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."
Little shifts, becoming comfortable in his seat while they are driven. Arms settled around Louis, gentler than the desperate cling from before but no less firm or deliberate for it.
A little scoff at this. Absurd.
"It's like I told you," Lestat says, "all of this is worthless if you are not audience to it."
Each song, each appearance, each outfit, each photograph, each interview. It does not surprise Lestat to imagine that Louis might believe otherwise, but this is the reality, as true as gravity. There is nothing about this absurd, indulgent spectacle that is not for Louis.
A moment's pause, watching Lestat's face. Feeling his heart beating, perfect twin to Louis' own.
Lifts his hand to cup Lestat's cheek, angle the closeness of their faces so Louis can kiss him. Soft, soft, all tenderness. A better answer than anything Louis might have said aloud, all of it lacking one way or another.
"Ain't worthless," Louis tells him, breaking the kiss. Remains there, close, so he can speak into the space between them. "Your story ain't worthless."
Easy, despite how rare it is, to tip his head and receive a kiss from Louis. Only going still when their lips meet, as if not to break it by accident. Breath held in his lungs, eyes closed.
Lestat raises his hand to press it over Louis' against his face. A shivered breath leaving him, another odd feeling, like a ripple of physical tension through his body. Trying to imagine what it would have been like to tell Louis all of these things is not a thought exercise he has engaged in much, but now, a minor twinge of regret.
Perhaps it would have been good to do so. Perhaps he should have trusted him to be as kind towards him then as he is being now.
"I felt I needed someone who would ask the questions," he says. "And then would ask them again and again if I do not answer properly, or when the story became difficult. Someone like your Mr. Molloy. I felt I couldn't do it by myself."
A little laugh, quiet and breathy, the kind that suggests this is a harder question to answer than it sounds like. That anything he says will be one answer of several.
"Well," Lestat says. "When he has asked all of his questions, it will be edited into a feature length documentary, or perhaps a mini series. It will go onto a stream service and people will watch it, I suppose. Humans, vampires."
He tilts his head as he looks at Louis, a hesitation, before he adds, "And then we will be two thorns in their sides, non? Your army of one will be an army of two."
Something Louis maybe could have guessed, if give opportunity. But Lestat says it aloud, offers it up and Louis smoothes fingers across the upturned planes of his face. Thumbs away lingering tear tracks. Tenderness in this too, a gentle examination of the familiar terrain of Lestat's face.
"You ain't gotta do that for me," Louis says softly, predictably. "Give up all your stories to them to protect me."
To divert them. Expose all his pain to ridicule and scrutiny for Louis' benefit.
"Not if you ain't gonna be able to live with it after."
Lestat gives a fond hum in the wake of this predictable answer. Soothed by the gentle strokes of fingers across his face.
"I would give up anything to protect you," he says. "Everything."
He runs his palm up the outside of Louis' thigh, too firm to be suggestive, just affection, just affirmation. "I know you don't need me," he adds. "You have all your resources. Your talents, your skyscrapers, your private jets. I hear all about it, you know, their furious whispers, chasing you, fleeing from you. I note the ones who are silenced after, the ones who give warnings.
"But I want to do it. And," a musical drum of his fingertips, "I would like us to have something in common again."
Louis has always needed him. Dreamed him when he couldn't have him, clung to a ghost when it seemed the man was lost to him for good. Louis had held on even the guilt had cut his palms.
Who is there be needs more than Lestat? It will always be him, an essential piece of Louis knit into the man hemmed in beneath him.
Louis presses their foreheads together again. Rests there, breathing. The world slides by outside the window, unacknowledged. Ramiz will drive in circles rather than interrupt. There is no hurry to conduct their business.
No hurry to circle his way back around to, "I don't want you to give anything up. Seemed like you already did, for a long time."
Lestat found in a water-logged shack, not even a piano to his name. Louis has not forgotten.
Doubt, still, for how necessary he truly is, that he is not just an anchoring weight, that the best thing Magnus ever did for him was leave, a final lesson he refuses to follow, but to speak it would be to ruin this rare sense of peace. He can believe that Louis believes it, and that is enough, it is much.
A fond noise, and he gently pushes where his forehead rests against Louis'. "Let us not pretend I am not doing this for myself," he says. "It is no great sacrifice to be a rockstar. To have a crew of people attend me as I tell my stories. To have someone care to hear it all. Someones."
He fidgets with a fold in Louis' shirt. "Two hundred and thirty six years. I thought I knew how this story would go. I thought I knew it well."
"Tell me," Louis coaxes, thumbs running in tandem along Lestat's jaws. "How'd you think your story was going to go?"
Maybe Louis can guess. Maybe it's only common sense, thinking of what Lestat had promised him once on an altar in New Orleans.
