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.
A little more hiding, gasping, squeaking breaths between his hands. There is no other way to let it out. Nothing here in this car he could rend into shreds. Too conscious of Louis right next to him to upset him in this way. Cannot bring himself to run, to fling open the door and just go, not as long as Louis' hand is on him, touching his shoulder, his hair.
"I never," Lestat is saying, more or less coherent, "I never wanted to do it to you that way. To take your life, to take you away from what made you happy. I thought I could do it, that I could make our life together,"
and probably some other words, lost. Hysterical, from an outside perspective, but he does not feel so. Rational, to look at Louis then, to form a cracked, tearful smile at how beautiful he is, his fledging, and so concerned, and to flutter a touch against him.
"It is what I thought," he says, "in my coffin in New Orleans. That Claudia had only been trying to free you both. Magnus knew that much, didn't he? To go into the fire?"
Claudia, face creased in urgency: We have to burn him. It's the only way we'll know!
Even now, years and years later, Louis still flinches to think of it. Of even the possibility of feeding Lestat into the incinerator. He'd laid there on the floor, clutching Lestat's body, feeling how cold he was with the life bled out of him, and screamed. Screamed, and screamed. Then grieved, for years after.
Says, "No," so immediately that it nearly tramples on the end of Lestat's words. No, no, no these parallels cannot stand.
Difficult to measure how much touch Lestat can stand. If anything more would be too much to bear.
"You gave me a gift. It ain't your fault I couldn't see it."
He'd grieved. He'd grieved his life. He'd struggled with the way the mortal world clutched onto him, mortal prejudices, mortal structures containing him in a way they did not, could not contain Lestat. But all those things being true didn't mean—
"You ain't nothing like him. What we are, it's something else."
They are in a storm-torn shack, the winds rattling the glass in their panes which threaten to burst at any moment. Lestat listens to Louis with the same mute attention now as then, near fearful to receive it as completely as he'd like. (More makeup, here, though it hasn't survived contact, everything about him a little wilder than even then.)
Louis says this last thing, and there's no rebuttal. No denying it. His expression softens from the tension that had set in his jaw and mouth without simply crumpling.
"Yes," near whispered. Yes, it was something else. Still is. Perhaps there is something in him that means no one can love him, maybe so, maybe Magnus has made it stay the way he has made his blue eyes stay, but he made Louis. Perhaps no one else would have, could have done that.
He finds a hold at the hem of Louis' shirt, a small asking gesture.
A request, and Louis needs nothing beyond it. Senses maybe the kind of breaking, unraveling thing in Lestat he had seen in New Orleans, and goes to him, closing the slip of space between them. Gathering in the same action as Louis puts himself into Lestat's lap. Grounding, surrounding. Cupping Lestat's face in his palms.
"You weren't never that to me. Weren't never that to Claudia."
Their vengeful, furious daughter. She'd had so many names for Lestat, few of them flattering but none of them could be shared with the vampire Magnus.
Louis leans into him. Forehead to forehead, nose to nose. Look at me, telegraphed with his whole body.
"You remember what you said to me? You remember how it was with us, on that altar?"
Evocation of Claudia brings new tears, but Louis holds him so warmly and closely that he doesn't shatter. Lestat's arms go around Louis, keeping him close, an assuring weight across his thighs, further smothering those minor twinges that might want him to run away. He could just imagine his daughter, vicious and spiteful, taking his story and throwing it back at him.
(But she didn't. He recalls that. Even this sparer version of it, the worst she had done was doubt it. Accuse him of doing the murdering. Of lying. Kitten scratches. Perhaps she might have done worse, if she hated him enough.)
His arms are tight around Louis' waist, his ribs. Breathes the same air, world narrowing down to the tight intimate space Louis makes between them.
"I remember," he says. "I remember you reached for me."
How it felt like kneeling near a drowning man, hands out stretched, begging to be grasped but refusing to do more.
Louis had reached for him. Louis had taken him by the face, drawn him into a kiss.
Louis had said yes. This was the truth.
"You made me from love. Love you had for me. Made Claudia from it too."
If there was fault for Claudia, responsibility for Claudia, then it was Louis' to bear. Louis had begged for her, pleaded, and Lestat had said yes to him. Done what Louis hadn't yet worked out how to do.
"Said yes to you because of it. Because of the love you offered it with."
Little nods, not enough to disrupt the way their brows touch, hands fitful where they hold onto shirt fabric, grasp at Louis' shoulders, back.
Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. How sick he felt when he held her, fed from her, bled into her. How he can never tell Louis all he had felt that night, and has no reason to. Because then, no disaster, not for years. Claudia, his best student, his most unexpected pride. Claudia, whose judgment about what kind of life she and Louis deserved matched only by Louis' mercy.
"It was good," Lestat whispers. "For the three of us, there were times it was good."
This could never have been his interview. He would sooner eat the gremlin's fledging and all the crew before he utters such things, in this voice. Pleading with the universe to make what Louis has to say to him true.
Closer. He tucks his forehead against Louis' shoulder, holding him tightly. "You have it still," quieter. Wetter. "Always."
His hands form fists at Louis' back, fabric clutched there, shuddering through the great swell of feeling that presses against the interior of his ribcage. The painful extraction of something deeply embedded, healed over with scars, given to complications. Lestat can feel himself hold onto it stubbornly, hurtful conviction.
But this is true. Louis is alive. Something good, enduring.
Relaxing by degrees, grasp loosening. Hands spreading to lay against Louis' back, before, finally, lifting his head, hands coming up between them to touch at Louis' face.
"It was a gift he gave me," he says, eyes bloodshot but clear. "You make this true. I can't regret it, when you are near me."
Would it have changed anything in New Orleans? In those hard days, Louis struggling to be any kind of vampire, would it have made any part of it easier to know Lestat had regrets of his own?
But to speak them would have been to unspool the entirety of this story. And maybe that could only have happened now, decades later. After Louis had spoken his own pains into Daniel's recorder to be made into a book that Lestat then sought to answer.
"I didn't know it was a gift," Louis repeats, soft words between Lestat's palms. "I know what it is now."
Because the truth of it is simply:
"I only ever wanted you. What you promised me."
Not the power, not the immortality. Just Lestat, and the life he whispered to Louis, the never ending loop of love sent back and forth between them.
They both made it so difficult for themselves. Not Louis' fault alone, Lestat knows, but doesn't wish to raise that now while he is like this, while Louis will be compelled to reassure him or avoid it. It's enough to absorb these words, to feel the rush of affection.
His hand smooths around to the back of Louis' head. He would like to kiss him, but settles for mapping their brows together, the bridges of their noses. They would fall asleep like this, sometimes. No amount of closeness was too much.
Familiar touches. Familiar and intimate and achingly welcome. They have been so long apart, but see how easy it is to fit back together again.
Louis uses his weight still to hem Lestat in. No one is hiding. No one is falling away into the deep wrenching pull of memory. They are here. Lestat touches him and Louis breathes out, lets his hands splay out across Lestat's chest. Lays a palm over his heart.
Still, a struggle to offer: "I know."
Some trace bitterness, remembering how Louis had told Lestat everything once. All of himself, the most vulnerable pieces. Things he had never said aloud.
Unfair thoughts. Louis pushes them aside.
"You tellin' me now," Louis reminds him. Eighty or so years later, but still.
A nudge of his nose. Admits, "I been jealous. Envying Daniel getting to hear your story."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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"I never," Lestat is saying, more or less coherent, "I never wanted to do it to you that way. To take your life, to take you away from what made you happy. I thought I could do it, that I could make our life together,"
and probably some other words, lost. Hysterical, from an outside perspective, but he does not feel so. Rational, to look at Louis then, to form a cracked, tearful smile at how beautiful he is, his fledging, and so concerned, and to flutter a touch against him.
"It is what I thought," he says, "in my coffin in New Orleans. That Claudia had only been trying to free you both. Magnus knew that much, didn't he? To go into the fire?"
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Even now, years and years later, Louis still flinches to think of it. Of even the possibility of feeding Lestat into the incinerator. He'd laid there on the floor, clutching Lestat's body, feeling how cold he was with the life bled out of him, and screamed. Screamed, and screamed. Then grieved, for years after.
Says, "No," so immediately that it nearly tramples on the end of Lestat's words. No, no, no these parallels cannot stand.
Difficult to measure how much touch Lestat can stand. If anything more would be too much to bear.
"You gave me a gift. It ain't your fault I couldn't see it."
He'd grieved. He'd grieved his life. He'd struggled with the way the mortal world clutched onto him, mortal prejudices, mortal structures containing him in a way they did not, could not contain Lestat. But all those things being true didn't mean—
"You ain't nothing like him. What we are, it's something else."
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Louis says this last thing, and there's no rebuttal. No denying it. His expression softens from the tension that had set in his jaw and mouth without simply crumpling.
