Three at the Crossroads - Chapter 2 - Due to Blood
© Persephone & Siren
degas.ballerina@gmail.com

Spoilers: Up to Interview With the Vampire
Rating: PG-13
Status: Incomplete
Characters: Lestat, Louis, Gabrielle & Armand
Summary: AU. What if Armand hadn’t been left behind in Paris in the year 1780? Part two.

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There was a small monkey in the courtyard garden. Lestat heard the servants trying to capture it as he came home from the hunt early in the evening. At first he thought it was a rat they were chasing, but this was not Paris. It had not been Paris for a decade. And the brand of vermin since Paris had only become more exotic.

"I'll catch it," he told the two scrambling natives as he stepped out onto the flagstones. The yard was in disarray. They had done more damage than the monkey. "Go back inside."

They obeyed without protest, without insisting their service when it was refused, just as they always did since learning that there were certain things their two masters would simply not have done.

Lestat stepped over a dropped birdcage, the same one he had struck the other night. He would have picked it up, but he could already tell that the fall had killed the nightingale. Tiny scent of death in the air. When he woke tomorrow evening, it would already be replaced.

Sighing, he tilted his head back to find the shivering intruder where it clung in the swaying shadows of the topmost green branches of one of the trees. He considered shaking it out. He considered leaping up to snatch it. But he did neither; extending his hands, he simply called to it, beckoned it, and very soon after, the squeaking thing scurried down into his arms like a lost child.

"Not so different after all from grand Parisian rats, are you?" Lestat laughed.

He kept a hand tight at the nape of the small creature's neck to keep it from bounding away as it grew anxious at the unnaturalness of his touch, but otherwise Lestat handled it gently. It calmed in only a minute or two, though if Lestat had not killed so recently, it might have fought tooth and nail. Strange, the keenness some animals have to the undead.

By the time he felt Armand come home, Lestat had taught the little monkey how to clasp its hands and chatter pitifully in exchange for a bit of ripe fruit. And when it perched on his shoulder, its long, warm tail wrapped snugly under his arm. He found it all delightfully droll.

Come and see, he called to Armand as he listened to the soft sounds of the servants properly tending to his arrival as they had been too preoccupied to do upon his own.

Only a moment later, Armand was in the doorway. His prompt appearance wasn't unusual, but suggested that he had already been on his way before Lestat had called to him. His hair was neatly tucked behind his ears, only a curl or two out of place; it was too silky to remain that way for long.

The lantern by the door cast shadows across his face and its light gleamed in his eyes, less so than it would normally. He'd killed.

One of his hands was against the front of his coat, as though he was about to take it off, but it slipped away as he neared Lestat. He didn't seem to notice the monkey. Armand never protested the presence of animals, but he rarely, if ever, expressed interest in them.

Lestat laughed as the monkey squirmed from his hands and leapt over him to cling to the back of his shoulder. He looked up to Armand from where he was sitting on one of the stone steps across the garden and gave him a smirk. "You frighten him."

Reaching back to the animal, he pulled it out from behind him and dropped it back upon his knee. "You needn't be afraid of Armand!" He lightly flicked one of its little furry ears, and then added, unable to keep from laughter again, "He wouldn't hurt a fly."

Frowning faintly, Armand said nothing. The monkey still didn't seem to be enough to catch his interest, or his mind might have been elsewhere, and the longer Lestat's attention remained on the animal on his lap, the dimmer his eyes became.

Armand's hand moved back against the buttons on his jacket front, but then his fingers still only lingered against the edge of the lapel. "Weren't you here when I left?"

Glancing up at him again, Lestat shook his head, and then looked back down to pick up the creature as he stood. "Do you mean me or him?"

Armand only frowned.

Lestat smirked as he approached Armand and then deposited the monkey on his shoulder. "You see? He likes you!" It actually did not seem the monkey liked Armand at all, as Lestat had to hold its squirming body in place with the pressure of one hand.

Armand stepped back, but didn't grimace at the feeling of claws digging into his shoulder as the motion interrupted its delicate balance.

Tilting his head to the side, Lestat took in the image of the two of them together. "I think he needs a name. What shall we name him, Armand?" His eyes twinkled naughtily as he met Armand's again and then he seemed unable not to laugh aloud irreverently. "We'll be three again, yet!"

