Vamptember - Tumblr Posts

🧛🏻

Aphrodisiac/"He ate my heart".

I'm late ((...

Beautiful Boy / Grocery Store

Night Club / Dead Dove: Do Not Eat

FREE DAY 

Ghosts / Breakfast In Bed / Three Is Company

He's late.

Office / Forest

Kittens

Lost In Eras

Therapy for the polycule [Vamptember]

[I'm completely new to Tumblr, so I hope I'll get this right, haha.] For Vamptember, I'm writing a multichapter fic, that revolves around Louis, Armand, Daniel and Lestat forming a polycule and healing their traumas and issues through therapy! Luckily they found another vampire who is a psychologist and can treat them all! One prompt per chapter - flashback scenes that explain how they started this thing spread throughout the work - table of contents in chapter one, handy to look through that if you want to read single chapters instead of the whole thing (many chapters can be read as a standalone without further context.) Rating: Mature, Pairings: Louis/Armand/Daniel/Lestat and every combination of that, Current Word Count (September 23rd): 42.284

Vamptember Day 23: Cigarette

Armand enjoys a quiet night with a pack of cigarettes - until Lestat appears, leading up to an emotional confession and flirtatious indulgement. Rating: Mature ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [...]

Armand threw his cigarette into the ashtray and grabbed the whole pack. He looked around to see if any humans from the nearby buildings were watching him – negative. So, with his usual grace, he leapt from the window, floating down to the soft grass below. He much preferred it to the harsh feeling of stone under his bare feet.

Lestat turned around, looking a bit startled, but then smiled.

“Can I have one?” He asked, pointing at the pack.

“That is why I brought them.”

“Now, now,” Lestat said teasingly, “we both know that you aren’t done with smoking for the night.” Armand frowned but handed him a cigarette. Lestat was not wrong. Sometimes, indulging helped clear his mind.

Armand flicked his fingers, lighting it for him.

“Thank you,” he mumbled, inhaling the smoke so deeply that a quarter of the cigarette burned down at once.

Armand watched him closely, noticing the way the cigarette’s glow cast a calm yet haunting light across Lestat’s face. There was something peaceful about it, but also—something else.

Perhaps he could find his own peace tonight, through Lestat’s presence.

But the quiet moment didn’t last long. Armand remembered the unusual reaction from earlier.

“Lestat, why did you react so strangely when I implied that you would be Rapunzel?” Armand asked, remembering to smile to portray his friendly intention.

Lestat’s face flushed slightly after he exhaled a thick cloud of smoke, almost as if he’d been caught off guard. He must have fed recently to make that bodily reaction happen.

“It’s … well. If you must know. You called me princess. I liked that.” [...]

Vamptember, Day 24: "Half in love with an easeful death"

Armand wakes to a therapy session with Chloe - when she asks him a question about his killing methodology, it leads to a heavy conversation, a journey through Amadeo's and Armand's past that explores how his sentiment of choosing his victims might have to do more with the past than he'd wanted to admit. Context for those only reading that chapter: In this, Armand is part of a DID system. And mind the tags and trigger warnings in the author's notes! Rating: Mature Words: ca. 6,86 k Short excerpt under the cut!

This excerpt is probably not the most interesting part, but I don't think I can post the best parts on Tumblr, because of the thousand trigger warnings they would need!

[...] Armand replied immediately, maybe a little too fast. “Grace acts as the opposite of the brutality we are. We need to balance the scale.”

He could feel the muscles in his jaw tensing and twitching, the tension that rose inside him breaking through. Navigating this conversation was like a game of chess, where one player reveals enough of their strategies to their opponent to create a sense of false security, to make the other person think they had the upper hand in seeing the pattern, only to then later turn the table around so drastically, leaving the other player baffled and accidentally giving away their plans. A way to win. But … this was therapy. There was nothing to win, except happiness in the long run, maybe? Insight?

Chloe studied him for a long moment – wrote something down, again. Her hand moved across the paper without urgency. Then, she met his gaze full-on, managing to surprise Armand by putting her notepad and pen down, and discarding it onto the table.

“Armand, it seems like you’re holding something back. Is there any reason you’re so hesitant?”

Was he hesitant? Probably.

“The issue here is not hesitation. Carefulness, yes. Deliberate planning.”

Chloe leaned back in the armchair, and then, she smirked. A twinkle appeared in her eyes, confusing Armand enough to raise his eyebrows. “If I tell you some of the reasons – not all – behind asking certain questions, would that make you feel more secure? Make you take the plunge into revealing more about that topic?”

Oh, now she was the one playing a game? Intriguing. [...]

