InexplicablePeas

COMMUNION

The first time he feeds you, it feels like being delivered from the horror of loneliness to an embrace of love and lust. 

Yes, he also feeds the boys in the palazzo — but with you, it's different. Everyone knows it's different, and no one mentions it. The dinner table is filled with the most scrumptious dishes, yet you seldom eat at the dining table because he will feed you in his chambers. With you, it's different. 

He watches when you eat. It seems like he enjoys it. His eyes focus on your fingertips, coated in fatty oil from the fried wig, before focusing on your lips while he licks his. 

He slices up bread, cheese and salami, crafting a little morsel of colours and flavours and smells. He holds it before your mouth, and you eat it from his hand, licking his fingers not-so-innocently. 

Suddenly, you hear a man's voice, muted, distant: "One must never bite the hand that feeds you, boy.” It's a fatherly voice, but you don't remember who said it. This terrifies you. 

He sees your distress and offers you the sweetest, juiciest grapes. He hand-feeds you, and seeing as you mustn't bite this hand, surely you must suckle it. 

Your tongue traces his nails, your lips encircle his middle and index finger. He gently pulls his fingers in and out, and they slide so easily on your tongue that it makes all of your body hot. He chuckles, kissing your cheeks. You repeat the little game for each new sandwich of salami and prosciutto and cherry tomato and goat's cheese. 

By the time he caresses your belly, it is round and full. He seems wholly satisfied, while it feels like you've been reduced to the parts between your legs — aching, moist, tightened. 

You want to feed him, so you prepare a morsel of cheese and focaccia. You want to feel his tongue on your fingertips so bad… He chuckles instead. Rejects your little treat, but gently grabs your hand, letting your fingers into his mouth for him to play. His mouth is really cold, and it exists as the perfect foil for the fire between your legs. His tongue is delicious along the length of your fingers, but it's best when he separates your fingers with it, running his icy tongue between them. Your moans come out like steam. 

When he's done sucking your fingers, he guides them, wet and moist, inside your camisole and has you circle slippery fingertips on your nipple. The wetness has you squirming on his lap. He lifts your camisole so he might tease your nipples himself. He makes you face away from him, legs spread on the outside of his, nipples pinched and toyed with, while he whispers words of love in your ear. It feels like you're floating, until a soft sting on your neck makes it so. You are floating, you have to be. The only thing keeping you grounded is the soft sting on your neck and the two pinched nipples.

Whenever he hand feeds you dinner, you finish it with a belly full but you still feel light and dizzy as if you had barely eaten. 

He grimaces, but still says it: "Delicious…" and you agree.

***

You have never seen him eat. None of the boys has seen it either. You sometimes wonder if he lives off the little stingy bites he sometimes takes from your neck, sometimes from your bare skin behind pulled curtains. 

When you confront him, he quotes poets and poems, and declares in a quiet, hushed tone at the shell of your ear: "Your love alone sustains me, cherub." 

He says words of love almost every night. Sometimes he sounds miserable as he says it. Sometimes he sounds somber and frightened. Thankfully, on most nights he is warm, his words full of adoration, love, but most importantly — they are filled with joy. You, too, think that his love alone could sustain you, but it makes you so happy to know you do the same for him!

Nothing matters as much as making him happy. 

*** 

He brings you to the best taverns so you might drink the finest wines and meads, and spirits. Whatever you wish for, really! It feels like every night of lust must be preceded by a night of gluttony. 

You don't like going to taverns with him. He doesn't put you on his lap in public, of course. You sit side by side, like most men, and he talks of politics and philosophy and silly little things like the greater good, the measurements of morality and the importance of law. You could not care less, but oh how his beautiful lips purse and pout whenever he says words like "society", "ethics" and "individualism". He scolds you for not paying attention, and you make it up to him by licking the bottle neck almost obscenely, letting a frothing drop slide down your chin and neck, well aware he follows with his eyes. The drop continues down to your chest, but his eyes have stopped on your neck. 

"Should we go home, maestro? I am hungry, and Vicenzo said he would save me dessert," you tease. 

He doesn't care for dessert. 

And you know you will be his.

***

Intimacy evolves — dissolving into red, red and red.

You feed him with blood, and he feeds you with gold. 

