They kiss. Louis' grip becomes an encouragement, guiding Lestat in as his opposite hand splinters the balcony rail behind them. They kiss and Lestat tastes of blood and liquor and chemicals. He fills Louis' senses. He blots out the tinny whine in Louis' ears, the panicky thud of his heartbeat.
It is as it has always been: Lestat is everything, even when they've argued, fought, hurt each other.
For a split second, everything else goes away.
And then Louis bites him, a sharp nip to his lower lip.
Says, "After," without even fully considering what he's proposing.
After. Everything must wait until after those below have been made to regret what they've done here tonight.
And time slows around them, one last flex of ability that Lestat is happy to funnel into giving them space for a biting kiss instead of shooting the fish in the barrel below. He could swoon again, but keeps his grip on the railing, lists into Louis. After. Something to look forward to. He's lacked this simple joy for a while, now.
Lestat looks down. These ones are in the way of his after. So, he leaps again—lets gravity do the work, drags the burliest of them down with him into a tussle, Lestat's swifter hand catching his target up under the chin to slam his skull back into concrete.
Whether or not they survive is a foregone conclusion.
Louis is left dangling as Lestat goes, a moment to catch his breath. The elder is an ink blot in the corner of his awareness. Fading fast, packing up. Louis has some certainty this attempt was organized, a gift for Lestat. Louis is less sure anyone realized he was going to attend.
No, Louis can't fly, but he can fall. Swings his legs where he hangs, building momentum, before he lets go of the ruined balcony and follows Lestat's example, makes himself into a projectile.
Again, they are a matched set. Lestat drags down the largest of their number. Louis lands so hard behind him that the vampire unlucky enough to break his fall snaps bone, screaming from the floor as Louis gets to his feet. This vampire does not rise alongside him. Louis does him a minor mercy: kicks him hard enough in the face to send him into unconsciousness before he makes an end of him.
No wavering in Louis' resolve. They all must die. Some have survived him, ones and twos, to spread the word. But tonight isn't that kind of night.
"Lestat," is the beginning and end of Louis' sentence. Nothing else needs to be said. They move together as they always did, and Louis need say nothing else other than his name to draw his attention to the fact that the remaining three have begun backing away from them. That their assailants are considering retreat.
Edited (no, let's do it different) 2025-08-10 15:17 (UTC)
In Louis' periphery, Lestat slides to a stand, a liquid way of moving that always informs the way he navigates the world but seems especially pronounced when he is either closing in on something he wishes to kill, or prowling the stage as he was moments ago.
He smiles as he sees what Louis has called attention to: fear. Fear unmasked, no vampiric bravado or adrenaline or fierceness, just hasty math being made of the doors, their relative positioning, and a sense of white noise where Lestat can just barely hear swift telepathic correspondence snapping back and forth between them.
"Don't run," he suggests. Touching Louis' shoulder. Three, two, one—
And scaffolding with a full set of stage lights slams down onto the trio, where, beyond anyone's perception, the screws had been nimbly untwisted, enough connecting pieces overhead quietly, telekinetically worked free until the whole rig could come down with a crash of shrieking metal and breaking glass.
Lestat's cackle fills the ringing aftermath, the angry hissing and clamour.
Sudden awareness: Louis has missed Lestat's laughter, even ill-timed or infuriating.
Louis looks at these struggling, pinned vampires, and extends a hand. Unnecessary, dramatic gesture. Louis doesn't need any physical movement to encourage flame. It cracks to life, consuming these last three, heating the metal of the scaffolding to molten temperatures.
Lestat is touching his shoulder. At some point, Louis has caught hold of his hip.
They're alive.
"We missed one."
Mild. Louis doesn't truly count whatever or whoever had been occupying the balcony as a player in this conflict. That had had been a conductor. It will be a problem another day, Louis is sure.
They are touching each other, a thing as natural to Lestat as standing, breathing, existing. It is natural then too to pivot on the axis of these touches, to sling his arms around Louis' shoulders, moving them in a circle together. He reaches out, encourages flames to leap, to set hot teeth in the other downed vampires. It's the only way to be sure.
