Louis understands this. Doesn't doubt this. Daniel had been the best, the best for Louis, but even beyond their affinity, Daniel is simply the best at this work. There is pleasure in watching him, even in spite of Louis' own growing discomfort, the sense that he is intruding.
Invited, yes, but feels his presence an intrusion all the same.
He is quiet. Smoking, presently, for something to occupy his hands while Lestat gives a fuller picture of the story Louis and Claudia dragged from him decades ago.
(Would Louis have ever heard it otherwise?
Unfair. Jealousy and hurt undeniable but smothered away. This is not about Louis.)
They are past the forty-five minute mark.
No one is moving.
Louis' eyes move between Lestat and Daniel, waiting. Unwilling to break the quiet, beat Daniel to his question. Has a finger at the edge of Daniel's mind anyway, feeling the buzz of his mind as Daniel looks at Lestat.
An impulse suppressed: Don't push.
It's not for Louis to say, though he wants to shield Lestat from whatever it is he is reliving.
But no. Daniel prompts, presses. Encourages. Pulls the story free, into the quiet sprung up between the three of them.
Daniel prompts, presses. Pushes. Beyond the call of a celebrity documentarian appeasing the vanity of celebrity rockstar, but he can't help himself, he is built this way.
It's why Louis needed him.
Here, Lestat's problem is not recall, but some labyrinthine, resistant quality between memory and speaking it into being. An effort is being made. He speaks of being bitten on that rooftop and then flown through an ice-flecked sky, of being spilled on stone ground in a chamber with broad shutterless windows, a heavy wooden trapdoor with iron lock. And Magnus, who toyed with him. Encouraged Lestat's struggle and curses while laughing, impossibly strong, touching him as he pleased.
And yes, the famous chamber and its blonde, bloated corpses. He felt he had disappointed the vampire, eventually, when the fight left his body, and he was taken into that room of horror and rot, and left there. A message, his eventual fate.
A week, he had said. Yes, a week.
Some heavy pull to the story, a centre point. The turning, but they both (all three) are vampires, familiar with the horror. Still, Lestat is quiet once again.
(Not about Louis? Lestat would laugh to know he thought so.)
There is no need to caution Daniel as to the handling of the story. Daniel's prying and prodding with Louis had been to drag out what Louis would not speak of. (Could not, whether Louis had used those words or not. Had understood the truth of those words or not.) Lestat says these things and Daniel listens, and Louis holds quietly at the edge of Daniel's mind. His eyes never leave Lestat.
Detail, at long last, to the abbreviated version of events Lestat had offered Claudia, and Louis. How many years they had lived together, and Louis had never known any of this. How abbreviated his account, even when he had finally offered any part of it.
How terrible that the turning became a relief, considering what had come before.
Slowly, slowly, Louis reaches to hook a careful finger into Lestat's. Cigarette burning red as Louis inhales, permitting himself this minor contact. This small offering, a comfort Lestat is welcome to rebuff.
A week. And then a transformation.
And then Magnus had been gone.
And then he was alone.
Louis remembers this part of the story.
Lestat is quiet. Daniel leans forward. Louis reaches for him, an anchor, if Lestat is to recount what comes next.
His hand twitches as he is touched, but then relaxes. Curls that finger to ensure Louis does not withdraw, a glance down and aside at it.
"I felt I loved him, after," Lestat offers into the silence. A disorienting cut forwards, but Daniel is a little used to it. Lestat and his habit of speaking to whatever occurs to him, less patience than Louis' careful, considered chronology. "After, I wished he had stayed. Once a vampire, nothing is the same, even the things that have happened already. I felt I could love, even, my mortal family, even though—"
Here, Daniel interrupts, ignores the icy glare he gets as he does so. They are still in the tower. Lestat is still human. We can talk about what it all means to the vampire when he arrives.
Lestat teeters on some edge between compliance and tantrum, before yielding. Very well. It was horrifying, of course it was, and cold, and dull, and the dullness would be interrupted when he awoke to Magnus there to feed from him, and then feed him a wine that tasted of apples, of home, and then he was brought back out and into a chamber he had not seen before, richly appointed, and laid on a cold but comfortable bed.
And he was not instructed in what was expected of him. They made love (and Lestat does not acknowledge the way Daniel almost disputes this) and he fought it, as Magnus desired, and he was offered the blood, and he fought this too, begged for his life, and when he was drained, begged for death, but then blood was in his mouth and pleasure had caught him in a hard grasp and all his resistance and fight melted away, and he drank, and succumbed, and was made a vampire.
"And all of his ugliness became beauty, to me," Lestat says, voice tight in his throat. "As if there were no more ugliness in the world, anymore."
Daniel points out: he did not speak of beauty, the first time he spoke of it to Louis and Claudia.
No, he didn't. He felt they would not understand, with the way he told it. He was protecting them.
Or, Daniel supposes, you were protecting yourself. Hard to be vulnerable when your adult daughter is staring daggers.
Perhaps.
And you're doing it now, except it's a camera, and you're adding violin tracks to sexual violence.
And Christine Clare cuts in, time is up, and Daniel is preoccupied with turning his ire on her as Lestat curls his finger tighter around Louis'.
