Creole Blood

She tries to find her words as they walk, the exercise always difficult for her, especially when it comes to feelings. After a lifetime of not only having speech difficulties, but also being only loved when she shut up and didn't express any desire, she tries to take the space she's owed. She doesn't know what is too little, and what is too much. She gets too greedy and acts spoiled and demanding, or she erases herself and tries not to exist. Her moods are contradictory, her emotions fast changing and huge. One day, she might find balance.

"I sometimes forget you would know very well about narrating a story," she replies with a small smile as she chooses to stay in the more opulent side of the neighbourhood this time, leading them to a park she enjoys. She is not hunting right now, which means they can go to brightly lit areas and better parts of the city.

"A little. He was making a point about earthly pleasures, which I understand, and which were kind of lost on me at the time he was writing by the way, but then he kind of got too into the retelling of it all. I guess you'd call it stream of consciousness in more literary terms. It's only... Well, I suppose Marius scares me a little in his narration. The... discipline, mostly."

It shouldn't bother her that much.

"I'm not sure why it stays with me. Because by that logic, Armand should scare me too from your book and Lestat's, and Lestat himself too, but they don't." she reflects aloud. Maybe Marius is too much of a mystery figure for her yet. Maybe it's something about the maker fledgling bond. Maybe... he feels too much like an authority, like someone in charge of her and she notoriously has bad experiences with that kind of male figure.

"Oh, and of course I get jealous when he comes in and barely looks at me and then, even worse, it's like Armand's forgotten me. In case that part wasn't obvious," she suddenly adds, pulling too hard on a seam of her sleeve that has somehow decided to go undone. She winces at the ripping sound, suddenly feeling like she's wrong and bad for feeling like this, and for telling Louis. Immature again, the voice in her head says. He only made you to keep Armand alive anyway.

The evening air always feels good on his skin, even in the city with its endless smog and all the density that comes with human life. Even the neon glow of window signs and shopfronts seems to lend themselves to something soft and romantic in the old-fashioned sense when Sybelle is around. Indeed, the world always seems a bit lighter in her presence.

The flush that rises in his cheeks at the mention of his story takes him by surprise. He hasn't thought of that infamous book for ages; not since the world had been in peril and his maker had taken up a publishing of his own, and his name seemed to be on the lips of every blood drinker in the waking world.

But Sybelle...when did she read such a thing? Did she devour the paperback before, in those years with Armand? Did she stumble upon the copies so foolishly shelved in the grand library? Did she hear his voice on the page, or picture his visage? How on earth could she reconcile the utter failure on those pages, and the man he has become?

"My story was a cautionary tale," he sighs eventually. "Armand's was meant as a gift. There is a great difference between the two."

Gently, he wraps his hand around her restless, picking fingers.

Mon Dieu, I'm a sea of regrets. Would you have me list them alphabetically or chronologicaly?

Recently, though?

I regret tossing out that dark grey sweater you love so much in a fit of pique while you were in New York.

I regret that, when you left this time, I was angry and insecure and didn't tell you how much I love you.

I regret the fears and insecurities I still keep from you, even unintentionally, because I am continuously struggling to remember that I never want anything between us again, and my own patterns and pitfalls are so relentlessly hard to unlearn.

And I know that you love me, just as I know how the words will always get caught in your throat.

Trussed like an animal, he's a beautiful mess of shivering yearning flesh. The bonds he surely could have ripped to shreds with ease, if only there was anywhere else he'd rather be.

"Mmh!"

The preceding strike of the switch forces Lestat's eyes to shut tight, the ruthlessness of it sparking magnificent pain through the inflamed nerves of his backside. He arches back wordlessly, toes curling a little in delight.

Then he's drawn backward again, farther, commandeered by an unforgiving fist in his hair to wrench his head upward. The gesture draws out a subdued imploring moan, Lestat's fangs snapping down against the artificial impediment, as if driven by blind impulse.

What sweet torture, to look into Louis' eyes and see the bright dazzling fury there.

He gazes back at him in astonishment and some semblance of awe, eyes blown in an adoring daze through the tears. Vague flashes of the inciting incident; his hand slipping covetously over Louis' thigh beneath the meeting hall table, his lips hovering at his ear, and the rush of burning shame that had flushed prettily over his lover's face. How beautiful it had been to see the discomposure overtake him completely. How endlessly amusing.

Ah, and what a beautiful mutt he is with his tangled hair and wild eyes, panting and whimpering with each labored breath. There's something that aches in Louis as he tucks a few strands of his mane behind his ears, admiring the infinite curls of his baby hairs that stick to the alabaster flesh with weeping beads of blood sweat. A feeling so big it feels barely contained in his mortal coil; a base and primal instinct to tear and bite and claw at his lover, to rip his beauty to shreds. A love so strong it can only turn to violence.

Louis needs to love him to the bone. He always has.

Again, he pulls at the knot of hair in his hand until Lestat's head is at the proper angle for him to slip his thumb beneath the flushed rosy petal of his lip and pet at the glistening flesh beneath. Back and forth he strokes across the line where the gum gives way to the delicately sharpened tooth, now crudely pressed against the rubber and no doubt aching for the satisfaction of true flesh to sink into.

"If I were cruel, I'd threaten to take these," he murmurs, stroking fondly down the length of one fang.

[text: Louis] I'm kidding.

[text] The loafers are distracting. Once people begin to suspect I'm "dressing up," the rumors start all over again.

RANDOM TEXT MESSAGE PROMPTS.

[text: Louis💚] Hidden under all the dust, I would think.