Work Text:
Streaks of green stain the back of Gabrielle’s stolen roquelaure by the time she stands, the wind doing little to dislodge the blades of grass that cling to her, their shape embedded in the cream-coloured fabric, her braid littered with stray leaves and wildflowers, their stems woven throughout her hair. Hours, she had spent, laid out in the empty fields, the night’s breeze and the star-filled sky her only companions, Lestat, at last, willing to let her roam free while he returned to Paris to settle matters with Roget. There were lies to spin, he’d said—appearances to keep. Mortal men and their petty needs, their human sensibilities. She had no interest in reprising her role as mother, as woman, as Marquise. She had no interest in any of it.
The countryside is what she craves. Open air, an open grave. No limitations. Never again, a limitation. It astonishes her still. Six days since the Dark Gift worked its magic with her, and the amazement remains, tendrils of it reaching for her every time she wakes: That she continues, unchallenged. That her emancipation had not been a mere deathbed dream, nor a single, stolen night of ecstasy, a parting gift permitted by the universe before it thrust her forth into eternal damnation. That her end does not seem to lurk behind every corner, inside every crevice, waiting for her moment of weakness. That she had cheated death, yes, and that she wields it, now.
That there is time, again—endless, boundless time. And all mine.
Gabrielle moves, unhurried, through the fields, content in her quiescent sea of green, content to simply be. The excitement of her immortal life teeters the edge of too much, her senses unaccustomed to such relentless stimulation after so long spent amidst the atrophy of Auvergne. She’d sought out the empty country for a reason; her solitary soul yearns for the blessed silence of seclusion, nature a comfort, even now, when there is no château to run from, or husband to hide from. She revels in her aloneness, and takes her time with her return to civilisation, endlessly fascinated with the moonlight, the starlight, the sway of the forest trees.
The tower is still a ways away when thudding footsteps sound behind her, a beckoning voice calling out across the dark.
“Excuse me, sir,” it says, then stumbles as Gabrielle turns, the speaker turned sheepish. “Er—miss.”
She comes face to face with a young man—a boy, really, eighteen or nineteen at most, blue-eyed and slightly breathless, his reddish hair peeking out beneath the rim of his cap. He blinks at her, innocent and awkward where he stands, his clothes dusted with dirt and damp with dew, not unlike hers. In the waning moonlight, she can only just make out the pale pink tainting the apples of his cheeks.
“Uh,” the boy says.
Gabrielle tilts her head, curious. “Yes?”
The pink in the boy’s cheeks deepens, the rush of blood calling to her. Gabrielle steps closer on instinct, and at once, her mind fills with the formless impression of the boy’s thoughts, confusion and fascination muddled together in equal measure as he stares, his predicament half-forgotten. Distracted, he is, by her breeches, the tight stretch of the silk across her stomach, her thighs. It thrills her, slightly, to feel his enthrallment second-hand. She is no stranger to admiration—since girlhood, her beauty has turned heads, boys and men watching always, everywhere she went, until the very worst of the sickness had taken that, too—but this is different, Gabrielle thinks. This boy sees her, but does not see her, blinded as he is.
There is power in the deception. It calls to the thirst, a burning, gnawing temptation.
She shifts where she stands.
“You’re a far way from home,” Gabrielle says. Easy enough to infer, she thinks, as she takes in the boy’s clothes, the fraying edge of his woollen cloak. Easier still to pluck from his head.
The boy nods, face aflame. A tourist, clearly. Lost and lonely and infinitely curious by the kittenish girl in a man’s dress. “I saw you out with the wildflowers,” he explains. “I don’t mean to stalk you. I only thought you might—”
He babbles through his embarrassment, his French poor, softly accented. Gabrielle lets him speak—he’d lost his way, you see, due at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés last week. He’d taken a wrong turn or two, his directions, his possessions, his funds, all stolen.
“Please,” the boy begs. “Could you help me?”
