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Returning to him was a mistake. Lonely as he would have been at first, Nicki would have eventually moved on from the loss of him. He might still have found himself in a wayward vampire’s clutches, however unlikely that would have been, or wound up in an accident of some sort, or fallen ill, yes, but none of those scenarios pain Lestat as much as the one that actually happened—the one he brought about with his own selfishness.
Le Théâtre de Vampires. It is, as Nicki had so declared, his proudest achievement. A theatre company composed only of vampires, acting as vampires, putting on plays in which vampires go about their vampiric ways, but with a twist: the audience is completely unaware that everything which occurs on stage is real.
As a means of feeding, it is superbly efficient. As a form of theatre, well…it isn’t. It isn’t theatre at all in Lestat’s eyes. For what is the meaning in a play in which none of the actors are acting?
“You aren’t getting it, Lestat. You’re thinking too simply, again, as you always do,” Nicki complains, insulting his intelligence yet again as he so often does these days. “We sell the audience on the very premise that it is only theatre! It is an act within an act! We are not vampires acting as mortals, we are vampires acting as mortals who are acting as vampires!”
“But you are vampires,” Lestat argues, “And the audience only believes the act because they believe in the goodness of the art as much as they disbelieve in the existence of vampires! It’s a farce and an affront to all those who put their love into the art!” Nicki whirls around with a scoff. Hands on his hips, he glares down at Lestat where he sits at the edge of the aisle. “Any man can get on stage and punch another man in the face,” Lestat continues, attempting to paint a picture for him. “It takes real talent to pull one’s punch at just the right moment, and to take a hit that never connects.”
Nicki rolls his eyes at him. “Where is your—”
He stops short as the door swings open, and in comes Armand, followed closely by Celeste, Estelle, Eleni, and two others whose names Lestat has yet to learn.
“How goes the preparation for tomorrow’s show?” Armand asks Nicki.
There is noticeable tension between the two of them, though it is nothing like the bitterness between himself and Nicki. Still, Lestat doesn’t like watching their interactions any more than he likes arguing with Nicki—as every interaction with him these days is, most unfortunately, an argument.
Nicki is eerily silent for a long moment before he sneers at Armand. “Fine,” is all he says before turning away, and then he marches back on stage and disappears behind the curtain.
“Hello,” Lestat says in greeting, giving him a polite smile. Armand smiles back down at him.
“Hello, Lestat. How are you tonight?”
Lestat sighs with a pointed look in the direction Nicki vanished. “As well as ever,” he says.
Armand stares at the curtain as he speaks. “Things will get better for you very soon, I am sure.”
Lestat thinks to ask him how he could possibly know that but decides the better of it, assuming it to be no more than a turn of phrase.
They have a short but pleasant conversation, the women joining in as well when Armand invites them to do so. It is rather remarkable how much the dynamic of the coven has changed since that day: a small positive in a sea of negatives. As hard as it is to get through each night knowing that Nicki resents him now more than he ever thought possible, he can’t imagine how much harder it would be if he did not have Armand's comparatively pleasant company to balance the scale.
When an hour passes and Nicki still hasn’t emerged from the dressing room, Lestat excuses himself from the conversation and goes to check on him. He knocks quietly on the door, calling out to him as well, but receives no answer.
“I’m coming in,” he announces. The door isn’t locked.
At first he thinks he must’ve been mistaken, that Nicki had already left. The room is dark and appears empty at first glance, but then he spies Nicki in the far corner, shoulders rigid, head hanging low.
“Nicki?” Lestat asks, stepping into the room and quietly shutting the door behind him.
Nicki stands up straight but doesn’t respond nor turn around. Lestat approaches him cautiously, one arm extended, intending to grasp him by the shoulder, but Nicki spins around abruptly just before he makes contact.
“What do you want?” he asks, like nothing is wrong. Like he hadn’t just been staring at the wall in a pitch-dark room, entirely unresponsive.