"Very wise of them," Lestat is saying as he does so. The black is shrinking in his eyes, which are bloodshot and bright, a little manic in a way that is probably familiar and new at the same time. Moon-bright irises have a natural intensity. So do his moods.
And Louis is here, in his arms, although there is a jostling, rowdy, bullying quality to this grasp as they turn together.
Closer, hooked in by Lestat's bare arms. Close enough for Louis to run eyes over Lestat's wounds, breathe out some relief that he can detect no new marks joining them.
"I liked the parts of it I saw," Louis tells him. "Always do."
Fingers flex tighter at his hip, finding the slip of bare skin between waistband and corset, where the latter has ridden up just enough. Louis' finger digs in there, holding harder, urging Lestat in a step even as Lestat handles him. Even as Louis reminds himself: there are just so many reasons they shouldn't be touching each other at all.
And yet, Louis promised. After.
"You think they'll ask you back after they rebuild?"
It's worth saying: he has been very angry at Louis as well.
But this changes nothing. Louis is here, and asserting his own grip in a way that doesn't drive him apart, and Lestat is urged inwards, closer. Louis' tunic has all but fallen off his shoulders, leaving behind biteable bare skin, the leather straps that pleasingly press against it, all the familiar elegant swoops of muscle and bone.
"They should," he says. "Perhaps you give them the funds, smooth it over for me. They have me back. I sell a million tickets."
A small venue, actually, but that's besides the point.
Dry practicality, even as Louis nudges a thumb up beneath the taut fabric of Lestat's corset.
A tip of his head, watching Lestat's face. Feeling out the edges of his own emotions, trying to suss out the play of reaction on Lestat's face, identify what he's feeling. What's there beneath the surface.
Lestat wears a sulk for this first part. How cruel of Louis to say.
A sulk that evaporates at that insistent finger, nudging up beneath stiff lace that has less give than his own flesh. The arch to his back that follows is entirely instinctual, as if to encourage Louis' hands on him, under his clothing, as easy to fit as a million people in a night club.
"Maybe you do," he echoes back. The tips of their noses brushing, Lestat tipping his head as if to angle a kiss. "They're your friends after all."
Louis' breath stalls, held, as Lestat tips his head. As Louis realizes how easy it would be to kiss him. To kiss him the way he'd like to, the way they'd tipped into kissing in the back of Lestat's outrageous limousine.
Instead, carefully: "Seems like you been getting familiar with all of 'em without me."
Not asking, not really. Some room in which Lestat can side step, just as he'd circled around the topic with Louis.
Well, circled until he'd lost his temper. But Lestat had tried.
A smile, then, a broad spread that he briefly traps with teeth to lower lip. Louis noticed? Who told him? And other questions that mean nothing, because Louis is here. Lestat jolts a shrug as he presses himself in closer.
"I made my introductions," he says. He lowers his voice, mock-conspiratorial, "No one reads books anymore anyway."
Who can make the biggest mess? Louis is certainly capable of giving Lestat a run for his money, beyond capable, but Lestat is happy to try.
Something about ancients and technology. They could be flippant about it if they like.
Thumb running along skin beneath the seal of the corset. Watching Lestat, who cannot hear anything Louis says into the cacophony of the many. Lestat, who has been making threats of his own. Louis is sure they're threats, regardless of how Lestat chooses to frame whatever it is he's been saying.
"You don't need introduction," is equal parts fond and exasperated.
What can Louis do? He can't put the words back into a bottle. He can only provide a more pressing distraction.
And Louis is capable of that. Of being a bigger and bigger problem, of being an insult to their fellow vampires.
Nothing said for a long moment. The fire is smoldering. Louis has considered that they might like to leave. He has also considered they might want to take separate cars.
"I didn't want you to do this," is what Louis says. "Interrupt your tour."