Louis' grip on him shifts tighter in turn, thumb running firmly over Lestat's knuckles. Watching his face.
None of this is about Louis. About his comfort. About the instinct to shield Lestat.
Is this a breaking point? Would it be a disservice to insert himself, draw Lestat from the room? There had been moments when Armand would intervene, and Louis had felt at those moments it had been for his sake. Maybe it was. But it had been for Armand too.
Louis doesn't want to be that. Doesn't want to do that to Lestat.
Thumb running back and forth across Lestat's knuckles, watching his face. Asks in Daniel's mind, Can you leave it here, or do you need to keep pushing? as he holds all that Lestat has said in his mind and sees the weight of it on Lestat's face and wants nothing more than for Daniel to say Yes even as he considers the possibility that Daniel will say No.
Louis gets back a less articulate thought from Daniel, a flurried impression of just give me a second as he fends off a lawyer.
Next to him, Lestat is composed, but brittle. Still and watchful as pale eyes flick between Clare and Molloy, mouth set in an unhappy line. It cracks into a less than pleasant smile, Lestat leaning forwards in his chair as he asks, "Are you not content with our time together, Mssr. Molloy? We have covered much ground."
Daniel gladly pivots. It's not about the mileage. It's about the story being told.
It is what happened. (Is this a breaking point? Lestat's hand is tighter.)
It's what you say to yourself happened. And that's understandable. Survivors of this kind of thing—
"And what would you know about it," snapped, finally, the way Lestat's voice can boom at a moment's notice, and his other hand comes down flat against the table and its absence of goblet. "You told it your way already, and now this is mine! Or shall you be the author of this once more," and he is moving, fingers hooking against the edge of the table and sending it scattering aside, a gunshot-bang of noise as it hits the concrete floor.
His hand loose in Louis', prepared to slip away as Lestat stands, to fly from the room as he has done before, although this time, nearby mortals with their equipment find themselves inching backwards.
Not directed at Louis, but near enough to spark some flinch of tension in his body. Bracing. The table skidding across the floor, mortals jumping.
Lestat's grip goes slack, and Louis tightens. Holds.
"He told it the way he heard it," comes in a rush. Holding fast, saying these things. Lestat can knock him aside easy, Louis knows. But he presses, reminds: "The way I said it."
The way Louis heard it, the one and only time Lestat had spoken of it.
Jarring with the thing Daniel is needling at, drawing out. Survivors of this kind of thing. (But I have a capacity for enduring.) Daniel following Louis as he fled, running from a thing too painful to touch. He'd follow Lestat. He's more durable now than he was then. Always in pursuit of the truth, Daniel Molloy.
It's not for Louis to interfere. (Is this right? Are his instincts right, in this moment?) But he has. He is. The grip of his hand begging Stay in the same moment as he prods at the edge of Daniel's head, a spurring sort of pressure. Unnecessary. Daniel doesn't know how to stop.
Caught by this grip to his hand, Lestat is stopped from fleeing the set, a defensive set to his jaw as he fixes Louis with his stare, just that little bit red rimmed by now. Yes, easily shaken aside, but he doesn't.
Daniel is saying: if you want the redo, then you have to stay in the chair.
The way Daniel heard it. The way Louis said it. The way Louis was told it by Lestat.
One steadying breath later, and Lestat sits back down. Someone glances at someone else, and a brave intern steps in to set the table back to rights. Daniel asks for a sound check, and Lestat says he will eat anyone who comes near, and the sound guy indicates he's picking up the lapel mic just fine. Slowly, the tension eases as a reset takes place, and Ms. Clare checks and adjusts his schedule.
Meanwhile, Lestat slides his fingers between Louis'. The question is then put to him: what did Magnus want? What saved him?
Refusal, Lestat believes. He imagines each rotting corpse in that room of disappointments must have stopped fighting sooner than he. Must have asked for the Gift when Magnus told them to.
A near-imperceptible glance from Daniel to Louis. Some mote of doubt for the method in the madness.
But Lestat is still speaking. "When you take the blood of the one you have chosen, you see them completely," and his voice has gone soft again. "And after, you give them the Gift, or you don't. Perhaps it is whatever he saw when he took of me that moved him so."
Louis, drawing a mouthful of smoke off his cigarette. Listening. Daniel looks to him and Louis looks back, and can offer nothing but a tip of his chin, his own doubt tempered by the sense that Lestat's summation is as good as they will ever have.
Magnus is gone. All those boys before Lestat are dead. And Lestat has this truth: he said no, over and over.
Lestat had never wanted to be a vampire. Magnus had made him one anyway.
Louis' thumb resumes the same firm slide across skin, along Lestat's knuckles, the back of his hand. Comfort. Tangible reminder. Louis is here, present and real, no intention of going.
"Power," softly. A guess. Not Louis' place, so this offering is quiet, wreathed in smoke. "Made you refuse, and showed you it didn't matter that you had."
An hard-won insight. Louis, who has such intimate knowledge with the ways power could be wielded, had been marked by the demonstration of power in his mortal and immortal lives. He sees some similar chime in this. He can offer, but go no further than that.
