an examination of tractability

by mitzvahmelting

Summary:

"Dear Baby Lulu, would you like to hear the trick to putting your bitch of a director in his place?"

The coven embrace Claudia, so they clue her in about how to survive Armand's leadership.

Notes:

NOTE - this is an alternate universe where the coven actually like Claudia and they're not going to betray her. just to soothe any worries about that :3

big thanks to everyone on discord who has listened to me ramble about this fic for the past three and a half months!! particularly big thank you to bellaedythe for alpha reading, and platoapproved for beta reading the final draft.

Chapter 1: dramatis personae

Before this story begins, a quick reminder of faces and names:

		Claudia You know her.
		Santiago The Master of Ceremonies and a member of the core acting company, he's the youngest of the Théâtre des Vampires. As a mortal his name was Francis Naughton; he took the name Santiago when he was turned.
		Sam Barclay Playwright in residence of the Théâtre des Vampires, a nod to the real life playwright Samuel Beckett.
		Gustave A member of the core acting company, he was also present in the scenes with the grub coven.
		Celeste A member of the core acting company, she was also present in the scenes with the grub coven. She's implied to be Estelle's maker.
		Estelle A member of the core acting company. I'm not sure if she was present in the grub coven, but she might have been the woman selling tickets for the first performance of the Théâtre des Vampires. Celeste is her maker.
		Basilic A member of the orchestra, Basilic was also present in the scenes with the grub coven. He's implied to be Planche and Merde'em's maker.
		Planche A member of the orchestra. Basilic is his maker.
		Merde'em A member of the orchestra. Basilic is his maker. Don't ask me why his name translates to "shittem," your guess is as good as mine.
		Tuan Pham Manages the projections. He is Quang's father, and also his maker.
		Quang Pham Swing actor, which means he's not quite part of the core acting company but he does participate on stage. He is Tuan's son and fledgling.
		Hans Luchenbaum Costumes. He has a first name - "Hans" - but everyone seems to primarily refer to him by his last name.
		Eglee Front of house, meaning she handles ticket sales and ushering. Eglee is in a relationship with Santiago, and feels jealous and hurt when he shifts his focus to Celeste. (This fic ignores that subplot entirely.)
		Romaine Stage manager and props master. He's also a snitch.

Notes:

a more thorough (and rambling) off-the-cuff overview of everything we know about these characters from canon is available here on my tumblr, but everything you need to know to read this particular fic is in the table above.

Chapter 2: Gustave

Summary:

Immediately following the disastrous post-show meeting, the coven begin to tell Claudia about their histories with Armand. Gustave talks about the grub coven.

“Discipline Claudia for bumping into the scenery, but let Louis run wild. And you do this for what? Is it thirst? Is it love? What is he exactly? Are you companions?”

“Yes.” “No!”

“It’s not gonna fucking last long, that’s for sure,” Santiago growls, taking the steps down into the lair two-by-two.

“The American is quite dreamy,” Estelle offers.

“The American has a mind like wet paper,” Santiago bites back, “and carries exactly the sort of boyish self-superiority about his artistic endeavors that found Sam bent over Maître’s knee in 1923.”

“I’ll thank you not to involve me in this,” Sam gripes.

The Lulu dress lays sprawled over the back of Claudia’s chair like a massive, baby-blue animal carcass, limp and ugly. Stepping up to her dressing table, Claudia feels something boil in her stomach, a righteous anger matched only by the fury she felt in New Orleans when she demanded her maker’s head on a platter.

She remembers Maître’s scolding and she thinks: how dare he. And how dare Louis just let him.

“Louis gets stupid when he’s in love,” she says aloud, to remind herself as much as to inform the others. “He’s got an astronomical tolerance for bullshit. If anyone’s breaking them up, it’ll have to be the other way around.” She pauses. “I don’t know how likely that is. You all know Armand better than I do.”

The rest of the company goes quiet. Through her mirror, Claudia watches the members of the core cast exchange a series of wordless glances... and then the air charges with electric static, like Claudia is about to be inducted into yet another new facet of coven life.

(Every time this happens, something softens in Claudia. It’s another piece of welcome, a token of belonging, gifted not from the maître but from the company of her peers. She likes having peers, feeling like part of something bigger. She unclenches her fists.)

Having reached a consensus, the rest of the company silently resume their post-show rituals: cast to their makeup chairs, orchestra to their instrument cases. No side conversations. Everyone tunes in to the same frequency as Santiago says with a carnivorous smile:

“Oh, yes, we know our Maître very well.”

“He’ll hear you,” Luchenbaum warns in a sing-song voice from his seat at the sewing table.

“Oh, will he now?” Santiago snaps. “Somehow I doubt that, since we all know he’s busy getting his pretty little hole stretched in their chic fucking Le Neuvieme apartment.”

In the corner where the musicians perform maintenance on their instruments, Planche tsks with an amused, conspiratorial twitch of a smile. Against the back wall at the table where he’s respooling the film reels, Tuan sighs loudly.

Claudia snorts despite herself, then settles into her own makeup chair, ignoring the blue dress at her back. She pulls the cold cream off her desk, then spins her chair around—she can clean the blood sabbath makeup off her face while still facing the company, ready to listen.

After sharing a look with Santiago, Estelle comes to kneel by Claudia’s chair. She’s still dressed for blood sabbath herself, impish and wild-eyed, androgynous with the head wrap tightly restraining her curls. Though she’s usually a shameless flirt around Claudia, in this moment Estelle seems oddly sober: “Maître has been hard on you lately. Traditionally it is our policy to allow the new coven member to flail about under Maître’s scrutiny for a few years so they develop the proper respect for him. But I was telling everyone: it’s not fair to you, since he is so much harsher with you than he ever was with Santiago.”

“Oi, he was pretty fucking harsh with me.”

“But he was not in love with your brother, non? Claudia is in a uniquely difficult situation. She deserves our help to navigate it.”

“You just want to hear Santiago talk about fucking him again,” Celeste accuses fondly.

Perched on the arm of Santiago’s chair, Eglee mutters, “Well, I certainly do.”

Hope curls in Claudia’s chest. I’m not alone. They don’t want me to be alone in this. “You’re telling me... you’ve got some way of dealing with Maître that you’ve been keepin’ secret?”

“Oh, dealing with him. Yes, that’s good,” says Santiago cheerfully. “Dear Baby Lulu, would you like to hear the trick to putting your bitch of a director in his place?”

Before Claudia can respond, Celeste barks, “Romaine, go play lookout.”

Romaine, who was the last down the stairs and has only just finished scribbling down a full dictation of the director’s notes into his stage manager script, crumples in disappointment. “Oh...” he complains morosely, “but you know he won’t come back for at least a few hours.”

“And you’ll make sure of that. We can’t have a repeat of 1894.”

Estelle explains to Claudia, “Maître walked in on a version of this conversation in 1894, and was so infuriated that he kept our leashes choked up tight right through the turn of the century.”

“Besides,” Eglee teases, “listening to them fuck shouldn’t be much of a chore for a pervert like you, Romaine.”

At vampiric speed, Romaine throws something at Eglee’s head—she dodges, and his clipboard sticks in the wood of the wall like a throwing star.

Eglee laughs. Romaine trudges back up the stairs.

Claudia can’t stop herself from smiling a little—family, she thinks while smearing the cold cream over her face. Never felt like this in Rue Royale. She wipes the cream and makeup away with a towel; fresh air, finally, beyond the oils and greasepaint. She passes the pot of cold cream to Estelle, who grins and thanks her.

After a brief, silent conversation with Celeste, Gustave stands and comes closer, finding a seat for himself on the lid of Luchenbaum’s coffin (who groans and implores him not to scratch the wood.)

“Armand is... old,” Gustave begins. “He was old even in the beginning, before the theatre, when he was coven leader to us few satan-worshipping grubs of the sewers.”

“A hundred fifty years ago?” Claudia asks to clarify.

“Ehhh, that’s when we founded the theatre, yes. But I have been Maître’s charge since I was a fledgling sent from the Roman coven in 1681, and Celeste was turned by an outsider and recruited into the coven at the start of the 18th century.” He crosses his arms, thoughtfully. “We have known Armand for a very long time—worshipped him, in the old days. Our every action and breath devoted to the holy trinity: Dieu, Satan et Armand.”

Claudia scoffs, picturing that. “You thought he was God? Him, the prissy little vampire who spends every waking minute making fuck-me eyes at my brother?”

Gustave coughs and hides a smile behind his hand. “We believed that he was an angel, or a devil, sent by God to shepherd us through our dark works.”

“He had a skill,” Celeste adds. “He still does. He looks inside you and finds the most vulnerable part of your soul, then exploits that vulnerability to coax your obedience.”

That part does sound familiar. It may have taken her a few months to finally ascribe malice to the choice, but Claudia recognizes now that Armand didn’t cast her as Baby Lulu by accident. He knew how deeply it would cut. He wanted her to suffer.

“Any time I harbored doubts, his voice brought me back,” Gustave reminisces. “You must understand, Claudia—the Roman coven was wealthy and learned, and our leaders commissioned grand artworks so we would always feel Satan watching us. But here in Paris, we lived in the sewers, and there was only Armand to serve as both master and priest for the whole flock. Yet... I believed in him. When he spoke to me, his voice was like the voice of the holy Christ: merciful, loving, with steadfast moral conviction.”

“He was a good liar back then,” Santiago murmurs coolly. “I wonder when precisely he lost that skill?”

“It was after the coronation of Louis XV in 1723,” Celeste answers, though Claudia’s pretty sure the question had been meant rhetorically. “I remember Maître saying, ‘This is my third Louis.’ I think he felt old. He slowed down, then.”

“Now he’s found a fourth Louis,” Quang says, earning a series of groans.

“I believe Mr. du Lac is actually the seventh, by that logic,” Luchenbaum points out.

“No,” Celeste disagrees, “Maître abandoned any pretense of interest in mortal politics after the Seven Years War. Certainly Louis XVI escaped his notice until the mortals started carrying the poor bastard’s head in a basket.”

“Maître was tired,” Gustave explains softly. “Temperamental. Often inexplicably sad. The most zealous members of our coven saw no difference in his attitude, I’m sure, but Celeste and I were younger, and we remembered more of the world outside the cult. Armand was our Maître and the vengeful angel of Satan, but we began to see that he was also just a boy, abandoned by his elders into responsibilities he was ill-prepared to bear alone.”

“Not that there was much for us to do with that knowledge at the time,” Celeste adds. “Our suffering was our deserved punishment for being the children of Satan. To seek or offer comfort would be a sinful transgression.”

“But Celeste volunteered to assemble the coven for the routine rituals, and I led the prayers. We took some of the burden from him, and he was... grateful, I think, in his way.”

“Hard to say,” Celeste admits. “He is much easier to read now than he was then.”

It’s hard for Claudia to picture anyone worshipping Armand, but... sure. If they already believed that vampires were put on earth by God to serve Satan, they may as well have believed that Armand was the messiah or something.

If he had been kinder to her... would she have felt that way, too? Would she have admired him? She had almost admired him in the beginning, before she swore her oath to the coven, when he was her competent director and not yet her tormentor. The gift of the flea circus still sits on her dressing table.

“So,” she prompts, “what changed?”

“The reformation,” says Luchenbaum.

“Lestat taught them how to have orgies,” Eglee clarifies.

Something oily and slick tightens around Claudia’s stomach at the mention of her maker, but she shields her thoughts. “Lestat, the guy from the painting?”