"I think that you should take him now." Armand's tone wasn't threatening, but he sounded serious, and annoyed. He continued pointedly, "This fabric is flimsy. You chose it yourself."

Only laughing again at Armand, Lestat lifted his hand, and with a tiny screech, the monkey instantly bolted far across the garden to disappear behind a wide terracotta pot against the wall. Lestat seemed disappointed as he watched it go, but then gave Armand a chastising look. "There is more to life than fabric."

No longer frowning, Armand's response was very soft. "Something came for you." Then there was a spark to his eyes that made it look like he should be laughing, but there was no sound to it as he closely watched Lestat at once pause in how he'd turned away to follow the animal.

"Came?" Lestat went back to Armand immediately, the monkey completely forgotten despite how it scratched loudly at the gravel.

Armand's hand moved against the front of his coat again, and he withdrew a letter from the inside pocket. "Just today. Don't you want to see?"

"No. Not at all." Lestat snatched the thin packet from Armand's hand and turned it over. It was from Roget. Becoming very still, Lestat did nothing but stare down at the Parisian postmark for a long minute before his fingers too falteringly moved to pull at the string.

It didn't seem to occur to Armand to give Lestat privacy. He stayed where he was, but his eyes were on Lestat's face and not on the letter he rolled out of the envelope at all.

Lestat was quiet for some minutes. Much longer than it should have taken him to read the handwriting on the page even a dozen times. When he did look up again, he was so startled to see Armand, that he took a step backwards toward the pond. "I..." He shook his head slowly, dazed, and his fingers seemed to tremble as he folded the page toward himself as if meaning to keep it from Armand's eyes.

Armand spoke immediately, "What is it?" He frowned, his gaze intense and studying, and he took a step forward to counter Lestat's retreat.

Blinking as if he were in a trance, Lestat looked back down at the page. "An uprising... an... Oh, you know...One of those tiresome peasant revolts." He laughed sharply then took a quick breath as his eyes seemed to fill with sudden dark color. Half of the letter crumpled into his hand as his attention followed the rippling on the pond. "They're dead. All of them, save my father."

A gust of air made the paper flutter against his fingertips and then he let Armand have it before turning away again.

The letter disappeared from Armand's hand in an instant. He took another step, and his hand found Lestat's elbow, stopping him from going in the direction the monkey had gone. "I am sorry." Armand's eyes lowered and his fingertips pressed into Lestat's arm. They were colder than usual.

Lestat stilled, but after a moment answered him softly, "No you're not. You don't give a damn. Let me alone."

"Lestat," Armand said, gently, and his hand moved against his arm. "Let me stay with you, don't send me away."

"I don't want you here..."

Shaking his head, Armand's fingers curled more into Lestat's sleeve. "You do. You can't want to be alone right now, not right now..."

"You... Do you... You did not even look at it!" Lestat looked back down at Armand abruptly. He was trembling. "He wants me to go to him. To America, of all places. One of the colonies..."

Armand blinked. It seemed that he was confused, or perhaps interested. "Aren't you going to go?" His tone was innocent, but also suggested that it was what Lestat should do.

Lestat jerked his arm away. "I don't want you here! Not you!"

A soft inhalation of breath, and then Armand spoke again, "Lestat..."

The challenging look burned in Lestat's eyes for another moment before sifting away like the sands in the wind. He moved around Armand in the other direction. "I am going out."

"No!" Armand said, almost too quickly. His hand lifted to Lestat's arm again, but there was something hopeless about the gesture and he only managed to catch his hand. "Don't go. Not again..."

"Then leave me!"

Armand's hand moved, slipping down to hold the end of Lestat's fingers in the place of the chisel they both knew they were truly itching for, but he was otherwise still until Lestat once more pulled away from him to walk toward the door.

"Wait..." Armand's voice was small, lost. "I'll go." It seemed as though he would say something else, but then he was gone, and there was only silence.

Not long after, it was without care or discrimination that Armand found himself in a nearly deserted street. The still-early evening hour was just too late for it to be crowded with its usual merchants, loudly proclaiming the existence of a perfectly woven carpet or a dish that dated back to ancient times. There was still plenty to see, however, from the occasional toothless vagrant to the once lavish tents that were still being packed up for the evening, but Armand's focus was inward. He did not listen to anything around him, nor did he allow himself to be seen by the few mortals who passed.