An offering, gently made and softly spoken, capturing Lestat's attention. Eyes glossy, rose-tinted and grey, as this insight is taken in.
He may realise later that there is a steep difference between reciting one's understanding of their own history, and truly revisiting it, reassessing it. Of the kind of interview that took place in a penthouse in Dubai. For some new truth to claw its way in. His hand is tight but still in Louis', and there is too long a silence between Louis' words and then Lestat looking forwards once more.
"He called me wolfkiller," he says. "Lelio, of the stage. It was his belief that the qualities in me that would refuse him, defy him, would make a good vampire. And so I was chosen. And after it was done, there was no fear anymore. My vision was remade and the darkness that had frightened me in my mortal years no longer held its secret terrors. The vermin and the crawling things in the earth, those that fed on my likenesses, no longer made me recoil. Even the horrors—"
A moment of catching his breath, which has drawn shallow in his chest. "Even those horrors visited on me took new meaning, and his own deformed visage was beautiful to me. He loved me and I loved him, in the ways only monsters can."
Daniel, throughout, keeping his mouth shut, and teetering on the edge of something. Louis knows him well—the instinct to chase, to bully. But he has also known Daniel to back off, to leave something for the day, and here, he calls it. They've gotten enough. Some amount of strategising will be needed for the next session.
Lestat is blankly silent, first, when the interview is ended, and then gives a brittle smile. "Bon," but doesn't stand, as if unsure how to resolve himself with Louis at his side.
Daniel will take his time. He will circle what has been said, and parse out its inconsistencies to be focused upon, once Daniel has them in his sights, the approach will come easy, a kind of savage grace in the way Daniel pursues the heart of a story being told.
Louis feels affection warm in his chest for it, even as he weathers a kind of quiet dread for what it will look like. For the possibility that Lestat might prefer Louis out of the room. He doesn't take his place here for granted.
So much of this is beyond what Lestat had ever told him. Years of denials, over and over, and now this. This interview. Louis sat alongside him, listening.
There had been an ash tray on the table, at one point. (Now it is in many pieces on the floor, some harried PA's problem.) Louis crushes out his cigarette on the scuffed tabletop, economical motions, never letting go of Lestat's hand. Daniel is gathering his notes. Humans are shuffling anxiously around the edges of the space. Lestat's lawyer is watching, sharp-eyed, measuring. Rachida has slipped to Daniel's side, making the offer of assistance Louis expects of her.
Lestat has not moved.
"Lestat," he murmurs, thumb continuing its rhythmic stroke along Lestat's knuckles, turning just a little to run up the back of his hand. "Come with me."
Some sense of not quite being in the room anymore, or of being a spirit lurking on a tall shelf in his own structure. Distantly aware of Louis' hand around his, but also, more keenly aware of it than much else, including the way his breathing has gone shallow, as if reluctant to take in the air of the room.
Perhaps it would be best if he murders everyone here. Not Louis, of course, but the crew, his own lawyer, the fledgling vampire. Destroy the equipment. Find a way to tacitly agree with Louis that nothing of note occurred.
Louis proposes an alternate action.
Assent in the way Lestat considers this, and then stands, a near-silent rustle of sheer fabric, the swath of grey sheer robe around the tighter garments beneath. The click of heels will follow on the concrete floor of the studio, but only as Louis leads him.
Shifting his grip only to hold Lestat more securely, reassure himself of the quality of this tethering link, Louis leads him from the studio.
Had Lestat anything else to do today? Any other responsibilities? Maybe. Louis has disregarded them.
There is a car. He puts Lestat into it.
They cannot move as freely as Louis wishes. Lestat is a very public figure, with very adoring fans. He would like it if they could leave the studio and be done with all demands upon Lestat's person, but there are fans. They scream, they are ignored. The door of the car closes, and Louis murmurs some quiet instruction to Ramiz.
And then they go, wherever it is Louis has chosen for them.
Louis keeps hold of Lestat's hand. Does not ask, Would you like to talk about it?
Instead, Louis explains, "There's a gallery I been meaning to see. I figure we start there. Decide the rest as we go."
What Louis wants for him is quiet. Absence of scrutiny. Time in which Lestat can steady himself. Lestat can speak if he likes, or they can say nothing. Louis can give him this much, even if what he wants is a place like they found at Lestat's launch party. Somewhere private, somewhere beneath the sky.
They are in a car that Lestat doesn't recognise, which is normal, but moments later realises is Louis'. Or the one Louis is using, and his driver. His scent lingers in the clean interior. The windows are tinted.
I figure we can start there.
He knows what he would do if Louis left. He would go back to his hotel. He would sweet talk Larry into giving him whatever he has on him. Invite one or all of them out to waste the night. Drink of the world, bestow upon it his kisses, just as Magnus had once told him to do. Close his eyes and let whatever his impulses choose to imagine who is touching him.
But Louis has not left. Their hands tightly tangled, an anchoring, a reeling in away from the white water rush that might otherwise await him. So he nods, and says, "I have been wanting to go with you," and adds, to explain, "To see your galleries."
