The vampires scream dwindles into an agonized gurgle.
Shades of New Orleans. A church. Lestat crouched just this way on the polished tile, biting down on his prey.
(A thrill of reaction: He's here, he's here, he's here.)
Louis pushes up off the rail. Adrenaline is too high. He doesn't feel anything but his own fury, his own frustration. And he vents both on this last injured vampire. Takes him spitting screaming swearing from his swaying lean on the rail and twists his head free of his shoulders. Blood sprays freely.
A mess. Louis is aware he's made a mess.
But he has the presence of mind to scan for others. There can't be only two, surely?
The body drops. Louis firms up his grip on the head. His mind finds two more, waiting outside the fire door.
Beneath Lestat, this unlucky would-be kidnapper is struggling. Weaker and weaker in his efforts, but presence of mind to grab for Louis' ankle as he walks past.
A scooping bite of throat comes free as Lestat lifts his head with enough force to flip his hair back. The finer details of lip gloss and colour correcting foundation on the lower half of his face now ruined with gore, and he spits flesh aside. Sees that reaching hand, pins his arm, twists the shoulder until the vampire gives a loudly pitched, furious scream beneath the sirens.
"Louis," Lestat says, voice thick, dazed, grey eyes bright and bloodshot as he looks towards him. Smears of blood and little nicked claw marks mark his bare arms, and the shifting light of the club render his vest in darker colours than they are, burgundy and gold trim under proper light, exposing a pale triangle of flesh at his belly, his hips. Along with blood, his face is decorated with gold dust around the eyes, emphasised with glued on sparkles curved around his cheekbone.
And his hair wild, from roving hands, from his short flight up onto the balcony. Clinging to sweat, to blood.
Yes, two others outside. One is making a retreat. The other is hooked in place by the psychic cries of the one still alive, under Lestat's hands, which are silenced with a clean snap of the neck.
This isn't anything new. It is only the most immediate thing that comes to mind when Lestat says his name, draws his attention, when Louis looks back to him and sees him illuminated by fire and strobing lights.
The vampire beneath him is dead. One is fleeing. One remains.
"I'll be right back," Louis says, faintly aware of the absurdity. Saying this as if he is stepping out to the woodshed, into the next room for a book, performing some menial errand rather than what he intends.
Which is to open the door, head in hand, and flip it out to the last remaining would be kidnapper.
"Fuck off."
Otherwise known as: Tell your friends.
The fire alarm is going. Louis is bleeding. He doesn't feel anything. When the door bangs closed behind him, all he can do is look at Lestat. Beautiful and bloody, pinning something dead down to the floor.
It is as it was that night. When Lestat turned him. Saved him.
Louis is so beautiful. In what he wears, yes, and in the way he moves now, and the strike of his voice as he snaps this command out the metal door, and then look again at Lestat.
The air is a cacophony of fire alarms and the music no one has pulled the plug on and frightened shouts, angry shouts at those not moving fast enough. The air is veiled in smoke as the velveteen covered lounges merrily burn away. Lestat's prior predatory grace leaves him for a moment as he gets to his feet, mouth painted red and streaking down his chest.
He glances down at the dead vampire. It has been some time since he has indulged in violence this way. Perhaps not since the masquerade.
"You didn't tell me," he says, looking back up, eyes blown black, voice quiet and yet evading drowning out by the noise, "you would be bringing friends."
His heart is beating wild and excited in his chest, and he can feel blood drooling from his lip where he'd taken his big broad gulps of vampiric blood. Smears some of it away with the palm of his hand, mingling golden glitter and slick crimson on his fingers.
Lestat looks down at the corpses at their feet. One missing its head, the other half crushed. He thinks, first: Clare is going to be cross with him.
Which is fine.