Not a single suspicious thought in his head as she agrees. Too trusting, this boy, even as she lures him off the dirt track, far away from the local village. He follows her like a duckling might, never more than a half-step behind, too chatty for her liking, overly friendly, horrendously naïve.
He remains utterly unsuspecting until the very last second.
She’d had her fill earlier in the evening, but the boy is too sweet to abstain. Gabrielle drains him against the trunk of an old oak tree, her lip curling with a sick, rapacious pleasure as realisation dawns on his face, the brief flash of interest—that childish, confusing, hopeful flicker of arousal—replaced in an instant, the boy’s thoughts filled with nothing but horror as the length of her fangs sink in, the blood flowing free and sweet, each greedy gulp of it like a torch touched to her veins. It warms her from the inside out, small, strangled sounds of pleasure catching in her throat as she drinks and drinks, the boy slowly stilling beneath her, his fumbling attempts at resistance no match for her preternatural strength.
When she’s finished, there is blood smeared across her chin, her cheek, the tips of her cravat soaked with it. Her chest heaves, the thirst satiated. She lets the boy drop to the earth below, his dead weight discarded with a thud, all evidence of foul play left scattered in the grass.
The sky above has lightened when she looks, its pitch-black softening to grey as dawn trickles in. There is no time to waste—Gabrielle leaves the body slumped over, slain, the boy’s blood flowing through her as she races back toward the tower, dizzy with adrenaline and giddy in her conquest. She’s an impossible image in the dark: too fast, too fleeting, her golden braid unravelling with the wind as she runs and runs and runs, the sting of the late-night chill no match for her flushed face, not with the magic of the blood working through her in waves.
She’s smiling to herself as she approaches the castle; smiling, still, as she locks the iron gate.
Lestat has beaten her home, it seems. She finds him waiting in the crypt alone, his shoulders tight with tension, his face basked in the yellow-gold firelight as he paces before the hearth. The flickering shadow does little to hide his relief—he turns as she enters, his whole manner softening as he takes her in, his smile faltering only when he sees the boy’s blood still smeared across her chin. More curiosity than concern, Gabrielle thinks. Perhaps dismay at what he’d missed.
She steps close, and stands on tip-toe to kiss him. “Hello, my darling,” she says, a laugh bubbling in her chest for no reason she can discern. Blood drunk, perhaps. Or just a side effect of this new-found freedom.
Lestat takes her ruined roquelaure, the edges of his mouth turned down as he eyes the damage she’d done to it, the streaks of mud and dirt and earth, flecks of the boy’s blood scattered amongst the stains. He folds the garment over his arm, his spare hand smoothing down the fabric, and turns his attention to her.
“Did you enjoy the countryside?” he asks.
Gabrielle’s smile returns. Incessant, it seems, and all the more exceptional for it, her cheeks tight with the strain. “I did,” she says, then leans to kiss Lestat again, his little frown vanishing beneath her lips.
He moves to hold her, visibly delighted to encounter no protest, to find that she welcomes his closeness, the roquelaure forgotten as he takes her in his arms. He kisses her cheek, first, and then her hair, his chest vibrating with a delicate laugh as he plucks a leaf from the lion’s mane, her braid a dishevelled mess of tangled curls down her back, the knots too loose for her liking.
Gabrielle laughs, too, fascinated by the ease of it, this uncanny levity in her chest. She hadn’t missed him in the countryside—hadn’t needed him, nor wanted him, really; truthfully, she hadn’t thought of him at all—but she finds herself happy he’s here, now. Inexplicably, there is a part of her that calls for him. No longer a cross to bear, he’s her fellow devil in the dark. Her son-cum-maker. The only one she’d ever loved.
Lestat opens his mouth to speak—something about Roget, perhaps, or Nicki, the presence, Paris—and she raises her hand to stop him, the tip of her finger touching his lip.
