on the couch. “Camila deserves this. She deserves love. For a long time she focused on nothing but work. Now, she’s found something worthy stopping for. I hope she doesn’t throw it all away. That would definitely break my heart.”

            “What makes you think she’ll throw it all away?” Lucy furrowed her eyebrows and looked at Ally.

            “I just know that Camila would do anything for that girl.” Ally answered. She was worried that it might have to come down to the thing she was afraid of.

            “Don’t worry,” Lucy placed a hand on Ally’s arm. “I’m sure they’ll have a happy ending.”

            “I hope so.” Ally said sadly. She tried hard not to think about the fact that not all demon slayers get a happy ending. She wanted to believe Lucy and wait for the couple’s happy ending but something was telling her that wasn’t going to be the case.

            Suddenly, the door to the room opened. Normani and Dinah rushed inside and informed the group of the news that they’d just heard. Lestat, the vampire that they reached out to, had returned word. Normani did as best she could to remember the vampire’s exact words as she handed Lauren a piece of paper. Normani told the emerald-eyed vampire that Lestat wanted to meet her alone at the address written on the paper.

            “Do you think this is his actual address?” Lauren asked as she showed Camila.

            “What do you think?” Camila asked. She knew that Lauren knew more about him. After all, he turned her into a vampire a long time ago.

            “Well, I know that he would be too smart to give his actual address,” Lauren said as she played around with the paper in her hands. “I’ll scout it out. See what happens from there.”

            “You’re not actually thinking of going there alone, are you?” Camila asked. Her face changed to a worried look. She was not going to allow Lauren walk into a trap.

            “What else are we supposed to do? We need that book.” Lauren looked around, searching for anyone who agreed with her.

            “I say we should think about this for a bit,” Ally suggested. “I don’t want you walking into your death, Lauren. We should make a plan.”

            “I agree,” Camila said, placing a hand on Lauren’s. “I don’t want you getting hurt, okay?”

            Lauren looked deeply into Camila’s eyes and said, “Okay, we’ll figure out a plan.”

            “Whipped.” Dinah whispered to Normani, followed by a short laugh and a fake cough.

*

Year 2016 – Middle of nowhere

            Lauren stepped out into the dark, empty field. It was midnight and she was all alone. The girls have devised a plan that would guarantee Lauren’s safety, at least one which would guarantee her life, after tonight. They knew that if anybody else had showed up with Lauren, worse things would happen. They were working with vampires after all.

            The crunch of the gravel under her feet was the only sound she could hear. Everything else around her was silent. The air was refreshing and cool. It was cold enough outside to cause the girl to shiver. Who knew vampires still reacted that way to temperature? She looked around and saw nothing. Five minutes have passed and no one was around. Lestat and his men should have been there by now.

            Suddenly, Lauren jumped at the voice behind her saying, “You’re early.”

            Lauren turned around and her eyes were met with several silhouettes. She clenched her jaw and said, “You’re late.”

            “Sorry,” Lestat said as he wiped at the corner of his mouth. “We got distracted.”

            “Can we just get this over with?” Lauren asked. She was clearly not in the mood to play games.

            “Alright,” Lestat smiled evilly. “What do you want?”

            Lauren put her hand in her pocket and fished out a lighter. She produced a flame and shined it at Lestat and his men. There were only four of them. Lestat moved his hand over his eyes to block out some of the light. Once his eyes have adjusted he let his hand fall to his side once more. Lauren let out a calm breath and said, “I want a book of old spells that you took from a wizard named Robert. It looks like this.” Lauren held out a piece of paper with a sketch of the book. Robert had drawn it there.

            “I know of which book you speak of,” Lestat said, waving his hand as to dismiss the drawing. “It’s somewhere at home. You can have it if you like… I just need something in return.”

            “How did I know you were going to strike up a deal?” Lauren laughed.

            Lestat joined Lauren’s laughter and said, “I mean… I guess it’s because we’ve known each other for so long. We know everything about each other, right?” Lestat moved closer to Lauren and continued, “And I know for a fact that you really care about the people closest to you. I want something you have, someone you fell in love with. I know you have Lucy. Give her to me and I will let you have the book.”