“The very same,” Gustave confirms. “Lestat de Lioncourt was the harbinger of vampiric modernity. And though the transition from Satan-worship to theatre troupe was not smooth, we survived the instability.”

Celeste says, “Maître wanted Lestat. Which was exciting for us, because we had never seen Maître want anything at all. But he did not get to keep Lestat in the end, and afterwards he viciously denied ever having wanted in the first place.”

Oh, hell. Of all the vampires in the world to get tangled up with, Louis chose Lestat’s ex-boyfriend. Of course. Claudia can’t even fully process the gravity of that point here; she has to keep her shields up, and later, maybe, she can go find her brother and ask Did you know about this? and What the fuck were you thinking?

“Maître believed the only way he could keep the coven in line was if he showed no vulnerability,” Gustave says.

“Not much has changed there,” offers Planche, grimly.

“But I knew him very well after over a century of coven life with him, and it bothered me to see him retreat inside of himself. Then one night after the show, he shouted something at Basilic—”

“I missed a cue,” Basilic says, “and he caught me looking at the audience instead of my sheet music. Threatened to take my eyes, since I clearly wasn’t using them to play.”

“—and I decided I had seen enough. I followed Maître back to his office, and...”

But Gustave trails off, falling silent as he gazes into the middle distance. It lasts almost thirty seconds, by which point Claudia can’t help but demand: “And what?”

“It’s...” Gustave tries, “it’s difficult to explain. You can’t assume that just strutting up to Maître and acting cocky will get you the result you want. There’s more to it than that. You must become impenetrable. You must shield your soul so completely that he has no way to unravel you. For me, that meant arming myself with my devotion and loyalty to him: my insolence came from a place of servitude. The others would go on to find different methods, in later years.”

“But what did you do to him?”

A bashful grin flicks over Gustave’s face. “It was rather tame in hindsight: I ordered him, ‘Maître, shut the door and sit down.’ At first, he did not move. He was Anubis, weighing my soul against a feather. If he detected a speck of weakness in me, I thought he would kill me on the spot. But then the moment passed. Warily, he shut the door and sat at his desk, watching me, waiting for me to expose a crack in my own composure.

“I went on to tell him, ‘Stop behaving as if you were left behind in the catacombs. You were liberated with the rest of us, and you deserve more than anyone to taste the fruits of the garden.’” Gustave shakes his head, smiling in earnest now. “By that point, I think he was in shock. I had spent a century speaking to him only in the meaningless words of a worshipper to their icon of the divine; it must have been jarring to hear me address him as a person.

“And in the space ceded by his shock, I said further that I loved him with all my heart, as did Celeste, and we both desired nothing more than to share with his body what succulent tenderness the coven had long since discovered amongst ourselves.”

“So, you fucked him,” Claudia summarizes flatly.

Celeste smiles, too. “He was a fragile thing then. He hadn’t felt a kind touch since the sixteenth century.”

“I’m not going to fuck him.” She won’t. Not for anything. Not for respect, not for freedom, not for all the jewels in the world. She would not let any male vampire touch her that way, but especially not Armand.

“Ah, but it’s not the fucking that’s the key,” Sam interjects. “It’s the ordering.”

“And the aftermath, too,” Luchenbaum chimes in. “To permit the intrusion, Maître must believe that it will not affect coven discipline. In the aftermath, you must demonstrate your obedience to him with even more deference than in your initial bid to join the coven.”

“Otherwise, if he sees that you’ve lost respect for him, he’ll close back up again,” Eglee explains, closing her hands together like a clamshell. “And none of us will be able to get through to him for the next decade.”

“Gustave is right to warn you that it’s a knife edge,” Basilic adds imploringly. “You won’t need to worry about the aftermath if you can’t get through to him in the first place. I’ve tried it just twice in my tenure, and both times Maître tore through my mind like cardboard and sent me off with my tail between my legs.”

Claudia shrugs. “Well, maybe you’re just bad at it.”

That pulls a startled laugh from Santiago. Merde’em punches Basilic’s shoulder affectionately, and Planche reaches over to ruffle his curls.

“So, it’s a mind gift thing?” Claudia asks. If it’s just a mind gift thing then maybe she can pull it off, too. “You shield your thoughts and then tell him what you want him to do?”

“Oh, no. You need him to want to obey you,” Santiago says. “Perhaps Tuan should enlighten us?”

Chapter 3: Tuan

Summary:

Tuan contributes his own history with Armand, including how they met.

“Oh, no. You need him to want to obey you,” Santiago says. “Perhaps Tuan should enlighten us?”

All eyes turn to Tuan, at the worktable with the film reels. “Luchenbaum was the next,” Tuan says after a beat. “Chronologically speaking.”

“My story will bore her,” Luchenbaum says, but he sits up in his chair at the sewing table with a grunt, prepared to give a brief summary nevertheless: “After emerging from Plato’s cave, Maître picked up a mimicry of Lestat’s 18th century fashion, and then he did not refresh his wardrobe for many decades. In... I believe it was 1832, Maître asked me to repair a canary yellow waistcoat for him. I told him, ‘Fuck no, Maître. Absolutely not. You look like a goddamn macaroni.’ And I finally forced him into some respectable, modern clothes. That’s all.”

“Funny, I recall the last time you told this story it involved Maître stripped down bare in your studio; a wide-eyed beauty inviting you to ravish him,” Merde’em teases.

Luchenbaum scoffs, with a flush of embarrassment. “I sometimes exaggerate the story to amuse these perverts,” he grumbles, gesturing widely at the coven, “but the truth is I never fucked him. Some of us know how to keep work and pleasure separate.”

At this, Tuan sinks deeply into his chair, covering his face in humiliation. Quang goads him, “Yes, Father, tell us all about how you separated work from pleasure.”

“You fucked him, too?” Claudia asks in disbelief. She’d known the actors were incorrigible and the musicians were shameless, but Tuan Pham always seemed more stoic than the rest of the coven, and it feels odd to picture him getting involved with Maître.

“Wait for the full story,” Eglee tells her. “It’s quite romantic.”

Tuan clears his throat. “I was still a fledgling when the coven came to Saigon,” he begins. “My maker was a resistance fighter, using the blood to recruit learned men from Saigon to destroy French armies in the countryside. He gave me the gift, but though I supported his cause, I could not abandon my responsibilities in the city.”

“Tuan’s maker’s bloodline began with a defector from our coven,” Celeste explains soberly. “Maître therefore had a duty to exterminate the defector, and either execute his sirelings or bring them under our control. That’s why we were touring the colonies in the first place.”

Tuan continues, “I had begun attending their performances of my own volition, ignorant of the fact that they had come to my city to kill me. I only knew that they were vampires, and I hoped they would teach me how to control my thirst around my son, who was only a child, and needed his father.

“They refused to answer my questions at the theatre, but Armand walked me home to my studio one night after the show. He asked about my work—camera repair and film development—and then he asked about my intentions. He asked if I was a threat to his children.” Tuan swallows. “I asked him if he was a threat to mine.”

“I already knew father wasn’t human,” Quang explains.

“No vampire shall ever reveal his true nature to a mortal and let that mortal live,” Santiago recites darkly. “And yet, The Dark Gifts must never be given to children. The Great Laws allowed only one outcome for little Quang Pham.”

Tuan nods. “This is what Armand explained to me... ruefully, like it was a great burden upon him. And I saw in him a reflection of myself: a young father trapped by circumstances beyond his control. Having reluctantly led them away from the safety of their established home in Paris, Maître was terrified for the lives of his children, running himself ragged to guard them from all unknown guerilla assailants waiting in the hidden places of a foreign city. And now he would be forced to kill a child—my child—to protect his own. The harrowing realization that I could not protect Quang from this ancient monster passed between us like a resonance of paternal fear.

“He expected me to attack him, and incur for myself a noble but futile death. Instead, I grasped his shoulder, stared into the heart of him, and told him, ‘Armand, I know you do not want to kill a child. I see the goodness in you railing against the monstrousness of our circumstances. I know you must protect your coven—so bring us both into the fold, and let my son live encircled by the coven so that he cannot share his knowledge with any mortals. Let him reach maturity, and then I will turn him. He will never have the opportunity to bring harm to you.’“

Claudia sniffs. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of deal Maître would go for.”

“And he wouldn’t have, if not for Tuan’s dashing good looks,” Santiago snarks. He then goes on, counting off with his fingers: “And he was a father, a good man, who saw goodness in Maître, and who wanted only to give Maître the opportunity to avoid making a difficult decision... every angle perfectly aligned to push the pins in the lock to turn our fearless leader into a fangless kitten for Tuan Pham.”

Tuan sighs but doesn’t disagree. Instead, he continues, “He warned me that it would not be a good life for my son—”

“And it wasn’t,” Quang chimes in sourly. “I was treated like the mortal housepet for thirty years.”

“—but for months I had been dreading leaving my son a fatherless orphan in a broken nation. If I could see him fed and protected, if I could see him grow into a man, that would be more than I had ever hoped for.”

Tuan then falls silent. After a beat, Claudia asks him, “That’s it?”

“It was the first time I overrode his will, yes,” he says calmly.

Like a hungry child struggling to appreciate what meager rations they’d been given, Claudia thinks, Okay, what have we learned? Tell him he’s not a bad person, no matter that he’s the fucking worst. Tell him he’s not a bad person and that you understand what he’s going through. And, if you’re also handsome like Tuan, maybe that’ll be enough to get Maître to leave you the fuck alone.

But then there’s a swell of protests from the rest of the coven. “No, no,” Quang says with a laugh, “you can’t get away with that, Father. Tell the rest.”

Tuan turns and pretends to scrutinize one of the half-wound reels of film on his table. “It is hardly relevant for Claudia’s purposes.”

“Don’t be so shy, Tuan,” Eglee calls out melodically, “We all want to hear the story again.”

“And she deserves the full picture,” says Basilic. “Or do you want us to tell the story for you?”

“Fine,” Tuan snaps. “Fine. The rest of it—it started a couple of decades later. Quang was already an adult, but he refused to accept the gift because he wanted to wait, to appear ‘distinguished’ in immortality. I resented my son for his mortal weakness. Finally, he had reached an age where Maître would allow me to protect him with the blood, yet he refused me, flaunting his vulnerability, ignorant of the frailty of his body.”

“It was a big decision!” Quang interjects. “I would be stuck with my body for eternity; I refused to suffer disrespect on account of my perceived age. You understand, Claudia, don’t you?”

She clenches her jaw. “Yes, I understand.”

Planche says: “Every night, they rehashed the same argument. We may as well have added it to the cast’s repertoire.”

“Then one night father lost his patience,” Quang says, before taking on an exaggerated tone of fury: “‘I am your father and you will obey me!’ he shouted at me, like some stodgy old traditionalist. Then he slapped me, with the strength of a vampire against my puny mortal form. He sent me crashing through the set pieces, sending splinters everywhere. It took Romaine two weeks to rebuild everything.”

Tuan covers his face. Basilic drifts over to him, pats a hand on Tuan’s shoulder and says, “Not your finest moment, old friend.”

“Okay, so you weren’t a perfect father,” Claudia says carefully, trying to steer them back on track. “But what does that have to do with Maître?”

“He saw it happen,” Santiago purrs. “Isn’t that right, Tuan? Maître watched the whole episode, with eyes unblinking.”