It does the trick. He quiets under her touch, unmoving as her fingers trace the contours of his face, the cut of his cheek, his jaw, the jut of his throat. He watches her, the intensity of his gaze—the burning heat of his curiosity, his open, childlike optimism—so palpable in what little space remains between them. Gabrielle feels it, but cannot bring herself to face it for more than a few, fleeting seconds at a time, so strange it is, so utterly atypical, to feel his yearning mirrored in herself with such unrelenting strength.
Lestat’s hold tightens around her waist, and she lets him pull her closer, lets him kiss her once, twice, allows his tongue to slip between her lips and taste the blood still clinging to her teeth. She wonders if he can feel it, the thrum of excitement that fills her veins. She wonders if this is how it had been for him, that very first week. Insatiable hunger, infinite need.
She moans into his open mouth, as shocked by it as he is, her face flushed with the blood and this burgeoning heat. Lestat pulls away to look at her, as if to verify her very existence, his eyes wide with wonder, his face filled with rapture.
“Mother?” he questions, suddenly timid.
His dark-eyed desire vanishes when Gabrielle recoils with a flinch, the expression replaced at once with a mournful regret. His mouth opens again, lips working in soundless circles—a useless attempt to take back the uttered word.
Gabrielle looks away as not to witness it.
Not for the first time, she misses their preternatural connection, the ease of their open minds, those few blessed moments where she’d had no need to waste time with words, no struggle to articulate them, to find ones he’d understand. She detests this uncanny quiet just as he does, the veil of silence perhaps the Dark Gift’s only disadvantage.
Slowly, Lestat inches close again, lips touching her cheek in silent apology. He noses at her, breathing her in, a fluttering of kisses pressed to whatever he can reach, his tongue peeking out for a taste of the boy’s blood. It’s experimental, the way he licks, tentative, unsure, insecure. Gabrielle allows it once, and then twice, then turns her head to catch his eye, her hands sliding up the panel of his chest until they frame his face once more, the soft flicker of the firelight illuminating the wet sheen to his eyes.
No matter, thinks Gabrielle, as Lestat stares, and stares, and stares. No seeming need for mindreading tonight.
He must recognise it in her, she thinks, this eagerness, this openness, this desire for closeness that even she does not fully understand. So accustomed to it, is her Lestat, so intimately familiar, this pitless pining a part of his very nature. No wonder he can read it on her.
Another kiss. Another. Another after that. Lestat’s transgression is absolved, their minor hiccup forgotten as he pulls her flush to him, the fire, the tower, the very city nothing but background noise as they fuse together, their bodies two halves of the same whole.
“Gabrielle,” Lestat says, half-whispered, reverent.
He’s breathless—lips plump, red, his face flushed not unlike her hapless victim’s, though all traces of the boy’s blood were gone, now, the remnants licked clean, leaving only the two of them.
Gabrielle presses her palm to Lestat’s cheek, her thumb ghosting across the bow of his lip. “Lie down,” she says, and swallows.
It’s exhilarating, his obedience, the way he drops to the floor in an instant, so needy, her Lestat, so receptive. He’s dreamed of this, she knows it. Has felt it in the way he looks—the way he lingers—his gaze straying, always, to the tight stretch of her breeches, the fit of the men’s clothes on her rejuvenated figure. It’s there now, the hunger, his features gone slack with desire. She sees it clear as day as he tilts his head to look up at her, the gold firelight illuminating his face.
There’s that thrill of power again, building at the base of her spine. Gabrielle focuses on that rather than the wave of insecurity that forms when she joins Lestat on the floor, her maker reaching for her at once, their bodies a twined mess of limbs as he pulls her to him, flush, her knees forced to either side of his hips as they settle. The layers of cloth do little to hide his desire. She can feel him, hot and eager beneath her, and it gives her pause.
She’s out of practice—frankly, inexperienced—this sort of mutual infatuation a forgotten relic from her girlhood daydreams, her fantasies of a reciprocal passion nothing but a naïve, juvenile delusion her time in Auvergne had at least had the decency to free her from. The Marquis had had different expectations from wedlock, she’d learnt, and learnt quick.