“I just wanted to make sure you were alright,” Lestat says, letting his arm drop. “It has been over an hour since you—”
Lestat flinches, backing away a step when Nicki suddenly bursts into raucous laughter.
“Alright? Me?” Nicki asks, pointing at the center of his own chest. “Alright?” He laughs again, and again, until he doubles over with laughter. “My life was over before it ever truly began! I was nothing, nobody! A dark void where a soul should be. I had no reason to live, but then there came a breathtakingly beautiful man so impossibly full of light and life…” Nicki steps forward, the simple motion wobbly and unnatural. He lifts his hands to hold Lestat’s face—something he sorely missed, but that felt horribly wrong now, as Nicki uses far too much pressure, his nails biting into Lestat’s scalp. “A man who lived a life just as pointless as mine, devoid of any real joy, who somehow remained joyous despite that. I saw that man, and I thought to myself, what would it take to utterly ruin someone like him?”
Lestat doesn’t like his words nor the tone he speaks them with one bit. “Nicki, you’re hurting me. Let go.” Nicki only held onto him tighter, his nails piercing the flesh enough to bleed.
“What would it take to drag someone like him down to the depths of hell, where I’ve resided all my life? What would it feel like to watch him fall apart, to watch him realize that I’d been right all along? There is no goodness in what we do, Lestat. There is no goodness that cannot be corrupted. You are the evidence!”
Lestat slaps his arms away, caring not for the drag of his sharp nails across his face. “You’ve gone mad!”
Nicki chuckles. “No, no. I’ve not gone mad. It’s this world that’s gone mad. Or perhaps it always was, and I’ve only come to that late.”
Lestat shakes his head and turns on his heel. “I won’t entertain this madness. I won’t entertain your delusions, and I won’t entertain this sick idea of yours or the way you’ve—”
“But you’ll entertain him just fine,” Nicki scoffs. “Won’t you?”
“What?” Lestat had been reaching for the door, but he pauses now with his hand out.
“Don’t play coy.”
“What in the hell are you even trying to say?” Lestat demands, whirling around to face him. “Speak plainly or not at all!”
“And if I do, will it help at all? You don’t listen to a word that comes out of my mouth either way.”
“If you want to insult me,” Lestat says through gritted teeth. “Then do so at your will. But do not speak to me meaningless words and act as though I’m a fool for not inventing a meaning to fit them! It is a waste of my time and yours!”
“You are a fool if you think you can convince me you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Nicki says with a sneer, “And a worse one if you really don’t know. I’ve seen the way you look at him. I know you were speaking to him all those times you ignored me. I know you’re drawn to the darkness in him just as you were drawn to the darkness in your maker.”
Lestat feels the blood in his face drain away as he finally catches on to Nicki’s meaning. “Drawn to him? I told you!” he shouts. “I told you he was watching me, speaking to me, I told you! I told you, and you didn’t listen! And I told him no,” Lestat says, voice cracking. He doesn’t want to cry here, now, in front of Nicki and his delirious, cruel smile. “I begged for death, and he denied me. I prayed to God and he did not answer. Don’t accuse me of things you have no knowledge of. You haven’t the faintest clue what I’ve been through.”
Finally, Nicki’s smile fades. “No, I don’t. Because you won’t tell me. I waited months for you to tell me, and you never did. You don’t trust me, so why should I trust you? Hmm?”
Lestat has nothing to say to that. He knows Nicki won’t accept any answer from him. They are long past that point. Past the point of return now, it would seem.
As much as it pains him to acknowledge that, Lestat can’t simply ignore it any longer.
“I was not drawn to Magnus,” he says. “I was not drawn to Armand either, at first. But you don’t want to hear that. You’ve already decided what is true and what isn’t without my input. So be it. You want to stand around in the dark and stare at the wall all night, so be it. You want to kill people on stage and call it acting, so be it. You want to belittle me, mock me, call me a coward, a liar, a fool?” Lestat shakes his head, then points at the corner of the room. “You can tell it all to your new friend, Monsieur dusty wall. I won’t tolerate it any longer.”
