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.
The day that Lestat does not feel a little rough and disarranged next to Louis' composure is an unwelcome one. He has never minded. He does not mind it now.
He follows him into a room that isn't lived in enough to smell deeply of Louis, but, carries traces all the same. Preferred products and soaps and scents, and that barely tangible, barely real thing that he carries with him everywhere. But otherwise, an anonymous room, the layers of lives embedded in its textures, a transience he has gotten very used to.
And Louis says 'come here' and Lestat pays attention again. A glance aside at abandoned shoes. His own boots strap him in firmly up past his ankles, but he will concern himself with this later as he instead does as he is told, following.
"How close?" is teasing, but also, you know. How much space does a conversation need anyway.
A little thrill to be reeled in, no matter how angry or not angry he is, and Lestat lets his hands come up and rest delicately on Louis' shoulders. Fingertips tracing along skin beneath the loose collar of his tunic. Close enough for their breaths to mingle, for the world to reduce to nothing but Louis' green eyes.
"That depends," he says. "Are you going to tell me again not to worry my pretty little head about the vampires who want to kill you?"
Tempting, that feeling of Louis' hand creeping for the seams of his clothes. Always tempting.
Louis would love to say this. He'd like it better if he could convince Lestat of it.
But it's late for it now, considering what Lestat has been up to. Louis isn't sure he can walk any of it back.
"I'm still deciding what I'm going to tell you."
Leave it to me, isn't off the table.
"Turn for me," he instructs quietly, palming the fabric.
Indulgent, wanting Lestat out of these clothes, these outfits. He had liked it so much when he'd come to Lestat and found him in all soft things, washed clean of glitter and eye liner. He is beautiful in these garments, yes. Louis simply wants to see him without the performance.
There is a smug twist to his smile that says already: he knows it's too late. He has made his move, this refusal to be ignored.
It softens a little at this instruction, given so gently, with such presumption. Who is there, now, to tell Lestat what to do? To want him in specific ways? A moment of lingering, and Lestat turns, a hand coming up to press against the corsetry at his stomach to help hold onto the garment.
At some point, his hair has been worked into curls, preserved with product that adds a sheen to the gold. Evidence of glossy platinum bleached highlights, grown out by an inch or two. Something of its natural warmer tones nearest the crown of his head.
And bruises, down his back. A set of reddish marks disappearing beneath the lace where someone got their claws in near the spine.
"I have never hidden what I am," he says, as he does so. "It is not like the theatre."
A humming acknowledgement. Lestat has said this thing. Louis is weighing it, deciding what he will do with it.
They hid themselves, once. Louis remembers. Louis might not have understood to what extent they were hiding, how the ways in which Lestat was keeping him and Claudia a secret. But they had hidden from mortals, once.
It was a different era.
Daniel hadn't done what he'd done with the book.
Louis' sweeps Lestat's hair to one side, over his shoulder. Fingers trail skin, an indulgence that stalls against the desire to drag his fingers through Lestat's curls, ruin the styling and the product.
"Why aren't these healing?"
Fingertips mapping bruises, skimming evidence of claws digging after Lestat's spine, the vital organs beneath.
Lestat is older than Louis. (An inescapable truth.) The marks shouldn't linger on him the way they sometimes do on Louis.
Not completely sober, then, as his nerve endings sing under the brushing of Louis' fingers along tender flesh. Or maybe that's just Louis.
"They are healing," Lestat replies. "You don't see open wounds, do you?"
They are healing slowly, granted. And he knows it is what Louis means. He toys with the slightly fried ends of his hair where its been swept over his shoulder, a streak of blood dried into a lock, absently worked at.
"That one got close, but I let him. All the better to twist his head from his shoulders."
Louis hums his disapproval, as if he has never made similar plays, taken similar risks.
It's different, with Lestat. This had never needed to be Lestat's problem.
"I ain't forgotten you haven't been eating like you should."
Maybe it had been just that once. Cookie had imparted signs of a particular kind of breakdown and maybe that's all it was.
And yet.
Louis hooks fingers into the laced ribbons, begins gently working them free to loosen the corset. He's taking his time. There's some disorientating echo of the past: their room in New Orleans, those rare evenings when Louis would let himself bend enough to put Lestat's cuff links on.
How instantaneous, that his eyes should sting in the wake of this observation. At the feeling of the band of lace and stays around his waist coming loose.