"I ain't bought this one," Louis explains. The lurking comedy of an unspoken yet at the end of the sentence. Maybe he will make an official partnership. Maybe he will buy the entire enterprise. It is hard to say, sight unseen. And Louis is less likely to content himself with sight unseen, these days.
No yielding, maintaining the link of their fingers even as Louis uses it to draw Lestat in. Coaxing. A silent Come to me as Louis beckons him in, down across the seas, to lay a head on Louis' thigh.
"They show a lot of up and comers," is a steady murmur, Louis' voice low and warm. "Got a girl in now, never shown her work anywhere else. It could be she hits, and then you and I bought her earliest works."
A soft inclusion. Them, together. Choosing like they used to.
A pause, a hesitation. No misunderstanding in it, in Louis' intent—perfect comprehension, in fact, and a momentary reluctance digs its heels in.
Doesn't last. It can't. Louis says Come to me and Lestat has no desire to deny him, and so he goes, laying across the seat to rest his head against Louis thigh, a leg folding up under himself. Settling, slowly, hooking his hand around Louis' knee. It is like they are flying, like Louis is flying, carrying him away, and it is warm and good, and there will be no ice-speckled stone tower at the other end of it.
"Yeah," Louis agrees. He does. He has spent long decades developing that instinct, using it to make money. But even so—
"Still wanna know if you like any of it. If any of it'll be worth keeping for ourselves."
His fingers thread through Lestat's hair. Scratches his nails lightly over Lestat's scalp, careful touches. The landscape slips past outside the windows, silent and dark.
Daniel had deemed it a good stopping point. Louis doesn't doubt it. But he has questions. Feels the buzz of curiosity, a little nostalgic in its familiarity. Lestat had side-stepped Louis' questions. Louis had stopped asking. But there had been moments of curiosity. Wondering. They'd never been so easy to put aside. He holds it all in check now, sensing the fragility in Lestat. Delicate. Louis wants to put his hands around him, hold him like he'd done before.
Tacks on, "You don't like any, I'll get a few for selling later. Can leave the rest, and go on with out night."
Looking at art, together. Ruminating on it. Making selections. Perhaps he will put some in his place in Malibu. Perhaps he will sell the place in Malibu and buy a townhouse in New Orleans. The future could be anything but it usually has a way of mirroring the past.
But this can be something they do, and Lestat nods his agreement. They can own something together. One day, perhaps they will own the wall it decorates.
Some tense thing in him has no choice but to relax under Louis' touches. His hair has suffered a little abuse in the way of products to encourage his hair into curls, but softer to the touch nearest his scalp where freshly glossy platinum highlights have been treated with impossibly expensive alchemy to ensure it weathers the damage. It feels nice, to him.
He had never wanted to see fragile to Louis. How disappointing, he thinks, to know your maker is a man of straw and glass? The one who ushered you into eternity? Like realising your parents are fallible, or flawed, or evil. And how foolish to have tried to pretend otherwise. I have a capacity for enduring, he had said, and perhaps that was so. He is not sure.
He swallows, a thick feeling. Finally says, "Should I have kept it all to myself?" A slight turn to his head, a blurrily peripheral glance before resettling. "Your friend seemed unconvinced."
Yes, Louis is aware of the product involved in creating artful curls. He drags his fingers through Lestat's hair anyway, slow, meditative pulls over and over even when Lestat has lapsed into quiet. Maintains the motion even when he speaks and says this thing that twists into Louis' chest.
Decades of saying nothing. Both of them. It hasn't served.
And Lestat is carrying a whole history Louis has only glimpsed.
"That's his way," Louis explains. "It's how he finds his way in to the thing we ain't ready to say."
Or how Louis understands Daniel's process, the way Daniel dismantles the things a person tells themself and strikes at what lies shielded beneath.
His thumb strokes along Lestat's temple.
"You did good, saying it," is true. But Louis asks, "You having regrets?"
"No," comes quickly. And then he thinks about it. And then says, "No," again, with more certainty.
Maybe something embarrassing about it. Less of a public blood letting, the way he'd imagined, sacrificial and dramatic and painful, and more like he'd wet himself and evoked the wrong kind of pity. His nails make themselves felt through trouser fabric at the edge of Louis' knee.
But it is done, and that is what he wanted, and Louis hasn't shied away from him. Isn't angry with him for lying, for secret-keeping. He thinks, anyway.
"It is why I wanted it to be different for you," he offers, watching the lights glance off the car's partition. "Why I felt I'd failed, a little, when I read how you recall your changing."
There had been horror, yes. Spilled blood, the shock and terror of beholding Lestat with blown-black eyes and terrible fangs, gore smeared down his chin and throat, these had been a kind of horror. And what preceded it had been grief, grief and fear, hearing a voice calling to him, feeling the seduction of it as a pressure bearing down upon him.
But after—
"I was scared," Louis admits. "But I chose you. You offered and I picked."
And here is the thing Louis is more certain of now than he had been when he and Daniel spoke then:
"You'd have listened if I'd told you I didn't want it."
Tears aren't far, thickening now. He nods there against Louis' thigh, small but urgent motions. The thought is horrifying, of course, to be forced to abandon Louis to his miserable mortality, to an inevitable end, by his own hand that night or the drink decades from then, sorrow either way, to have had to move on from him despite how much he loved him, but this is what would have happened.