Nicki scoffs again, preparing to say something else, but Lestat has already swung the door open and slammed it behind him before he can start. He meant to head back to the auditorium, but his legs won’t move. His back slides against the door as he falls to the ground. He’s startled to see a drop of blood on his pant leg, entirely unaware that he started crying at some point. He swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand but acknowledging it in this way only makes it worse. He needs to get away from the door; he doesn’t want Nicki to hear him knowing he’ll make fun of him for it later. He doesn’t know when or understand why Nicki became so cruel.
“Oh dear,” says Armand. Lestat flinches at the sound of it, didn’t realize he’d come down the hall. “Are you alright, Lestat?”
No point in lying seeing as how his face is a bloody mess, but he refuses to admit defeat where Nicki can hear. “Perfectly fine,” he says, attempting to dry his face on his sleeve. “I was just going to get myself some fresh air.”
“Shall I accompany you, then?”
At first Lestat thought only of escape from it all, but something about the unreadable look on Armand’s face when he looks up at it—certainly not the pity nor sympathy one would expect from someone who’s stumbled upon a grown man crying on the floor—has him accepting the offer. “Please. I’d appreciate the company.”
Armand smiles. It’s…more genuine than the others he’s seen, Lestat thinks. He didn’t think the others weren’t genuine before but in comparison…he doesn’t know where this is coming from. Armand is offering him his hand, so he takes it with an answering smile of his own.
“There’s a secret place I frequent when I need a break from it all,” Armand says as he pulls him to his feet. “Let me show you.”
He doesn’t let go of his hand. Lestat doesn’t bother pulling it away, letting himself be led by the hand like he once led Nicki through the crowded streets during a festival that had been held shortly after they first arrived in Paris. It was the only time they could get away with such a thing as there’d been the convenient excuse of not wanting to get separated from each other amongst the throngs of people. No one looked at them strangely for doing so. Lestat wishes either of them had had the courage to try it again.
“Where are we going, exactly?” Lestat asks. “Or am I not allowed to know yet.”
Armand chuckles quietly. “You’ll see when we get there. It’s not too far.”
Not far at all it seems, as they soon stop at the doors of Les Invalides.
“I would hardly call this a secret place,” Lestat says, raising his brows at Armand.
Armand shakes his head with a bright grin, the likes of which puts that last smile of his to shame. Lestat finds himself smiling too. “Not Les Invalides itself,” he says, then raises his free hand to point straight up. “Up top. Come, follow me.”
He begins to rise. Lestat lets himself be pulled up for a second before he rises too, wondering what could possibly be so special about the roof. Only, they don’t stop at the roof. Armand leads him all the way up to the very tip-top of the spire.
“Here?” Lestat asks, eyeing the point of it. “And you simply—what, float above it?”
Armand sits one foot down on it, still holding onto Lestat’s hand, and wobbles slightly as he tries to balance. “Here, you try,” he says.
He looks ridiculous! Lestat can’t help but laugh. “Absolutely not! You barely fit yourself, there’s no chance the both of us could stand on it together.”
“Oh, come now! At least try first before you decide it’s impossible.” Armand tugs his hand, trying to pull him closer.
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Lestat complains, and yet he tries his best to find room for his own foot. “We’ll both fall!”
“Well, it’s a good thing we can fly. I’ll hold on to you, and in return you’ll hold on to me. We shouldn’t fall like that.”
It sounds reasonable enough, but Lestat is suddenly aware of just how close they’ve been all this time. It’s senseless considering it didn’t bother him at all up until this point but his face grows warm nonetheless.
“Is this why you brought me up here?” Lestat asks, attempting to diffuse his embarrassment. “Just to hold on to me?”
“Not entirely,” Armand says. “There’s something else I wanted to show you. But I’ll only do so if you can balance with me.”
Lestat huffs. “Fine.” He reaches for Armand’s other hand as he plants his foot firmly on the widest part of the spire he can reach. He doesn’t know what to do with his other leg so he bends it up and out of the way. Armand must find this funny as he tries and fails to contain his laughter. “What? I’m balancing, just like you asked.”