Tuan uncovers his face and clears his throat. “In the immediate aftermath, my focus was entirely consumed with repairing my relationship with my son, of course.”

“Of course,” Gustave echoes with friendly skepticism.

“But later, when Quang and I had smoothed things over, I became... aware that Maître was still watching me.” Tuan shoots Gustave a helpless look. “It, ah... perhaps you should—”

“It’s worth noting,” Gustave helpfully steps in, “that none of us know exactly where Maître came from, or what his life was like before he became the leader of our coven. Over the years, we’ve filled in a few details here and there, mostly by extrapolation. In those days, long before his enlightening tryst with Santiago, my best guess was that the Roman coven had taken him as a boy, grooming him from a very young age to rule Paris. His attraction to Tuan did seem to support that theory. Where Celeste and I had only ever given him a soft place to rest, Maître saw in Tuan a father figure, an authority.”

“Five years!” Quang suddenly shouts. “Five years of listening to ‘Oui, oui monsieur, s’il vous plaît, baisez-moi!’ through the thin fucking walls of the old theatre.”¹

Oh, yes. Claudia’s familiar with that. She lasted six years, listening to Daddy Lou and Uncle Les fuck in Daddy Lou’s coffin when they thought she was asleep. And unlike Quang, she had the mind gift drawing everything into focus. She could feel Louis’ pleasure like the radiating heat from a campfire. Even when she tried to shut her eyes and plug her ears, the proximity still warmed her face and her clothes.

“It wasn’t every night. Maybe once or twice a month, at most,” Tuan gripes. Then he faces Claudia to explain, “It did help that I had the projector room to myself. I don’t think Maître would have let himself do any of that, if it meant risking the coven seeing him in that state.”

“We could still hear him,” Luchenbaum mutters.

“But you didn’t see him.” Tuan shrugs with one shoulder, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. “Armand is beautiful, of course, but I had never before seen him enjoy himself with complete abandon. It was... exquisite fun. We weren’t companions per se, but we were friends, and... and yes, sometimes he liked to pretend I was a father to him.”

Claudia blinks, feeling like her face is frozen. “He... he called you daddy?”

Is that what he’s doing with Louis?

Tuan flushes. “Not... not at first. At first, he would come to visit me in the projector room after rehearsal, with the buttons of his shirt already undone. We engaged in a mutual, comfortable seduction. And if, in his flirtations, he seemed a bit preoccupied with praising my capacities as a father, that was easily written off as a consequence of the fact that fatherhood was the bedrock of our mutual respect.

“But... a five-year affair is a long time for the development of intimacy. Sometimes I felt him... wanting, and it was no great sacrifice to offer a ‘bon garçon’ once in a while.² He—I knew he was ancient. I knew that. But sometimes he looked like a boy in need of comfort. And given that my real son so vehemently refused my protection, at least I was allowed to protect this boy instead, for as long as he would let me.”

It’s absurd to picture Maître like that. Claudia recalls the blistering humiliation of her young adulthood, when her fathers kept trying to set rules and boundaries as if she wasn’t already an adult with her own mind made up about how she wanted to live her eternal life—God, why would anyone want that? Why would anyone miss that? And especially Armand, the coven master with a stick so far up his ass someone could sell him as a popsicle—why would he want to be infantilized?

But the image from Tuan hums through the mental resonance of the cast: Armand, in the shadowy back-glow of the projector lens, eyes wide and guileless, full of yearning. Half-naked, his shoulders narrower absent the padding of his jackets. “Monsieur, ne voulez-vous pas m’embrasser?” he breathes so softly that it’s almost drowned out by the hum of the fan.³

Estelle makes a cooing sound. Celeste lays a hand over her heart in wordless affection. “See, this, this is why I like this story,” says Eglee.

“Gross,” Quang mutters.

Claudia’s inclined to agree with him. “I don’t buy it,” she says. “He—he must’ve had some kind of ulterior motive. Maître ain’t the type to just—”

“He is the type, actually,” Santiago interrupts. “But, yes, in this particular circumstance, I’m afraid you’re correct.”

“The pattern became clear by 1911,” Quang explains. “Maître’s timing gained more precision—he went to see my father only when he knew I would be within earshot, when I was deep cleaning the back rows of the house or repairing the decorative wall panels near the projector room. It was a taunt. He was deliberately trying to provoke me; not just by loudly and enthusiastically fucking my father, but by playing this stupid game where he was a better son than me.

“But I couldn’t escape it. I wasn’t allowed to leave the theatre without a chaperone, and none of the coven were willing to chaperone me because they were all perverts who wanted to listen to Maître’s noises.

“And I couldn’t confront Maître, either. But for his mercy, I would have been dead at age eleven. My complaints would be completely immaterial to him.”

“Maître thought Quang was being ungrateful,” Tuan explains, “forcing us to continue indefinitely harboring a mortal among the flock.”

“One night after the show, I pulled a muscle in my back when I was carrying a body to the wet room,” Quang says. “The pain was awful, and I collapsed under the weight I was carrying. But Maître wouldn’t let anyone help me up—he said that surely I must be ecstatic to endure the tender agonies of my mortality.”

“I’d seen enough,” Tuan says. “I told him to stop it.”

“Harshly,” Quang clarifies, “exactly the way father would speak to me, in both wording and tone. And the whole company heard it.”

Tuan’s gaze drifts blankly to the stairwell. “He obeyed my wishes in the moment, and our disagreement was moot a few weeks later when my son caught influenza and was forced to accept the gift. But the fact remained that I had scolded Maître in public. He never returned to me after that.”

“Or maybe he was just done sleeping with you, now that he’d gotten what he wanted from Quang?” Claudia suggests. That’s clearly not the lesson Tuan’s trying to impart, but it’s the lesson she’s willing to accept: Tell him he’s not a bad person, no matter that he’s the fucking worst. But don’t let him manipulate you. Don’t get conned.

Tuan shakes his head, and something bittersweet colors his expression. “I spent the final months of 1911 teaching my son how to hone his skills as a fledgling vampire... but I still felt Maître watching me. Independent of his ulterior motives, his attraction to me remained; I could sense his longing. But he would not act on it after what I had done. He would not trust me with that part of him again.”

“And so it goes,” Luchenbaum says. “A single moment of disrespect in front of the coven.”

Eglee makes the clamshell-shutting gesture with her fingers again.

“And just in time for the war,” Celeste adds, bleakly.

Notes:

Translations

^{1 Yes, yes sir, please fuck me! [return to text]}

^{2 Good boy. [return to text]}

^{3 Sir, won't you kiss me? [return to text]}

Chapter 4: Sam

Summary:

Sam gives us some insight into how Armand handled World War I.

“And just in time for the war,” Celeste adds, bleakly.

“We left the city in 1914—the rationing was not a problem for us, but the fires and bombings were. We followed the government to Bordeaux and installed ourselves in the lovely home of a politician whom Maître had long ago marked for culling.”

Sam, who up until this point had been mostly a silent but attentive presence in the conversation, chimes in to say: “No plays, the whole world in disorder, and a coven that disrespected him. This was a low point for Maître. I think that’s why he took to me so quickly.”

“Like you were a comfort?” Luchenbaum scoffs. “I’ve read your war plays, Sam, you were hardly a ray of sunshine.”

“I was capturing the goddamn human condition, Hans,” Sam bites back with an eye roll. “And your poor Maître was stuck listening to the mortals in the telegraph station twenty-four hours a day while you all drank wine and played parlor games—of course I was a fucking comfort!”

It’s a little disorienting to realize that they’ve caught up to years where Claudia was alive. While the Paris coven drank wine and played parlor games in Bordeaux, a nigh-unrecognizable version of Claudia was a little human girl getting her knuckles rapped by a mean old schoolmarm. She remembers reading grim headlines about the war in Europe when she was using the newspaper to practice her letters.

She doesn’t feel nostalgia for that time. It’s more like opening an unused cabinet to find a dusty sock inside; startling and bemusing to discover that these old memories had always been there, hidden and untouched, anathema to her current life.

“You weren’t part of the coven yet?” she asks Sam, without asking the question she really wants to ask: Are we almost the same age?

“Sam first approached us at the house in Bordeaux in 1916. He proceeded to form a special bond with Maître far more easily than anyone else who had ever taken up the task,” Gustave explains. “The perks of being an outsider.”

Claudia huffs. “I was an outsider. He wasn’t all that nice to me.”

“The perks of being an experienced outsider, then. Sam was already on his second century before contacting our troupe—”

“Third century, thank you. I didn’t live through Oliver fucking Cromwell for you to act like I was born swaddled in the Union Jack.”

“—and he bore firsthand knowledge of the war’s politics. Which was helpful for Maître, who was acutely distressed about the war, as he had completely missed the rise of geopolitical tensions that precipitated it because he had been so distracted by his affair with Tuan Pham.”

“Bravo,” Merde’em mutters to Tuan, cheekily.

“Shut up,” Tuan grumbles.

Claudia squints at Sam, trying to reconcile the affable playwright with those three centuries of life. Where Armand’s ancient power changes the barometric pressure of every room he walks through, Sam Barclay has always seamlessly disappeared into the fabric of the coven, and it’s only now, looking directly at him, that Claudia can recognize something oddly calm and prescient in his eyes.

“Allow me to tell the story,” Sam says. Seated on the lid of his coffin, he smooths his palms down his knees and takes a deep breath. “I was studying playwrighting at Trinity when the Great War broke out. My biggest worry was that the British would try to draft me before I could finish my degree; funny, in hindsight, because that was an anxiety shared by my peers, inciting them to start a revolution. I was in full support of their cause, except that it made Dublin a fucking warzone. The British started shelling, starting fires, shooting up our boys in the post office... so I left. Of course I left. Couldn’t walk to class without someone waving a gun in your face; how was I supposed to finish my degree if a mortal watched me get shot?

“Years prior, some vampiresses in the London coven had put me in contact with Armand. He had promised to read my plays once I finished my degree. I figured he would make an exception under the circumstances, so I set off for the continent.”

“If you were already three hundred years old, why were you going to college?” Claudia asks. “You’d already had three hundred years to practice playwrighting.”

“Oh, I’ve had other careers,” Sam explains. “I’ve been a historian, a political cartoonist, a novelist, a journalist... I’m a humanist, Claudia. I study existence through the lens of the people living in it. Playwrighting is just my latest bid to scrape truth from the walls of this world. I think I’ve got some of my best work in drafts now; you’ll see.”

Maybe that’s the key difference, then. Sam seems like a young vampire because he keeps turning back the clock on his education, where Maître just digs the rut of his existence deeper and deeper with every passing year.

“Did you fuck him, too?” Claudia asks, though a part of her bitterly insists that a vampire as old as Sam shouldn’t have to fuck Armand to gain his respect. Maybe that’s the price you pay when you keep trying new hobbies instead of perfecting the old ones; it takes time to convince anyone your work is worth anything. “He liked your plays so much that he just had to fuck you, right?”

Sam coughs. “Not... not precisely.”

“Sam formed a special bond with Maître,” Gustave reiterates. “But they never fucked.”

“Would’ve done, I’m sure, if Sam had actually joined the coven,” Santiago snarks. “But alas, a pretty face wasn’t worth signing away your future, hmm?”

Claudia gawps at Sam. “Wait, you’re—you’re still not a part of the coven?”

“Technically, no.” Sam says. “I’m only the playwright in residence. Maître and I have an agreement that I’ll stick around through the end of the 20th century, and then we’ll renegotiate my contract at the turn of the millennium.”

