Work Text:
Naples, 1742
Gabrielle is twelve and the splash of the water against the rocks she is perched on barely reaches her feet. She seeks no shelter from the Neapolitan sun, as she should do. Instead, she is looking at the boys. They are sons of fishermen – not yet men but somehow already fishermen themselves. The bronzed skin and tense lean bodies. They shout and laugh and tease each other, jumping off the rocks in increasingly complex flips, climbing back up, in abundant splashes and incredible noise. They move together in a rhythm they all understand, in a choir they are all part of. Is there such a difference between a school of fish and a group of boys?
Gabrielle has never been a part of anything. She likes to observe the world without any hope of being part of it. She observes the boys, these amphibious creatures. Their toned limbs and the hair barely growing on them, their shamelessly loud voices, the crack in it that sometimes accompanies a too-high pitch. The dialect rolling easily on their tongue, their short lives have already been mostly just work and early rise, always before the sun. Lives full of hardship and companionship, no idle time spent alone. Lives with almost no resemblance to hers.
Gabrielle never rises early, she never cared much for companions – the last of nine siblings, easily forgotten, easily slipping in the cracks of the listless surveillance of servants and relatives.
She does not yet know, in this very moment, that soon she will leave this coast. She will travel a small fraction of the old continent, and she will be far from the sea for a long time, for what will seem like a small forever. She will build a shelter out of silence and books and she will never talk nor participate in this disappointing and foreign world unless necessary. She will marry a man whose skin won’t be hardened by the sea, nor bronzed by the sun, and she will be pregnant most of her human life – her body will betray her again and again.
For now, the first betrayal of bleeding has not yet taken place, Gabrielle's body still that of a child, sexless. For now, on those rocks Gabrielle slowly takes off the blouse – tied-back hair and flat chest drawing no attention. Clothes folded, Gabrielle draws a deep breath and squeezes blue eyes closed against the bright sun.
They jump into the water.
Florida, 2025
It’s always dark now, the water. The blue from Gabrielle’s memory might as well be a dream, a myth Europeans sell to Americans to convince them to spend their dollars on the Italian coasts – promising postcard-worthy views. O’sole, O’mare. Yet it had been real. They know it. It has just been so long since there was anything other than darkness.
But the sea at night is just as real – and that’s not nothing.
A truth Gabrielle uncovered soon enough in their vampiric life is that the very basic elements of this world are, in fact, real. And Gabrielle has a right to them as much as any other creature does. The earth, the mud, the water. The ferns and rocks and roots, the soft ground they bury themselves in most nights. Those are what the world is truly, most fundamentally made of. The books that populated their human life often seem as irrelevant as any small human concern ever seemed to them.
The water is dark, but the sky is not. It’s disturbed, polluted, a fluorescent glow from the artificial abomination Armand dared to call Night Island. Tacky. Not un-poetically, the orange nuance the light pollution taints the sky with is reminiscent of Armand’s eyes. Lestat’s little devil, as he likes to call him with such transparent affection.
Armand. And all his flaming disdain and rage and want. Unnerving, insufferable needy little thing.
Gabrielle is in no hurry to leave the island, and they aren't sure it isn’t for the gravitational pull of Armand’s hate for them. An amusing and thin veil, this hate. Gabrielle’s vampiric life had not been long, not compared to most of those sitting at Sonoma just a short while ago. But their human life had not been short. In fact, it had been a little unending eternity. And with those two lives combined, Gabrielle knows that hate is an alive emotion – unstable, fragile. It can tip over, it can burn, it can fade, it can hide something. They know because they studied it their whole life – an exercise in passing by others’ hate and rage, an exercise in not caring.
They do not particularly care now, but they are amused. They can stay a little longer and study it more, or they can always leave it.
Yes, they can leave soon enough, the world is smaller than it used to be, but it’s still large, and it’s always calling.
Florida, 2025
Mostly everyone is gone, but inexplicably Gabrielle is still there. Armand hates her presence. Like a spot on an otherwise clean kitchen counter. Lestat and Louis are gone and Marius and Santino are gone and so the dam that prevented his emotions from spilling and drowning him no longer needs to be kept in place. The infrastructure of his sanity should theoretically be at no risk of crumbling to pieces. And yet Gabrielle won’t leave.
The nights are quieter now but the sound of the waves and of Daniel’s typing – a soothing combination, is polluted by Gabrielle’s silence, her mere presence tainting the soundscape of the island.
If only she would go away.
He complains to Daniel about it before coffin, a sleeping arrangement he took on again for the sake of his fledgling.
“I don’t understand why you dislike her so much. Sure, she’s not the life of the party. But compared to some of the top-class assholes who just left here, she’s, like, mildly pleasant, even.”
