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The fledgling Nicolas de Lenfent had not moved since his maker’s departure.
Eleni had gracefully and silently exited after both Lestat and his mother had said their goodbyes, leaving Nicolas alone with Armand in the wake of their parting.
Armand didn’t care much for Nicolas’ dissociative misery. He had his own wounds to lick with Lestat’s exit, and this was a trivial matter compared to the division with his own maker - Nicolas was privileged to have Lestat give him a gentle goodbye, and even then he had sat in silence and ignored him entirely. Ungrateful fledgling. Ungrateful for Lestat’s leniency, for the wealth he had been handed, for the Gift itself.
“Nicolas. Get up.”
He didn’t move, didn’t even look up as Armand stepped forward to where he was sitting on the plush chair at Lestat’s old vanity. Armand braced both of his hands on either side of Nicolas’ head and his vacant stare didn’t break even then; even when Armand spread his fingers wide and placed his fingertips against the heat of his scalp, filtering his way into Nicolas’ unguarded mind through the jumble of his vampiric existence.
He tangled his fingers in the tresses of Nicki’s hair, drawing out the threads of thought in his head and pulling them tight, letting them go, playing cat’s cradle with every flimsy string in his brain. Garbled images of music and dark streets and fire ran rampant through his mind, mixed with bitter memories of Lestat, of Armand and Gabrielle and the Children of Darkness; and when he dove deeper he felt muddled portraits of his childhood, of roaring fires again, Lestat leaving, his violin, the fire, the blissful relief of the burning, the-
Lestat is gone.
Armand sewed the thread so directly through Nicolas’ mind that he startled bodily, and moved for the first time since Lestat had left.
“You cannot sit here forever,” Armand said, staring into the newfound clarity in Nicolas’ eyes. “You are old enough as a fledgling to function on your own. You do not need to be spoon-fed by your coven master, now your maker is gone. Get up.”
He let his fingers move deeper through Nicolas’ hair, circling round to the back of his scalp and untying the ribbon that held it daintily in place. Did he deserve such luxury, Armand thought? A pretty bow to wrap up the chaos that lingered in his head? A garnish sitting just at the base of his neck where his blood thrummed beneath the skin?
Nicolas’ head lolled. As Armand used the grip he had on his skull to turn Nicolas’ gaze towards him, it was evident he’d done it on purpose: he widened his eyes, painted on a pout, gave Armand a look so pitiful and pathetic he nearly dropped his limp neck then and there.
No, he spoke petulantly into Armand’s mind.
Armand had gripped the nape of his neck before he could even contemplate what he was doing.
It wasn’t the refusal that had aggravated him so harshly, but the fact that he hadn’t even deigned to speak it aloud; Nicolas gasped delicately as his head was drawn back, neck stiff, eyes staring up at him. Armand never really touched Nicolas at all - even during the boy’s short time in the catacombs, watching his coven feed from him as they pleased. He was Lestat’s impeding, guileless lover from back home. He was Lestat’s burden, Armand’s sacrifice; he was the bait he had used to draw Lestat in that he was now stuck with himself.
“Lestat was clearly too lenient with his fledgling,” Armand muttered, “to allow it to misbehave so.”
Beneath the clutter of Nicolas’ thoughts, there was a coherent spark of ‘it?’, but he didn’t rise to it. Armand squeezed the skin on the back of his neck again. Speak, the motion said. He squeezed again.
“He wasn’t,” was all he said. Armand raised his eyebrows, and withdrew the pointed tips of his nails away where they’d been idling, threatening to pierce his skin.
“He let you parade around as you liked, with no regard for the Great Laws, nor for any social hierarchy.” He stroked the soft, downy hair on the back of Nicolas’ neck, dangling the tenderness he so craved right in front of him. Look what you can get when you’re good, hm? “And now he has abandoned you to me, and you disrespect your maître as though it is nothing.”
“My maître,” Nicolas hummed, drawing out the syllables in a sing-song voice. Even with the grasp Armand had on his neck, he still managed to bob and sway his head back and forth. “My maître, my maître.”
“So insolent.” Armand tightened his grip again. “He left you, Nicolas. There is a reason he took one fledgling with him, and not the other.”
Nicolas stilled once more, freezing at Armand’s words and settling back into his grasp. He had been alight before Lestat entered the room and informed him of his departure, ripping himself away like a limb and expecting a clean break; he had been ferocious and sarcastic and kindled by all of the bravery the new coven had given him, and now he was nothing. Now he sat on the chair like he was nothing, retreating into nothing, becoming nothing.