As if the interruption is the most pressing thing. Maybe it is.
The smoke will become unpleasant, even for them. The alarms will go off. Questions asked. Even now, he has the sense of his audience shaking off his influence, milling around outside. They need to go.
Lestat stays unhelpful, making much of the repetitive stroke of Louis' thumb pressed against his skin.
"It is my tour," he says, a little restless toss of his hair as he says this. "I can do what I wish with it."
He could leave it there—light and dismissive, a shrug. But his expression hardens, just a little, a look that wanders over Louis' face before finding his eyes again. "You don't think there is some deeper reason to all of this?" he asks, a note of reserve in his voice. "Or you think it's just my vanity, running wild."
It is very difficult to put away his teeth when Lestat offers him such a clear opening.
A struggle, to swallow the petty urge that wants to say well, yeah. To argue, because why not argue. Louis' anger is so near, so easily kindled.
He keeps touching Lestat, thumb slipped up beneath fabric, a ribbon falling down the back of his wrist. Lestat's breath ghosting along his cheek. Louis could steal him. Take him from here. Lestat would let him, he is sure of it.
"I ain't gonna make any guesses," is what Louis says. Some admission. They have been out of sync. "You wanna tell me, I'll listen."
He has objections. Of course he has objections. But those are for another moments. The fire is catching. Maybe Lestat returns to his adoring public. Maybe Louis leaves out the back door. Maybe they quit while they're ahead instead of arguing again.
How much he wants to be touched more. Teased by the limits of Louis' patience, encouraging the desire to be held and palmed at and scratched and bitten. He shifts against him, needful, shameless, while they fail to kiss one another.
Lestat slides a hand around Louis' mostly bare shoulder. Trails two fingers along a leather strap, nail teasing at an intersection of metal loop.
"You want to have a conversation?" is a rhetorical, doubtful purr.
Conflating the two. What they need to do as opposed what they want to do.
Louis doesn't necessarily want to speak about it. But what Lestat has invited cannot be erased. The wounds on his body can't be ignored. Louis finds them profane. Even when he had cut open Lestat's throat, it had felt unreal. An impossibility. Lingering wounds carry that same feeling, that same sense of something precious defiled.
But before they can lapse into true impasse, slide in the wrong direction—
The fire alarm is headsplittingly loud, Lestat flinching as it goes off, mood shattering into a dozen sharp pieces. Fine, fine. A glance backwards for the stage, the back area, and then up—this way. He takes Louis' hand and starts moving, hauling him along towards the nearest fire exit.
At least this time, there is no limo of his own idling nearby. The show had just started. Just an open evening in front of him.
Outside into the clear, cool air. No smoke, the alarm muted. Louis inhales a deep breath, face tipping briefly up to the sky.
His grip on Lestat's hip dislodged, caught only by the hand.
"We should go."
Before there is a messy entanglement with either fans or authorities.
But where?
Maybe some of that uncertainty shows in Louis' face. Where do they go? What is neutral ground for them now? They've fucked and argued and Louis has come back to him, what is even ground?
"Oui," agreement. The crowd has cleared from the immediate entrance of the fire exit, but it's not anywhere Lestat wants to linger—a concrete courtyard, trash cans, a chainlink fence, the promise of intrusion.
Lestat glances back at Louis, sees that uncertainty, and casts him a crooked smile. Brings his hand up to kiss, leaving behind a messy smear of blood and glitter, and then releases his hand. It is only practical to do so, as Lestat takes off running—vaults the fence, moves at a blur across the street.
At the edges of hearing, a metal clang as his bodyweight lands upon a dumpster, uses it to leap up onto a rooftop. Of course, if Lestat didn't want Louis to follow, he could make more effort to disappear.
A scorch of contact, Louis' knuckles smarting as Lestat moves away from him. Wanting to drag him back. Wanting to bite him again.
Lestat could simply vanish. He can fly. He could leave Louis behind.