But he asks. Invites. Lestat has spoken of all the worst things today. It could be a balm to speak of good dreams, of what a life could be, the stories they tell themselves. What did Lestat wish to make of his life? Centuries of it, slipping by, what should it have been?
The tone of Louis' question is something of a guide—inviting, coaxing, away from the story of a stone tower. Difficult, this task. Retrospection so often leads back there. But—
"I thought I would be famous," Lestat offers, after a moment. "Immortalised in that fashion. Now it is the 2000s and I don't think a single soul in all of France could name a player of commedia dell'arte. The cruelty of being taken away from my life in Paris is matched only by the likelihood of one day dying drunk and penniless. Which is how I spent most of my free time, quite happily."
He steals one of Louis' hands, laces their fingers together. "And then I was a vampire. And I met other vampires and I knew I would do it differently. I went to the new world. I wanted to leave it all behind and be something else. I had hopes of finding my companion, but it seemed the least likely dream of all. But it wasn't. There you were, nearly my first night in America. Or it may as well have been, as I don't remember the others."
And then the rest. Louis is more than aware of all of his hope and dreams for them both.
So much would be different. Louis would be long dead, maybe.
Lestat is given custody of his hand. Louis squeezes tight, holds fast. Thumbs at the corner of his mouth, looking into his face. No pictures, nothing, only what Lestat has said of what came before. He is beautiful now. He must have been beautiful then.
"My destiny," Louis murmurs. Reminding. Lily's voice, teasing, flirting. She had been adept at maneuvering through conversation. And she had known him. Maybe she'd seen something, long before Louis did.
"You made it different for me," Louis murmurs. He has lived long enough to be sure now. "Made it different for our daughter too."
Claudia made in horror, yes. But look what she had chosen, when given her chance. A companion made from love, like Louis had been made from love.
A little, near-adolescent feeling heart flutter for this sentiment, drawing Louis' hand close to himself, against his chest. A little stolen, all of this, he thinks—they are not companions. There is a distance that exists despite their current configuration.
But Louis is being giving and Lestat is not of a mind to refuse.
"All the vampires I had met at that time," he says, "they lived in darkness and degradation. My maker, though the same as them, intended something different for me. He is the origin of my small fortune, anyway. He left behind a mountain of gold and garments in red velvet and rare pearls. He wanted a new kind of vampire in the world, even if he did not live to see it."
A little shrug. "That was what I wished to be, once I realised there was no return. To live in light. To be the gentleman death that courted his prey." His tone has that element of self-deprecation, a long look back on his fledgling ambitions.
"I don't know," finally. "The more I talk of it, the more I think I was only the lucky one. He stole me because I was blonde haired and blue eyed and enjoyed it while it lasted and that is all."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
"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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
"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?"
no subject
(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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
A little scoff at this. Absurd.
"It's like I told you," Lestat says, "all of this is worthless if you are not audience to it."
Each song, each appearance, each outfit, each photograph, each interview. It does not surprise Lestat to imagine that Louis might believe otherwise, but this is the reality, as true as gravity. There is nothing about this absurd, indulgent spectacle that is not for Louis.
no subject
Lifts his hand to cup Lestat's cheek, angle the closeness of their faces so Louis can kiss him. Soft, soft, all tenderness. A better answer than anything Louis might have said aloud, all of it lacking one way or another.
"Ain't worthless," Louis tells him, breaking the kiss. Remains there, close, so he can speak into the space between them. "Your story ain't worthless."
no subject
Lestat raises his hand to press it over Louis' against his face. A shivered breath leaving him, another odd feeling, like a ripple of physical tension through his body. Trying to imagine what it would have been like to tell Louis all of these things is not a thought exercise he has engaged in much, but now, a minor twinge of regret.
Perhaps it would have been good to do so. Perhaps he should have trusted him to be as kind towards him then as he is being now.
"I felt I needed someone who would ask the questions," he says. "And then would ask them again and again if I do not answer properly, or when the story became difficult. Someone like your Mr. Molloy. I felt I couldn't do it by myself."
no subject
And he does. He understands the necessity of someone who will push, chase after truth even when it lives behind high defenses.
Even when seeking and finding it destroys all around it.
This is who Daniel is. The right man for Louis, the right man for Lestat.
His thumb sweeps back and forth across Lestat's cheek. Small movements, no possibility of dislodging Lestat's hand where it lies.
"What do you want at the end of it? When he's asked all the questions?"
no subject
"Well," Lestat says. "When he has asked all of his questions, it will be edited into a feature length documentary, or perhaps a mini series. It will go onto a stream service and people will watch it, I suppose. Humans, vampires."