            “I’m not letting you have her,” Lauren clenched her fist, the one that held the piece of paper of Robert’s drawing. “What else do you want?”

            Lestat looked at Lauren amazed. He licked his lips and said, “I didn’t think you would go against what Lucy wanted.”

            “What are you talking about?” Lauren asked, confused.

            “Oh,” Lestat bit his lip and laughed. “I thought Lucy told you! Oh, that’s right, she didn’t. She didn’t tell you about how she disappeared. I guess maybe it’s because she lost all of her memories.”

            “How do you know all of this?” Lauren was getting angry now. How was it that Lestat knew more about what happened to Lucy than her?

            Lestat smiled wide and explained, “Well you see, she came to me a long, long time ago. Her family was after you and her. They caught me and well, used me for information. They knew that I was watching the two of you. I knew that you fled to the New World. They followed and I went with them. And then little Lucy always knew that they would catch up to the two of you so she came to me. I don’t know how she found me but she did. She told me, ‘Take me to Hell… alive. If you do that, I will do anything for you when I come back. I will not remember anything. I will be helpless; you can do anything to me.’ Of course, with an offer like that I took it. I love a little bit of drama here and there. Watching you go crazy about losing her was the best thing I’d ever seen. Then, you remember when you… um… came to me asking for help? Then I slammed the door on your face and left you there? That was great. You passed up a great opportunity to be with me, Lauren. We could’ve been amazing together. We could’ve owned this city, this world!”

            “Where is this story going exactly?” Lauren tried to keep a level head but deep down, there was anger growing.

            Lestat moved even closer to Lauren, his face next to hers. He spoke close to her ear, “I took Lucy to Hell, just like she asked, in exchange for her. That night at the Bronze, I was supposed to take her home with me but then you and your friends showed up with an army of slayers. I was going to take her home and I was going to do things to her… unspeakable things. So, Lauren…. I just want what’s rightfully mine unless you have a better idea.”

            “Take me instead,” Lauren offered. “I’m not letting you have her or anybody else.” Lauren needed to find a way to get into Lestat’s hideaway. It had to be her and nobody else.

            “I don’t know,” Lestat laughed. “Something tells me that that’s a bad idea.”

            “Then you should just kill me because I’m not going to tell you where she is.” Lauren said as she closed the lighter. Everything was dark once more and Lauren used it to her advantage to get out of Lestat’s way as he tried to pounce at her.

            Lestat’s men scrambled to find Lauren but the emerald-eyed vampire vanished into thin air. It turned out that the Lauren at the meeting was only her soul called an “astral body”. Lauren’s astral body acted as eyes and ears for the group back at the Safe Zone without putting Lauren in any real danger. Her soul was free to walk around outside of her body with the only danger of being lost forever and never being able to return.

            As Lestat’s men found no more traces of Lauren, they abandoned their search and Lestat decided to return home. Lauren, in her astral form, followed them back.

            “How is it that a vampire can still do this?” Camila asked Robert who was sat down with a crystal ball watching the action.

            “Unless you are made of pure evil, then you will have a soul,” Robert informed the slayer. “Lauren is far from evil.”

            “I just never thought that anything that isn’t human could have one.” Camila admitted as she sighed.

            “You’d be surprised of all the things that we’ve misinterpreted,” Robert said, smiling. “You’ve been trained to think this way; don’t feel bad for not realizing it until now. Just be sure not to close your mind to ideas that may contradict what you’ve been taught your whole life. Remember, not everything you’ve been told is right.”

            Camila looked at Robert with a smile before turning to look at Lauren who was lying on her back. It seemed as if she was asleep. She looked peaceful. On the other side of the room, there sat Lucy. Camila was curious as to what the new girl was thinking. She wondered if she could remember anything.

            Camila walked over to Lucy and sat down with her as the brown-haired girl read the book in her hand. Lucy was so consumed in the story that she didn’t even realize that Camila had sat next to her. Camila cleared her throat to get the brown-haired girl’s attention.