Vamptember Day 25: Garden

Our favourite chaos crew takes a short vacation - to inspect a house on the countryside they might just be interested in buying. Its garden, or more like 8 acres of land, holds many things to discover - and Louis thinks, that the same is true for their relationship.

Rating: The chapter itself probably "Teen and Up". The whole work "Mature".

Short excerpt under the cut!

Short excerpt: [...]

They walked further away from the house – discovering a variety of trees, their crowns loomed over them, their branches appeared newly trimmed without affecting the trees’ majestic beauty or compromising their age. Four apple trees stood close together, some branches and twigs touching. But each had its own stem, and would in the fall carry its own fruit. Maybe they could tie hammocks there, creating a space to relax outside.

It was Daniel, who discovered patches of newly planted flowers – all kinds of colours mixed, their youth and different aesthetics not disturbing the established nature around them. Instead, they brought a certain contrast, a new perspective into the garden.

They passed some small greenhouses, that with a bit of effort could give space to experiment with more exotic plants, spicing things up a bit. When they reached a small pond with lilies floating on top, Louis could feel Lestat’s excitement, as a toad leapt from one lily to another, ripples spreading across the pond. A lot of animals seemed to exist in this space. Some passing through, some having found their home here.

They also came upon a long-forgotten corner, where thorny bushes and sprawling weeds claimed the ground, in which more beautiful plants could be seeded or structures could be built.

The area was too vast to explore fully – with deserved detail - that night, when the house still awaited its initial inspection. As they wandered back toward said building, a thought struck Louis: This garden was more than just land, it was a reflection of their relationship. Like a mental image realised, an abstract made tangible. The nature here wasn’t static, but it had a shape and a foundation to it, that nothing could shake. Just like their companionship was now rooted in love and resilience, ever-growing and starting to bloom with the work they had fertilised it with. If vampiric existence was the Savage Garden, then this, where he stood, could be their sanctuary. And suddenly he knew: He wanted to have this, to stay, to see how things would develop here.

[...]

Vamptember Day 26: Funeral Pyre

Still on vacation, the polycule spends an evening around the bonfire. But staring into the fire makes Daniel's thoughts drift in a difficult direction, evoking emotions he'd rather not like to deal with. Thinking about the future is hard - why not follow old patterns instead? Saying no to help comes easy to him, after all. Or: Hey let's watch how a normal bonfire makes Old Man Fledgling Daniel spiral into an existantial crisis, that makes him ditch his therapy goals for a moment.

Excerpts under the cut. Very Daniel centered, the others are only somewhat present.

Excerpt 1: [...] So, calculating, he had maybe five to ten years left of showing his face to anyone without raising suspicion and another five to ten years of being a faceless figure. And then what?

In this modern time, he would surely need to fake his death somehow or go missing. The first would be too much effort. But if he officially went missing, he needed to do it somewhere they wouldn’t be able to find him. But where? He wasn’t ready to dig himself a hole, to hibernate underground and wait out a century. He was too young of a vampire, he wanted to experience being undead and savour everything about it. So, he would have to hide somewhere, give up his registration, an official life for what, years? Decades? A human lifespan, or two? How much time would need to pass before he could make an at least half-official reappearance into the world? With the ongoing digitalization and state surveillance, it would be difficult to do, but was it possible at all? [...]

Excerpt 2: [...] Not once, before this night, had Daniel felt even the tiniest bit of regret or grief about his human life being over. And now he didn’t feel that either, not really – but all of those implications, the uncertainty of his future was what overwhelmed him, made him think that planning his funeral instead would have been less confusing and upsetting. The thoughts turned to emotions – emotions he couldn’t deal with. No, because he refused to deal with them. As the fire slowly burned down, so did his ability to withstand letting himself glide into the familiar darkness that always waited just around the corner, luring him in.

The fire could be fixed by throwing in another branch, if one would bother to do so.

But his thoughts … Well, technically he had the tools to calm his mind, knew what he had to do to refocus on the present, climb up the walls of the dark and rotten pit of despair. If he truly wanted to. The thing is, he didn’t. [...]

Saw a bunch of cool leather-clad Lestats for the @vamptember event and remembered I had a sketch lying around... so here's me joining the rockstar's bandwagon (the first 'proper' drawing I've done of him so far?!)

Unrelated extra:

Marius & Daniel: From Rio with Love

(Vamptember prompt "Rio de Janeiro")

Quick sketch of Nicki in his "mute to mania" moment, one of my favorite scenes in The Vampire Lestat! (For the Vamptember prompt "Metamorphosis")