Since when was that an option? Claudia wants to scream. She feels Santiago’s grim agreement in the back of her mind: The perks of being Sam Barclay.

“Which is why Sam gets all the dirty work,” Luchenbaum explains. “Picking up trash, scraping gum, wet work; it’s the price he pays for always keeping one foot out the door.”

“I don’t mind it,” Sam insists. “It’s an honor to work in the theatre. And if that’s what he needs from me to feel assured of my loyalty, I’m happy to provide it.”

Claudia turns over those words in her mind, frowning. She can feel the puff of the Lulu dress against her back.

Sam puts a hand over his heart. “Gosh, Claudia... Maître’s not a bad man. He’s... difficult, yes, and lacking in certain managerial skills, but... I’ve met many coven leaders over the years. It’s usually the cruelest of our kind who rise to power; it’s a rare blessing to have someone like Armand in the position instead.”

“He can be cruel,” Santiago hisses.

“But his cruelty is only ever born of fear,” Sam counters. “Not ego. Never ego. Your maître cares for you all more than he cares for himself; count your fucking blessings.”

Santiago’s got his fangs out. There’s real pain, there. Resentment. Claudia feels it in her own heart, too.

“What’s he afraid of?” she asks. “With me? What’s he so fucking afraid of that he’s gotta be such a bastard to me?”

“It’s not about you,” Santiago murmurs. “It’s about us.”

“Maître wants Louis,” Estelle explains. “And we are watching him want Louis, even though he hates to be seen wanting.”

(Oh, of course it’s about Louis. Everything is always about Louis.)

“It’s about coven discipline,” Celeste says. “It’s about proving that things are still under his control.”

“And Santiago’s taunting today did not help matters,” Luchenbaum adds with a scowl.

“He was out of line,” Santiago says. “Who is he to talk about Claudia’s level of commitment when he’s been off sowing his wild oats with Louis six nights a week?”

“But you made it worse, Santiago,” says Basilic.

“I will not spend the rest of my immortal life walking on FUCKING eggshells to protect that man’s feelings.” Santiago snarls. “I will not censor myself to maintain this collective delusion that Maître is a competent leader—”

“Your maker said the same thing, and now what’s left of him is in the walls,” says Luchenbaum.

Santiago lunges at Luchenbaum in fury, but before he gets anywhere, Sam intercedes with his fist scrunched up in Santiago’s shirt.

“Lad.”

“Not your fucking lad, Barclay.”

“Santiago,” Sam concedes evenly. “I understand why you believe Maître enforces the laws capriciously. He was lenient with so many of us, so why wasn’t he lenient with your maker? But you only arrived at the end of the story—you didn’t bear witness to the decades of tension and distrust building up between Armand and—”

“Don’t say his name.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Sam drops Santiago and looks over at Claudia. “His name was Claude. Yet another weight on the scale of Maître’s opinion of you, I’m sure.” Then back to Santiago: “It was apparent even during the first war that your maker was nearing outright mutiny.”

“It had been building for a while before that,” Estelle recalls. “At least since 1894.”

“Did they fuck, then?” Claudia asks coolly. “Maître and... Claude?”

“No,” Gustave answers with a lurch of a laugh. “No. They were... not compatible.”

“Two catamites trapped in a perpetual pissing contest,” Merde’em jokes.

“Maybe Maître handled things better back in the old theatre,” Sam offers. “But when I arrived in Bordeaux, I saw firsthand his utter inability to enforce discipline. And it certainly didn’t help that none of you were willing to be in a room with him for more than five minutes.”

“Uprooting the whole coven and transporting us to the provinces proved to be more disruptive than our visit to Saigon, because at least in Saigon we kept performing,” Celeste explains. “It quickly became apparent that... unprecedented changes to his routine make Maître particularly unpleasant to be around.”

“Understatement of the fucking century,” Gustave mutters.

“So he was snappish, what did you expect?” says Sam. "Go off with Claude for an unsanctioned hunt, break curfew, get drunk on stolen wine... then come home, and bitch and moan about your uptight coven master while he’s three rooms away just trying to keep you all alive.”

“Maître was paranoid,” Quang mumbles.

“Oh, fuck off,” Sam growls. “It was 1916. The Serbian coven was already two years dead, the coven in Constantinople lost three sisters to a fire, and the London coven had the misfortune to flee to Liverpool on the same night the German Zeppelins got blown north. And that’s without even mentioning the poor bastard fledglings who kept stepping on landmines and blowing themselves to bits, ‘cause they thought they could get some easy meals on the front lines. It was the war to end all wars. If you weren’t paranoid, you weren’t paying attention.”

That shuts everyone up. Guilt hangs over some of their faces.

Sam sinks back down onto the lid of his coffin. “He was expending all his energy listening to everything at once—I helped him narrow it down. Told him which telegraph operators would be the first to hear of enemy aircraft breaching the front lines, and which politicians were making decisions about the funding and placement of anti-aircraft artillery. If he only followed those threads, the coven would be safe, and I could keep an ear on the broader political machinations of the Triple Entente in his stead.”

He lets out a slow breath. “I remember the night they bombed the old theatre in Paris—though, we didn’t have confirmation at the time that the theatre was gone. It was only that same neighborhood, that same street, mentioned over the telegraph wire. It was just a building, you know? But the utter devastation in his eyes... like he had just lost something sacred to him. His personal Reims Cathedral. I fed him from my wrist that night. Held him.” He glares at Merde’em, adding: “I believe the rest of you were hunting down a pair of displaced Parisian theatre critics at the time.”

“Sam,” Gustave says softly. “Enough.”

But the image still hums through the coven’s mental resonance: a rich man’s kitchen, with a gas range and a big sink, made smaller with nighttime shadows. Seated in an uncomfortable wooden chair there’s Armand, face sallow with dehydration, eyes wet with exhaustion, his hand limp in Sam’s grasp. The quiet buzz of the telegraph operator’s thoughts in a building down the street. “C’est détruit, je le sens,” Armand whispers, dead.⁴ Sam pulls him closer, cradles his face against his shirt, and Armand makes a sudden noise too dry to be called a sob.

Some primal part of Claudia recognizes this grief. It’s vampiric nature to feel safe in one’s walls, one’s coffin, one’s lair; to destroy those things is to destroy that safety. But Claudia hardly ever had a place of her own, and when she did, she didn’t covet it the way Armand clearly does. Maybe you get more sensitive to that sort of thing when the years pile up.

Or maybe there’s something about Armand specifically that breaks when you destroy a place he called home, like cracking a load-bearing column in his mind.

Notes:

Translations

^{4 It's destroyed, I sense it. [return to text]}

Chapter 5: Santiago

Summary:

Santiago reflects on his seduction of the coven master.

“If Maître was really falling apart, losing control of the coven and everything, then why’d you help him?” Claudia asks Sam. “You were an outsider; you could have just as easily ingratiated yourself with Claude instead.”

Sam hums. “I said Claude was getting close to mutiny—I never said I thought he would be successful. Make no mistake: Claude was only a brat chafing under loose reins.”

“After one hundred years of the theatre, we were all rediscovering what it meant to be a coven without the structure of nightly stagecraft,” Celeste says. “We rebelled like mortal adolescents testing the boundaries of paternal authority... but Claude was only the leader of our delinquency. We never viewed him as a true contender for coven master.”

“A reassuring lie in hindsight,” Santiago says with a sneer.

“I mean, it sounds like Celeste, Gustave, Tuan, and Sam all had some kind of special bond with Maître,” Claudia offers. “Just ‘cause they weren’t ready for a coup doesn’t mean your maker didn’t have other allies in his pocket.”

“He didn’t. If he had, he wouldn’t have felt the need to make a new one,” Luchenbaum says. “Maître came down hard on the coven after the war, and Claude’s resentment festered. When he was late for call time three nights in a row, Maître stripped him of his role and told him he would need to earn the coven’s forgiveness before he’d be permitted on stage again. But Claude did not grovel—he left. He attended performances at other theatres. Rather than punish him for it, Maître was just glad to be rid of him for a while.”

“That’s when he made you?” Claudia asks Santiago, who nods wordlessly, focused on some spot on the floor.

Luchenbaum continues, “Claude despised Maître with such single-minded fervor that he would gladly kill himself to spite Maître. But Claude was also aware that he did not possess a fraction of Maître’s power... so he made a fledgling. Either Maître would be too weak to enforce the laws, and Claude would continue making fledglings with impunity until he had amassed an army strong enough for a coup, or Maître would enforce the laws, and though Claude would be killed for his impudence, he could still slip a fledgling into the coven on his way out. He groomed Santiago to be a fox in the henhouse. It remains to be seen how that maneuver will play out.”

Santiago covers his face and remains silent for a long moment. Then he says, “My maker was... incredibly intelligent. Sharp-witted and clear-sighted. He attacked eternity with a tenacity I have never seen in another. It is a grave loss to us all that he is gone.”

With a deep breath, Santiago uncovers his face and stretches his shoulders, leaning back in his makeup chair. “The one thing my maker lacked was gravitas. He could hold attention with his boyish looks and wicked smile, but it was just that: boyish. He coveted my stage presence, the way I commanded respect.” He shrugs. “Perhaps he did wish to cast me in the role of Armand’s betrayer; if so, that wish died with him. I watched him burn. Maître ensured I watched, so that I would not be so eager to follow in his footsteps.”

Claudia pushes down thoughts of Lestat holding her chin straight, forcing her to watch Charlie burn. Instead she points out, “You do have a lot of friction with Maître, though.”

“There are other ways to respond to weak leadership besides outright rebellion. I do not wish to die anytime soon.”

“But would you take over the way Claude wanted you to, if you could? If you thought you could get away with it?” A part of Claudia thinks that things wouldn’t be so bad with Santiago in charge. He might teach her something. He certainly wouldn’t force her to wear the stupid little-girl dress.

“A dangerous question, Claudia,” Luchenbaum warns.

But Santiago smiles, with a startlingly gleeful spark in his eyes. “If you had asked me that question twenty years ago, I might have had a different answer. But now...” he waggles his shoulders exaggeratedly, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve grown fond of our Maître. I find him utterly infuriating sometimes, and this love affair with your idiot brother is a fucking travesty—no offense.”

“Watch yourself,” Claudia warns, smirking.

“But we can bring him back in line. It’ll just take some finesse.”

“And you’ve got a special way of finessing that’s different from everyone else’s, hmm?”

“Yes, indeed,” Santiago says darkly. “I have the voice. Maître was forced to contend with that talent of mine quite early on. With my maker’s unfortunate demise, there was an opening in the cast in the role of Master of Ceremonies.”

“At first, Maître hesitated to give so much stage time to an untested member of the coven,” Gustave explains. “I subbed in for a few weeks; I had always been the understudy for that role, but my performances were...”

“Serviceable,” Celeste offers.

Gustave smiles, bashfully. “That’s a kind way to put it. Anyway, Santiago was such a natural that Maître was practically forced to let him on stage.”

“He wasn’t happy about it,” Santiago says. “He was far stricter with me than the rest of the cast. He drilled me in rehearsals, scolded me for flubbed lines, insulted my intelligence and manhood. But he was hardly the first strict director I’d ever encountered. I rose to the challenge. It became easy for me to enchant the room, lull them into a trance. And it helped that every flight I landed on the balcony to flirt with Maître—all part of the performance, of course.”

“The flirtation was not part of the performance,” Estelle counters, laughing. “Claude never touched him.”