But he did not go unwatched.

He walked until he reached the end of the alley, until nothing lay beyond but sand and wind. Here, in the shadow of a blue-striped overhang, the moonlight did not reach him.

It must have been a long time that she had been watching him, listening, before he noticed her, because the shadows had already shifted and when the moonlight glittered in her eyes, they only appeared colder than he'd remembered.

Her wealth of hair was bound up into a single plait coiled at the back of her neck and lost under a sand-spotted scarf, and her clothes were men's, but the femininity in her walk was undeniably feline as she crossed the square to enter the mouth of Armand's alley.

Armand was unable to hide his surprise, but remained where he stood underneath the faded tent. Gabrielle.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, his eyes narrowing. Armand's tone held no threat, it even seemed innocent, but the defensive greeting was plain enough. She wasn't wanted.

When the breeze that caught under the tent tugged at her scarf, grains of sand fell quietly from its folds like bits from a broken hourglass, but her voice in the night's heat was as smooth as ice, "Where is my son?"

"I do not know," Armand truthfully replied. He said nothing more about Lestat. He didn't like the way that she looked at him, the way that she spoke. "Leave me alone."

"There was a package." She came closer. "I know that." Her perfect lips pursed above her pretty chin. Shadows wrapped the rest of her face. "Let me read the letter."

If Gabrielle's knowledge that he still had it shocked him, it wasn't apparent save for the slight widening of Armand's dark eyes. But his question was simple and soft, "Why?"

"If it mentions my grandchildren, you will let me read it."

She seemed sure of that. Too sure in fact, and the certainty made Armand pause.

He considered the question, as if deciding whether or not an argument was worth it, and then duly took the folded letter from his pocket. He made no unnecessary move towards Gabrielle, but extended his hand as far as possible to allow her to take it.

Not even bothering to turn back toward the moonlight, she read the long page immediately. When she lifted her eyes again to meet Armand's, there was nothing like sorrow in them, merely a distant, contemplative frown, but when she spoke this time, her voice was less than a whisper, "Where is my son, Armand?"

"I have told you," Armand said. He seemed weary, and wasn't looking at her. His eyes were trained somewhere on the distant horizon, beyond Gabrielle, where sand twirled and danced in front of the moon.

She touched him with fingers as cold as her features. More grains sifted down onto the wrinkled paper. "Tell me where it is you stay with him. Don't you understand what this will do to him, or has already? Don't you understand that he must not go to New Orleans?"

Armand withdrew from Gabrielle's touch immediately. "I don't know what you mean," he replied smoothly, with only a faint trace of a frown. "Do you think I've read it? Leave me be. I gave you the letter."

Her jaw set in the exact same way Lestat's so often did. "His father begs him to come. He must not go. I've come back for him, Armand. I am taking him with me up the river." She folded the letter up methodically with delicate creases.

He did not flinch, but there was the slightest flicker in Armand's eyes that betrayed his wariness, or fear. "He won't want to go with you."

"And yet he will come all the same."

Silence. Armand moved, and the shadows from the overhang slid from his hair. For an instant it shone in the moonlight, brightened to a brilliant copper, and then he slipped into the darkness of the alley.

She turned, but remained where she stood. "I will follow you. I will find you again."

There was no answer from him.

Armand left the alleyway and Gabrielle behind. As he moved, he closed his mind to everything around him. He had been careless these past few months, and knew that that was how she had been able to track him. He wouldn't allow her to follow him again.

He remained out for another two hours, both to be sure Gabrielle was not behind him and to give Lestat the time alone he'd promised.

When he returned, he made very little noise, but it was just enough to assuredly be noticed.

Armand went into the garden, which was still lit. He turned over the cage with the dead nightingale and opened the small, barred door. He reached inside and stroked the bird's back with one finger. The feathers on the end of its wings were curling. The smell did not bother him.

When a servant approached to see if there was anything he needed, Armand quietly informed him to replace the bird immediately. He also wanted to be left alone.

The servant took the cage and disappeared. Armand remained knelt by a Corchorus plant and some stacked pottery filled with fresh dirt. His arms were crossed over his knees, and the fingertips that had touched the dead nightingale rubbed together in a slow, steady rhythm.