            “I’m sorry if I bothered you,” Camila said awkwardly. “I just wanted to know how you’re holding up.”

            “I’m fine,” Lucy said just as awkwardly as the petite brunette. “I’m still pretty confused. This is all very new to me.”

            “You really don’t remember anything?” Camila asked, hoping to get something out of the brown-haired girl.

            “I would like to,” Lucy admitted, closing her book. “I just… all I see is black when I try to remember anything before you saved me. Well, sometimes I see images of places I don’t remember. It’s all pretty broken. I don’t remember any complete memories. It’s as if someone took all of them from me.”

            “In this world I wouldn’t be surprised if someone did.” Camila laughed a little.

            Lucy joined Camila’s laughter and asked, “Can you tell me a little more about what’s really happening? Or can you tell me anything about me?”

            Camila hesitated at first but looking at the brown-haired girl and how confused she looked, she decided to tell her everything she knew. Camila sighed and said, “Well, this is going to sound crazy but you were a demon slayer from the sixteenth century. And from what I’ve heard, you fell in love with an emerald-eyed vampire.” Camila looked at Lauren, causing Lucy to follow her gaze. “You disappeared and was never heard from again. You’re my great aunt times a hundred.”

            “You’re right,” Lucy said, her face was emotionless. She didn’t know how to feel about the new information. She was a little surprised to have been a former lover of the vampire in front of her. “That does sound crazy. And did she… love me back?”

            “Lauren?” Camila asked, her eyes on her hands.

            “Yes.” Lucy answered.

            “She did,” Camila answered in a half truth. She didn’t want to admit to Lucy that Lauren still had feelings for her. She didn’t want to lose the emerald-eyed girl again. “That’s all I really know.”

            “Well clearly I didn’t love her that much because I don’t remember anything about our relationship.” Lucy joked, trying to lighten up the mood.

            Camila was about to speak when Robert beckoned the petite brunette to look at the crystal ball in front of him. Camila quickly made her way to Robert’s side and watched the crystal ball, looking for what was so important. There was a clear image of Lestat’s estate. It was an old mansion, a little worn down but well-maintained. Tall trees surrounded the house as well as other vampires scouting in all directions. The mansion was well hidden away but now that Lauren has seen it, it will be easy to find.

            In the crystal ball, Camila watched through Lauren’s eyes as she made her way through Lestat’s estate. She explored the many rooms that the mansion had to offer, searching for the book that Robert needed. Lauren could not find any signs of the book until she stumbled upon Lestat’s personal quarters. He had a massive collection of books, one of them being Robert’s magic spells. Lauren reached for the book but her hand went through the object. She wasn’t able to grab any objects that weren’t already on her person. It would have made things a lot easier if she had been able to.

            After a few more minutes of searching through Lestat’s estate, Lauren began to stir in her half-sleep. Robert took notice and started working on getting her back to her body. If she stayed too long out of it, there was a chance that she might never get back. As Robert chanted his spell to help Lauren back, the image on the crystal ball began to dissolve. Once the crystal ball was completely clear, Lauren snapped out of her sleep and sat upright.

            “Welcome back,” Camila welcomed the emerald-eyed girl. “Did you have fun on your trip?”

            “No,” Lauren rubbed at her head. Her head was pounding. “Promise me you won’t make me do that ever again.”

            Camila frowned and sat beside the emerald-eyed girl. She placed her hand on her shoulder and sighed, “I’m sorry but we need a little bit more information. You might have to go back in again.”

            Lauren looked at Camila and frowned, “Seriously? It hurts!”

            “I’m kidding,” Camila smiled. She liked to make fun of the emerald-eyed girl. “I think you should get some rest.”

            Lauren smiled along with the petite brunette and said, “You’re a dork, you know that? Can you take me to my room?”

            “Of course, I would do anything for you.” Camila blushed and offered her hand to Lauren.