“That pose. You look very dainty, mademoiselle.”
Lestat’s face burns even hotter at that. “That was hardly my intention,” he says, “And don’t call me that.” He drops his leg with a pout, turning his head away to look down at the city below them. “I still don’t understand this balancing act but the view is quite nice.”
“Yes, isn’t it? As I said, I come here often when I feel overburdened. To balance on the tip of the spire, as no mortal could ever hope to accomplish, and look down upon the whole of the city. So high the mortals look like ants: tiny and insignificant. The city itself doesn’t seem so large from up here. Everything appears small to me, even my burdens.”
Lestat watches a tiny carriage pass over the bridge until it passes out of sight.
“Your burdens…you mean the coven?”
“Yes.”
“If you find it to be a burden, why don’t you leave? Surely no one is forcing you to lead them?”
Armand’s grip tightens momentarily but he says nothing. Lestat turns his attention back to him, sees him frowning down at his own foot, and waits. What he finally says is not at all what he had expected.
“Why haven’t you left your Nicolas yet?”
“I beg your pardon?” Armand turns to look at him. His face is serious now, and there’s a trace of irritation in it. “Nicki is not a burden.”
“You and I both know that is not true. And yet, even after what he said to you earlier, in the dressing room, you have not chosen to end it. Not entirely.”
Lestat lets go of him completely. His foot slides but he corrects his posture in the air immediately, and Armand follows suit. “You were listening.”
“Difficult not to. I heard you shouting and came to check on you, but I didn’t want to interrupt. I didn’t want you thinking I was eavesdropping either, so I returned to the auditorium, but you were both quite loud. I fear everyone there became your unwitting audience.”
Humiliation colors Lestat’s cheeks now. “Well, I’m sorry you all had to hear that but the words shared between Nicki and myself are none of your business.”
He doesn’t wait for a response before floating back down to the roof. Armand touches down shortly after he does but he ignores him, intending to jump. Before he can, Armand grabs him by the arm.
“It might be none of my business, but I don’t like seeing you hurt,” he says. “I know you love him with all your heart, but I don’t like hearing the things he says to you and I don’t like seeing you cry because of him.”
Lestat watches him warily from the corner of his eye. He had his suspicions, and Armand has just about confirmed them. Even so, he has to ask. “Why? Why do you care?”
Armand releases his arm only to take his hand again. He takes a step closer, urging Lestat to look him in the eye. “Because I love you.”
Lestat inhales sharply, mouth hanging open as he stares back at Armand. He’s waited how long, exactly, to hear those words?
“I love you,” Armand says again. “You are unlike anyone I have ever met, mortal or immortal. You are beautiful and kind, and you light up every room you enter. You can see it in my children, how different they are now after the time spent in your presence. You have something the rest of us have long forgotten.”
“And what is that?” Lestat asks, still reeling from the confession.
“Hope,” Armand says, raising his hands to hold Lestat’s face gently. Lestat can’t help but remember Nicki’s nails digging into his skin. “And what a miracle that is, after all you’ve been through. In such a short time, at that. A testament to the strength of your spirit.”
“I…” Lestat doesn’t know what to say. Armand is staring down at him with so much raw emotion, he feels paralyzed by it. Nicki used to look at him like that once. It should make him sad. It does make him a little sad, but it also makes him…hopeful.
“Does anyone else know the size of your soul?”
He’s said it so quietly, even with the scant few inches between them Lestat can barely hear it. But the words themselves are gigantic, momentous, earth shattering. Whatever doubts Lestat had about Armand’s intentions, whatever regrets he had about the way things ended up with Nicki, none of them matter right now. Not with the gaze of this ancient, indescribably powerful being flickering between his eyes and his lips like he wants to kiss him but is too bashful to make the first move.
That’s all well and good, Lestat thinks as he closes the short distance between them. Armand gasps when their lips brush. He trembles when Lestat raises his hands to hold his face in turn and deepens the kiss, moans softly when Lestat sucks on his lower lip. He sighs blissfully when Lestat pulls away.