But Lestat has none of his father’s cruelty, and not nearly enough of his greed. He’s gentle with her, tender, soft in a way that suffocates. If he notices her hesitance, he hardly seems to care, or question it.
Her hands paw at his linen shirt, aimless, curious, her body pressing impossibly closer the longer he holds her in his arms, the warmth brewing in her stomach caused by neither the fire nor the blood.
Her half-jacket is discarded, her waistcoat pried open. Lestat seeks her mouth, first, and then her jaw, his face nuzzling into her collar. Idly, Gabrielle wonders about his experiences. Nicolas, surely, but before that? Tavern girls and passing performers, if his brothers were to be believed. No decades spent abstinent, at any rate, she thinks. No boorish man breathing down the back of his neck. No vulgar transformations, save the one in this very tower. No—
Lestat’s palm is warm on the nape of her neck, his fingers slipping beneath her cravat to touch her there, his hand guiding her back towards him. Gabrielle leans in, all thoughts of her husband and her son’s lovers forgotten as Lestat tears through his own tongue, the blood pooling in his mouth and spilling over his lips, his next kiss presented as an offering, his blood hers for the taking.
Gabrielle groans at the first taste of it, flush all over as the blood coats her tongue. She kisses him and kisses him, astounded that she hasn’t grown sick of it, that there is pleasure in it, that her whole body aches from it. She rocks against him, curious, at first, with how it eases the ache in her cunt, her insides twisted with a gnawing need, her upper thighs growing increasingly slick.
It’s slow to begin with, agonisingly so, each adjustment, every minor movement, an experiment. She remains fascinated by the pleasure in it—had never known sex to be like this. All her mortal life, it was something that was done to her, something to endure. Tedious at best, horrific and humiliating more often.
She hadn’t realised this was an option.
Slowly, Lestat palms at her thighs, his hands stroking from knee to hip, his touch careful, encouraging. His hard length presses against her with every little manoeuvre, and she finds an exquisite joy in the jolt of it, in the flutter of her abdomen. It spurs her on, a curious rhythm building as she brushes purposefully against him, Lestat’s quiet cries of pleasure as exhilarating as the physical sensation.
She can’t be sure how long it carries on that way, time inconsequential as she rides wave after wave of pleasure, the rising sun forgotten as Lestat comes undone underneath her, his golden hair a halo around his head as he twists against the crypt floor, tears gathered in his lashes. Even still clothed, he’s overwhelmed. Overripe, thinks Gabrielle—like the rotting fruits of childhood, the apples she’d plucked as she’d scaled trees, the fallen peaches swiped from by her grandmother’s feet. If she were to press down, she thinks, his skin would split the same way, that soft, sickly-sweet centre oozing out to make a mess in her hands. She calls his name, and covers his heart with her palm, an echo of the urge calling out like the thirst: crush and ruin, just because she can.
Gabrielle kisses him instead, her chest tight with an inexorable fondness when his tears wet her cheeks, no matter that he tries to hide them. Her crybaby, he is, her golden boy, her lovely one, her brave son, who was born weeping and seemingly never ceases to stop.
“Shhh, my darling,” she says, barely more than a breath.
Lestat bucks against her in answer, mouth wide open with wonder, his grip on her hips too tight. There will be marks, surely, Gabrielle thinks—little indentations, her white flesh marred red even with the protection of the breeches. The thought, she finds, has no appeal. Neither does Lestat’s touch when it slides up above the curve of her hips, toward her breasts, his attempts to slip a hand beneath her waistcoat incessant.
Gabrielle reaches for his wrists, her fingers sliding beneath the linen of his sleeves to take hold, his hands pried back and pinned down as she takes control. “No,” she says, perhaps harsher than intended. She swallows, and then says it again, softer, Lestat’s surprised, strangled cry going ignored as she squeezes tight, her weight shifting, her back braced against his thighs.