But the mode of travel is invitation in and of itself. Louis can make these jumps with ease, and so he does, moving in Lestat's wake. Ascending up to rooftops, farther from the cacophony of the alarm, the chatter of confused mortals who cannot understand why they just left—
Disregarded.
Louis turns, eyes skimming the horizon. He sees no one and nothing hanging in the air. Whoever stood upon that balcony, they are gone. Did not linger.
"Where?" is what he asks as he pivots back to Lestat. Hotel room? Another backseat of another car, somewhere Louis can be banished from again should they argue?
It's a shock of difference, out in the open. Free of smoke and the smell of burning meat and blood and melting plastic, motion in the air. Lestat feels his own state of under-dressed where the wind shifts his hair about around bare shoulders, his decorative bruises. He is dressed for the stage, still, which is a place of intimacy in spite of what it is.
He takes a breath. Sobriety looming, too. Unfortunate.
Lestat keys back into Louis. Well, what is sobriety when he feels insane at any time he is in proximity of his erstwhile companion?
"Your room," he decides, invites. Wherever that is, he doesn't care, he would simply like not to to have to deal with his own little life congregating around a shared hotel floor.
Louis watches him for a long moment. Considering. Measuring, to some degree, Lestat's sobriety. The likelihood of them tearing into each other, whether or not it is diminished or heightened by the absence of a high.
And then, relenting: "Yeah, okay."
Flinging himself into this, what conversation comes, what they make of the night together, as he flung himself towards the newness of his life and all the freedoms and violence that waited for them.
Turns, and this time it's Louis' task to lead them from rooftop to rooftop, assuming Lestat will follow.
Some anxious feeling rises in him as Louis looks at him. Sounds off like white noise in his mind, like shrieking feedback. He is being judged and measured by metrics he doesn't understand. They have had a nasty argument and now Louis is here again.
Louis answers and it sounds like relenting, and Lestat would like to say: well where do you want to go??????
But Louis turns to lead them off. And they have so much more bickering to do, he is sure.
Lestat follows, keeping pace rather than letting Louis stay too far ahead of him. His stage clothing doesn't love the activity of crouching and leaping and running, and by the time they are near the hotel, he is pausing to ensure he doesn't break right out of his corset, tugging the ribbons back taut before the last final leaps.
Louis is not suffering in such a way. His tunic is slouching down off one shoulder still when he lands on the appropriate roof, harness twitched back into place with two fingers as Louis strides towards the rooftop door. The handle breaks with very little effort applied.
There's still time to reroute, but no. Louis leads Lestat down a single flight of stairs to the penthouse suite booked under Rachida's alias, layers on layers of discretion insulating Louis from enthusiastic book readers. One wall comprised entirely of windows, curtains tied neatly back. French doors opening onto a balcony. Vintage furniture arranged stylishly around this living room. There is a door ajar, revealing a slice of a bed, the edge of a coffin. Louis sees it, leaves it. Lestat has been invited in.
"Come here," is what he says instead, having kicked off his own shoes beside the door before treading deeper into the room.
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He doesn't.
They kiss. Louis' grip becomes an encouragement, guiding Lestat in as his opposite hand splinters the balcony rail behind them. They kiss and Lestat tastes of blood and liquor and chemicals. He fills Louis' senses. He blots out the tinny whine in Louis' ears, the panicky thud of his heartbeat.
It is as it has always been: Lestat is everything, even when they've argued, fought, hurt each other.
For a split second, everything else goes away.
And then Louis bites him, a sharp nip to his lower lip.
Says, "After," without even fully considering what he's proposing.
After. Everything must wait until after those below have been made to regret what they've done here tonight.
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And time slows around them, one last flex of ability that Lestat is happy to funnel into giving them space for a biting kiss instead of shooting the fish in the barrel below. He could swoon again, but keeps his grip on the railing, lists into Louis. After. Something to look forward to. He's lacked this simple joy for a while, now.