            Lauren accepted Camila’s hand and she slowly got onto her feet. She wasn’t hurt but she made it look like she was so that Camila would walk extra slowly back to her room in order to spend more time with her. She also just wanted the petite brunette to care of her once they get there too. She always found it cute when the petite brunette paid all of her attention to her. She just wanted to spend as much time as possible with the petite brunette.

            “Ready to go?” Camila asked as she held onto Lauren, helping her move around.

            “Yeah,” Lauren nodded. “I’m ready.”

            Lauren and Camila walked out of the room together and made their way around the compound carefully. Meanwhile, left in the room were Lucy and Robert. Robert packed his magical items back into his bag of endless things. Lucy, on the other hand, kept reading her book. She was soon interrupted by Robert who now stood in front of her.

            Robert cleared his throat and said, “It doesn’t surprise me that the vampire loves the slayer.”

            Lucy looked up from her book and replied in confusion, “Excuse me?”

            Robert answered Lucy as if he was her father bestowing some wisdom on her, “Camila reminds me a lot of you when you were a slayer. She’s fearless and she would stop at nothing to get the job done. She’s also selfless when it comes to the people she loves. It may be your memories doing this to her, the experiences you’ve had affecting her behaviour but I have a feeling that even without your memories, she would act the same.”

��           “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Lucy informed Robert, still as confused as before.

            “I know,” Robert said as he sat down beside the brown-haired girl. “The reason why you don’t remember is because all your memories are inside of her. You gave them up so she could save the world. You felt like you had to do it because you couldn’t do it before. It wasn’t the right time.”

            “So you’re saying that she is… me?” Lucy looked down at her hands. They looked foreign to her, like they weren’t her own. Who was she without her memories?

            “Yes, kind of,” Robert cleared his throat. “A part of her is you, which then affects the rest of her body.”

            “Then what am I doing here?” Lucy asked, looking sad. “What is my purpose if she has all my memories? I’m not who I am anymore.”

            “We’ll figure it out soon enough,” Robert said, unsure of what to say to the girl. “For now, we shouldn’t think about it so much. Go rest.”

*

            Lauren and Camila entered Lauren’s room slowly. Camila carefully laid the emerald-eyed girl down onto the bed before closing her door. She made sure that Lauren was comfortable before even thinking about leaving her alone. All she cared about was the emerald-eyed girl’s health.

            “Camila,” Lauren said groggily. “Can you stay with me tonight?”

            Camila’s stomach turned over and over itself, butterflies fluttered around like crazy and her cheeks turned a deep red before she could process what Lauren had just said. She snapped out of her trance and answered the simple question with a simple, “Yes.”

            Lauren smiled and laughed, “Did you get the feeling too?”

            “What are you talking about?” Camila asked, pretending to be confused.

            “You know, the feeling.” Lauren motioned some sort of signal to Camila, hoping she would understand. She kept pointing at her stomach and drawing circles in the air.

            “Yes,” Camila bit her lip. “I did. I got the ‘feeling’.”

            Lauren didn’t answer. She just took hold of Camila’s hand, making her stop what she was doing, and just looked deep into the petite brunette’s eyes. They held their gaze at each other for a full minute, just admiring one another before snapping out of it and smiling and giggling out of control. Lauren was glad that she could finally admit her love for the petite brunette now. It felt like the best thing in the world.

            Lauren moved over in her small bed just to make a little bit of room for the petite brunette. She patted down at the space that she made and Camila smiled before taking the space made just for her. She lied down on her side, her back facing Lauren. Lauren carefully slid her arm around the petite brunette’s waist and sighed. This was the best feeling they had ever felt.

            Just as Camila rested her head on the pillow, Lauren whispered, “So tomorrow, when we wake up, we’re going to kick some ass and save the world, right?”

            “Slow down,” Camila smiled. “We’ll only be one step closer to saving the world, okay?”

            Camila turned her face a little and Lauren planted a kiss on her cheek. The kiss made Camila smile and all the butterflies in her stomach fluttered like crazy once more. The moment was perfect for the two girls. They had each other.