"Yes," near whispered. Yes, it was something else. Still is. Perhaps there is something in him that means no one can love him, maybe so, maybe Magnus has made it stay the way he has made his blue eyes stay, but he made Louis. Perhaps no one else would have, could have done that.
He finds a hold at the hem of Louis' shirt, a small asking gesture.
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"You weren't never that to me. Weren't never that to Claudia."
Their vengeful, furious daughter. She'd had so many names for Lestat, few of them flattering but none of them could be shared with the vampire Magnus.
Louis leans into him. Forehead to forehead, nose to nose. Look at me, telegraphed with his whole body.
"You remember what you said to me? You remember how it was with us, on that altar?"
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(But she didn't. He recalls that. Even this sparer version of it, the worst she had done was doubt it. Accuse him of doing the murdering. Of lying. Kitten scratches. Perhaps she might have done worse, if she hated him enough.)
His arms are tight around Louis' waist, his ribs. Breathes the same air, world narrowing down to the tight intimate space Louis makes between them.
"I remember," he says. "I remember you reached for me."
How it felt like kneeling near a drowning man, hands out stretched, begging to be grasped but refusing to do more.
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Louis had reached for him. Louis had taken him by the face, drawn him into a kiss.
Louis had said yes. This was the truth.
"You made me from love. Love you had for me. Made Claudia from it too."
If there was fault for Claudia, responsibility for Claudia, then it was Louis' to bear. Louis had begged for her, pleaded, and Lestat had said yes to him. Done what Louis hadn't yet worked out how to do.
"Said yes to you because of it. Because of the love you offered it with."
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Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. How sick he felt when he held her, fed from her, bled into her. How he can never tell Louis all he had felt that night, and has no reason to. Because then, no disaster, not for years. Claudia, his best student, his most unexpected pride. Claudia, whose judgment about what kind of life she and Louis deserved matched only by Louis' mercy.
"It was good," Lestat whispers. "For the three of us, there were times it was good."
This could never have been his interview. He would sooner eat the gremlin's fledging and all the crew before he utters such things, in this voice. Pleading with the universe to make what Louis has to say to him true.
Closer. He tucks his forehead against Louis' shoulder, holding him tightly. "You have it still," quieter. Wetter. "Always."
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Would it have been better if he said all this before? If Louis had known, if Claudia had heard?
There's no good answer. Only guesses, and painful ones.
Even I wish you'd said would be useless. Accusing where Louis would rather be anything else.
"I know," Louis tells him. "I know, baby."
Falling short, Louis knows. Falling short because this can only get him so far.
"You saved me with it," is what Louis tells him instead. "Over and over. Kept me alive."
Not just at the theater.
"You ain't him. You never been, even when things were bad."
And they had been. But there is no comparison. Not for Louis.
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But this is true. Louis is alive. Something good, enduring.
Relaxing by degrees, grasp loosening. Hands spreading to lay against Louis' back, before, finally, lifting his head, hands coming up between them to touch at Louis' face.
"It was a gift he gave me," he says, eyes bloodshot but clear. "You make this true. I can't regret it, when you are near me."
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Would it have changed anything in New Orleans? In those hard days, Louis struggling to be any kind of vampire, would it have made any part of it easier to know Lestat had regrets of his own?
But to speak them would have been to unspool the entirety of this story. And maybe that could only have happened now, decades later. After Louis had spoken his own pains into Daniel's recorder to be made into a book that Lestat then sought to answer.
"I didn't know it was a gift," Louis repeats, soft words between Lestat's palms. "I know what it is now."
Because the truth of it is simply:
"I only ever wanted you. What you promised me."
Not the power, not the immortality. Just Lestat, and the life he whispered to Louis, the never ending loop of love sent back and forth between them.
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His hand smooths around to the back of Louis' head. He would like to kiss him, but settles for mapping their brows together, the bridges of their noses. They would fall asleep like this, sometimes. No amount of closeness was too much.
"I don't mean to hide from you," he offers.
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Louis uses his weight still to hem Lestat in. No one is hiding. No one is falling away into the deep wrenching pull of memory. They are here. Lestat touches him and Louis breathes out, lets his hands splay out across Lestat's chest. Lays a palm over his heart.
Still, a struggle to offer: "I know."
Some trace bitterness, remembering how Louis had told Lestat everything once. All of himself, the most vulnerable pieces. Things he had never said aloud.
Unfair thoughts. Louis pushes them aside.
"You tellin' me now," Louis reminds him. Eighty or so years later, but still.
A nudge of his nose. Admits, "I been jealous. Envying Daniel getting to hear your story."
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