Lestat looks down. These ones are in the way of his after. So, he leaps again—lets gravity do the work, drags the burliest of them down with him into a tussle, Lestat's swifter hand catching his target up under the chin to slam his skull back into concrete.
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Whether or not they survive is a foregone conclusion.
Louis is left dangling as Lestat goes, a moment to catch his breath. The elder is an ink blot in the corner of his awareness. Fading fast, packing up. Louis has some certainty this attempt was organized, a gift for Lestat. Louis is less sure anyone realized he was going to attend.
No, Louis can't fly, but he can fall. Swings his legs where he hangs, building momentum, before he lets go of the ruined balcony and follows Lestat's example, makes himself into a projectile.
Again, they are a matched set. Lestat drags down the largest of their number. Louis lands so hard behind him that the vampire unlucky enough to break his fall snaps bone, screaming from the floor as Louis gets to his feet. This vampire does not rise alongside him. Louis does him a minor mercy: kicks him hard enough in the face to send him into unconsciousness before he makes an end of him.
No wavering in Louis' resolve. They all must die. Some have survived him, ones and twos, to spread the word. But tonight isn't that kind of night.
"Lestat," is the beginning and end of Louis' sentence. Nothing else needs to be said. They move together as they always did, and Louis need say nothing else other than his name to draw his attention to the fact that the remaining three have begun backing away from them. That their assailants are considering retreat.
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He smiles as he sees what Louis has called attention to: fear. Fear unmasked, no vampiric bravado or adrenaline or fierceness, just hasty math being made of the doors, their relative positioning, and a sense of white noise where Lestat can just barely hear swift telepathic correspondence snapping back and forth between them.
"Don't run," he suggests. Touching Louis' shoulder. Three, two, one—
And scaffolding with a full set of stage lights slams down onto the trio, where, beyond anyone's perception, the screws had been nimbly untwisted, enough connecting pieces overhead quietly, telekinetically worked free until the whole rig could come down with a crash of shrieking metal and breaking glass.
Lestat's cackle fills the ringing aftermath, the angry hissing and clamour.
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Louis looks at these struggling, pinned vampires, and extends a hand. Unnecessary, dramatic gesture. Louis doesn't need any physical movement to encourage flame. It cracks to life, consuming these last three, heating the metal of the scaffolding to molten temperatures.
Lestat is touching his shoulder. At some point, Louis has caught hold of his hip.
They're alive.
"We missed one."
Mild. Louis doesn't truly count whatever or whoever had been occupying the balcony as a player in this conflict. That had had been a conductor. It will be a problem another day, Louis is sure.
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"Very wise of them," Lestat is saying as he does so. The black is shrinking in his eyes, which are bloodshot and bright, a little manic in a way that is probably familiar and new at the same time. Moon-bright irises have a natural intensity. So do his moods.
And Louis is here, in his arms, although there is a jostling, rowdy, bullying quality to this grasp as they turn together.
"Did you like the show?"
What all thirty seconds of it occurred.
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"I liked the parts of it I saw," Louis tells him. "Always do."
Fingers flex tighter at his hip, finding the slip of bare skin between waistband and corset, where the latter has ridden up just enough. Louis' finger digs in there, holding harder, urging Lestat in a step even as Lestat handles him. Even as Louis reminds himself: there are just so many reasons they shouldn't be touching each other at all.
And yet, Louis promised. After.
"You think they'll ask you back after they rebuild?"
A joke.
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But this changes nothing. Louis is here, and asserting his own grip in a way that doesn't drive him apart, and Lestat is urged inwards, closer. Louis' tunic has all but fallen off his shoulders, leaving behind biteable bare skin, the leather straps that pleasingly press against it, all the familiar elegant swoops of muscle and bone.
"They should," he says. "Perhaps you give them the funds, smooth it over for me. They have me back. I sell a million tickets."
A small venue, actually, but that's besides the point.
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Dry practicality, even as Louis nudges a thumb up beneath the taut fabric of Lestat's corset.