Worse than that—
"I hear them sometimes," still a little dazed, dizzy. The feeling like he wants to laugh, but at what? His smile breaks into an idiotic smile anyway, a brief flash of blood-stained teeth before it vanishes. "The way they speak of you. Trying to impress one another with the goriest and worst possible ways they could punish you."
But it would be hard for it to entirely escape notice, Louis will admit. The voices of the Many carry. Even if Lestat does not listen as Daniel listens, he will hear them. Some of the conversation invokes Lestat's name, but there's a difference. Lestat is older. Many fear him.
But when it comes to Louis—
He kicks aside a flopped limb, treads closer.
"This shouldn't have happened. They shouldn't have been here."
A bold maneuver for this little group. Maybe it would have paid off if Lestat hadn't arrived when he did. Louis isn't certain what to do with that thought just yet.
A mood has coalesced, calcified beneath the shimmering pool of the drug in his system. Something shuttering up at this first ridiculous claim, that the threats of rogue vampires should not occupy his focus, but now this next thing—
He watches Louis come nearer to him. He has not moved, stance set solid, black platform heels on blood-slicked concrete. Always, a magnetised lure. He would like to be close. He can sense a heat in the way Louis watches him in return, and his skin prickles with a desire to be touched. It should be confusing, the rise of desire mingling with some darker, sharper mood, but it's instead familiar.
Here, a step forwards. Fire scorches the wall, blisters the paint.
"A mistake on their part," he says. "But fortunate on ours, no?"
Consider all the ways it is not fortunate. Lestat's party ruined, mortals scattering, sirens rising in the distance.
Lestat says fortunate.
Louis is so close he can smell the sweet scent of perfume, the sprays in Lestat's hair, traces of the powders on his face. The animal tang of blood doesn't mask any of it, only sharpens Louis' awareness.
Lestat drifts his hand to one of Louis' exposed arms, where a rivulet of blood has escaped a healing laceration. He presses his fingertips to collect it, a gentle pressure that follows this line of red up an inch, two inches.
"What if I had not been there?" he says, head tipped, watching this little detail. His fangs had already dropped in the fray, and stay there now. "You might have been hurt terribly. Worse."
A hitch of breath, Louis' eyes darkening as Lestat touches him. Gold glints in his mouth, lips parting, fangs masked by the gleam of affixed jewelry. The air is shimmering heat, and Louis feels molten from just the press of fingers to oversensitive skin.
"You saying I can't handle myself?"
Low, soft-toned. Unable to help himself even as he wants to sway further into Lestat's touch.
They aren't supposed to be doing this.
Louis can think of nothing but how much he wants this. He can think of nothing but an altar, blood, fire. Lestat's eyes near black, just like this.
Lestat brings his bloodied fingertips to his own mouth, setting them against his lips, indulging in sucking the crimson away as his eyes dart to that glimmer of gold in Louis' mouth. Tips his head. Intrigued. Knows an impulse to push Louis' lip aside to get a better look.
"I'm saying I saved you," he says, and he knows he is being annoying. He knows he is, himself, annoyed, bristling at the implications in Louis' words, in the blank spaces they gesture to, but it feels like a thread of a thought caught in the current of his high. "You aren't going to thank me?"
This scant taste of tacky blood is a sweeter and more powerful drug than any addled mortal, swooning in the back of his car.
What does Louis taste like? Adrenaline, still. Anger, maybe. Desire, most certainly.
They exist in a bubble, untouched by the wail of fire alarms, of the flames licking up the walls. Louis sees nothing but Lestat. Reaches out almost unconsciously, taking Lestat by the blood-slick chin.
An uneven draw of breath as Louis touches his chin, holds it. Is it an invitation? A means of keeping him at arm's length, a way to say no more?
They have been out of sync, lately. Not always, but many times.
He settles fingertips feather light at Louis' wrist. He remembers moments when they had allowed each other discreet, deniable touches a century ago, when he had been so careful to give nothing away, no accidental bruise from a grip to the shoulder, no accidental jostle through a narrow doorway. The sharpness of his nails, the unyielding structure of his bones.