Each droplet feels like being poured liquid fire down your throat towards the middle of your legs. His hands slide between your thighs, offering you to either spread your legs or endure a torture of frisson and shivers as he teases ghostly fingertips at the edge of your skin.

His breath is cold against your neck, and he plants dozens of kisses while whispering your name: Amadeo, Amadeo, Amadeo. 

It is nowhere near enough. 

His hand finds the source of fire between your legs, and he plays with it, his hand caressing you gently, and his kisses making you arch your back, squirming while he giggles sweetly, drunk on your reactions.

You're close to climaxing, and it's still nowhere near enough.

"Give me your sweetest kiss, master. Give me red — your red," you whisper back, feeling Babylon ready to be unleashed. 

"Oh, Amadeo," he whimpers, hands deftly leading you to completion amidst moans and pants. 

Your chest rises and falls with your accelerated breaths, and at your side, his tears are crimson and juicy. Like licking little pomegranate seeds, you don't waste a single drop of this sacred red. His eyelashes are soft against the tip of your tongue, and his sobs also sound like your name: Amadeo, Amadeo, Amadeo. 

"Don't cry, master. Can't you see it? I can make you smile, and I will… Have me, master. I know it will please you, and it pleases me tenfold."

"You know! What can you know — an innocent like you? A christened apostate in the shape of a fallen angel," he curses with so much affection it could almost be mistaken for an offence.

Amidst kisses on his cheeks, his nose and eyelids, you sing: "I love you, I love you, I love you, master."

"Oh, yes. Alas, the tragedy lies in this: I fear I love you, too."

"Love me!"

"Oh, Amadeo…"

He feeds off your blood, and it feels like being delivered from the horror of living into something much greater, coloured in satin scarlet.

***

He feeds you blood and sweets. He feeds you the finest foods in Venice, even if, for a very brief moment, you thought the brothels fed you finer meats. You suspect he hired the brothel chefs — but you don't really have confirmation. 

He feeds you imported pastries and expensive liquor. 

He forces you to swallow your own tears as you beg for the life of a Florentine banker. He finally lets you watch him feed on someone that isn't yourself. 

It's as hypnotising as it's offensive to watch man after man fall to his demise under his rosy fingertips — he should be feeding off you, letting you fill his belly with your blood. 

He feeds you his blood, finally, mouthful after mouthful, transubstantiating his delicious cardinal red into a less bright and far more sinful carmine. The blood he once took from you is now yours to take.

The fire between your legs spreads everywhere as you press your lips against his neck. You feed off his blood, and he cries your name throughout. 

It finally feels like being delivered — from life to an embrace that feels like home. 

***

He drinks your every tear whenever you shed them for the mortal life you left behind. It is finally your turn to cry, and his turn to run the tip of his tongue against your brittle eyelashes. It is you who cries behind pulled curtains now. 

"I love you, master…"

"Do you? Well, now, that's not too surprising," he says, caressing your hair as he presses your face against the crook of his neck — as if he knew you could not face him now. 

"I cannot help loving you. You have taken me from the embrace of my brothers and my parents, and Bianca, and I wouldn't have it any other way… What else may I do, besides loving you with all I have?" you whisper to his succulent artery, your fangs grazing against the white column of his neck.

"Damned be the night I first laid eyes on you, Amadeo. Why do I love you? Why must I love you so much…" he admits, and only because you can't see it. He never says this to your face. 

But your mouth traces the line of his artery, and it's easier this way — when neither of you has to face the other.

***

He still feeds you. He takes your hand like the doting parent he is, and you, faithful pupil, are taken feast to feast, banquet to banquet. The back alleys filled with criminals are now a cornucopia of red.

He holds you in his arms, his possessive fingers pressing on your artery as you feed off tonight's victim. The man's warmth, briefly, feels more delicious than any pleasure he could offer you. 

Faced with delicious mortality, nothing else can compare.

But soon enough, the man in your arms — child, bride, groom, infant, meal — is dead.

As you tenderly place tonight's victim on the ground, the world spins. Your eyes search for him, for someone who might catch you as you fall and ground you to present. 

He is, once again, all which matters.

You throw yourself into his embrace, and he takes to the skies with you in his arms. Suddenly, your skin is gently lapped by the cold Serenissima. Venice is nothing but tiny specs of gold in the distant ground. You're surrounded by stars. 

"Give me your blood, master."

"Be mine, Amadeo. Forget God and false prophets, forget the trappings of faith and worship only this love, nurture only this love."