A tip of his head, watching Lestat's face. Feeling out the edges of his own emotions, trying to suss out the play of reaction on Lestat's face, identify what he's feeling. What's there beneath the surface.
"But maybe I help you smooth it over anyway."
Maybe.
Maybe like an olive branch, extended.
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A sulk that evaporates at that insistent finger, nudging up beneath stiff lace that has less give than his own flesh. The arch to his back that follows is entirely instinctual, as if to encourage Louis' hands on him, under his clothing, as easy to fit as a million people in a night club.
"Maybe you do," he echoes back. The tips of their noses brushing, Lestat tipping his head as if to angle a kiss. "They're your friends after all."
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But he isn't so sure they were here for him.
Louis' breath stalls, held, as Lestat tips his head. As Louis realizes how easy it would be to kiss him. To kiss him the way he'd like to, the way they'd tipped into kissing in the back of Lestat's outrageous limousine.
Instead, carefully: "Seems like you been getting familiar with all of 'em without me."
Not asking, not really. Some room in which Lestat can side step, just as he'd circled around the topic with Louis.
Well, circled until he'd lost his temper. But Lestat had tried.
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"I made my introductions," he says. He lowers his voice, mock-conspiratorial, "No one reads books anymore anyway."
Who can make the biggest mess? Louis is certainly capable of giving Lestat a run for his money, beyond capable, but Lestat is happy to try.
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Something about ancients and technology. They could be flippant about it if they like.
Thumb running along skin beneath the seal of the corset. Watching Lestat, who cannot hear anything Louis says into the cacophony of the many. Lestat, who has been making threats of his own. Louis is sure they're threats, regardless of how Lestat chooses to frame whatever it is he's been saying.
"You don't need introduction," is equal parts fond and exasperated.
What can Louis do? He can't put the words back into a bottle. He can only provide a more pressing distraction.
And Louis is capable of that. Of being a bigger and bigger problem, of being an insult to their fellow vampires.
Nothing said for a long moment. The fire is smoldering. Louis has considered that they might like to leave. He has also considered they might want to take separate cars.
"I didn't want you to do this," is what Louis says. "Interrupt your tour."
As if the interruption is the most pressing thing. Maybe it is.
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Lestat stays unhelpful, making much of the repetitive stroke of Louis' thumb pressed against his skin.
"It is my tour," he says, a little restless toss of his hair as he says this. "I can do what I wish with it."
He could leave it there—light and dismissive, a shrug. But his expression hardens, just a little, a look that wanders over Louis' face before finding his eyes again. "You don't think there is some deeper reason to all of this?" he asks, a note of reserve in his voice. "Or you think it's just my vanity, running wild."
He will be the first to say: it isn't not that.
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A struggle, to swallow the petty urge that wants to say well, yeah. To argue, because why not argue. Louis' anger is so near, so easily kindled.
He keeps touching Lestat, thumb slipped up beneath fabric, a ribbon falling down the back of his wrist. Lestat's breath ghosting along his cheek. Louis could steal him. Take him from here. Lestat would let him, he is sure of it.
"I ain't gonna make any guesses," is what Louis says. Some admission. They have been out of sync. "You wanna tell me, I'll listen."
He has objections. Of course he has objections. But those are for another moments. The fire is catching. Maybe Lestat returns to his adoring public. Maybe Louis leaves out the back door. Maybe they quit while they're ahead instead of arguing again.
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How much he wants to be touched more. Teased by the limits of Louis' patience, encouraging the desire to be held and palmed at and scratched and bitten. He shifts against him, needful, shameless, while they fail to kiss one another.
Lestat slides a hand around Louis' mostly bare shoulder. Trails two fingers along a leather strap, nail teasing at an intersection of metal loop.
"You want to have a conversation?" is a rhetorical, doubtful purr.
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Conflating the two. What they need to do as opposed what they want to do.
Louis doesn't necessarily want to speak about it. But what Lestat has invited cannot be erased. The wounds on his body can't be ignored. Louis finds them profane. Even when he had cut open Lestat's throat, it had felt unreal. An impossibility. Lingering wounds carry that same feeling, that same sense of something precious defiled.
