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This particular game had started with praises and pet names, lifted straight from Armand's stories of Marius. Louis would pause in the middle of whatever he was doing and give Armand a strange look that he couldn't place, then affirm unprompted that Armand really did look like Verrocchio's David, a da Vinci Saint, a Caravaggio cupid, or Botticelli's Saint Sebastian—that one seemed to be his favorite.
Armand couldn't quite parse it, and Louis was too experienced with masking his thoughts these days for him to peer. It felt, at first, like Louis was catering to what he believed Armand wanted, to replace what he'd lost when Marius was burned. In fact, he did not need Louis to use the same endearments, nothing Louis could ever do would fill any part of that particular emptiness, and some of the praises felt out of place from the mouth of Louis, an American photographer and the most modern vampire Armand had met to date, Marius' opposite in so many ways, but it was an endearing gesture, and he chose to appreciate it.
If it started that way, though, it did not stay that way. He realized that the hunger in Louis' gaze was disarmingly and unarguably real, that there was something searching and raw in it. When Louis uttered the words, he would seem to forget himself and pose Armand with long, drawn breaths. He stopped looking at Armand like he was a person at times, looking instead like Armand was something he wanted to devour and break, or a spoil he wanted to display. Was it an attempt to claim or soil Marius' property, prove himself the better keeper?
But there was also the matter of Louis' religion, and by the time Armand made the connection, Louis was more than a little obsessed with his newly realized fetish, and Armand felt moronic for not seeing it earlier. Since Louis had started this, it had become less and less about the finery and the art and the endearments from Marius, and more and more about the saints.
Louis would call him by the names of martyred saints before intercourse and then whip and burn him in just such a way during, muddling their usual banter and coming dangerously close to playing out cohesive martyrdom scenes. The association was clear, obvious, recurring, but it was as if Louis hesitated to bridge the rest of the gap or admit what he was doing, to Armand or himself. As with so many other things in the life of Louis, it had to be without context, or because Armand wanted it, or because that's just what people did, however little sense it made. Even after having so many of his other denials uprooted, Louis, it seemed, could not have a perverse relationship with religion, even if he was no longer a believer or practitioner, and Armand knew it was exactly this lingering dissonance that made the fetish so cogent for him.
One day, while visiting a property they were trying to sell, Louis gave him one of the odd looks, gave it again and again until Armand couldn't stand it, until he knelt on the floor, then and there, without a word, either to demand Louis act on his thoughts or assent to the fact that he was already about to. Louis closed the gap between them and slid his hand through Armand's hair, with both an affectionate rustle and a soft grab. "This was your job," he said, using a tone so neutral as to be loaded.
"Yes, Maître."
"Do you know what they're doing these days to make sales? The sellers who are serious about what they're doing?" Louis said that part accusingly. The hand in his hair tensed almost imperceptibly, as if he were uncertain about the direction he was taking.
The question was rhetorical, as Louis had used a St. Joseph statue in front of Armand before. It was an odd practice, the burial of a saint as a method of intercession, as if torturing the very memory of their body would squeeze yet more holiness out of them: the "necessary suffering" of Christianity they spent so much of their time debating taken to an absurd degree.
He didn't know where Louis meant to go with this, but a prickle of warm, excited fear coursed through his body, the flush he always felt when Louis told him how he wanted to have him, when he most seemed to Armand like a God.
"Tell me, Maître."
Louis buried him the next day.
He restrained and gagged Armand, plugged and caged him, wrapped him in a sheet and closed him in a dirty, narrow crate, which was left in the earth tilted backwards towards the building, one yard away from the for-sale sign.
He couldn't remember afterwards if the mansion had sold during or after his time in the earth, and he lost all perception of time, but he remembered Louis checking on him, over and over again, excitedly touching every inch of him while he squirmed, only to firmly rearrange and bury him yet again. He was completely nonverbal (and uncontrollably aroused) when Louis finally pulled him up for good.
"You did it. Three days and three nights," Louis crooned against his skin. He caressed him, for hours and hours, for days, and nothing felt more special. Louis' little saint, his little sacrifice, his toy, his.
When Armand mentioned that it hadn't rained, Louis used it as an excuse to cuff his hands behind his back, bend him down, and dunk his head in a bucket of water, over and over again, one hand in his hair and one on his throat, the way the figures of saints were sometimes held beneath water to compel them to invite the rain. Armand's didn't strictly need the air, but no cell in his body could be convinced of that, and Louis dunked him until each of those cells had been taught that air, relief, came from Louis, that each individual breath had to be permitted and guided by him. Even when his head was held out of the water, Louis gripped his throat to pace him, to teach him not to gasp so greedily. Armand was grateful, and found himself leaning against his God, fully compliant and safe with the air He allowed him.
Another day, Louis chained him to a pole and cut him. "Like St. Cassian," he admitted, varying between slow slices and quick, shallow jabs, studying Armand's face intently to see the different winces and shudders he might draw out of him with different cuts, and to watch that he did not go too far. He outlined every part of him with blood, prodded and needled him when he grew too lax, kneaded and pulled the flesh around wounds he left.
He added that it was a way to intercede for the dead. If he didn't specify which dead, well…
Armand wasn't gagged this time, but he didn't dare ask.
All the same, Louis bathed him after, gently, sponging him with so much care that it hurt more than the knives. His saint, he called him. His saint, his saint, his saint.
His saint, it seemed, in place of all his old saints, perhaps a repository for all his resentments over the ways the old ones had betrayed him, and for all he had lost, but maybe too for all of the worship and love he no longer had another avenue for.