Pairing: Lestat de Lioncourt x OC (eventual Lestat de Lioncourt x OC x Louis de Pointe du Lac)
Tags: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Injury, Explicit Sexual Content, Vampire/Human Relationship, Blood Drinking/Blood Play, Eventual Polyamory, Canon Divergence: Louis is bi, Slow Burn, Power Imbalance, Dominant Lestat, Light BDSM and Daddy Kink (in later chapters), Past Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Canon-typical Violence
Summary: Evie Mora is a documentary producer and camerawoman hired to follow The Vampire Lestat on tour. She does not believe the vampire branding is real. She is very sure she can keep her distance.
What begins as a job becomes a slow, unwilling fall into Lestat’s orbit—first as his reluctant personal assistant, then as the mortal who sees the cracks in the performance, then as the woman who stays after she learns the truth. Blood, trust, and a public life neither of them planned for. When the tour reaches Paris and Lestat finally breaks open, Evie makes a call that changes the architecture of everything: she brings Louis de Pointe du Lac back into the room.
A slow-burn, eventual poly IWTV fic about damage, chosen family, cameras, and the people who refuse to leave when the wound is open.
Evie Mora had a system for surviving other people’s chaos.
She arrived in Los Angeles two days before principal photography with her equipment cases labeled in the same precise handwriting she used for everything else, a reusable water bottle that never left her side, and the black notebook that lived in the outer pocket of her camera bag. The front half of the notebook was already half-filled with pre-production notes: lens packages, preferred frame rates, the particular way Daniel Molloy liked his observational coverage cut. The back half remained private. Poems. Song lyrics. Fragments of melodies she sometimes heard when the city went quiet enough. No one on a set ever asked to see the back half. Most people assumed the entire thing was work.
Daniel met her in the production office the first morning, looking exactly as she remembered from grad school and somehow older in the eyes. He hugged her once, brief and real, then held her at arm’s length.
“You look tired,” he said.
“You look like you still don’t sleep.”
“Occupational hazard.” He studied her face the way he used to study her rough cuts—searching for the thing underneath the polish. “You sure about this one? It’s going to be a circus.”
“You called me,” Evie said. “I said yes. We’re doing it.”
Daniel’s mouth twitched. “Still the same. All right. Come on. I’ll walk you through the schedule.”
The job itself was clean on paper. Documentary series following Lestat de Lioncourt—self-styled Vampire Lestat, rock star, walking provocation—across the US and European legs of his tour. Evie was second camera and Daniel’s primary field producer. She would shoot, log, manage the day-to-day needs of the small crew, and keep the subject from eating the schedule alive if possible. She had done versions of this work before. Music videos for artists who believed their own press. Concert films where the star changed the set list six times and still expected magic. Her own independent documentary two years earlier about people who lived inside the night: the ones who clocked in when everyone else went home. She knew how to disappear behind a camera and still see everything.
She told herself this would be more of the same.
The crew was small and competent. Most of them had worked with Daniel before. Evie fell into the rhythm easily—early call times, quiet efficiency, the particular satisfaction of a shot that landed exactly as she saw it in her head. She liked the work. She had always liked the work. It was the one place where her tendency to anticipate every possible disaster felt like a professional asset instead of a leftover survival skill from childhood.
She did not talk about childhood.
At night, in the short-term rental the production had booked for her, she opened the back of the notebook and wrote until her hand cramped. Short poems. Half-finished lyrics about distance and performance and the particular loneliness of being the one who watched. She played soft fingerstyle guitar on the cheap instrument she had brought, volume low enough that the neighbors would not complain. The songs were sad. They always were. She never showed them to anyone.
On the third day Daniel sat with her during a lunch break and said, almost casually, “He’s going to try to charm you. Or provoke you. Possibly both at once. Don’t take it personally.”
“I’ve handled difficult subjects.”
“Not like this.” Daniel’s gaze was steady. “Lestat collects interesting people. You’re interesting. Just… keep your center, Evie. That’s all I’m asking.”
She nodded. She had been keeping her center since she was nine years old and learned that no one else was going to do it for her.
She met him on the fifth day.
The first formal interview was scheduled for a soundstage in Culver City. Evie was already there, checking the A-camera battery and running a quick white balance, when the door opened and Lestat de Lioncourt walked in forty-three minutes late.
He was taller than he looked in the advance stills. Golden hair artfully undone, sunglasses still on indoors, a black shirt open at the throat, and the kind of smile that assumed the room had been waiting for him. He moved like someone who had never once been told he took up too much space. When Daniel introduced the crew, Lestat’s gaze moved across faces with theatrical interest and then stopped on her.
“And this is Evie Mora,” Daniel said. “Second camera, field producer, the reason we might actually finish on schedule.”
Lestat removed the sunglasses. His eyes were startlingly blue. He looked at her for a beat too long.
“Evie,” he repeated, tasting the name. “Not the full Evangeline?”
“Pity. The longer one has such lovely weight.” He smiled, slow and deliberate. “You’re the one who made that night documentary. The bartenders and the hospital workers and the woman who cleaned office buildings until dawn. I watched it twice.”
Evie kept her expression neutral. “Thank you.”
“It was sad,” Lestat said. “Beautifully sad. You have a mournful eye, petite étoile.”
The nickname landed like a hand on the back of her neck. She felt her spine stiffen.
“I’m here to work,” she said. “Not to be catalogued.”
Lestat’s smile widened, delighted. “Honest. How rare.”
He spent the next three hours performing for the camera and, she was certain, for her. He was late answering questions, early with digressions, constantly adjusting his own lighting with small gestures that forced the gaffer to scramble. He was magnetic and exhausting in equal measure. Evie kept the frame clean and her mouth shut. Every time he glanced toward her camera she felt a flicker of irritation so sharp it was almost physical.
He was also, objectively, one of the most beautiful people she had ever seen in person. The fact of it annoyed her more than anything else.
That night in the rental she wrote three pages in the back of the notebook and then scratched two of them out. The only lines she left were:
He looked at me like I was already a story he wanted to tell.
I wanted to tell him to stop.
She closed the notebook harder than necessary and went to bed with the taste of irritation still in her mouth.
She could already tell he was going to be a problem.
She just did not yet know what kind.