“She’s cold and heartless and she carries herself with inexplicable arrogance for being such a powerless unimportant being. She is a terrible vampire and she was a terrible human, a terrible mother to Lestat.” It all comes out so easily.
“Well, that last part it’s hard to dispute in the light of– ”
Armand keeps going, talking over Daniel, on a roll. “She has no respect for any law or custom, she sleeps in the earth like a savage– ”
“A savage? Are you hearing yourself? Now you just sound like Grandpa de Pedofilus.”
Armand tries to convey a hot wave of rage and hate towards Daniel, and he must feel it like a slap, because he shuts up immediately, recoiling. Still, he recovers in record time, never really losing steam for a good verbal sparring match.
“So, she’s guilty of being cold and of sleeping outdoors. Wow, she sounds like a monster. Oh wait, she is one.” Daniel’s sarcasm has never been a subtle affair.
“You don’t know her well enough,” is all Armand has, and it sounds more petulant than he intended.
“And you do?” Daniel presses. He doesn’t bother answering.
Paris, 1794
Armand hated Gabrielle from the first moment he set eyes on her. He hated her when he drank from Lestat and he saw her through his eyes, his loving and confused eyes. He hated her when he saw her killing two young men along the Seine and wearing their clothes with such defiant levity. He hated her fangs in Lestat’s neck and her hands steadying his waist.
It was not the scandal of it. He was not disgusted – he understood. But to understand does not mean to love.
He looks now, and he hates how Lestat seems to melt under her touch, the soft helpless sounds he makes as Gabrielle sips from him. He hates the gentle kisses Lestat presses on her mouth, the reverent way he touches her underneath her shirt.
He sees that and more, and it’s not disgust he feels: it’s rage. Blinding, painfully helpless rage. It makes him wish for violence, it makes him want to cry. It’s humiliating.
Gabrielle’s no mother. And yet, what does he know about mothers? He knows one Father. One and only. And his kisses were gentle, too, until they weren’t. His touch was reverent too, and all the more violent for it.
He does not remember a Mother. He remembers a sensation, a feeling about it. But a sensation is not a person. And it could be a false memory, for all he knows. It’s a wish, maybe.
Florida, 2025
There’s something soothing in the concept of an island. The circumscribed certainty of its perimeter, its loneliness, the way it forms itself slowly on the horizon when approached.
It’s different now, here in the Keys. There are motorboats and electrical lights so powerful they can illuminate the shore from great distances. He remembers nights sneaking to Le Vignole or La Certosa or Sant’Erasmo, with a small boat they would steal and give back by morning. Everything seemed so different, the smell of the lagune, the fishermen’s boats scattered all around like small constellations in the low waters of the higher Adriatic Sea. The stench of Venice slowly fading as they rowed towards the nearby islands they were not allowed to go to if they had no business to attend, no glass or lace to buy in Burano or Murano, no church functions to attend.
This island is something else. It’s his. And Gabrielle is haunting its shores.
Armand finds her sitting by the water, on the naked and humid ground she never seems to mind or even think about, staring at the water.
Armand sits beside her and Gabrielle makes no gesture of turning or acknowledging him. Why would she?
You’re overstaying your welcome. Armand beams directly into her mind.
This seems to amuse Gabrielle, whose lips curve into a smile.
“Armand, what is the issue?,” Gabrielle asks aloud. “What about my presence bothers you so? I am barely intruding into your home. I sleep here on the beach, as you know.”
Armand tries to convey his disdain into her mind, and of course, he finds it so utterly open and defenceless. If no one ever bothered to instruct Lestat on his powers apart from him, surely no one bothered instructing Gabrielle, and neither did she seem interested in seeking to learn.
“I think you hate me,” Gabrielle states calmly, “because we are more alike than you care to admit. And you hate that.”
“We are nothing like each other,” Armand blurts out, scandalized.
“I have no basis to state this claim, of course. Only what Lestat told me and what your fledgling divulged in his book. A lot of reading between the lines, too.”
Armand grimaces at the thought of Gabrielle knowing anything about him at all, let alone her reading Daniel’s book.
“I was not aware you cared about anything other than your roaming.”
At this, Gabrielle turns to face Armand. The blue of her eyes is darker than Lestat’s, and her mouth is smaller. The strong cheekbones are his, too, though. The resemblance is unmistakable, yet there’s no trace of Lestat’s vulnerability and warmth – traits he so often wears when he forgets to perform. And yet there is an invitation, an intentional offering as her mind invites him in. Come and see for yourself.
So he does.
Naples, France, Paris, Brasil, Canada, 1746, 1760, 1794, 1820, 1920, etc.
Gabrielle reads books where men travel to faraway places and discuss philosophy and theology and politics. Men around Gabrielle move with a freedom her status does not grant her. They are noblemen, white men, rich men. Men who discuss acquisitions and marriage prospects and diplomacy and her white, rich, noble body has an exchange rate that her status and money cannot buy out of.
