I'm companion enough for myself, he had said to Lestat as a hurricane whipped around them. He'd meant it. Means it still. Meant it when he said to Daniel he couldn't go back to Lestat, not until it felt less like he was living with nothing but broken pieces, overgrown garden, fractures on fractures, absences like missed steps on a staircase. Who is he? How can be any kind of companion without knowing?
He'd wanted time.
Armand is dragging that away from him too. Trapping him into declarations, into closed doors. Trying to quantify a thing he had felt so strongly, and then had been taken out of his hands fifty years ago. Trying to do that in tandem with understanding what he and Lestat can be, will be, to each other now.
And all this time, Louis has been tending to his anger. The relief of Lestat alive made space for it, made it easier for Louis to hold it in check. He'd nursed it. Kept it close, caught between his palms. This great swell of feeling over seventy-seven years, what's been done, how inescapable it feels.
Now Lestat says all these things, and Louis is forced to consider the transgression. No immediate distraction of Lestat, covered in blood, to prevent him from considering the fullness of what's been done. There is only Lestat, reminding Louis that Armand had used these pieces of his life as a weapon. Dragged out the intimacy of a conversation in their marriage bed, the horror of a small room in San Francisco. The things he'd said in that room before everything had come apart, how it had felt to say the worst things, the ugly things, to talk and laugh and be heard, certain Daniel wouldn't ever require Louis to bit his tongue. Feels shades and shadows of what he had felt on a stage in Paris, pieces of him put under harsh light to be scrutinized. Here, now, weaponized.
There is a ringing in his ears. Louis is watching himself grind out a cigarette on the windowsill. He is watching himself turn to walk briskly towards the door.
no subject
I'm companion enough for myself, he had said to Lestat as a hurricane whipped around them. He'd meant it. Means it still. Meant it when he said to Daniel he couldn't go back to Lestat, not until it felt less like he was living with nothing but broken pieces, overgrown garden, fractures on fractures, absences like missed steps on a staircase. Who is he? How can be any kind of companion without knowing?
He'd wanted time.
Armand is dragging that away from him too. Trapping him into declarations, into closed doors. Trying to quantify a thing he had felt so strongly, and then had been taken out of his hands fifty years ago. Trying to do that in tandem with understanding what he and Lestat can be, will be, to each other now.
And all this time, Louis has been tending to his anger. The relief of Lestat alive made space for it, made it easier for Louis to hold it in check. He'd nursed it. Kept it close, caught between his palms. This great swell of feeling over seventy-seven years, what's been done, how inescapable it feels.
Now Lestat says all these things, and Louis is forced to consider the transgression. No immediate distraction of Lestat, covered in blood, to prevent him from considering the fullness of what's been done. There is only Lestat, reminding Louis that Armand had used these pieces of his life as a weapon. Dragged out the intimacy of a conversation in their marriage bed, the horror of a small room in San Francisco. The things he'd said in that room before everything had come apart, how it had felt to say the worst things, the ugly things, to talk and laugh and be heard, certain Daniel wouldn't ever require Louis to bit his tongue. Feels shades and shadows of what he had felt on a stage in Paris, pieces of him put under harsh light to be scrutinized. Here, now, weaponized.
There is a ringing in his ears. Louis is watching himself grind out a cigarette on the windowsill. He is watching himself turn to walk briskly towards the door.