“Oh, but Maître was just as much a member of my audience as the mortals were. Though he despised me offstage, he was enthralled by my presence onstage. First time I ran the opening monologue in dress rehearsal, I pressed two fingers to his lips like this—he loved it,” Santiago says, with a sensual growl of emphasis. “Now, six nights a week, he stands there in the same spot waiting for it like Pavlov’s dog; it’s adorably pathetic.”

“Why did you want to seduce him in the first place?” Claudia asks. “Because the coven told you that was the only thing that would work?”

Santiago laughs. “No, the rest of these bastards told me absolutely nothing. You’re lucky Estelle took pity on you, Claudia; they kept me in the dark for years about Maître’s predilections. I was forced to forge my own strategy, and it was only luck that I chose such an effective one.”

“So you... wanted to seduce him? I thought you’d hate him, since he killed your maker.”

“I did hate him.”

“Santiago was biding his time, searching for a way to hurt him,” says Eglee, with a graceful lift of her brow.

Santiago’s voice lowers into something smooth and seductive as he murmurs to her, “I wished to hurt him very badly. Alas, I was only a fledgling, hardly strong enough to go head-to-head with him. Better to use my innate talents, and encourage Maître to willingly expose to me his... most tender underbelly.”

Eglee makes a show of fanning herself.

But Santiago’s attention shifts back to Claudia, and his expression turns serious.

“What transpired next was not solely a matter of skill,” he admits. “Those of us who were most successful in breaking Maître’s walls did so because we bore unearned advantages: Tuan was a handsome father who believed in the best of Maître. Sam was a long-lived outsider with a wealth of knowledge to soothe anxieties during an unprecedented moment of global turmoil. As for me... I was a commanding presence. Do you know how it feels to break into a crypt that hasn’t been maintained for centuries, Claudia? How the lids of the caskets crack with the slightest movement? Now imagine leaning on the caskets inside a man’s mind, those structures which have not been forced to bear any weight for four hundred years.

“I hunted him, drew him into telepathic conversations, plied him with the timing and inflection of my words. I struck when he was being watched, either during my monologue on the balcony or in rehearsals when he was directing. Those times when he could not afford to react; those were the times I slipped him images of what I thought he might like to see: my fat prick in my hand, my face between his legs. When I pressed my mind against the barriers of his, expecting to find resistance, I found none. His defenses crumbled to dust under the barest pressure.”

“Meanwhile, Santiago was perfectly well behaved in public,” Estelle cuts in. “He was the most obedient member of the cast. And Maître was taking every opportunity to remind the rest of us, ‘This is what it means to be a professional.’“

“The fledgling was an eager ass-kisser. Every other word was, ‘Yes, Maître. Thank you, Maître!’“ Quang mimics in an exaggerated accent.

Santiago flips him off. “It was not arse-kissing, it was a stratagem. I backed him into a corner with it. Because really, what was he going to do? If I was the golden child against which he measured the other vampires, then he could not afford to publicly acknowledge my insubordination. It would make him look weak, to admit that such a demure and agreeable fledgling was harassing him in private.”

“Oh, sure, you were a cold-blooded manipulator, and all bids for Maître’s approval were solely made in service of that manipulation,” Gustave appeases with an eye roll, then to Claudia he whispers, “It’s very easy for him to sand down the edges of this story in hindsight.”

Santiago throws a tube of greasepaint at him, but Gustave snatches it out of the air and winks at him.

“Perhaps,” Santiago concedes through grit teeth, “there was a part of me that enjoyed earning Maître’s approval. I’m given to understand that such behavior would have been a perfectly natural expression of fledgling instincts after the traumatic loss of one’s maker.”

Gustave laughs and holds up his hands placatingly. Eglee leans over to press a mockingly maternal kiss to Santiago’s fair hair, but he brushes her off.

“And,” Santiago continues heatedly in Gustave’s direction, “that does nothing to diminish the fact that after just three weeks of telepathic flirtations, your Maître was gagging for it so badly that he wanted to suck my fingers right there in front of the audience.” He glances at Claudia and explains further, “I caught that stray thought from him during the monologue one night, with the pads of my fingers still pressed to his pretty little mouth. To this day he hasn’t admitted if that was an accidental disclosure or an intentional bid to seduce me.

“Either way, while I would have loved nothing more than to ravish him right there on the balcony, we did have a show to finish. I set it aside for the duration of our performance. It was much later, after cleanup and the post-show meeting, that I finally made my way to his office, foolishly confident that he would be waiting eagerly for me to fuck him...”

“But he wasn’t as eager as he was on the balcony, huh?” Claudia reasons.

“It was a rookie mistake,” Santiago admits, smiling bitterly. “I gave him time to think about it. Almost three hours.”

“As you saw demonstrated in our post-show meeting tonight,” Celeste chimes in, “You’ll best succeed at getting through to Maître if you can catch him on the back foot. He wasn’t expecting Santiago’s sudden insolence tonight; it made him freeze up. But when he was disciplining you, Claudia, his words were precise and cruel because he had planned the entire lecture in advance.”

Santiago smirks, but his gaze remains dim. “Give him time to plan, and he’ll claw his way under your skin. Those... those little fangs do pack a wallop when he wants them to.”

“He attacked you?”

“In a manner of speaking.” His gaze lowers. “I remember he was at his desk, facing away from me. He complimented my performance that night. He... well, easier to show you.”

The memory hums through the mental resonance of the coven. It’s not quite as clear, visually, as Sam’s and Tuan’s recollections, but the aural element—the sound of Armand’s voice, awkwardly shaped around English words for the sake of the English fledgling—remains locked in crisp fidelity. “As a matter of fact, your performances these past few weeks have been excellent, fledgling. Bravo. You’ve proven much more valuable to the coven than your maker would have led me to believe.”

A squeeze of grief in Santiago’s chest, a furious tremble in his voice when he asks, “What do you mean by that, Maître?”

“Ah, it’s nothing. A brief conversation between myself and your maker prior to his sentencing, when he begged me for his life. ‘Just kill the fledgling,’ he insisted, ‘and when he is dead, it will be as if I never made one, and we can resume life as before.’ I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the thrust of his argument. He felt embarrassed that his final legacy would take the form of a middling theatre actor who only wanted the dark gift as a salve for a mortal ego bruised by perfunctory applause. But I am glad now that I was not swayed by him; you’ve turned out to be a far more agreeable replacement.”

“Jesus,” Claudia says.

Santiago covers his face. Eglee strokes his back.

Claudia thinks, Yeah, that’s exactly the same way he talked to me. And for the first time, she actually believes what they’ve been saying to her all night: it’s not personal. It’s not something particular about her that makes Armand hate her. He does this to everyone. He’s been doing it for hundreds of years.

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” she asks.

Santiago shrugs without looking at her.

“Having known Claude for his entire tenure in our coven,” Gustave offers soberly, “I don’t believe he would have begged Armand for his life.”

But, Claudia notes, that’s not the same as saying ‘your Maker wasn’t embarrassed of you,’ which is the assurance that Santiago would’ve surely preferred to hear. Part of Claudia wants to tell Santiago, ‘My maker once said he wanted to replace me with a blonde bimbo lounge singer from Ponchatoula,’ but she’s pretty sure he wouldn’t appreciate being invited to the club of fledgling disappointments.

“It was clear,” Santiago says hoarsely once he gathers himself, “that Maître wanted to provoke me. He wanted to make me lash out at him, because... because he knew the script for that, do you understand? If I lashed out, then he would know how to subdue me, how to scruff me like a kitten and reestablish control.”

“So you couldn’t let yourself lash out.”

“If I fought, I would lose,” Santiago says simply. “I knew that. I had known that for weeks; that’s why I wanted to seduce him in the first place. The only way left for me to win was to... reach deeper. Reel him in.”

The memory continues:

The sound of Santiago’s heartbeat pounding in his ears. “Well struck, Maître,” says his voice, somewhere beyond the muffling of his own rushing blood. “Is that everything you wanted to say to me?”

In the blurry, impressionistic shadows of the office, Armand remains seated at his desk and does not turn to face the fledgling.

“That’s it, hmm? Belittle and humiliate me so I’ll never again have the audacity to flirt with you—but for what? Does flirtation frighten you? Am I a threat to you, Maître?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

Santiago steps forward into the painterly room, closer to the back of Armand’s chair. In reverse, the reflection of Santiago approaches through the frame of the mirror hung above Armand’s desk, closing in on the coven leader. “As you’ve said,” Santiago agrees softly, “I am the middling fledgling of a middling vampire; I couldn’t hurt you even if I wanted to.”

Haltingly, waiting for Armand to rebuff him, Santiago reaches forward to cup his fingers around the front of Armand’s throat, his claws deliberate and careful when they drag against fragile skin. Armand only leans back into the contact, eyes shut, gripping the wooden armrests of the chair.

“But you want me. You’ve been fixated on me since the moment I stepped on that stage. Keening for it, night after night, but never brave enough to ask for what you really want. I can’t understand why.”

The points of Santiago’s claws pierce the side of Armand’s throat, like a bite without a mouth, and Armand gasps and tilts his chin up.

“Why deny yourself this?” Santiago asks him, coaxingly. “Haven’t you earned a moment of respite? Is it not the privilege of the coven master to receive the loyal passions of his flock?”

Armand’s thoughts are impossible for Santiago to decipher; not rational coherence but bursts of unconscious flavor like chewing the flesh of a ripe fruit. Nevertheless, the sense of Armand’s wordless ecstasy alchemizes Santiago’s remaining fear into a cruel satisfaction. His face splits into a smirk, and his free hand dips under Armand’s shirt collar, to the almost-warm flesh below his collarbones... made small beneath Santiago’s large hand.

He curls forward, lowering himself to whisper darkly in Armand’s ear: “You can have everything you want, love. You deserve it. You are Maître, and this fledgling is eager to serve.”

Chapter 6: Santiago continued

Summary:

Santiago reveals what he learned about Armand's past, and the discussion reaches its conclusion.

“You can have everything you want, love. You deserve it. You are Maître, and this fledgling is eager to serve.”

“I can’t believe that worked,” Claudia blurts out.

“The art of seduction comes easily to our Santiago,” Sam says, like a balm to soothe the earlier tension between them. It seems to work; Santiago glances at him, holds the Irishman’s gaze for a beat, and then winks back in acknowledgement.

“My ability to maintain composure and think quickly in such a challenging moment was a credit to my decades of stage experience,” Santiago says humbly. “If not for that, I would’ve buckled under his cruelty, and gotten myself punished or killed for my insolence.” Then he pinches the bridge of his nose and gives a short sigh, muttering, “Fuck, he was a bastard though. Every time I catch myself thinking ‘ohhh, poor little masochist just begging for someone to hit him,’ he spins around and does something completely beyond the pale.”

“There was something different about Maître’s affair with Santiago,” Gustave tells Claudia. “It did not smooth over old hurts; it did not bring them closer together.”

“On the contrary—I’ll have you know he wished to be very close to me,” Santiago cuts in with an uneasy smile. “Sometimes after I fucked him, the wretched thing wanted nothing more than for me to hold him like a lover—and I obliged, of course. I’m not a monster.”

“But outside of your trysts,” Gustave argues, “there was still a ferocity, a resentment between you.”

“Well, that’s because Santiago still wanted revenge, right?” Claudia asks. “I mean, you said that was the whole point of seducing him. Did you ever follow through?”