He tilts his head as he looks at Louis, a hesitation, before he adds, "And then we will be two thorns in their sides, non? Your army of one will be an army of two."
no subject
"You ain't gotta do that for me," Louis says softly, predictably. "Give up all your stories to them to protect me."
To divert them. Expose all his pain to ridicule and scrutiny for Louis' benefit.
"Not if you ain't gonna be able to live with it after."
no subject
"I would give up anything to protect you," he says. "Everything."
He runs his palm up the outside of Louis' thigh, too firm to be suggestive, just affection, just affirmation. "I know you don't need me," he adds. "You have all your resources. Your talents, your skyscrapers, your private jets. I hear all about it, you know, their furious whispers, chasing you, fleeing from you. I note the ones who are silenced after, the ones who give warnings.
"But I want to do it. And," a musical drum of his fingertips, "I would like us to have something in common again."
no subject
Louis has always needed him. Dreamed him when he couldn't have him, clung to a ghost when it seemed the man was lost to him for good. Louis had held on even the guilt had cut his palms.
Who is there be needs more than Lestat? It will always be him, an essential piece of Louis knit into the man hemmed in beneath him.
Louis presses their foreheads together again. Rests there, breathing. The world slides by outside the window, unacknowledged. Ramiz will drive in circles rather than interrupt. There is no hurry to conduct their business.
No hurry to circle his way back around to, "I don't want you to give anything up. Seemed like you already did, for a long time."
Lestat found in a water-logged shack, not even a piano to his name. Louis has not forgotten.
no subject
Doubt, still, for how necessary he truly is, that he is not just an anchoring weight, that the best thing Magnus ever did for him was leave, a final lesson he refuses to follow, but to speak it would be to ruin this rare sense of peace. He can believe that Louis believes it, and that is enough, it is much.
A fond noise, and he gently pushes where his forehead rests against Louis'. "Let us not pretend I am not doing this for myself," he says. "It is no great sacrifice to be a rockstar. To have a crew of people attend me as I tell my stories. To have someone care to hear it all. Someones."
He fidgets with a fold in Louis' shirt. "Two hundred and thirty six years. I thought I knew how this story would go. I thought I knew it well."
no subject
Maybe Louis can guess. Maybe it's only common sense, thinking of what Lestat had promised him once on an altar in New Orleans.
But he asks. Invites. Lestat has spoken of all the worst things today. It could be a balm to speak of good dreams, of what a life could be, the stories they tell themselves. What did Lestat wish to make of his life? Centuries of it, slipping by, what should it have been?
no subject
"I thought I would be famous," Lestat offers, after a moment. "Immortalised in that fashion. Now it is the 2000s and I don't think a single soul in all of France could name a player of commedia dell'arte. The cruelty of being taken away from my life in Paris is matched only by the likelihood of one day dying drunk and penniless. Which is how I spent most of my free time, quite happily."
He steals one of Louis' hands, laces their fingers together. "And then I was a vampire. And I met other vampires and I knew I would do it differently. I went to the new world. I wanted to leave it all behind and be something else. I had hopes of finding my companion, but it seemed the least likely dream of all. But it wasn't. There you were, nearly my first night in America. Or it may as well have been, as I don't remember the others."
And then the rest. Louis is more than aware of all of his hope and dreams for them both.
no subject
So much would be different. Louis would be long dead, maybe.
Lestat is given custody of his hand. Louis squeezes tight, holds fast. Thumbs at the corner of his mouth, looking into his face. No pictures, nothing, only what Lestat has said of what came before. He is beautiful now. He must have been beautiful then.
"My destiny," Louis murmurs. Reminding. Lily's voice, teasing, flirting. She had been adept at maneuvering through conversation. And she had known him. Maybe she'd seen something, long before Louis did.
"You made it different for me," Louis murmurs. He has lived long enough to be sure now. "Made it different for our daughter too."
Claudia made in horror, yes. But look what she had chosen, when given her chance. A companion made from love, like Louis had been made from love.
no subject
But Louis is being giving and Lestat is not of a mind to refuse.
"All the vampires I had met at that time," he says, "they lived in darkness and degradation. My maker, though the same as them, intended something different for me. He is the origin of my small fortune, anyway. He left behind a mountain of gold and garments in red velvet and rare pearls. He wanted a new kind of vampire in the world, even if he did not live to see it."
A little shrug. "That was what I wished to be, once I realised there was no return. To live in light. To be the gentleman death that courted his prey." His tone has that element of self-deprecation, a long look back on his fledgling ambitions.
"I don't know," finally. "The more I talk of it, the more I think I was only the lucky one. He stole me because I was blonde haired and blue eyed and enjoyed it while it lasted and that is all."
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