"Sometimes," and Lestat's voice is thicker, following suit, the tearful creak at the edges, "I wonder if my maker felt for me the way I did for you. When he followed me at night or saw me from the wings and the stands. If he felt love, then, while I felt horror. If in that way we were the same."
He shouldn't be saying any of this. Shouldn't be tasking Louis with the responsibility of making him feel better. But the words come anyway, teetering and shaky.
It feels correct, what Louis is saying. Words that penetrate, find a mark, confirm something he has known. That twist through him, sharp edged. That Magnus did not love him, he was not made from love, and why should that have been so? When those that brought him into the world couldn't love him, when Lestat drank of Nicki and discovered his hatred? When his daughter did not love him well enough to forgive him, if she ever did? When Louis, stroking his hair now, cannot bring himself to say it?
His breathing has become shallow, only realising he has begun to cry properly after it has started. He gives a groan of resignation for it, curling back up out of Louis' lap to press his palms over his eyes. He has never felt very ashamed of it, crying, but it cuts as close to it as it ever will now.
"I'm sorry," makes it out, words creaking beneath the weight of all he has to be sorry for. Starting with, at least, an unglamourous way to spend an evening.
"You got nothing to be sorry for. It ain't on you what he did."
Would it have made a difference if he'd said any of this earlier? In New Orleans, when Louis had been asking? Years later, when Claudia begged to know?
Doesn't matter. No need to go down that road.
Instead, Lestat is abruptly upright and Louis has to turn along with him. Touches him, light fingers first at his elbow, then at his shoulder, sweeping back the fall of blond to settle there.
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Louis understands this. Doesn't doubt this. Daniel had been the best, the best for Louis, but even beyond their affinity, Daniel is simply the best at this work. There is pleasure in watching him, even in spite of Louis' own growing discomfort, the sense that he is intruding.
Invited, yes, but feels his presence an intrusion all the same.
He is quiet. Smoking, presently, for something to occupy his hands while Lestat gives a fuller picture of the story Louis and Claudia dragged from him decades ago.
(Would Louis have ever heard it otherwise?
Unfair. Jealousy and hurt undeniable but smothered away. This is not about Louis.)
They are past the forty-five minute mark.
No one is moving.
Louis' eyes move between Lestat and Daniel, waiting. Unwilling to break the quiet, beat Daniel to his question. Has a finger at the edge of Daniel's mind anyway, feeling the buzz of his mind as Daniel looks at Lestat.
An impulse suppressed: Don't push.
It's not for Louis to say, though he wants to shield Lestat from whatever it is he is reliving.
But no. Daniel prompts, presses. Encourages. Pulls the story free, into the quiet sprung up between the three of them.
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It's why Louis needed him.
Here, Lestat's problem is not recall, but some labyrinthine, resistant quality between memory and speaking it into being. An effort is being made. He speaks of being bitten on that rooftop and then flown through an ice-flecked sky, of being spilled on stone ground in a chamber with broad shutterless windows, a heavy wooden trapdoor with iron lock. And Magnus, who toyed with him. Encouraged Lestat's struggle and curses while laughing, impossibly strong, touching him as he pleased.
And yes, the famous chamber and its blonde, bloated corpses. He felt he had disappointed the vampire, eventually, when the fight left his body, and he was taken into that room of horror and rot, and left there. A message, his eventual fate.
A week, he had said. Yes, a week.
Some heavy pull to the story, a centre point. The turning, but they both (all three) are vampires, familiar with the horror. Still, Lestat is quiet once again.
(Not about Louis? Lestat would laugh to know he thought so.)
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Detail, at long last, to the abbreviated version of events Lestat had offered Claudia, and Louis. How many years they had lived together, and Louis had never known any of this. How abbreviated his account, even when he had finally offered any part of it.
How terrible that the turning became a relief, considering what had come before.
Slowly, slowly, Louis reaches to hook a careful finger into Lestat's. Cigarette burning red as Louis inhales, permitting himself this minor contact. This small offering, a comfort Lestat is welcome to rebuff.
A week. And then a transformation.
And then Magnus had been gone.
And then he was alone.
Louis remembers this part of the story.
Lestat is quiet. Daniel leans forward. Louis reaches for him, an anchor, if Lestat is to recount what comes next.
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"I felt I loved him, after," Lestat offers into the silence. A disorienting cut forwards, but Daniel is a little used to it. Lestat and his habit of speaking to whatever occurs to him, less patience than Louis' careful, considered chronology. "After, I wished he had stayed. Once a vampire, nothing is the same, even the things that have happened already. I felt I could love, even, my mortal family, even though—"
Here, Daniel interrupts, ignores the icy glare he gets as he does so. They are still in the tower. Lestat is still human. We can talk about what it all means to the vampire when he arrives.
Lestat teeters on some edge between compliance and tantrum, before yielding. Very well. It was horrifying, of course it was, and cold, and dull, and the dullness would be interrupted when he awoke to Magnus there to feed from him, and then feed him a wine that tasted of apples, of home, and then he was brought back out and into a chamber he had not seen before, richly appointed, and laid on a cold but comfortable bed.