Not so very long later, the little forgotten monkey abruptly shot by him in a blind bolt for the interior door. The footsteps that could only have been Lestat's boots paused, but when he continued into the courtyard, the animal was not with him.

When he saw Armand on the ground, he sighed as if he would reprimand him, but then seemed to lack the energy to do it and his gaze only drifted to the empty earth in the pots.

Lestat's sigh was echoed by one of his own, and Armand stood as though he somehow heard the intended chastisement. He waited for Lestat to speak, but soon realized that he wasn't going to, frowned, and watched him instead.

Finally he took a step forward, then seemed to think better of it and turned away. Silently, Armand lifted a hand to the tall plant next to him, but it only brushed the air above a frayed leaf.

There was silence between them for a minute or two, then as if drawn by the rippling sounds of the pool's water against its flags, Lestat crossed to sit on the steps. He stared dismally at the dim outline of his reflection, but when he finally spoke, it was to Armand. "What should I do?"

Armand's fingers curled and his hand dropped back to his side. Slowly he turned his head to look back at Lestat, the rest of him followed, and in the next moment he was sitting beside him. He didn't touch him, but there was a strange energy in each of his movements. He was excited.

"We should go," Armand said softly, persuasively. "There is nothing for us here. We should go immediately."

"You mean there...To cross the Atlantic." Lestat scowled slowly, and his hands curled just barely in the air where his wrists hung over his knees, but when his eyes shifted aside to Armand, it was only grief that tinted them.

Leaning towards Lestat, Armand nodded. "It can be done." He wanted to take Lestat's hands, but settled for pressing the tips of his fingers. He was still cold. "We could leave by the end of the week."

Lestat's gaze fell again, but he did not shift away. "No..." he sighed after a minute had passed. "I am not done searching. I..." He looked confused and then the expression only faded away with a gentle shake of his head.

Marius again.

The slightest hint of a frown crossed Armand's features, but it was too brief to be noticed. He continued firmly, his hand shifting to slowly cover one of Lestat's, "Lestat... I am what you are looking for. I am the one who loves you and shares everything with you. Come with me. We'll go together..."

Lifting his other hand to press the side of it between his eyes, Lestat squeezed them shut. "It's only been ten years," he breathed.

"A decade of silence," Armand said softly, and he pressed Lestat's hand. "The time was wasted." He paused, then continued even more quietly as though to make up for what he'd said, "I miss you."

"I'm right here," he answered softly. Lestat's hand slipped from his face, and he looked down slowly to where Armand touched him.

Armand shook his head, but his tone was weary and seemingly-agreeable, "Sometimes."

He covered Lestat's hand with both of his then until Lestat let it turn to clasp them. And then as Lestat only sighed, gradually, not at all abruptly, Armand leaned against him so that the side of his forehead rested on Lestat's shoulder. One of his hands slipped off of Lestat's to move to his opposite arm, and he held him there in a half embrace.

The night slowly shifted around them. Different sorts of insects began to chirp and click in the foliage as the minutes passed and the temperature might have dropped in the laughable way desert temperatures do.

All that had been in his mind having gone quietly, Lestat spoke again, "I can't give it up. I..." He shifted to look at Armand, his eyes blinking back nothing. "Armand, I know he is out there... I know I can find him... I know he knows the way..."

Hidden from Lestat, Armand's eyes widened in a slow, startled way. He drew a breath and his head lifted. Shadows from nearby trees fell over his face, but it only made his eyes shine more brightly. "You don't need him. What you taught me was to find strength in yourself, Lestat... and me. We will find the way to go on together. We can start anew..."

His eyes dulling, Lestat's expression knit in a way that for a moment made him look ten years older than he should have. "Armand..." He looked up at him again and slowly searched his gaze.

Armand's hand rose and his fingers brushed the side of Lestat's face with just enough pressure to keep his head turned towards him. "Something just for us."

He sighed shakily and glanced away, but a moment later Lestat moved to pull Armand into his arms and keep him close.

Both of Armand's arms lowered and he moved them around Lestat's waist. His forehead rested against the front of his shoulder. He didn't speak for several minutes and then when he did his voice was soft, gently persuasive, "Please."