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But before they can lapse into true impasse, slide in the wrong direction—
The fire alarm is headsplittingly loud, Lestat flinching as it goes off, mood shattering into a dozen sharp pieces. Fine, fine. A glance backwards for the stage, the back area, and then up—this way. He takes Louis' hand and starts moving, hauling him along towards the nearest fire exit.
At least this time, there is no limo of his own idling nearby. The show had just started. Just an open evening in front of him.
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His grip on Lestat's hip dislodged, caught only by the hand.
"We should go."
Before there is a messy entanglement with either fans or authorities.
But where?
Maybe some of that uncertainty shows in Louis' face. Where do they go? What is neutral ground for them now? They've fucked and argued and Louis has come back to him, what is even ground?
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Lestat glances back at Louis, sees that uncertainty, and casts him a crooked smile. Brings his hand up to kiss, leaving behind a messy smear of blood and glitter, and then releases his hand. It is only practical to do so, as Lestat takes off running—vaults the fence, moves at a blur across the street.
At the edges of hearing, a metal clang as his bodyweight lands upon a dumpster, uses it to leap up onto a rooftop. Of course, if Lestat didn't want Louis to follow, he could make more effort to disappear.
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Lestat could simply vanish. He can fly. He could leave Louis behind.
But the mode of travel is invitation in and of itself. Louis can make these jumps with ease, and so he does, moving in Lestat's wake. Ascending up to rooftops, farther from the cacophony of the alarm, the chatter of confused mortals who cannot understand why they just left—
Disregarded.
Louis turns, eyes skimming the horizon. He sees no one and nothing hanging in the air. Whoever stood upon that balcony, they are gone. Did not linger.
"Where?" is what he asks as he pivots back to Lestat. Hotel room? Another backseat of another car, somewhere Louis can be banished from again should they argue?
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He takes a breath. Sobriety looming, too. Unfortunate.
Lestat keys back into Louis. Well, what is sobriety when he feels insane at any time he is in proximity of his erstwhile companion?
"Your room," he decides, invites. Wherever that is, he doesn't care, he would simply like not to to have to deal with his own little life congregating around a shared hotel floor.
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Reckless, this proposition.
Louis watches him for a long moment. Considering. Measuring, to some degree, Lestat's sobriety. The likelihood of them tearing into each other, whether or not it is diminished or heightened by the absence of a high.
And then, relenting: "Yeah, okay."
Flinging himself into this, what conversation comes, what they make of the night together, as he flung himself towards the newness of his life and all the freedoms and violence that waited for them.
Turns, and this time it's Louis' task to lead them from rooftop to rooftop, assuming Lestat will follow.
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Louis answers and it sounds like relenting, and Lestat would like to say: well where do you want to go??????
But Louis turns to lead them off. And they have so much more bickering to do, he is sure.
Lestat follows, keeping pace rather than letting Louis stay too far ahead of him. His stage clothing doesn't love the activity of crouching and leaping and running, and by the time they are near the hotel, he is pausing to ensure he doesn't break right out of his corset, tugging the ribbons back taut before the last final leaps.
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Louis is not suffering in such a way. His tunic is slouching down off one shoulder still when he lands on the appropriate roof, harness twitched back into place with two fingers as Louis strides towards the rooftop door. The handle breaks with very little effort applied.
There's still time to reroute, but no. Louis leads Lestat down a single flight of stairs to the penthouse suite booked under Rachida's alias, layers on layers of discretion insulating Louis from enthusiastic book readers. One wall comprised entirely of windows, curtains tied neatly back. French doors opening onto a balcony. Vintage furniture arranged stylishly around this living room. There is a door ajar, revealing a slice of a bed, the edge of a coffin. Louis sees it, leaves it. Lestat has been invited in.
"Come here," is what he says instead, having kicked off his own shoes beside the door before treading deeper into the room.
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