And he was not instructed in what was expected of him. They made love (and Lestat does not acknowledge the way Daniel almost disputes this) and he fought it, as Magnus desired, and he was offered the blood, and he fought this too, begged for his life, and when he was drained, begged for death, but then blood was in his mouth and pleasure had caught him in a hard grasp and all his resistance and fight melted away, and he drank, and succumbed, and was made a vampire.
"And all of his ugliness became beauty, to me," Lestat says, voice tight in his throat. "As if there were no more ugliness in the world, anymore."
Daniel points out: he did not speak of beauty, the first time he spoke of it to Louis and Claudia.
No, he didn't. He felt they would not understand, with the way he told it. He was protecting them.
Or, Daniel supposes, you were protecting yourself. Hard to be vulnerable when your adult daughter is staring daggers.
Perhaps.
And you're doing it now, except it's a camera, and you're adding violin tracks to sexual violence.
And Christine Clare cuts in, time is up, and Daniel is preoccupied with turning his ire on her as Lestat curls his finger tighter around Louis'.
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Louis' grip on him shifts tighter in turn, thumb running firmly over Lestat's knuckles. Watching his face.
None of this is about Louis. About his comfort. About the instinct to shield Lestat.
Is this a breaking point? Would it be a disservice to insert himself, draw Lestat from the room? There had been moments when Armand would intervene, and Louis had felt at those moments it had been for his sake. Maybe it was. But it had been for Armand too.
Louis doesn't want to be that. Doesn't want to do that to Lestat.
Thumb running back and forth across Lestat's knuckles, watching his face. Asks in Daniel's mind, Can you leave it here, or do you need to keep pushing? as he holds all that Lestat has said in his mind and sees the weight of it on Lestat's face and wants nothing more than for Daniel to say Yes even as he considers the possibility that Daniel will say No.
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Next to him, Lestat is composed, but brittle. Still and watchful as pale eyes flick between Clare and Molloy, mouth set in an unhappy line. It cracks into a less than pleasant smile, Lestat leaning forwards in his chair as he asks, "Are you not content with our time together, Mssr. Molloy? We have covered much ground."
Daniel gladly pivots. It's not about the mileage. It's about the story being told.
It is what happened. (Is this a breaking point? Lestat's hand is tighter.)
It's what you say to yourself happened. And that's understandable. Survivors of this kind of thing—
"And what would you know about it," snapped, finally, the way Lestat's voice can boom at a moment's notice, and his other hand comes down flat against the table and its absence of goblet. "You told it your way already, and now this is mine! Or shall you be the author of this once more," and he is moving, fingers hooking against the edge of the table and sending it scattering aside, a gunshot-bang of noise as it hits the concrete floor.
His hand loose in Louis', prepared to slip away as Lestat stands, to fly from the room as he has done before, although this time, nearby mortals with their equipment find themselves inching backwards.
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Lestat's grip goes slack, and Louis tightens. Holds.
"He told it the way he heard it," comes in a rush. Holding fast, saying these things. Lestat can knock him aside easy, Louis knows. But he presses, reminds: "The way I said it."
The way Louis heard it, the one and only time Lestat had spoken of it.
Jarring with the thing Daniel is needling at, drawing out. Survivors of this kind of thing. (But I have a capacity for enduring.) Daniel following Louis as he fled, running from a thing too painful to touch. He'd follow Lestat. He's more durable now than he was then. Always in pursuit of the truth, Daniel Molloy.
It's not for Louis to interfere. (Is this right? Are his instincts right, in this moment?) But he has. He is. The grip of his hand begging Stay in the same moment as he prods at the edge of Daniel's head, a spurring sort of pressure. Unnecessary. Daniel doesn't know how to stop.
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Daniel is saying: if you want the redo, then you have to stay in the chair.
The way Daniel heard it. The way Louis said it. The way Louis was told it by Lestat.
One steadying breath later, and Lestat sits back down. Someone glances at someone else, and a brave intern steps in to set the table back to rights. Daniel asks for a sound check, and Lestat says he will eat anyone who comes near, and the sound guy indicates he's picking up the lapel mic just fine. Slowly, the tension eases as a reset takes place, and Ms. Clare checks and adjusts his schedule.
Meanwhile, Lestat slides his fingers between Louis'. The question is then put to him: what did Magnus want? What saved him?
Refusal, Lestat believes. He imagines each rotting corpse in that room of disappointments must have stopped fighting sooner than he. Must have asked for the Gift when Magnus told them to.
A near-imperceptible glance from Daniel to Louis. Some mote of doubt for the method in the madness.
But Lestat is still speaking. "When you take the blood of the one you have chosen, you see them completely," and his voice has gone soft again. "And after, you give them the Gift, or you don't. Perhaps it is whatever he saw when he took of me that moved him so."
Yeah, says Daniel. Perhaps.
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Magnus is gone. All those boys before Lestat are dead. And Lestat has this truth: he said no, over and over.
Lestat had never wanted to be a vampire. Magnus had made him one anyway.