Armand had led himself through both Lestat and Gabrielle’s minds after Nicolas’ turning: he had seen the moment it from the point of view of his maker, digging his fangs into Nicolas’ neck and hiding in the warm skin as he drained him, plagued by the dark visions he saw; and then through the eyes of the Vampire Gabrielle, coming across the scene when Nicolas was already covered in blood and trembling through his first moments of the Gift. He had seen the aftermath. He had seen Gabrielle clean him up and dress him like a doll as he sat silent and motionless and Lestat watched on in terror.
Nicolas had been doomed from the start of his vampiric life, Armand thought. Perhaps not the start of his mortal life - admittedly, he had liked the sounds of the boy’s violin when they were not incessant and miserable, although that was most of the time - but as soon as Lestat had picked him up in the catacombs with that heartrending look on his face, Armand knew it was over. He was going to turn his Nicki, and it was going to go terribly. The vampire Nicolas de Lenfent would not live long, whether Armand had anything to do with it or not.
Maybe it would have been kinder for Lestat to let him die. To carry him home and lay him down on the bed in their Paris apartment, stroke his hair as he eventually fell unconscious. Even leaving him underneath Les Innocents to bleed out would have been more merciful than reducing him to this.
“Perhaps you may have lived,” Armand said softly, releasing his neck once more to cup his face instead. Nicolas seemed half-perturbed and half-intrigued by the gesture. “We did not take so much from you that you would have died immediately. It would have been a shame to entice Lestat in using you, only for him to find you dead before he arrived. We took only enough for you to suffer.”
Nicolas stared up at him, attempting fruitlessly to cease the quivering of his lower lip.
“No,” he said weakly. “He would have known.”
“Would he?” Armand cocked his head. “He knew very little of being a vampire, and even that wouldn’t have helped him. Do you think he knew where the line was between life and death, Nicolas? Do you think you could have been saved?”
It wouldn’t have mattered either way, Armand thought. Where would the boy be if Lestat hadn’t turned him? Playing his violin in the street for meagre coins, while Lestat distanced himself from his mortal lover and Nicolas’ own family didn’t care for him at all? Alone, forever, with his mind permanently shattered?
“He didn’t even want to turn me,” Nicolas murmured, twitching his hands together. “He told me no at first. His mother told him no. He didn’t have a choice. He did it out of love.”
“That’s what he told you.”
Nicolas snarled, a flash of his fangs jutting out from his mouth. “You don’t know him as deeply as you think you do.”
Armand saw everything flashing through the boy’s mind; a childhood friend with honey-blonde hair that shined underneath the Auvergne sunset in the autumn, their long and soulful conversations in the village tavern, a proud onlooker as he played his violin in the city and then in the theatre. He saw what Nicolas thought was an all-encompassing, exhaustive understanding of Lestat de Lioncourt, and saw the force with which he believed it to be true.
“You knew the mortal Lestat,” Armand said, “And you still believe him to be the same as the Vampire Lestat. This is why you’re struggling so terribly, Nicolas.”
He loosened the muscles in his palm as he spoke, moulding the shape of his fingers to Nicolas’ cheek with a soft hum in the back of his throat.
“He still loved me,” he insisted sadly, tilting his head into Armand’s touch. “That part of him didn’t change.”
Armand smiled despite himself. The coven had taken hostages before, but none the same as Nicolas; none they kept alive, none that Armand spoke to, none that would soften under the same claws that had dragged him down into the catacombs.
“Would the mortal Lestat have left you here with me?”
Nicolas said nothing. Armand slipped his fingers into his hair, spreading the soft brown tresses out over his ears, his shoulders, the ruffled collar of his shirt. Despite saying nothing during their goodbye, he had still dressed himself up for their last meeting. It was a pity.
“A terrible father to his fledgling,” Armand murmured. “A terrible lover. To you, to me.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Leaving a large sum of money and a pitiful goodbye? Are they the hallmarks of a perfect lover, do you think?” Nicolas bristled at his words, and once again Armand saw the glimmer of white as his fangs dropped. “And a maker, failing to teach his offspring how to respect his coven master. Not training him to keep his fangs subdued. Any other vampire as old as I would take offence to such a thing, Nicolas. It’s a combative gesture. It’s goading.”
“It’s not-”
“Are you going to bite me?” Armand raised his eyebrows, gave a warning tug to his hair.
“No.”
“No?”
“No, maître.”
“There,” he soothed, releasing his grip yet again. “Another of Lestat’s shortcomings. You’ll learn. Do try your best not to provoke me again.”