Blinked away, stubborn, and Lestat manages a breath of a laugh. "You are the expert at good feeding, now," is more unkind than he means to be in his attempt to deflect, and he bows his head as his hands go to align the looser corset to make its removal easier. "The tour makes the hunt difficult."
There. It is true, anyway. He cannot actually leave piles of bodies behind him in each town he performs, but it had felt correct, somehow, the deprivation. An inspiring hunger.
He has at least moved on from rats. That, he will permit.
Lestat pulls the corset away but cannot bring himself to move off from Louis' fingers. Steel boning has left red imprints in white skin, which is a shade paler than he ever was when he was following a routine amount of gluttony back in New Orleans. Or maybe the lights were different, lamp gold and lower than modern overheads.
He tosses the garment underhand away from himself, and then turns to face Louis. Eyes bloodshot around blue-silver mirrors. "A boy, this evening," he says. "Rolling on psychoactives and pineapple vodka. He let me take from his thigh."
His hand slips down between them, running a finger near Louis' inseam. "You should come by more. Party with me properly. Then you can speak with authority instead of insinuation."
Reflexive wrinkle of Louis' nose for pineapple vodka, diminished as Lestat touches him.
All things felt more manageable when Louis was touching Lestat. Controlled contact, in which Louis directed each place their skin met. It was made easier by Lestat giving Louis his back, a little distance even as they stood centimeters apart.
Now Lestat has turned. Louis feels that sense of control slipping, the world tilting under his feet. Feels some urge to grab Lestat by the hips, steady himself by the only fixed point in the room.
Of course Louis has seen, has been watching, and found it all very distasteful, and continued his distance. Lestat simmers in the sting of this latest rejection until the obvious thing occurs to him: Louis is here now, and he is touching him.
He draws that one finger up Louis' thigh, the narrow path of fingernail, swerving a path up towards his hip.
"You came tonight," Lestat says. "So there must be something you don't know."
Shades of San Francisco. Merriment as self destruction.
Or maybe he is only seeing what he wants to see.
"Why you putting targets on your chest," Louis says, voice low. Fingers coming to rest at the center of Lestat's chest, over his heart. "Why you drawing fire."
Well, none tonight. But how much has gone unseen? Louis isn't certain whether or not there have been many skirmishes or just a few. Lestat is not Louis. He is older, less likely to be mistaken as an easy target.
"Why you making yourself part of something that's my problem."
Quieter, but no less intense for it.
Edited (refining that dialogue) 2025-08-15 14:46 (UTC)
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no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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 follows him into a room that isn't lived in enough to smell deeply of Louis, but, carries traces all the same. Preferred products and soaps and scents, and that barely tangible, barely real thing that he carries with him everywhere. But otherwise, an anonymous room, the layers of lives embedded in its textures, a transience he has gotten very used to.
And Louis says 'come here' and Lestat pays attention again. A glance aside at abandoned shoes. His own boots strap him in firmly up past his ankles, but he will concern himself with this later as he instead does as he is told, following.
"How close?" is teasing, but also, you know. How much space does a conversation need anyway.
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Louis turns the question aside, leaves it unanswered in favor of reaching out and snagging Lestat by the corset ribbons. Draws him in.
How close? This close.
And then light pressure at his hip, fingers suggesting a turn, reaching for lacing.
"You done being mad?"
More teasing than needling, but only just.
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"That depends," he says. "Are you going to tell me again not to worry my pretty little head about the vampires who want to kill you?"
Tempting, that feeling of Louis' hand creeping for the seams of his clothes. Always tempting.
no subject
But it's late for it now, considering what Lestat has been up to. Louis isn't sure he can walk any of it back.
"I'm still deciding what I'm going to tell you."
Leave it to me, isn't off the table.
"Turn for me," he instructs quietly, palming the fabric.
Indulgent, wanting Lestat out of these clothes, these outfits. He had liked it so much when he'd come to Lestat and found him in all soft things, washed clean of glitter and eye liner. He is beautiful in these garments, yes. Louis simply wants to see him without the performance.
no subject
It softens a little at this instruction, given so gently, with such presumption. Who is there, now, to tell Lestat what to do? To want him in specific ways? A moment of lingering, and Lestat turns, a hand coming up to press against the corsetry at his stomach to help hold onto the garment.
At some point, his hair has been worked into curls, preserved with product that adds a sheen to the gold. Evidence of glossy platinum bleached highlights, grown out by an inch or two. Something of its natural warmer tones nearest the crown of his head.
And bruises, down his back. A set of reddish marks disappearing beneath the lace where someone got their claws in near the spine.