Louis' thumb resumes the same firm slide across skin, along Lestat's knuckles, the back of his hand. Comfort. Tangible reminder. Louis is here, present and real, no intention of going.
"Power," softly. A guess. Not Louis' place, so this offering is quiet, wreathed in smoke. "Made you refuse, and showed you it didn't matter that you had."
An hard-won insight. Louis, who has such intimate knowledge with the ways power could be wielded, had been marked by the demonstration of power in his mortal and immortal lives. He sees some similar chime in this. He can offer, but go no further than that.
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He may realise later that there is a steep difference between reciting one's understanding of their own history, and truly revisiting it, reassessing it. Of the kind of interview that took place in a penthouse in Dubai. For some new truth to claw its way in. His hand is tight but still in Louis', and there is too long a silence between Louis' words and then Lestat looking forwards once more.
"He called me wolfkiller," he says. "Lelio, of the stage. It was his belief that the qualities in me that would refuse him, defy him, would make a good vampire. And so I was chosen. And after it was done, there was no fear anymore. My vision was remade and the darkness that had frightened me in my mortal years no longer held its secret terrors. The vermin and the crawling things in the earth, those that fed on my likenesses, no longer made me recoil. Even the horrors—"
A moment of catching his breath, which has drawn shallow in his chest. "Even those horrors visited on me took new meaning, and his own deformed visage was beautiful to me. He loved me and I loved him, in the ways only monsters can."
Daniel, throughout, keeping his mouth shut, and teetering on the edge of something. Louis knows him well—the instinct to chase, to bully. But he has also known Daniel to back off, to leave something for the day, and here, he calls it. They've gotten enough. Some amount of strategising will be needed for the next session.
Lestat is blankly silent, first, when the interview is ended, and then gives a brittle smile. "Bon," but doesn't stand, as if unsure how to resolve himself with Louis at his side.
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Louis feels affection warm in his chest for it, even as he weathers a kind of quiet dread for what it will look like. For the possibility that Lestat might prefer Louis out of the room. He doesn't take his place here for granted.
So much of this is beyond what Lestat had ever told him. Years of denials, over and over, and now this. This interview. Louis sat alongside him, listening.
There had been an ash tray on the table, at one point. (Now it is in many pieces on the floor, some harried PA's problem.) Louis crushes out his cigarette on the scuffed tabletop, economical motions, never letting go of Lestat's hand. Daniel is gathering his notes. Humans are shuffling anxiously around the edges of the space. Lestat's lawyer is watching, sharp-eyed, measuring. Rachida has slipped to Daniel's side, making the offer of assistance Louis expects of her.
Lestat has not moved.
"Lestat," he murmurs, thumb continuing its rhythmic stroke along Lestat's knuckles, turning just a little to run up the back of his hand. "Come with me."
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Perhaps it would be best if he murders everyone here. Not Louis, of course, but the crew, his own lawyer, the fledgling vampire. Destroy the equipment. Find a way to tacitly agree with Louis that nothing of note occurred.
Louis proposes an alternate action.
Assent in the way Lestat considers this, and then stands, a near-silent rustle of sheer fabric, the swath of grey sheer robe around the tighter garments beneath. The click of heels will follow on the concrete floor of the studio, but only as Louis leads him.
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Had Lestat anything else to do today? Any other responsibilities? Maybe. Louis has disregarded them.
There is a car. He puts Lestat into it.
They cannot move as freely as Louis wishes. Lestat is a very public figure, with very adoring fans. He would like it if they could leave the studio and be done with all demands upon Lestat's person, but there are fans. They scream, they are ignored. The door of the car closes, and Louis murmurs some quiet instruction to Ramiz.
And then they go, wherever it is Louis has chosen for them.
Louis keeps hold of Lestat's hand. Does not ask, Would you like to talk about it?
Instead, Louis explains, "There's a gallery I been meaning to see. I figure we start there. Decide the rest as we go."
What Louis wants for him is quiet. Absence of scrutiny. Time in which Lestat can steady himself. Lestat can speak if he likes, or they can say nothing. Louis can give him this much, even if what he wants is a place like they found at Lestat's launch party. Somewhere private, somewhere beneath the sky.
It'll come to him. They can start here.
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I figure we can start there.
He knows what he would do if Louis left. He would go back to his hotel. He would sweet talk Larry into giving him whatever he has on him. Invite one or all of them out to waste the night. Drink of the world, bestow upon it his kisses, just as Magnus had once told him to do. Close his eyes and let whatever his impulses choose to imagine who is touching him.
But Louis has not left. Their hands tightly tangled, an anchoring, a reeling in away from the white water rush that might otherwise await him. So he nods, and says, "I have been wanting to go with you," and adds, to explain, "To see your galleries."
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No yielding, maintaining the link of their fingers even as Louis uses it to draw Lestat in. Coaxing. A silent Come to me as Louis beckons him in, down across the seas, to lay a head on Louis' thigh.
"They show a lot of up and comers," is a steady murmur, Louis' voice low and warm. "Got a girl in now, never shown her work anywhere else. It could be she hits, and then you and I bought her earliest works."
A soft inclusion. Them, together. Choosing like they used to.