"I would prefer it as a verb," he says. "But you could tell me what it is you do about the ones who I should not give my attention, who jump you in these more convenient places. That also."
Is not exactly the thought Lestat has. A barely formed shape of it, making his mouth twitch, doing nothing to impede the rush of heat it encourages. A sharper breath out, and he moves. His hand turns, collects Louis', drawing it back down to hold as he turns. Moves for the staircase, evading the roaring flames, pulling Louis along in his wake as they flow down for the ground floor.
Outside, the limo has moved slightly, intent on clearing the parking space for oncoming emergency vehicles but finding it difficult to do so as evacuated club goers mill about, uncertain. They don't quite evade notice, and someone will have to figure out what to do about pictures taken of Lestat de Lioncourt and the man he is holding hands with striding out from a burning venue, covered in blood.
The attention is ignored. Lestat wrenches open a limo door, ducks inside.
Somewhere, Rachida is dialing Christine on her phone while a flurry of legal papers are drafted and readied to be dispersed.
Outside the club, Lestat leads Louis by the hand out of the fire, out of the club, through a crowd of mortals scrambling for cell phones with clumsy fingers. Louis is aware of pictures, turning only to bare gold-capped fangs at the bold enough to dare reaching out to them seeking Lestat's attention.
The interior of the limousine smells of blood and drugs. Of unfamiliar bodies. Of a kind of party Louis knows but hasn't engaged in for decades.
Lestat gets in, and Louis follows after, sliding across plush leather. The door closes, muffling the sounds of people shouting Lestat's name. Louis looks at him, eyes dark still, rapt even as adrenaline ebbs and injuries make themselves known.
"You gotta wait for your band?"
Louis would like the answer to be no but steels himself for yes.
Some silent command, then, and the car suddenly jerks forward, blares its horn, the excitable murmur of fans outside puncture with an angrier shout as the limo makes a more aggressive attempt for the street. Probably, Lestat should wait for his band. He is not in the mood.
The interior of the car has a strange unearthly nighttime glow about it, empty now save for the way the scent in the air speaks still of many bodies, makeup and sweat and perfume. Now, blood, permeating, stranger blood, Louis' blood.
Lestat closes his hand around Louis' elbow, drawing his arm towards him, tipping his head to evaluate a gouge in his skin. Without asking, or thinking, he bows his head to put his mouth to it.
Louis observes him as if from far away, time slowing around them. Lestat lowers his head, lifts Louis' arm and Louis knows what he doing and doesn't draw his arm away.
Like on the mangled balcony with two corpses at their feet, watching Lestat suck blood off his fingers, Louis simply watches. Feels his body catch fire.
The application of lips to the gouge in his skin drags sound from Louis. Stifled, almost a moan, tamped down into a ragged scrape of breath. His fingers flex, tighten and loosen and tighten again, knuckles grazing Lestat's chest. A sense of fabric, speckled with blood.
"Lestat," falls out of Louis' mouth.
Like Louis should have been gripping his chin, thumbing at his lower lip, Lestat shouldn't be touching him this way.
He'd been provoking Louis before. Louis is uncertain if this is better.
He steals a dainty sip from this healing wound, a moment of pressure that sharpens, abates, soothed then with the slick flat of his tongue as he'd healed the girl in the car. Hums his enjoyment for the taste. Swallows down the mouthful he'd pulled, feels he could swoon against Louis as his already excitable, already altered brain chemistry floods him with bliss.
His name is said, and Lestat looks up again. Almost a renewed shock—Louis, here, close, his taste in his mouth.
"Do you lick closed your own wounds," a blurry murmur, "so I don't know they were there?"
He tips his head, eyeline dipping again as if seeking out another injury to mouth.
Lestat puts his mouth, lips and tongue, to Louis' skin and Louis forgets everything that isn't him.