She has no desire for that, is what she does not say. Has no interest in repeating the patterns of her mortal existence, her husband’s humiliation techniques. Touch, grope, take—
No. She much prefers this, this steady drag of her hips, this juvenile rutting. Sex on her own terms, it is. A confluence of power and pleasure, at mercy to her whims.
Lestat acquiesces underneath her, pliant and eager, still, for anything she’ll give him, no protest on his part as she adjusts herself again, moves him this way and that, his quiet groans silenced with a kiss as her knees settle to either side of one of his thighs, his aching, leaking need ignored as she chases her own release.
Her arousal has soaked through to her breeches, the sticky, wet warmth of it seeping through to stain the fabric. Gabrielle hardly notices as she grinds against the muscle of Lestat’s thigh, her hips rocking with an increasing desperation, her cunt dragging back and forth as Lestat paws at her, or tries to, his eyes wide again, mesmerised, a string of mindless babble falling from his lips.
Her grip slips, and he’s reaching for her in an instant, hands settling on her hips to help her grind against him, his fingers squeezing, pulling, pawing like he’s trying to pull her straight into his body, his mouth, when she meets it, hungry and needy and desperate, the strangled groan of his pleasure louder even than her own stuttered breathing.
She adjusts herself again, pleasure pooling low in her abdomen as the seam of her breeches folds just right, the added pressure against her clit drawing a moan from her lips. She’s hot all over—overcome with desire, dizzy with these newfound delights. Her fingers twist in Lestat’s shirt, the linen tearing where her nails have dug in, her grip on him grounding her as she chases the high. She feels ripe.
His name is on her tongue when her pleasure comes to its crest. Time slows, her body still one moment, and then a shaking, trembling mess the next, the sound that comes out of her not one she’d thought herself capable of. It ought to embarrass her, a part of her thinks, and yet any inkling of shame is overshadowed by the sweetness of her release.
She collapses into Lestat, her face buried against his shoulder, her abdomen spasming with the aftershocks. He’s still desperate beneath her, his cock a hot, hard presence by her thigh. Gabrielle lets him cling to her, then feels him press against her knee, a low, guttural groan escaping as his hips snap, and then stutter, the tiniest bit of pressure all he needs.
This close, she feels every spasm that runs through him, hears every beat of his heart and hitch in his breath. He calls her Mother again—says Maman like it’s ripped right out of him, like she’d pulled it from his chest—but doesn’t seem to notice, and she’s too far gone to care.
For a long moment, they simply bask by the waning fire, languid in the aftermath, their bodies still intertwined. Gabrielle sits, sated, in his lap, her limbs limp with exhaustion, her earlier fervour forgotten. Satiated in every sense of the word, she could stay there all day if he’d let her, her body gone boneless, weakening with the end of the evening, the sky outside surely brightening by now, her beloved moonlight replaced with the swirling colours of sunrise, a violet she’ll never again see outside of her maker’s eyes.
As if on cue, Lestat runs a hand through her hair, his fingers twining with what remains of her braid, golden curls falling loose to frame her face. He tucks them behind her ear, the gentlest of kisses pressed to her cheekbone. “Rest, now,” he says, and she nods to the unspoken request, her arms winding around his shoulders as he scoops her up to carry her to coffin.
It’s as the stone lid of the sarcophagus settles over her that Gabrielle thinks: Tonight, you can accompany me to the countryside. She’ll take him to the wildflower fields, she decides, and show him the sparkle of the stars, whatever remains of the boy she’d left dead and drained in the grass. He would like that, she thinks, half-asleep and hazy. She might even indulge him—help him pick the prettiest flowers in the dark, then weave the stems into his hair as she had when he was four and five and nine, and the château had yet to rot. If this wave of elation continues, she might even let him return the favour, a thank you for the Dark Gift he’d given her.
But then again, thinks Gabrielle, as sleep finally takes her. She might not.