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Doesn't last. It can't. Louis says Come to me and Lestat has no desire to deny him, and so he goes, laying across the seat to rest his head against Louis thigh, a leg folding up under himself. Settling, slowly, hooking his hand around Louis' knee. It is like they are flying, like Louis is flying, carrying him away, and it is warm and good, and there will be no ice-speckled stone tower at the other end of it.
"You have an instinct for these things," he says.
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"Still wanna know if you like any of it. If any of it'll be worth keeping for ourselves."
His fingers thread through Lestat's hair. Scratches his nails lightly over Lestat's scalp, careful touches. The landscape slips past outside the windows, silent and dark.
Daniel had deemed it a good stopping point. Louis doesn't doubt it. But he has questions. Feels the buzz of curiosity, a little nostalgic in its familiarity. Lestat had side-stepped Louis' questions. Louis had stopped asking. But there had been moments of curiosity. Wondering. They'd never been so easy to put aside. He holds it all in check now, sensing the fragility in Lestat. Delicate. Louis wants to put his hands around him, hold him like he'd done before.
Tacks on, "You don't like any, I'll get a few for selling later. Can leave the rest, and go on with out night."
No expectations.
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But this can be something they do, and Lestat nods his agreement. They can own something together. One day, perhaps they will own the wall it decorates.
Some tense thing in him has no choice but to relax under Louis' touches. His hair has suffered a little abuse in the way of products to encourage his hair into curls, but softer to the touch nearest his scalp where freshly glossy platinum highlights have been treated with impossibly expensive alchemy to ensure it weathers the damage. It feels nice, to him.
He had never wanted to see fragile to Louis. How disappointing, he thinks, to know your maker is a man of straw and glass? The one who ushered you into eternity? Like realising your parents are fallible, or flawed, or evil. And how foolish to have tried to pretend otherwise. I have a capacity for enduring, he had said, and perhaps that was so. He is not sure.
He swallows, a thick feeling. Finally says, "Should I have kept it all to myself?" A slight turn to his head, a blurrily peripheral glance before resettling. "Your friend seemed unconvinced."
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Decades of saying nothing. Both of them. It hasn't served.
And Lestat is carrying a whole history Louis has only glimpsed.
"That's his way," Louis explains. "It's how he finds his way in to the thing we ain't ready to say."
Or how Louis understands Daniel's process, the way Daniel dismantles the things a person tells themself and strikes at what lies shielded beneath.
His thumb strokes along Lestat's temple.
"You did good, saying it," is true. But Louis asks, "You having regrets?"
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Maybe something embarrassing about it. Less of a public blood letting, the way he'd imagined, sacrificial and dramatic and painful, and more like he'd wet himself and evoked the wrong kind of pity. His nails make themselves felt through trouser fabric at the edge of Louis' knee.
But it is done, and that is what he wanted, and Louis hasn't shied away from him. Isn't angry with him for lying, for secret-keeping. He thinks, anyway.
"It is why I wanted it to be different for you," he offers, watching the lights glance off the car's partition. "Why I felt I'd failed, a little, when I read how you recall your changing."
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Louis asserts this firmly.
"You weren't nothing like him."
There had been horror, yes. Spilled blood, the shock and terror of beholding Lestat with blown-black eyes and terrible fangs, gore smeared down his chin and throat, these had been a kind of horror. And what preceded it had been grief, grief and fear, hearing a voice calling to him, feeling the seduction of it as a pressure bearing down upon him.
But after—
"I was scared," Louis admits. "But I chose you. You offered and I picked."
And here is the thing Louis is more certain of now than he had been when he and Daniel spoke then:
"You'd have listened if I'd told you I didn't want it."
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"Sometimes," and Lestat's voice is thicker, following suit, the tearful creak at the edges, "I wonder if my maker felt for me the way I did for you. When he followed me at night or saw me from the wings and the stands. If he felt love, then, while I felt horror. If in that way we were the same."
He shouldn't be saying any of this. Shouldn't be tasking Louis with the responsibility of making him feel better. But the words come anyway, teetering and shaky.
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But Lestat is saying it now.
Louis' fingers stroke along his brow, return to scratching nails along his scalp. Little touches, anchoring, soothing.
"You ain't the same."
Something important to say, it feels to Louis. To say again and again if Lestat needs.
"Maybe he thought he loved you. But what he showed you, that ain't love."
And after: "And he ain't loved you any true way, if he did all that and then left you."
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His breathing has become shallow, only realising he has begun to cry properly after it has started. He gives a groan of resignation for it, curling back up out of Louis' lap to press his palms over his eyes. He has never felt very ashamed of it, crying, but it cuts as close to it as it ever will now.
"I'm sorry," makes it out, words creaking beneath the weight of all he has to be sorry for. Starting with, at least, an unglamourous way to spend an evening.
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Would it have made a difference if he'd said any of this earlier? In New Orleans, when Louis had been asking? Years later, when Claudia begged to know?
Doesn't matter. No need to go down that road.
Instead, Lestat is abruptly upright and Louis has to turn along with him. Touches him, light fingers first at his elbow, then at his shoulder, sweeping back the fall of blond to settle there.
"Don't do that. Don't hide."
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