Long moments looking at Lestat's bloody face, the slice of blue in his eyes. Breathing. Feeling the lock-thud of their heartbeats.
Eventually: "My fingers work fine."
His voice sounds so ragged.
A true answer. Rubbing away wounds with cut fingertips, drinking down blood after to erase any lingering shadowed evidence of the injury. It's served.
It is nothing compared to this. Lestat keeps hold of his arm. Louis lets him. The car is moving and Louis doesn't know where they're going like he doesn't know what they're doing.
"I handle it."
Reassurance? Provocation? Even Louis can't say for certain.
Lestat murmurs this with his lips a fraction distance away from the next wound he has spied, fingers tightening as he presses his mouth over it. A low purr of an appreciating sound for the taste, letting his tongue map torn skin in a warm curl of pressure. Lingering as it closes up beneath this kiss.
"All by yourself," is surely needling, given the falsehood. He cannot quite get his mind around it, this insight into what Louis does with his time between all his little mentions of art galleries and sales. It resists sinking in.
But he can nip at the edges as he adapts. Insist on closing some wounds.
It is needling. Bracing, in a way, even as Louis feels as if he's sinking, the air between them molten as Lestat tongues a second wound higher up his arm. Being needled doesn't banish any feeling in Louis' body. It stokes the heat. Always has.
"If you'd given me five minutes, I'd have finished the other," Louis asserts. Believes it to be true. "I done it before."
Regularly. But how regularly isn't necessary in this moment.
"Oh," whisper soft against his skin. "I believe you."
That can never be in doubt. His fledgling, who has come so far into his own, who has survived much, who has burned the Parisian coven down, who has acquired a grander wealth than the hoard Lestat was gifted once. Who defeated him, once, ran a blade over his throat and bled him until death, and has survived his own impulses that call for his self-ending.
And Lestat wants him. Wants to push him down on the car seat while the driver circles whatever the fuck city they are in. Wants to move against him until release is located. Wants to drain him dry.
Lifts his head again, lips newly red, eyes still black. "But would the other two that were out there give you your five minutes?" The tip of his nose brushes Louis cheek. "Say 'thank you, Lestat'."
Treading over delicate ground, nettled and desirous and in pain. His fingers turn, catching hold of Lestat by the front of his shirt.
"You gonna make me?" Louis murmurs into the space between them. Everything smells of Lestat. Of blood. Intoxicating.
He'd kept all of it from Lestat. As much as he could. Lestat couldn't hear Louis' challenge, flung into the night. Lestat hasn't seen the aftermath, what takes place beyond the glare of his stardom. Louis had preferred it that way. His burdens to bear. His war, his scuffles and fights.
Louis' knuckles press down, feeling Lestat's breath rising and falling. Teetering between pushing him away and dragging him closer.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Shades of New Orleans. A church. Lestat crouched just this way on the polished tile, biting down on his prey.
(A thrill of reaction: He's here, he's here, he's here.)
Louis pushes up off the rail. Adrenaline is too high. He doesn't feel anything but his own fury, his own frustration. And he vents both on this last injured vampire. Takes him spitting screaming swearing from his swaying lean on the rail and twists his head free of his shoulders. Blood sprays freely.
A mess. Louis is aware he's made a mess.
But he has the presence of mind to scan for others. There can't be only two, surely?
The body drops. Louis firms up his grip on the head. His mind finds two more, waiting outside the fire door.
Beneath Lestat, this unlucky would-be kidnapper is struggling. Weaker and weaker in his efforts, but presence of mind to grab for Louis' ankle as he walks past.
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"Louis," Lestat says, voice thick, dazed, grey eyes bright and bloodshot as he looks towards him. Smears of blood and little nicked claw marks mark his bare arms, and the shifting light of the club render his vest in darker colours than they are, burgundy and gold trim under proper light, exposing a pale triangle of flesh at his belly, his hips. Along with blood, his face is decorated with gold dust around the eyes, emphasised with glued on sparkles curved around his cheekbone.