Luchenbaum scoffs. “Obviously not, as he is still alive to tell the tale.”

“Oh Hans, he wouldn’t have killed me.”

“You’re sure about that?” Basilic challenges.

“He wouldn’t have killed me!” Santiago insists with a laugh. “You know, six months into fucking him, I think I could have talked back to his face in front of all of you and he still wouldn’t have killed me. Punished me, certainly; he would have been all too happy to rip my throat out and make me regret being born. But no, he wouldn’t have killed me. He couldn’t risk losing access.”

“Like an addiction,” Estelle suggests.

“And with all the unromantic and resentful connotations such a word implies,” Santiago agrees. “Did I follow through with my revenge? Yes and no. The whole point of a revenge seduction is the rug pull at the end... foster enough intimacy to dash his heart against the bluffs, betray his secrets to his enemies, that sort of thing. I only managed the first half.”

Claudia stares at him. “You didn’t pull the rug.”

“I did not.”

Her face twists into a sour expression. “You got soft on him? You?”

Santiago leans back in his chair, and his eyes trail thoughtfully up towards the ceiling. His mind starts to project leftover pieces of the memory: tiny gasps, moans, the only small sounds Armand would permit to pass his lips even in the throes of pleasure. It’s probably not meant for Claudia’s benefit, but for Eglee and Estelle, who both hum dreamily.

Still ruminating on these glittering shards of some beautiful evening many years ago, Santiago remarks quietly, “I remember at the beginning... it must have been the third or fourth time I’d ever had him. The beginnings of our encounters were fraught with distrust, but after getting his obligatory hissing and posturing out of the way, he softened up for me.

“So, the third or fourth time, he finally allowed me to see him fully nude. He’s stockier than you’d think, underneath all those big coats, but still willowy. Sensitive. After undressing himself he straddled my lap—I was seated—and I remember he hid his face in my neck, right here, and I thought he was going to bite me. But he didn’t. He just... nuzzled there like a child, trusting me to make whatever use I wanted of him.

“And I remember thinking: oh, this is exactly what I’d thought sex with my maker would be like.”

The abrupt laugh that comes out of Sam sounds like the honk of a goose. Even he seems startled by it, and he coughs and pounds on his chest for a beat afterwards.

“Is that funny, Sam?” Santiago asks testily.

“Only because it’s such an apt comparison. Fucking hell, I can absolutely see how you got there. Claude was callous and Machiavellian in exactly the way Armand continues to pretend to be. And Armand... at the core of him, he’s exactly what Claude mimicked to draw in allies and victims alike: guileless and lonely, seeking guidance and support.”

Santiago hums. As if to justify his attraction, he reminisces: “Claude waited at the stage door for Francis Naughton. Told me he’d been cast as the same character at his university and he wanted to pick my brain about it, which was hardly a credible lie given that I was the understudy for the role. But he buttered me up. Took me out for drinks. I kept trying to figure out what he wanted from me—kept a close eye on my wallet, but he didn’t rob me. We just talked. Then he came back the next night, and the next, and... eventually, I concluded that he must just be some queer boy looking for a man. I was older, yes, but not unattractive, and... he had that look about him, which at the time I attributed to his personality but in hindsight I recognize as a vampiric trait: loneliness, the sort of emptiness you only catch when you look at someone out of the corner of your eye, when they believe they are unobserved.

“My mother was already in the ground. My sister fucked off to Prague at the turn of the century. I was a confirmed bachelor. And while I possessed a vast social network of friends and acquaintances, the only home I’d ever known was the theatre. To be... wanted, needed by someone was a novel experience, and I thought, graciously, to befriend the boy and be a companion to him. He was so grateful for it that he promised me eternity in return.”

Claudia squints at him. “Did he do the rug pull?”

A flash of fang from Santiago. “In a way,” he admits, “insofar as the process of transformation was a traumatic one. But, while he was colder to me after my turning, he was also quite evidently a man who knew he was marching towards his death, haunted by the decisions he could have made had he never sworn his soul to a certain coven master. He was executed before I had the chance to find out how much of the feigned innocence was rooted in truth. I was... dazed, a new fledgling unfamiliar with the customs of our kind, watching the face of a pretty young man contorted in horror and agony as the flames consumed his body. In my mind he was an innocent, my own transformation notwithstanding.

“So you can understand that when I turned to exact revenge upon Armand, and found a deeply broken thing hiding behind his authority, that was... disorienting.” He shakes his head. “I needed to know what exactly was broken about him; I could not bring myself to crush him without knowing it. Over time, I came to understand his nature. It wasn’t only his desire for me which had made him such an uncomplicated seduction; it was also the fact that initiating sex with him relaxes him.”

“It does that for most people,” Claudia says bluntly.

“What I mean is that... sex is something he understands, something he knows how to do, how to make sense of. The verbal confrontation which preceded our first sexual encounter was treacherous for him, an opportunity to make mistakes, but sex? Sex is familiar ground. Home turf, as it were.

“The moment I broke the seal on his desires, he knew exactly what he wanted from me, and he knew exactly how to coax me to give it to him. He already possessed all the skills he would need to maneuver in that realm. As much as I was confident I could seduce him, he was every bit as confident that, once seduced, he could seduce me in turn. And he was right.”

“So he wanted you to be his daddy, and he tricked you into going along with it?”

“No,” Santiago murmurs, his lips curling in fond recollection. “What he wanted was a firm hand, a strict master, and a body to hold him when it was over. That’s the thing, Claudia—Gustave was wrong. He thought Maître was a boy groomed into leadership by the Roman coven, but a man raised in satanic deprivation doesn’t fuck the way Maître fucks. He was a whore once, before he was shackled to asceticism. He was a whore, and a talented one at that.”

Claudia grimaces. She doesn’t really want to admit to herself that she knows this, but: “Men rebelling against Catholic repression pick up a lot of tricks. Just ‘cause Maître’s good in bed doesn’t mean that Gustave was wrong about him.”

Estelle purrs, “Was Louis Catholic?”

Claudia crosses her arms and doesn’t answer. “Just, I’m a little skeptical about your conclusions.”

Santiago purses his lips. “I drank from Maître exactly once. He pushed me off him and threatened to pry my fangs out of my mouth if I ever attempted to do so again. I later learned that drinking the blood of a more powerful vampire will, over time, gift that power to the drinker, and he did not trust me with any more strength than I already possessed. Which was fair enough. Perhaps we could revisit the issue in a few decades, I thought.” He shakes his head. “That’s the only thing that would have forced him to kill me, I think... if I hadn’t respected that boundary. His concern for the safety of the coven would easily override any attachment to me. If I became a true threat to his command, I would meet my maker in oblivion.

“But, in that brief moment with his blood on my tongue...” He trails off, shrugging. “I saw enough. Do you wish to view the memory yourself? A boy with a body as young as yours, slapped and kicked and sodomized by men thrice his age?” Santiago huffs, his expression turning grim. “There was a vampire mixed in there, somewhere; presumably his maker. His padrone. It was all very sixteenth century.”

Her gut churns. No, Claudia does not wish to view the memory herself. She doesn’t want to even think about it. She’s well enough aware of the evil things men do, but to think about it happening to somebody else, to form a picture of it in her mind’s eye... that feels wrong. Makes her feel like she’s being watched, like someone else in the world (maybe her maker, God forbid) could be picturing it happening to her. Makes her knuckles itch for something to hit. Makes her want to claw away the floorboards and sink her teeth into somebody’s throat.

“You’re saying...” but she trails off. She doesn’t want to think about it, not even enough to make an inference. “What are you saying?”

“I suspect he lived in that brothel long enough for pain and sex to become as much a part of his life as oxygen,” Santiago muses. “I suspect his maker bought him out of slavery, rescued him from his torments, and that rescuing engendered an unquenchable loyalty in the boy. And I suspect—I know, rather, that his body still craves it. The pain and the rescue. The torment and the mercy. The strict but loving guidance of the pederast.”

She doesn’t say anything. Her mental shields wobble like the walls of a metal fishing shack in the wind. She doesn’t think about it.

It was better when he broke my bones, crammed me under the floorboards. I fought him, kicked him, clawed him, bit him. That was fine. It was when he had me pinned, and he’d tell me he loved me. Before, during, and after. Before, during, after. That fucked me up.

She doesn’t think about how she was a nearly thirty-year-old vampire where Armand was a human child. She doesn’t think about any of it. Fuck Armand, fuck his freak sex games. She never wanted to know about any of this shit. He’s a bastard, a bully… men like that shouldn’t be allowed to have a past.

Santiago clears his throat, then sighs. “Look, Claudia, Maître is a poor leader; he always has been. He inconsistently applies discipline, narrows in on inconsequential details of production—he has no idea how to prioritize tasks.”

“Someone rips a seam on the back of a costume and Maître acts like the building is on fire,” Luchenbaum mutters petulantly. “No one ever sees the back.”

“But when you look at him,” Santiago continues, “and, behind the petty little man drunk on his own power, you catch a glimpse of the child desperately scrabbling for perfection to please his absent maker... then it becomes easier to swallow his atrocious directorial decisions.”

“And easier to swallow the execution of your maker?” Claudia asks sharply.

He falls silent for a moment, looking around at his fellow coven members. “Yes,” he says softly. “It still enrages me, to remember what he took from me. But it’s a very different story when you have all the pieces, isn’t it? The vampire Armand is a cruel, stubborn, obscenely powerful creature, but he is also terribly brittle, and just knowing how easy it would be to shatter him is enough to slake what desire I had to actually do it.”

He had clenched his fist as if to punch some sort of ceramic vase, shatter it on the floor—now Santiago uncurls his fingers and gazes down at his own hand. “To be entirely transparent, I think I love him,” he admits, seeming surprised at his own words. “I find him absolutely infuriating to work with, and he should never have been made the leader of anything, and if he keeps letting Louis run wild like this I’m going to strangle him... but I care for him a great deal. Certainly more than my maker ever did.”

“Well, okay then,” Claudia says derisively. “So you love him, and you’re the first one in centuries to give him what he wanted. Then, how come he’s off with Louis instead of here with you?”

Several coven members groan. “Now you’ve done it,” Planche says with an eye roll.

“Why is he off with Louis?” Santiago asks, his eyes flashing with fury. “Why is he off with Louis?”

Oh boy, Claudia thinks, grinning.

“Because Louis does not challenge him!” Santiago declares. He stands up out of his makeup chair with a flourish.

Eglee subtly shuffles into his abandoned seat, watching with rapt amusement as he begins to pace around the center of the lair.

He whirls on Claudia. “The problem with Maître is that he is caged by his responsibilities. You see the thread of that, don’t you? He will succumb to seduction only if he can guarantee that it won’t jeopardize his authority over the coven—and not because he cares to retain that authority for its own sake, but because he feels responsible for the welfare of his vampiric children, and the only way he knows how to ensure our welfare is if he remains in control. His desire to indulge his proclivities will always conflict with his desire to maintain authority.

“But then there’s Louis,” Santiago says with relish. “And Louis is outside the coven. So there’s no need for the old song and dance—testing his loyalty, ensuring his compliance, bullying him into submission. Maître doesn’t need to do any of that with Louis, because Louis isn’t subject to his authority in the first place. He can fuck off to Le Neuvieme and spread his legs for Louis with absolutely no consideration for how it will affect his station in the coven. Isn’t that just so convenient?!”