Gabrielle discovers that there’s a pleasure radiating from the middle of her body, a pleasure that has nothing to do with the thrusts she counts down to in her marital bed. She touches herself and thinks of various things. Of men populating her books, men who have nothing to do with her life. Men from the village and from her past, men some other men wrote about. She thinks of these men in positions she learned from reading in Latin. She thinks of them as pliant and penetrable, she thinks of thrusting into them, of them swallowing down her length – pleasure radiates from a place within herself she doesn’t know where to locate exactly.
Gabrielle cuts their hair and it grows back overnight. The sounds that come out of them are not human sounds. Gabrielle is no longer human at all, but the desperation has a mortal flavour to it. Lestat tries to quiet their sobs but the tears come from a well that seems to have no bottom – it’s a well deeper than what they can understand, and the water never quenches their thirst. Thirst for all the life they always thought they could not leave.
Gabrielle is holding a newborn baby. It smells of milk and shit. It’s pungent and soft. Two toddlers wail in the crib nearby. She buried a child just a month ago. She is feeling nothing, she cannot let herself feel it. She must endure.
Gabrielle reads a book in Italian in the cool shadow of a French spring in their garden. She knows her youngest child, so full of life and curiosity, so similar to her it almost awakens something tender and forgotten in her – she knows her youngest child resents it. The book, the language, her silence. She has her secret world, and she can’t afford to share it, can’t afford to lose her refuge, can’t afford to taint it with reality. This is all the power she has, and it’s so little, it’s so fragile. It can’t be shared.
Gabrielle cuts their hair every morning now, even if there is no one to watch. Or maybe that is why it feels even more urgent. They need to sharpen their blade soon. They had been sleeping in the moist soil of the jungle. The sound of the forest is deafening, it’s like life and death amplified in a fractal cacophony. And yet there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. They don’t belong there and yet they have as much a place on this earth as the plants as the insects all around. They feel at home.
Gabrielle kills precisely and fast. As their fangs sink into the flesh of the young woman and start drinking, they see flashes of her short life. Her bathing in a cold river in the middle of summer, her body hers so effortlessly, feeling so real in the shape she embodies. A few furtive kisses hidden in a barn with the neighbour’s son, her joy as he embraced her waist and lifted her in his arms. Her radiance on their wedding day. Her certainty in her place in the world, in the order of things. Her effortless camaraderie with her three sisters, their shared struggles and fears. Her fights with her mother, her resentment towards her father. Her pain when the doctor told her she could not conceive, her – so young, so strong. Gabrielle kills this stranger whose life they can’t understand and, as usual, feels no remorse.
Gabrielle is sick and she knows she will die in that cold house so far from her native coast. She finds comfort in knowing Nicolas and Lestat used her money to escape, even though she could not.
Gabrielle sees a creature, ancient and ambiguous. They are covered in dirt and yet they seem regal, they are scared behind the showing off of power. They are delicate and full of rage, and they feel an immediate affinity, an unspoken kinship. They turn around and their feature fall into focus: the sticky dark curls, the eyes, a flaming orange–
Florida, 2025
“Enough!” Armand slips out of Gabrielle’s mind, as if stumbling. He feels tired, and he doesn’t understand why. The confusion adds to his discomfort.
Gabrielle seems to have no shame for any of the intimate things they so freely offered. They turn back towards the sea as if nothing had happened and Armand stands up with a mechanical motion. He walks away.
He needs to think.
***
“I don’t think Gabrielle is Lestat’s mother,” Armand says in the darkness. The words seem louder in the confined space of the coffin.
“Babe, what are you talking about? If this is you trying to mellow their incestuous thing for me, you’re shit out of luck.”
“No, I mean…”. Armand is not entirely sure what he means.
He takes a moment before continuing, trying to choose words that might make Daniel understand, an effort his fledgling might never know. Daniel’s words always come easy to him, so many things come easier to him.
“What is a mother?” he ends up asking. Wrong, silly words. He tries to make them sound philosophical, existential. They come out fragile, small.
“Someone you don’t usually fuck,” Daniel answers straight away. Armand ignores him.
“I’ve looked in Gabrielle’s mind. I don’t think she’s a woman, is what I mean.”
“No shit, she’s a vampire.”
“I don’t think that’s correct either, well not the vampire part. And you’re being thick on purpose, beloved, it’s beneath you.”
There’s more silence after that, a tried technique of his fledgling, waiting the rest of the story out. It often works, despite its transparency. Now it doesn’t.
Daniel gets impatient when he’s not in journalist mode. Or maybe he’s just a fledgling and tired.
“Are you saying she’s transsexual or something?”
Yet again, easy words, easy understandings. How can Daniel crack open a whole word with such a bored tone, as if that was so simple, as if such an obvious and unimportant truth was always an arm’s length away.