And his hair wild, from roving hands, from his short flight up onto the balcony. Clinging to sweat, to blood.
Yes, two others outside. One is making a retreat. The other is hooked in place by the psychic cries of the one still alive, under Lestat's hands, which are silenced with a clean snap of the neck.
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This isn't anything new. It is only the most immediate thing that comes to mind when Lestat says his name, draws his attention, when Louis looks back to him and sees him illuminated by fire and strobing lights.
The vampire beneath him is dead. One is fleeing. One remains.
"I'll be right back," Louis says, faintly aware of the absurdity. Saying this as if he is stepping out to the woodshed, into the next room for a book, performing some menial errand rather than what he intends.
Which is to open the door, head in hand, and flip it out to the last remaining would be kidnapper.
"Fuck off."
Otherwise known as: Tell your friends.
The fire alarm is going. Louis is bleeding. He doesn't feel anything. When the door bangs closed behind him, all he can do is look at Lestat. Beautiful and bloody, pinning something dead down to the floor.
It is as it was that night. When Lestat turned him. Saved him.
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The air is a cacophony of fire alarms and the music no one has pulled the plug on and frightened shouts, angry shouts at those not moving fast enough. The air is veiled in smoke as the velveteen covered lounges merrily burn away. Lestat's prior predatory grace leaves him for a moment as he gets to his feet, mouth painted red and streaking down his chest.
He glances down at the dead vampire. It has been some time since he has indulged in violence this way. Perhaps not since the masquerade.
"You didn't tell me," he says, looking back up, eyes blown black, voice quiet and yet evading drowning out by the noise, "you would be bringing friends."
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Ha, ha.
Drifting as he speaks, forward into Lestat's space. He is all over blood. He is so beautiful. Louis wants to lick him clean.
"And they weren't much appreciative of the party."
Jokes. Banter. Deflecting away from Louis' grand side project. It was never supposed to touch Lestat's tour.
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Lestat looks down at the corpses at their feet. One missing its head, the other half crushed. He thinks, first: Clare is going to be cross with him.
Which is fine.
Worse than that—
"I hear them sometimes," still a little dazed, dizzy. The feeling like he wants to laugh, but at what? His smile breaks into an idiotic smile anyway, a brief flash of blood-stained teeth before it vanishes. "The way they speak of you. Trying to impress one another with the goriest and worst possible ways they could punish you."
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But it would be hard for it to entirely escape notice, Louis will admit. The voices of the Many carry. Even if Lestat does not listen as Daniel listens, he will hear them. Some of the conversation invokes Lestat's name, but there's a difference. Lestat is older. Many fear him.
But when it comes to Louis—
He kicks aside a flopped limb, treads closer.
"This shouldn't have happened. They shouldn't have been here."
A bold maneuver for this little group. Maybe it would have paid off if Lestat hadn't arrived when he did. Louis isn't certain what to do with that thought just yet.
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He watches Louis come nearer to him. He has not moved, stance set solid, black platform heels on blood-slicked concrete. Always, a magnetised lure. He would like to be close. He can sense a heat in the way Louis watches him in return, and his skin prickles with a desire to be touched. It should be confusing, the rise of desire mingling with some darker, sharper mood, but it's instead familiar.
Here, a step forwards. Fire scorches the wall, blisters the paint.
"A mistake on their part," he says. "But fortunate on ours, no?"
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Leaves it there.
Consider all the ways it is not fortunate. Lestat's party ruined, mortals scattering, sirens rising in the distance.
Lestat says fortunate.
Louis is so close he can smell the sweet scent of perfume, the sprays in Lestat's hair, traces of the powders on his face. The animal tang of blood doesn't mask any of it, only sharpens Louis' awareness.