"I have never hidden what I am," he says, as he does so. "It is not like the theatre."
no subject
They hid themselves, once. Louis remembers. Louis might not have understood to what extent they were hiding, how the ways in which Lestat was keeping him and Claudia a secret. But they had hidden from mortals, once.
It was a different era.
Daniel hadn't done what he'd done with the book.
Louis' sweeps Lestat's hair to one side, over his shoulder. Fingers trail skin, an indulgence that stalls against the desire to drag his fingers through Lestat's curls, ruin the styling and the product.
"Why aren't these healing?"
Fingertips mapping bruises, skimming evidence of claws digging after Lestat's spine, the vital organs beneath.
Lestat is older than Louis. (An inescapable truth.) The marks shouldn't linger on him the way they sometimes do on Louis.
no subject
"They are healing," Lestat replies. "You don't see open wounds, do you?"
They are healing slowly, granted. And he knows it is what Louis means. He toys with the slightly fried ends of his hair where its been swept over his shoulder, a streak of blood dried into a lock, absently worked at.
"That one got close, but I let him. All the better to twist his head from his shoulders."
no subject
It's different, with Lestat. This had never needed to be Lestat's problem.
"I ain't forgotten you haven't been eating like you should."
Maybe it had been just that once. Cookie had imparted signs of a particular kind of breakdown and maybe that's all it was.
And yet.
Louis hooks fingers into the laced ribbons, begins gently working them free to loosen the corset. He's taking his time. There's some disorientating echo of the past: their room in New Orleans, those rare evenings when Louis would let himself bend enough to put Lestat's cuff links on.
They've come far from there.
no subject
Blinked away, stubborn, and Lestat manages a breath of a laugh. "You are the expert at good feeding, now," is more unkind than he means to be in his attempt to deflect, and he bows his head as his hands go to align the looser corset to make its removal easier. "The tour makes the hunt difficult."
There. It is true, anyway. He cannot actually leave piles of bodies behind him in each town he performs, but it had felt correct, somehow, the deprivation. An inspiring hunger.
He has at least moved on from rats. That, he will permit.
no subject
Louis feels the sting. Such a specific sore spot to dig a claw into.
He has to decide in the moment how much temper he wishes to allot to it, this sideswipe that Lestat follows in a more conciliatory tone.
"You been taking little sips, haven't you?"
Even toned, knuckles skimming skin, following the healing injuries downwards. Maybe a little needling in return, calmer than he feels.
no subject
Lestat pulls the corset away but cannot bring himself to move off from Louis' fingers. Steel boning has left red imprints in white skin, which is a shade paler than he ever was when he was following a routine amount of gluttony back in New Orleans. Or maybe the lights were different, lamp gold and lower than modern overheads.
He tosses the garment underhand away from himself, and then turns to face Louis. Eyes bloodshot around blue-silver mirrors. "A boy, this evening," he says. "Rolling on psychoactives and pineapple vodka. He let me take from his thigh."
His hand slips down between them, running a finger near Louis' inseam. "You should come by more. Party with me properly. Then you can speak with authority instead of insinuation."
no subject
All things felt more manageable when Louis was touching Lestat. Controlled contact, in which Louis directed each place their skin met. It was made easier by Lestat giving Louis his back, a little distance even as they stood centimeters apart.
Now Lestat has turned. Louis feels that sense of control slipping, the world tilting under his feet. Feels some urge to grab Lestat by the hips, steady himself by the only fixed point in the room.
"You think I don't know enough?"
Louis has not yet stepped away.
"I ain't on TikTok, but everyone else is."
And tabloids tend to embed videos.
no subject
Of course Louis has seen, has been watching, and found it all very distasteful, and continued his distance. Lestat simmers in the sting of this latest rejection until the obvious thing occurs to him: Louis is here now, and he is touching him.
He draws that one finger up Louis' thigh, the narrow path of fingernail, swerving a path up towards his hip.
"You came tonight," Lestat says. "So there must be something you don't know."
no subject
Familiar.
Shades of San Francisco. Merriment as self destruction.
Or maybe he is only seeing what he wants to see.
"Why you putting targets on your chest," Louis says, voice low. Fingers coming to rest at the center of Lestat's chest, over his heart. "Why you drawing fire."
Well, none tonight. But how much has gone unseen? Louis isn't certain whether or not there have been many skirmishes or just a few. Lestat is not Louis. He is older, less likely to be mistaken as an easy target.
"Why you making yourself part of something that's my problem."
Quieter, but no less intense for it.
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