“The idea of men and women, as people think about them now, with such certainty and such self-evident idiocy… that’s not what I know to have always been the case. It’s not as if you are born as such.”
“Are you going to quote de Beauvoir at me now? I’ve read her, too.”
“I actually had the pleasure to do more than read her work. She and Jean-Paul were such a delight.” Armand can’t help the amusement in his words, in knowing he is still able to shock Daniel.
“You fucked Sartre and de Beauvoir?,” Daniel blurts out, like clockwork – unable to resist the provocation. So predictable.
“That’s beside the point. What I was trying to say is, the time I grew up in, being a man or a woman was less fundamental than being free or enslaved, than being rich or poor. Being a Christian or not.”
He’s generalizing, sure. But he has to. It’s like gripping the balustrade of abstraction, so as not to fall into the pit, the dark pit of himself. For if history affected everyone, why does he still feel so different? Louis had been affected by his race, too, by his sexuality. Louis still came out a hundred times more of a man than he ever felt. Was it Armand’s history that made him feel so… He cannot find the word.
Was it his history or was it something else?
“So Gabrielle’s a man? Do you think they’ll use different pronouns? Shall we upgrade Lestat’s mommy issues to mommy and daddy issues at the same time?”
Daniel is grating his nerves on purpose – the purpose is still unclear. No thoughts can cross their bond, but a rivulet of emotion can, and it feels like jealousy.
Armand’s tired of this conversation. He regrets speaking of it out loud.
“Sleep now, beloved.”
“Fuck off,” Daniel predictably answers. But the dark of the coffin, his young age and Armand’s words drag him to slumber.
***
The following night it’s Gabrielle who finds him. He wasn’t hiding, so it wasn’t hard. He was simply sitting on one of the many open-decked boats in the harbour. The slow movement of the water soothing his thoughts in the otherwise still embrace of his body. He’s forgotten to move for what is probably hours at this point.
None of them say anything at first. As if Gabrielle sitting right by him on the deck, their legs so close they almost touch, was something within the realm of normality now.
They materialize two cigarettes out of the pocket of their linen shirt and Armand accepts one, and lights both with his mind.
For a while it’s just the rocking of the boat, the smoke lifting lazily in the humid air, the distant sound of humanity existing alongside them.
“How did you know?” Armand finally asks.
Gabrielle doesn’t answer, so Armand goes on. “How did you know when I didn’t?”. It comes out hurt, and it’s humiliating. It’s humiliating that someone else seemed to know something about him he was not aware of, it’s the mute humiliation of the muse at the hands of the artist, of the object daring to imagine it ever was a subject. The wetness that threatens to spill out of his eyes is humiliating, too.
“Don’t,” Gabrielle says, stern. “Don’t think it’s my doing. It’s not the mirror that creates the face reflecting in it. This is you, Armand.”
Armand studies Gabrielle’s face now, and it doesn’t feel like a mirror at all. It feels like a black hole that might suck him in.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” Armand finally admits. “And I don’t think it’s even important. I fear I never knew what to do with it.”
Gabrielle seems to soften at that. Their eyes change into a richer shade of blue. “The absence of the thing is just information. You don’t have to do anything with it. You can choose not to care.”
The absence of the thing. Such a diplomatic way to put lifetimes and lifetimes of not fitting into any role. Of being neither, of existing outside of the world’s certainties. Of knowing no other way to be.
Gabrielle caresses his face and gathers a tear with their finger Armand didn’t realise he was spilling. It’s such an unnatural gesture of warmth from Gabrielle that Armand can’t help letting a wet laugh escape.
“I still hate you,” he clarifies.
“I know,” Gabrielle smiles.
Armand leans in, touching Gabrielle’s face, too. Their short blond hair reminds him of creatures more angelic than they have any right to claim to be.
“Gabriele,” Armand says. One letter less, and a world of difference. “The Arcangelo had his statues on the side of the Palazzo Ducale. He was the one bringing the announcement after all. How fitting.”
One letter less, one whole offering. Armand is well familiar with the power a new name could have.
Gabriele rolls their name on their tongue once: Gabriele. They smile.
Gabriele, Armand repeats, and gently leans in, pressing his lips on Gabriele’s lips. They taste of smoke and salt.
Armand closes his eyes as Gabriele kisses him back, their hands reaching for Armand’s nape and caressing him with a decision and assuredness that makes Armand moan and go pliant.
And then it’s over. Cruelly so. Armand likes it. He likes the satisfied smirk on Gabriele’s lips when they observe him now, the smugness coming from the knowing, the possibility. He likes it and hates it. And likes it because he hates it.
“You will know how to find me, Armand, were you to wish to have more of that reflection.” Cocky, and arrogant in their being so simple.
Oh, how Armand hates them.
“I will,” he smiles.