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Lestat drifts his hand to one of Louis' exposed arms, where a rivulet of blood has escaped a healing laceration. He presses his fingertips to collect it, a gentle pressure that follows this line of red up an inch, two inches.
"What if I had not been there?" he says, head tipped, watching this little detail. His fangs had already dropped in the fray, and stay there now. "You might have been hurt terribly. Worse."
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"You saying I can't handle myself?"
Low, soft-toned. Unable to help himself even as he wants to sway further into Lestat's touch.
They aren't supposed to be doing this.
Louis can think of nothing but how much he wants this. He can think of nothing but an altar, blood, fire. Lestat's eyes near black, just like this.
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"I'm saying I saved you," he says, and he knows he is being annoying. He knows he is, himself, annoyed, bristling at the implications in Louis' words, in the blank spaces they gesture to, but it feels like a thread of a thought caught in the current of his high. "You aren't going to thank me?"
This scant taste of tacky blood is a sweeter and more powerful drug than any addled mortal, swooning in the back of his car.
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Louis' breath comes heavier, watching him suck.
What does Louis taste like? Adrenaline, still. Anger, maybe. Desire, most certainly.
They exist in a bubble, untouched by the wail of fire alarms, of the flames licking up the walls. Louis sees nothing but Lestat. Reaches out almost unconsciously, taking Lestat by the blood-slick chin.
"Thank you? That all you want me to say?"
Soft. Needling. Louis wants to bite him.
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They have been out of sync, lately. Not always, but many times.
He settles fingertips feather light at Louis' wrist. He remembers moments when they had allowed each other discreet, deniable touches a century ago, when he had been so careful to give nothing away, no accidental bruise from a grip to the shoulder, no accidental jostle through a narrow doorway. The sharpness of his nails, the unyielding structure of his bones.
"I would prefer it as a verb," he says. "But you could tell me what it is you do about the ones who I should not give my attention, who jump you in these more convenient places. That also."
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He also must decide what kind of answer he should give to the question Lestat is posing.
His thumb lifts. Drags along Lestat's lower lip, smearing the blood there even further.
"You got a car waiting still?"
Practicality.
Even if Louis were making reckless decisions, they probably shouldn't make out in a burning building
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Is not exactly the thought Lestat has. A barely formed shape of it, making his mouth twitch, doing nothing to impede the rush of heat it encourages. A sharper breath out, and he moves. His hand turns, collects Louis', drawing it back down to hold as he turns. Moves for the staircase, evading the roaring flames, pulling Louis along in his wake as they flow down for the ground floor.
Outside, the limo has moved slightly, intent on clearing the parking space for oncoming emergency vehicles but finding it difficult to do so as evacuated club goers mill about, uncertain. They don't quite evade notice, and someone will have to figure out what to do about pictures taken of Lestat de Lioncourt and the man he is holding hands with striding out from a burning venue, covered in blood.
The attention is ignored. Lestat wrenches open a limo door, ducks inside.
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Outside the club, Lestat leads Louis by the hand out of the fire, out of the club, through a crowd of mortals scrambling for cell phones with clumsy fingers. Louis is aware of pictures, turning only to bare gold-capped fangs at the bold enough to dare reaching out to them seeking Lestat's attention.
The interior of the limousine smells of blood and drugs. Of unfamiliar bodies. Of a kind of party Louis knows but hasn't engaged in for decades.
Lestat gets in, and Louis follows after, sliding across plush leather. The door closes, muffling the sounds of people shouting Lestat's name. Louis looks at him, eyes dark still, rapt even as adrenaline ebbs and injuries make themselves known.
"You gotta wait for your band?"
Louis would like the answer to be no but steels himself for yes.
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Some silent command, then, and the car suddenly jerks forward, blares its horn, the excitable murmur of fans outside puncture with an angrier shout as the limo makes a more aggressive attempt for the street. Probably, Lestat should wait for his band. He is not in the mood.