“Except for the fact that granting Louis a dispensation from coven membership proves that Maître enforces the laws arbitrarily,” Celeste remarks. “Which we already knew, but it was never as blatant as this.”

“It makes him look weak!” Santiago shouts. “Which you would think Maître cared about, given how much pain he’s caused others throughout the past centuries trying to compensate for looking weak. But for whatever reason, he cannot perceive the political consequences of his affair with your brother. Or he does perceive them, and he does not care, because he feels so assured of his station that he thinks he can get away with looking weak, because we’ll still be blind enough to obey.”

“Maybe it’s not about looking weak,” Claudia offers. “Maybe he just is weak.”

Several sets of eyes snap to her. Santiago falters, “What?”

“Well, you’ve got mountains of evidence to support the fact that he’s barely in control of anything. Maybe the solution to all this angst is just to start collectively treating him like what he is instead of what he’s been pretending to be. He’s a weak vampire who never should have been handed authority, like you said.”

Santiago’s yellow eyes bore into her. “You don’t actually believe he’s weak, do you?”

She crosses her arms, uncomfortably. “All these stories make him out to sound like a helpless fucking damsel who needs you all to comfort and protect him.”

“Oh, no, no, no...” Santiago murmurs, settling down on the floor beside Claudia’s chair, opposite Estelle. “He is cruel, and rigid, and tender, yes. But this is an important distinction, my dear: Armand’s problem isn’t weakness.”

“The measure of a vampire is his capacity to endure eternity,” says Estelle, propping her chin on the armrest of Claudia’s makeup chair like a somber, thoughtful dog. “Maître has proven his ability to endure.”

“No,” Santiago agrees, “Armand’s problem is that his decisions are entirely governed not by reason but by whatever rigid little wind-up toy passes for his higher brain functions. And anyone who has the key to that wind-up toy—anyone who knows him as we know him, including your brother—can wind him up to do their bidding. That, Claudia, is a rather dangerous flaw to find in a man charged with dispensing life and death.”

“A flaw against which the only defense is to ensure you also possess a copy of the key,” Sam murmurs gravely.

“Or to remove such severe responsibilities from his delicate shoulders entirely,” Santiago offers.

It hangs in the air for a beat.

For the first time that night, none of the other coven members say anything to shoot down the idea—Claudia suspects their silence is the first step towards finally getting Armand out of the fucking driver’s seat. That would be best for everyone, wouldn’t it?

He’s coming back, says Romaine in their minds.

“But, that’s a discussion for another night,” Santiago says gently, gracing the coven again with the shroud of their political ambiguity. “In the meanwhile, Claudia, we wish you all the best in navigating Maître’s fury. Godspeed on your journey.” He only sounds half-ironic when he says it. There’s a sincerity there which softens every word.

“Guard your minds,” Celeste reminds the coven as they resume their post-show tasks. “No sense in making him more angry than he already is.”

Chapter 7: Claudia

Summary:

Making use of all she's learned, Claudia confronts Armand.

Louis opens the door of their apartment and freezes, blinks at her. “Claudia? You—you didn’t have to knock.”

“Didn’t I?” She cocks an eyebrow at him. The buttons of his shirt are misaligned.

He laughs, and his eyes sparkle with that fond look he gets when she calls him out. “Just give us a warning and then you don’t gotta knock, alright?” he says, stepping aside to let her in. “This is still your home just as much as mine.”

She remembers, dully, that she loves him.

When she turns the corner into the main room, Armand’s there, as expected. He’s fully dressed in shirt, suit pants, and pointed shoes, with the oversized tan suit jacket folded over his arm, as if he were just about to leave. When he sees Claudia he says, “You are not wearing the Lulu dress.”

Claudia glances down at the yellow sundress she’s wearing. “I’m not.”

“I see.”

It doesn’t sound like the end of the conversation. She wonders suddenly: what’s he going to do about it? What does he think he’s going to do about it? She hasn’t seen anyone punished in the year and a half she’s been a part of the coven. There have been threats of punishment, arguments and shouting... but never actual violence meted out by the coven master. Will that change today?

Well. Certainly not in front of Louis, who presses a hand to her back as he scoots past her into the room, asking, “So how’s it going, sis?”

Claudia’s not here to socialize. She looks directly at Armand and shields her mind with righteous self-assuredness. “Can we talk? Alone?”

The two male vampires have a silent conversation above her head.

“Yes, of course,” Armand says eventually, like a reluctant concession. “I will take my leave, then; there is business to attend to at the theatre—”

“No,” Claudia interrupts, then gestures between herself and Armand to clarify. “Can we talk? Alone?”

Armand’s eyes betray his surprise. He masters himself enough to ask, “This could not wait until curfew?”

“The lair’s a lot of things, but it ain’t private. This is a private matter.”

Something I need to be worried about? asks Louis in her mind.

Coven stuff, she replies.

A beat. Then Louis hums and starts fixing the buttons of his shirt. “Okay, kicked out of my own damn house, I see how it is,” he jokes, fetching his camera before slipping his feet into his shoes. He presses a lingering but chaste kiss to Armand’s mouth. “I’ll see you later.”

He pats Claudia’s shoulder on the way past her, then exits the apartment, and Armand’s gaze follows him long after the door has shut.

Unlike Louis, Armand looks immaculate. He’s probably got lots of practice setting himself to rights when someone walks in on him in flagrante. The history of him... now that she knows so much about him, she’s found herself noticing things, fitting puzzle pieces into place. The way he holds his body. The way he rubs his knuckles with his thumb, over and over and over. She’s been noticing things all week, watching him and thinking about him. Deciding how she feels about him. Getting herself ready for this conversation.

Claudia moves past him and sits down on the bed that hides her coffin. She gestures to Louis’ bed, where the sheets and comforter lay completely flat and unrumpled—likely also Armand’s doing.

She says, “Have a seat, Maître.”

Like Gustave: Speak firmly, and wait for him to weigh your soul against a feather.

She feels him eyeing her, but she doesn’t flinch, nor does she harden herself to try to demand his compliance. That knee-jerk resentment she felt about the Lulu dress fiasco has mellowed over the past week. She’s come to understand that it’s not helpful to view Armand as a monstrous authority inviting armed rebellion; he’s a person, and speaking to him as a person is the key to surviving conflict with him. She keeps her tone of voice plain and neutral, so that complying with her request won’t reflect on his authority.

Armand hesitates, then sits on the bed opposite her. His spine remains perfectly straight, and he clasps his hands in his lap, modeling a calm and easy confidence. “What would you like to discuss?”

Like Tuan: Reassure him that he’s not a bad person, nevermind that he’s the fucking worst.

“First, I wanted to say that I understand where you were coming from the other day,” Claudia says carefully. “I understand that I’m the lead, and the audiences are paying to see me, so my performance reflects on the coven as a whole. Moreover, I understand that the other performers might feel jealous, if I get to keep this lead role when I haven’t been performing well. It might make them feel overlooked, or underutilized. So I see now why, as the director, you had to reprimand me in front of everyone, to show them that you were taking this seriously and holding me to a certain standard just like everyone else. I get that.”

Armand nods, slowly.

“But I also think that you cast me in this role in the first place knowing that it was going to be painful for me.”

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t apologize or try to explain himself. He doesn’t do anything that would confirm her suspicion, but he doesn’t deny it either.

“I don’t know if it was some kind of hazing, testing my commitment to the oath I’d made. Maybe you just needed to see what I’d do. I recognize, at least, that you probably didn’t expect it to last this long. If ‘My Baby Loves Windows’ had been part of the regular repertoire, swapped in and out of the show every few months without fanfare, it might’ve been more bearable.

“But it seems unfair to reprimand me for failing to endure the emotional toll of a show that you cast me in knowing it would make me miserable. You wanted me to suffer and I am suffering, Maître. It worked. I’m buckling under the weight of it, and I don’t think it’s fair for you to act outraged about that when that was the goal from the beginning.”

She pauses, then, and lets the silence hang between them, challenging him to respond.

Armand smooths his hands down his lap thoughtfully.

Other people, when you have a conversation with them, they’re thinking of what they’re going to say next before you’ve finished talking. Not Armand. He’s thinking now, weighing his words. When he does speak, it sounds calm and almost practiced, like he’d rehearsed it in his head before opening his mouth.

“You are correct that I did not anticipate the resounding success of ‘My Baby Loves Windows’. If I had known the play would have such staying power, I would have thought twice about casting an untested actress in the lead role. But I cannot rewrite the past. As for the situation we find ourselves in at present, I must tell you, Claudia: if another member of the cast were in the same emotionally difficult position as you, I would still expect them to put aside their personal grievances for the fifteen minutes a night required to indulge our enthusiastic patrons. I will not treat you differently for the recency of your oath.”

Hmm. Nicely volleyed, Maître, she thinks in Santiago’s voice, behind the safety of her mental shielding. Armand’s appeal to the absence of favoritism could be a mark of esteem for her just as easily as it could be a mark of disdain. His tone of voice was precise. It makes Claudia feel like she’s sitting on the rhetorical knife’s edge, and she needs to know, before they go any further in this conversation, which side of it he actually falls on.

“Let me ask you one question, Maître: Do you just dislike me as a person? Because if you dislike me, if you’re always going to dislike me and there’s nothing I can do to change that, then I’d like for you to just tell me, and save me the trouble of trying to repair an esteem for me which you never possessed in the first place.”

That makes him smile. He laughs once under his breath. His eyes are alarmingly shrewd, gazing directly at her. “I do not hate you, Claudia,” he says gently, like it comes from a place inside of him he does not often access in his role as Maître but which nevertheless exists in his repertoire... something almost paternal. “I have been... frustrated with your work ethic lately, but you understand already my concerns there.”

Claudia squints at him. “I told you I would rather give up the role and work backstage. You blew past that and made me apologize to Sam for being ungrateful.”

“Yes.”

“What happens if I refuse to go on stage tomorrow night? Will you hit me? Beat me? Rape me?”

A snarl twists his lips, too quick for him to suppress it. “Claudia—”

“I know that I’m putting you in an uncomfortable position,” she barrels on. “I know you won’t lay a hand on me, ‘cause Louis wouldn’t forgive you for it, and I know that my knowing that makes you angry at me, like I’m manipulating you into tying one hand behind your back. But ignore all that for a second. I’m not asking you this as Louis’ sister; I’m asking you as a member of your coven. What’s the consequence? If I can’t stand one more minute of playing baby Lulu and I refuse to go on stage, what happens to me?

Armand doesn’t answer. He looks trapped. He stares at her, the cogs turning behind his eyes. His mouth opens, abortively.

Like Sam: Tell him, I respect you, even if no one else does. I’ll help you find a solution to things that seem impossible now.

Claudia taps the floor with the toe of her shoe, setting an absentminded rhythm. “The fear of punishment is what you use to make people compliant. I mean, that’s the whole point of punishing; it’s gotta be a worse outcome than compliance would have been. But being compliant is already hurting me bad, Maître, so the punishment for this would have to be really bad in order to work on me. And then I’d be performing on stage while afraid, which is bound to impact my singing. Seems like a bad strategy.

“Especially because... because I already respect you, Maître. I only lasted five hundred performances because of that respect. So, sure, you could go through all the trouble of breaking me, and maybe at the end of it you’d have some meek shell of a vampire you could push onto the stage to play-act a little girl every night, but in doing so you’d lose the boon of an enthusiastic participant. ‘Cause I’m here, Maître. I’m already here, ready to work with you to find a compromise.”