“I know I’m not in danger,” Nicolas gritted out, a feigned bravery shining bright in his eyes. “He made you promise.”
Armand didn’t particularly care much about his promise to Lestat - but after decades of monotony, he liked observing Nicolas. It was entertaining. He liked monitoring the boy, liked seeing how things would progress with somebody who took so disastrously to the blood, liked watching the achingly slow implosion of Nicolas’ broken vampiric mind.
He reached out with the pad of his thumb to brush the pointed fang poking out from his slack mouth, letting his rounded lower lip catch on his thumb and opening his mouth further. Nicolas’ fangs were short, sharp; bigger than his own but smaller slightly than Lestat’s. He was sloppy in the way that he used them. He had to be watched while he hunted.
“He made me promise, and then left you unsupervised in my care. Where would he be, if I decided to kill you now? Do you think he would burst through the door to pull my fangs from your neck?”
Nicolas froze in fear, not even daring to move his mouth where Armand’s thumb was resting. He was still young enough in the blood that he hadn’t quite lost his instinct to breathe; Armand felt every puff of air coming out of his mouth, rapid and shallow, fanning out over his hand.
“Shh, Nicolas.” He softened his tone. “It’s alright. I promised, didn’t I? I promised.”
Despite the condescension, Nicolas’ eyes softened as he looked at him, as though the words were giving him a faux sense of calm. It was easy, with a vampire as fragile as he was. He had been hurling back and forth between apathy and disobedience and pliability all evening. Armand could mould him as he liked.
It still remained, however, that Nicolas couldn’t stay here forever, and Armand needed him to get up.
He pressed down with the thumb resting on Nicolas’ fang, let the soft pad of his thumbprint drop downwards to the pointed tip, and dug the point into his skin.
Nicolas’ mouth had fallen open far enough for Armand to see the blood that beaded almost instantly on his hand, then more still as he dragged his thumb over the fang, opening up the skin to offer more. He would have never had anything like it, Armand thought; not from Lestat, not from Gabrielle, not from the mortals he carelessly and messily drained when he hunted. He had never had blood as old as this. Wasn’t Armand so generous, he thought, to allow him this gift even after his near-constant impudence?
His eyes were round, staring up at Armand in awe as the blood pooled in his mouth and he closed his lips to drink; Armand couldn’t begrudge him the haste, with how young the fledgling was and the energy in his own blood. He held Nicolas’ face, kept his bleeding thumb snug inside his mouth, brought his free hand up to cup his other cheek.
“There you go,” Armand murmured. “Your maître does not exist to suppress you, Nicolas. I am here for your own good. Lestat left you with me for your own good.”
Because he couldn’t bear to look at you, Armand didn’t say. He was enjoying the blissed-out look on Nicolas’ face too much to ruin it, his deep brown hair strewn across his shoulders and eyes blown wide with need. He could tell he was close to drawing the boy out of his detachment, after all; something Lestat himself had never managed.
He was bitter. Of course he was - his previous coven dissolved and his lover gone, leaving him alone with a theatre to run and an untamed fledgling to nurture. Nicolas’ disobedience was just salt in the wound. He would soon fix things.
“Enough, now.”
It took a few long moments for Nicolas to detach himself, clearly unwilling as he took one last, desperate gulp, and opened his mouth. Armand let the digit rest there for a little longer, toeing the line of how much he could truly get Nicolas to submit; would he let the hunger take over? Or would he heed Armand’s command, and finally listen to his maître?
Armand couldn’t hold back his grin. Nicolas let the still-oozing blood well up over his lip, collect in his mouth, dribble down his chin, and all the while he didn’t move a muscle.
“Just as you were told,” Armand muttered proudly, mostly to himself. He finally took his hand from Nicolas’ mouth before he nodded his assent. “Go on. Finish your meal.”
Nicolas was almost panting as he swallowed, his eyes heavy with need and hands trembling at his sides, white-knuckling the sides of the chair he was sitting in. It would save the fledgling’s need to hunt for tonight, Armand thought; he could deal with little more than he already had today, and having to clean up after Nicolas would simply have been too much.
Armand stared down at his hand. His thumb was still cut open, slowly leaking blood down the width of his palm where Nicolas had eaten needily, messily; he dragged his tongue across the shallow gash to heal it, cleaning the bloody saliva Nicolas had left as he went. The cut healed quickly. He drank the taste Nicolas had left in his mouth.
Nicolas had been watching this, if his choked-off gasp was any indication. “Maître-”
“Shh. Our divine violinist,” Armand said. “You belong to me now.”