The interior of the car has a strange unearthly nighttime glow about it, empty now save for the way the scent in the air speaks still of many bodies, makeup and sweat and perfume. Now, blood, permeating, stranger blood, Louis' blood.
Lestat closes his hand around Louis' elbow, drawing his arm towards him, tipping his head to evaluate a gouge in his skin. Without asking, or thinking, he bows his head to put his mouth to it.
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Like on the mangled balcony with two corpses at their feet, watching Lestat suck blood off his fingers, Louis simply watches. Feels his body catch fire.
The application of lips to the gouge in his skin drags sound from Louis. Stifled, almost a moan, tamped down into a ragged scrape of breath. His fingers flex, tighten and loosen and tighten again, knuckles grazing Lestat's chest. A sense of fabric, speckled with blood.
"Lestat," falls out of Louis' mouth.
Like Louis should have been gripping his chin, thumbing at his lower lip, Lestat shouldn't be touching him this way.
He'd been provoking Louis before. Louis is uncertain if this is better.
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His name is said, and Lestat looks up again. Almost a renewed shock—Louis, here, close, his taste in his mouth.
"Do you lick closed your own wounds," a blurry murmur, "so I don't know they were there?"
He tips his head, eyeline dipping again as if seeking out another injury to mouth.
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Lestat puts his mouth, lips and tongue, to Louis' skin and Louis forgets everything that isn't him.
Long moments looking at Lestat's bloody face, the slice of blue in his eyes. Breathing. Feeling the lock-thud of their heartbeats.
Eventually: "My fingers work fine."
His voice sounds so ragged.
A true answer. Rubbing away wounds with cut fingertips, drinking down blood after to erase any lingering shadowed evidence of the injury. It's served.
It is nothing compared to this. Lestat keeps hold of his arm. Louis lets him. The car is moving and Louis doesn't know where they're going like he doesn't know what they're doing.
"I handle it."
Reassurance? Provocation? Even Louis can't say for certain.
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Lestat murmurs this with his lips a fraction distance away from the next wound he has spied, fingers tightening as he presses his mouth over it. A low purr of an appreciating sound for the taste, letting his tongue map torn skin in a warm curl of pressure. Lingering as it closes up beneath this kiss.
"All by yourself," is surely needling, given the falsehood. He cannot quite get his mind around it, this insight into what Louis does with his time between all his little mentions of art galleries and sales. It resists sinking in.
But he can nip at the edges as he adapts. Insist on closing some wounds.
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"If you'd given me five minutes, I'd have finished the other," Louis asserts. Believes it to be true. "I done it before."
Regularly. But how regularly isn't necessary in this moment.
"You don't believe me?"
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That can never be in doubt. His fledgling, who has come so far into his own, who has survived much, who has burned the Parisian coven down, who has acquired a grander wealth than the hoard Lestat was gifted once. Who defeated him, once, ran a blade over his throat and bled him until death, and has survived his own impulses that call for his self-ending.
And Lestat wants him. Wants to push him down on the car seat while the driver circles whatever the fuck city they are in. Wants to move against him until release is located. Wants to drain him dry.
Lifts his head again, lips newly red, eyes still black. "But would the other two that were out there give you your five minutes?" The tip of his nose brushes Louis cheek. "Say 'thank you, Lestat'."
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Treading over delicate ground, nettled and desirous and in pain. His fingers turn, catching hold of Lestat by the front of his shirt.
"You gonna make me?" Louis murmurs into the space between them. Everything smells of Lestat. Of blood. Intoxicating.
He'd kept all of it from Lestat. As much as he could. Lestat couldn't hear Louis' challenge, flung into the night. Lestat hasn't seen the aftermath, what takes place beyond the glare of his stardom. Louis had preferred it that way. His burdens to bear. His war, his scuffles and fights.
Louis' knuckles press down, feeling Lestat's breath rising and falling. Teetering between pushing him away and dragging him closer.
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