Lestat's embrace shifted around Armand, but his eyes remained fixed across the courtyard where the monkey had reappeared and begun to scratch around behind the pots in attempt to reach the lattice. Lestat might have answered Armand then if he had not been distracted by the sudden clatter of the little creature slipping and knocking over a flowering plant that hung from above which left the monkey briefly buried in earth before it popped up again and disappeared with a shriek back behind the door to the portico.

The silence then was sudden and Lestat's face dropped down against the side of Armand's hair. "Mm," was all that he said, but it could not be denied he was finally giving in.

A soft sigh. Armand's head turned up towards Lestat's face, but was unable to meet his eyes, and his lips brushed the side of his jaw. They parted as though Armand would speak, but only another sigh followed, and then he kissed him there.

This time, Lestat did not pull away. For this night at least, he became Armand's, and it was not long after that he turned his face to allow his mouth to meet his in a kiss that tasted like blood.

Armand's lips parted obediently once Lestat's mouth met his, and it was long after that when his eyes closed. At the flavor of it, a tremor moved through him, but his arms only became more secure where they held him. A moment later Armand's own blood could be tasted, immediately mingling with Lestat's despite how distinctive it was.

"Is this really what you want," Lestat whispered between kisses. "You, Armand...?" The air was still so warm that as they lost article after article of clothing upon the steps, they scarcely noticed the change. "To cross this ocean with me? To go where none of our kind have before gone? To be the only ones?"

His answer was immediate: "It is what I have always wanted." Armand's hands had slid to the backs of Lestat's shoulders. His head lowered after he spoke, as if he couldn't bear to look at him, but then it tilted back again as his hands fell away, his arms bending so that his elbows touched the cold stone beneath him.

Lestat brushed the auburn curls from Armand's eyes, searching him as if there could possibly be anything to doubt in them. "It will not be Eden." His lips barely moved with the words and he bent to press his flushed mouth to the front of Armand's white shoulder. "It will not be Paradise found."

Slowly, Armand's head tilted back against the step just behind it. His arm lifted, bending at the elbow to embrace Lestat around his shoulders, and his hand found the back of Lestat's neck. His voice was soft, steady, and sounded more like a sigh, "All I want is to go with you, share it with you. What we find does not matter."

"God damn it." Lestat's mouth slid further down against him as his hands moved over all familiar contours. "That it is what we will be. Two damn demons planting our blood flag in the new world." A minute too preoccupied to speak, and then he whispered again, almost inaudibly even for Armand to hear, "And only two..."

Armand frowned, but it was due to Lestat's tone, not because of what he'd said. His hand slid down to Lestat's shoulder while his face turned to the side. He could see nothing but stone and grass.

"No one else," Armand finally replied in the same whispering voice. His fingers probed the top of Lestat's spine as his hand shifted down his back, and Armand pressed against it, as though he wished Lestat to be flat against him, and all at once, he was.

"And so we go into a limbo large and broad..." Heat in Lestat's breath as he sighed into flawless flesh. "And imparadised in one another's arms. You and I. My dear...Armand..."

"Yes," said Armand eagerly, his eyes large and filled with light. "Yes, you and I." He would have agreed to anything, but it was what he wanted. The curve of Lestat's face felt warm against his hand. Armand shivered and turned his face up to kiss Lestat's throat. "You and I," he said again. His lips brushed Lestat's skin, gentle and tender, until their softness gave way to the scrape of his teeth.

Satin blood like red lightning from tiny wounds that would only disappear again, and only a razor sharp moment later, it filled Lestat's mouth as well. All miseries and regrets and wasted years faded there upon the stones beneath the twin sounds that - for once - were perfectly matched as they accompanied what was shared.

Still laughable, but the air was less warm, the wind above the roof had grown silent, and the heartbeat drums had faded into only the dull rippling of the water in the pool by the time the gentle opening and closing of doors within the house began to become noticeable. Timid shuffling footsteps were growing nearer. Babbling foreign thoughts prickled agitatedly in the air.

"Servant's looking for us," Lestat murmured languidly as his fingertips brushed up from where they had long stilled against Armand's thigh, as if daring the woman to find them now.

"I don't care," was Armand's soft response. His voice sounded lost. The interruption annoyed him; he pushed the noises away, choosing instead to focus on Lestat's hands against him, the softness of his hair.

"Mm," Lestat said, and ultimately, it didn't really matter if she found them or not.

But she wasn't the only one who was looking.

TBC