The moon, it seems, is as bright as his almost white hair. 

"Give me your blood, master, and I will be yours," you pant against his mouth. 

He feeds you red for almost a whole year. 

And then, life sees fit to only feed you ashes for almost half a millennium.

***

Even when you walk away, each footstep placed before the next leading you astray and beyond the chasm, it still feels like you always make your way back to him. 

This cannot be a descent into Hell if he lies at the end of it.

He is at the far end of the dungeon corridors. He never feeds from the criminals kept in dark, windowless rooms. He constantly insists they should all have their own view of the sky, and the council never listens, for they couldn't care less. 

But he does.

You come to the very last cell, and there he is — feeding. 

How undignified to see him lurching over a man who long stopped struggling. The sound of a wet kiss and of loud gulps rival the constant thrumming hum of his oh-so ancient heart. He is so old. 

How beastly he looks, red velvet a slumped, shapeless form, the lace hem brushing against filth and cobwebs from Lestat's cold prison. His back is like that of a demon, and this dungeon — how fittingly monstrous. Leviathan chained by nothing but pious duty. Order's most faithful acolyte.

He lives in this mausoleum with dozens of undead. And this is how he feeds now, not from criminals who have freshly sinned but from men who'd gnaw their own legs if that gave them a chance to escape. He feeds from men in dungeons just like the undignified, common fledgling without a maker when his own sire had been a God. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. 

You step into his dungeon cell, and his eyes turn to you like those of a startled beast. Who goes there to dare interrupt an animal while it eats? Do you have neither sense nor mind? 

His pupils go from a slit to a tender blackness. He sees you and he loves you, or so he and everyone else claims. He still loves you, the innocent boy you once made into a vampire tells you. He wants you, the landlord professes, and I know you need him, he claims.

You come closer, step by step. Feet always stumbling and somehow always threading a path that inevitably leads back to him — equal measures blessing and curse.

His mouth is clean, pristine. How fashionable his killing. Not a single drop wasted — and yet, his hand is placed deep within his victim's chest, blood gurgling and falling freely between them. 

He pulls his hand back, the heart carved out like he was pulling an apple from a tree. 

He stands — so tall and dignified. How unfair that life decided you must always look up when you meet his gaze, how blissful. 

He reaches his hand your way, offers you the heart still spasming in his hand, sputtering blood and dripping down his arm. 

He loves me, you concede. For what other reason would lead a beast to share its kill with another? Vampires are neither social animals like lions, nor are they bonded in packs, like wolves. This cannot be instinct; thus, it can only be one other thing. He wants to feed you. Wants you to share his cup, wants to part the bread with you and for you to sip the wine from his table.

Your tongue meets his alabaster skin, marble and hard despite the recent kill. 

You lick the deluge of red. Your lips press against his skin, slowly moving up and down, licking elbow, wrist and arm, cleaning his skin and tasting the delectable red of a captive victim. Children, all of them, with how old they are, one of Lestat's milk-fed, aged catamites.

Finally, you hold his hand like an apostle to Christ's. With due reverence, you kiss his hand before your fangs finally press against the leaking artery at the top of the dying heart. 

You feel his breath draw near as he suckles on the other end of the heart. 

He feeds you in blood communion, and takes it beneath his tongue, too.

You take the first bite from the offering, letting him take the next. Slowly, you both feed off the hearty flesh of tonight's feast. Your fangs ache for a bite and once you're done feeding off tonight's entrée you feel a hunger which threatens to consume you. 

You bare your fangs in the air with a gasp.

When you finally open your eyes, he is there, watching you with the same blank expression he once watched you in the taverns, and with the grapes, and with the finest treats in Venice. Oh, how can nostalgia be so cruel and so divine? 

Slowly, he comes near. He doesn't hug you, but he again presses your face against his neck like he still remembers that it is easier when you don't have to face one another. 

"Feast." He orders. He never asks anything of you — but he often commands, compels and demands. How delightful that he does. He remembers mastering you, but you sometimes wonder if he remembers loving you.

Only when your fangs once again graze over his beautiful neck does his hand find your body once more. He holds you, and your whole body awakes as if suddenly reminded of a time he'd feed you by making you lick his fingertips clean. 

"Put me in your lap next time, for old time's sake," you murmur in a sussurus.