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."
They are not companions. Not yet. An inbetween space, where despite all their intentions, the way gravity shifts, the magnetic pull of their connection, the relief of their closeness, all of this exists still. Not something past, but something present.
Louis' hand spreads across Lestat's chest. His weight shifts, tilting into Lestat. Pressing him more firmly into the seat.
"He stole you to get hold of all the things you are," Louis murmurs, fingers curling in the fabric of Lestat's shirt. Protective impulse, guarding his heart against what they speak of now. "What no one else had then and no one's got now."
It wasn't chance. Louis is certain it wasn't chance. Corpses on corpses, seeking something in particular.
Maybe only the pleasure of breaking one who would not acquiesce, would not beg.
The origin of Lestat's fortune. Money like a tether, keeping hold of Lestat for decades after.
Louis had never wanted to live off Lestat's money. Had felt guilt over what he and Claudia had taken in those early days of Paris. Did Lestat feel something like that too?
Lestat tips his head back against the headrest, watching Louis' face. Admiring it. His face is wet and eyes red, the occasional passing streetlamp casting unflattering pale light, blue veins and raw edges, but he offers a cracked kind of smile anyway as he covers his hand over Louis'.
"I think if you believe there is something special about me," has a touch of self-deprecation, but still sincere, "then it doesn't matter to me whether or not he did as well."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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."
no subject
Louis' hand spreads across Lestat's chest. His weight shifts, tilting into Lestat. Pressing him more firmly into the seat.
"He stole you to get hold of all the things you are," Louis murmurs, fingers curling in the fabric of Lestat's shirt. Protective impulse, guarding his heart against what they speak of now. "What no one else had then and no one's got now."
It wasn't chance. Louis is certain it wasn't chance. Corpses on corpses, seeking something in particular.
Maybe only the pleasure of breaking one who would not acquiesce, would not beg.
The origin of Lestat's fortune. Money like a tether, keeping hold of Lestat for decades after.
Louis had never wanted to live off Lestat's money. Had felt guilt over what he and Claudia had taken in those early days of Paris. Did Lestat feel something like that too?
no subject
"I think if you believe there is something special about me," has a touch of self-deprecation, but still sincere, "then it doesn't matter to me whether or not he did as well."
That, he could live with. Tolerate.
no subject
A firm assertion.
The point could be argued. All the things Louis doesn't know, all the things Lestat held back.
But Louis says this without any room for argument.
"I know you."
Bound together, forever. Always. All the worst of each other. All the best of each other. A light press of his hand over Lestat's heart, emphasis.
"He didn't."