Armand’s eyes narrow. “What sort of compromise did you have in mind?”

“Have someone else play Lulu.”

“You’re the only one with a child’s physique.”

“A child’s physique which is hidden by the bulk of the dress anyway. You could put Estelle in the Lulu dress and she’d look the part just as much as I do.”

He doesn’t snarl at her, but he does turn a sharp gaze to the wall beside her. “You are Lulu. The audience expects you in the role.”

“Well that’s the part I can’t compromise about. Me playing Lulu is the thing that has to stop. But we can make compromises outside of that. Like, if the audience likes me because of my talent, then you can give me a different role to play—let me be Evangeline Edwards, let me be Annie Oakley—”

“They won’t accept you as Annie Oakley.”

“And if it’s not my talent that they like, if they just want to see me playing a little girl, then at least let me play one in a show where the child’s childishness ain’t the butt of the joke. I’ll be your Dorothy, Maître. I’ll meet you there. I’m willing to be your Dorothy. I just can’t take any more Lulu.”

His gaze is still trained on the wall, on one of Louis’ stupid paintings; some white lady’s ass. “Did you know, Claudia,” Armand enunciates carefully, “that one can remove the limbs of a vampire without killing them? In my coven, if a vampire’s behavior seems particularly dangerous or erratic, I can relieve them of their hands, their feet, until such time as they can prove they will use those privileges responsibly.”

She knows he wouldn’t do it, not with the shadow of Louis’ judgement hanging over him. But she still feels the chill run up and down her spine. Her hands form fists in her lap. “You don’t need me to be afraid of you, Maître,” she tells him, her voice wavering somewhat. “Sam said you’re the best coven leader he’s ever met because you don’t make decisions based on ego.”

“Did he? I suppose that’s true.” Armand smiles; it doesn’t reach his eyes. His gaze finally turns back to Claudia, grave. “You wish to negotiate with me? Negotiations require a foundation of truth. Tell me what you did to your maker.”

“I didn’t do anything to him. He self-immolated on the bridge in—”

“We are not discussing ‘Bruce.’ We are discussing Lestat de Lioncourt.”

Well, shit. Her gut freezes. Whatever he knows already, he knows it from Louis, she thinks bitterly, because she knows her brother is constitutionally incapable of keeping his fucking head shut. But Armand can’t kill me without killing Louis too, and he can’t—he wouldn’t—would he?

Like Santiago: Those little fangs do pack a wallop. He’ll try to rattle you. Hold on to what you know of him, and why you came here. He only tries to rattle you because he feels rattled himself. Stay calm. No fear.

Claudia takes a deep breath. It’s her turn, now, to choose her words carefully. She takes her time, studying the hem of her sundress over her knees.

“You didn’t kill Tuan, for revealing his nature to his son,” she says steadily. “You didn’t kill Quang, for knowing about vampires. You didn’t kill Santiago for being turned outside the coven. It matters, if someone was ignorant of the laws when they broke them.”

“The truth, please,” Armand demands impatiently. “Respect does not require a shield.”

“He turned me in 1917,” she tells him, because Armand’s a bastard, and he’s bound to treat her worse than he would have treated someone handsome like Tuan in equal circumstances, but he’s not unreasonable. So, she’ll give him the context. The context has to be enough to absolve her.

“He made it clear I was created as a gift for Louis—reluctantly given. Over the years I got older, but they never stopped treating me like a little girl. I left home in 1924. I traveled. Came back six years later, because Louis needed me. He wasn’t living well without me.”

You can’t kill me, see? she thinks behind her shields. ‘Cause he needs me. If you want to have him in his right mind then you can’t kill me.

“The two of them had a big fight when I got back. Lestat dropped Louis out of the sky.”

“He what?”

“He—he flew up into the sky with Louis till they were so small I couldn’t even see them anymore, and then he dropped him, and Louis fell miles and miles and landed like a corpse on the ground. Splat.”

Armand swallows, his eyes wide with fascination but otherwise guarded. “And then you fought Lestat?”

Claudia snorts. “No. Bastard ran off. He stayed away the whole time while I was there putting Louis back together. Then as soon as Louis was strong enough to stand, Lestat started trying to apologize. Kept calling the house and sending gifts, wouldn’t leave us alone. Eventually Louis caved and took him back, because of course he did.”

“And then you fought Lestat.”

“No. Jesus, I just wanted to—I just wanted to leave. Find other vampires, find a better life. I wanted Louis to come with me, but he wouldn’t leave, because he was caught up in Lestat like always. But he gave me his blessing. He wanted me to be happy. So I got on a train to New York to catch a boat to Europe. And then—”

She pauses.

Like the coven: Sometimes it’s better to just share the memory itself. More visceral.

She shares the memory:

Lestat bursts into the train carriage, wearing the conductor’s hat, playing puppet with the corpse’s decapitated head. Taunting her about what happened with Bruce. (She doesn’t censor that part. Let Armand see it. Let him feel the mirror of her discomfort; empathy for the person he’d wanted to despise.)

Lestat keeps mocking her, threatening her.

“We endure each other for Louis’ happiness. So come home and make him happy. 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.”

Armand’s claws have dug into the fabric of his trousers. “I see.”

“We planned to kill him, because he was keeping us prisoner—both of us. I planned it while Louis kept him distracted. Poisoning and decapitation.”

“So he is dead.” Armand’s voice sounds hollow, fragile, like this revelation isn’t a surprise to him. He was just waiting for the confirmation.

But—”No, he’s—no, he’s not dead. Is that what Louis told you?”

Armand blinks. “Louis said he killed him.”

Claudia scoffs. “Well he didn’t. Jesus Christ, that’s the one thing he didn’t fucking do. Poisoned him, slit his throat—but Louis wouldn’t burn him and wouldn’t let me burn him either. So sure, maybe Lestat’s dead, but we don’t fucking know that. For all we know, the bastard’s getting on a boat to come hunt us down and murder us right now.” She covers her face, furious.

“You’re telling the truth?”

“Would it be this humiliatingly stupid if it wasn’t the fucking truth?”

After a beat she uncovers her face, takes a deep breath, and clears her throat. “We didn’t know about the laws. Technically, we didn’t even break them.” (Aside from Antoinette, but Armand doesn’t need to know about her.)

He rubs his palms together, taking a deep breath as well, his thoughtful gaze turning inward. “I was... surprised, by Louis’ guilt surrounding the murder of Lestat. I thought... I thought that it was impossible for Lestat to have died without my knowing. I thought I would have sensed it.” He nods to himself. “This makes much more sense to me.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes.” His answer comes automatically.

“More than Louis?”

“More than I love Louis, or more than Louis loves Lestat?” he asks in return, then laughs once, pinching the bridge of his nose.

At that moment, Louis’ voice filters through to the both of them in their minds. You two doing alright?

Claudia looks at Armand. He looks back at her with apprehension.

Don’t need you playing chaperone, she tells Louis.

He laughs in her mind, nervous but joyful. Alright, alright. I’ll mind my own business.

Then it’s just her and Armand, and the truth of it all sitting between them like a rock.

Claudia’s not like the rest of the coven. She’s not gonna fuck him—he probably wouldn’t want to, even if she offered. That shortcut to the heart of him just ain’t available to someone like her.

A dangerous flaw to find in a man charged with dispensing life and death.

But he is listening to her. He’s studying her like she’s a peer. He doesn’t hate her. And she’s got Louis as a backboard, so she’s probably safe. She’s probably not in mortal danger.

Maybe she can try something new.

She gets up off her bed and goes to sit next to him on Louis’. Armand tenses up at the new proximity, but she ignores him by looking out into the rest of the room, and after a few seconds he relaxes again. She tries not to think about what this particular corner of the bedroom smells like.

“I joined the coven because I wanted to be part of a family,” she says. “Never really had a family before. Mama died birthing me. Daddy didn’t want me. Auntie thought I was good for a beating and not much else.”

“And Louis?” Armand asks, haltingly.

Claudia hums. Something hurts in the back of her throat. “He loves me,” she says. “He tries his best. And there were a few years, at the beginning, where it almost felt… like how it’s supposed to feel in stories, you know? With parents. But only almost. It was like… they didn’t love me, they just loved the shape of a ‘daughter’ in their lives, and as soon as I didn’t fit inside that shape, they didn’t understand how to love me anymore.”

She doesn’t look at Armand directly, but she watches his thumb start moving, rubbing a circle over the knuckle of his index finger, round and round. He’s listening.

“I love Louis,” she affirms, because Armand had better not doubt that point, “but it’s lonely loving someone who doesn’t understand you. I needed to find people like me, a family of other vamps who could take me on hunts and teach me new ways to kill. People who would want me for me. And I finally found that in this coven.”

A pause in his rhythm, then he says, “I’m pleased to hear that.” It sounds a little wooden, but not insincere.

She taps her shoe on the floor. “Over the past year and a half, I’ve been getting to know everyone. The ladies and I play games in the wings between scenes; Santiago gives me lectures about Shakespeare; Quang recruited me to help prank Merde’em… I’ve spent time with everyone individually except you, Maître. ‘Cause you’re hardly ever around, and when you do show up it’s just to yell at people or give orders.

“For awhile I thought everyone just kind of hated you, and that’s why you didn’t stick around. I thought maybe I could bond with the rest of them by snarking about our mean director behind his back.

“But I was wrong.” She nudges Armand’s elbow with hers. “They don’t hate you. In fact, you’re kind of universally beloved. Which was baffling to me, because all I’ve seen of you is how you swoop in to be a bastard before going off to spend the night with Louis. But apparently that’s not enough to make them hate you. They care about you a lot.”

“I see,” he says. Claudia doesn’t look, but she can hear the catch in his voice.

“And I ain’t trying to say anything treasonous here, so don’t blow your top about it, but just... hypothetically, if you weren’t their maître, there would still be a place in that family for you. If you didn’t want to be in charge of everything; if you wanted to just do a little directing and fuck my brother on the side or whatever... you’d still have a place to come home, and people who care about you.”

“Thank you for your concern,” he says roughly, his voice low in his throat. “But I am obligated to the coven, and there is no one else I would trust to take on the role of Maître responsibly.”

“Hmm.” She glances at him sidelong, assessingly—four centuries of habits and worldview coiled up together like a knot. “You know, I don’t know if you missed this in the past couple hundred years, Maître, but the mortals have started trying out this thing called democracy?”

He laughs, wetly.

“So if you didn’t want to be the monarch anymore, there’s probably a way you could set things up so nobody was the maître. We could all get together and come up with some kind of constitution, make sure everything’s fair and safe and good for the future.

“And then you could just be Armand. They’d love you for just being Armand.”

She knows he won’t answer her now. It’s too weighty a proposition to be decided among just the two of them, in this little makeshift lair in Le Neuvieme.

She knocks her shoe into the side of his, companionably. “Just something to think about.”

“Claudia,” he says. “A favor, please.”

She peers at him from the corner of her eye. He looks wrung out and unguarded like he was in some of the coven’s memories. Claudia hadn’t anticipated feeling the exact same way herself, but here it is. “Yeah?” she asks him.

“Two more nights. Two more nights as Lulu. Time enough for Estelle to learn the blocking, for Hans to adjust the costume, for Tuan to alter the animations...”

A smile breaks out on Claudia’s face. Armand returns it, hesitantly.

“Yes, Maître,” she says.

Notes:

i hope you liked it! please leave a comment if you did!

as always please feel free to use this as inspo for your own works <3