“Are you alright?” Lestat asks, tilting his head. “You seem a little…”
Overwhelmed, maybe? He isn’t for certain.
“I…I haven’t touched anyone like this in a very, very long time,” Armand says. Overwhelmed it is, then. “I’m sorry.”
Lestat shakes his head. “You’ve nothing to apologize for.” He leans in again, this time for a quick peck only. Even that little bit of contact has Armand shuddering. “Do you want me to stop?” Lestat asks.
Armand immediately shakes his head. “No, please don’t.”
Lestat smiles. He leans in for another kiss and threads his fingers through Armand’s hair. When he swipes his tongue over Armand’s bottom lip, he hears his voice in his head.
You’ve no idea how long I’ve dreamed of this.
You dream of kissing me?
I dream of much more than this.
Lestat pulls away. To think he’d been so nervous around him previously is madness. To think there was a time he’d been afraid of him is even moreso. Armand is nothing at all like Magnus. He shares much more in common with Lestat himself, he’s beginning to think.
“These dreams of yours,” Lestat says, “Would you show them to me?”
Armand searches his face for a moment before nodding slowly, like he’s uncertain. Lestat doesn’t mean to embarrass him but he can’t help a quiet chuckle when images of himself appear in his mind’s eye.
“Not like that,” he says, feeling bold. He lets his fangs drop and uses the hand still in Armand’s hair to pull his head to the side. “Like this.” He bites into his exposed throat, the both of them moaning in sync as the blood hits his tongue. Did you dream of this, too?
Yes. Yes, I did, but…
But what?
Well, we were far less clothed in my dreams.
Lestat releases him then, tongue flicking out to lick a stray drop of blood from the corner of his mouth. He didn’t much like the taste of Magnus’ blood but Armand’s is positively divine. “Show me then,” he says again.
Armand looks flustered to the point of embarrassment, but he eventually reaches for the top button on Lestat’s jacket. He struggles a bit at first, hands shaking, but Lestat remains patient. He doesn’t think he would be able to control himself if he hadn’t touched another person like this in a century either. He hasn’t the faintest clue how he’s managed it.
It takes time, but Armand grows bolder the more time passes. He gets Lestat half undressed before he undresses himself and then he kisses Lestat with the fervor of a man starved. Lestat ends up on his knees at the edge of the roof at some point, Armand’s hand shoved down his trousers, but then Armand suddenly freezes.
“What is it?”
Armand shakes his head with a frown. He looks irritated, focused on something Lestat can’t see. It must be the coven, Lestat thinks. Someone is speaking to him.
Lestat grabs him by the back of the neck and pulls him into another kiss.
“Ignore them,” Lestat says when they part. “You said you came here to escape your burdens, no?”
“But I am…”
“They will survive without you for one night.”
Armand looks uncertain. Lestat worries he might very well leave him like this, so to tempt him further he quickly undresses the rest of the way until he’s bare from head to toe. Armand’s eyes pass over him hungrily. Lestat beckons him closer with a curled finger. “Come to me.”
Armand is on him again immediately. Hands, lips, and teeth. If the coven bothers him again, Lestat doesn’t notice. He’s much too distracted by the slide of warm skin against his own and the pleasure Armand is impressively adept at delivering. He would’ve thought some part of him at least would feel guilty for holding someone else like this—someone who isn’t Nicki, but he’s surprised to find he feels nothing of the sort.
Perhaps there is something special to this place after all. But no, that can’t be right, Lestat thinks: it’s him. Something about him makes Lestat want to cast his burdens aside. He catches a glimpse of Armand’s heavy burdens and wants to relieve him of them, too.
Perhaps when they’ve tired and the sun rises once more, the guilt will set in. Maybe Lestat will come to regret this encounter on the roof of Les Invalides. Armand might as well regret having shut the coven out for once.
But while the moon shines down on them and the rest of the world seems so small and far away, let them be burdenless.