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)
This gesture, a hand on his chest, can only be read as an intimacy. Some bad faith synapse sparks, imagines Louis keeping him at bay, but it can't commit. It feels like I love you, and I see you, and I want to protect you, and a dozen other statements that Lestat has vacillated on interpretation, in trusting his own reading.
Reading too much into it, perhaps. But those past moments had always felt so true. His heart aches beneath warm hand.
"Why shouldn't I," has a defensive tremor to it. Wanders his fingertip along the waistband of Louis' pants as he does so. "My mangled story, flung out into the world to be feasted upon. What use is there to its reanimation if no one is paying attention? If they do not believe it?"
It's not the answer. The answer lays beneath his tongue like a little blade.
Lestat is cooler to the touch than Louis recalls. Skin warms beneath his palm, fingers and thumb coming to rest in familiar arrangement, and Louis thinks of this and of Lestat dismissing his own hunger.
A reversal of roles, though to what extent Louis cannot truly say.
Louis holds behind his teeth the truth: he hadn't wanted the book. He had meant to take it all back, erase it.
But it would remove any possibility of Lestat reconciling with Daniel. So Louis does not say this.
"It ain't just your story."
Their story. Louis' story.
Claudia's story.
"It ain't you they wanted to punish before. I wanted it kept that way."
Lestat is touching him. Louis' heartbeat is too fast, uneven. Reacting even if Louis' face is studiously schooled into neutrality.
"And it isn't just your story," comes out a little more impassioned. "But you are the one jealously guarding it, not me. Saying I have no part."
It feels all the same to him, his outing, the brewing war, the ripple effects of the book he didn't contribute to but nevertheless is a weighty part of. The punishment, mention of which invites a defense set to Lestat's mouth and jaw.
A breath pulled in before he continues, "We have already endured one unfair trial," chin lifting. "You already suffered greatly for it. You're asking me to allow it again."
"Don't," falls out of his mouth, almost involuntarily. A flinch.
Old habits. Daniel would scoff.
But it is still painful. Painful to remember, made more so by the realization of what it was he endured. How foolish he'd been. How much time he'd lost afterwards, living with the architect of his daughter's death.
A breath. His fingers curl in slightly at Lestat's chest.
"I'm asking you not to allow this."
A slide of his hands. Fingers crest the edge of red markings, injuries healing shockingly slowly.
A weakness in him that wouldn't mind dissolving into tears, again, some more. He has gotten too used to that indulgence, succumbing to his own melancholies as though he were still all alone in his shack, cushioned by the tolerance of his band, those too reliant on him to mind very much. And how has it served him, to do so in front of Louis? Momentary comfort, until he fucks up once more.
Lestat lets himself shutter closed. Dips his fingers past the first knuckle under Louis' waistband, gives a taunting tug. His eyes are wet. It doesn't matter.
"What makes you feel you can ask that of me," he queries, teeth shown between consonants, "when I can ask nothing of you?"
A span of a breath, seconds, where Louis could have asked, where did you go?
But then Lestat is gone.
An impossibility to simply ignore Lestat's fingers, but Louis refuses to let it draw his focus. Keeps his eyes on Lestat's face, the wet gleam of his eyes.
Not quite arguing, not yet, but something unyielding in Lestat feels as if it will tilt them in that direction. Louis deciding how much he wishes to indulge, to permit this.
"What are you asking of me?"
A starting point. Circling back, trying to find some kind of equilibrium once more.
This is true. They have spoken of it all before, of what Lestat wants and needs, and what Louis can give him and when. What intimacies Lestat has dragged from him have been stolen, taken, tricked, manipulated into manifesting, because he is a manipulator, he has had time enough to learn all the things he is. Cry about his maker and enjoy the coddling, and then what?
"You will do as you do," he says. "And I will do as I do. Besides," a little jolt of a shrug, some attempt to loosen himself of is own tension as he draws in closer. "They will come for me anyway. All I did was remind them of their cowardice for dawdling."
Another little tug at Louis' waistband. "We did well, didn't we? Tonight, destroying them?"
Louis no longer finds it very convincing. And it is fraying his own resolve, his own understanding of what he needs, the push and pull of it set against Lestat as he exists now, as he has been existing now.
"We did."
Swaying into that tug, permitting it. A moment of indulgence, before Louis says, "You asked me what I was doing before. Now I'm asking you. What're you doing, Lestat? What're you doing with this tour?"
Lestat meets his eye, a careful study behind the slightly watery sheen he's managed to stay before he looks down in the close space between them.
Gently, delicately, working Louis' tunic loose. Gathering the fabric.
"I want a different world," he says, head tipping. "They are trying to kill you out of some misguided desire to put the genie back into the bottle. To protect their secrecy for whatever bullshit they are hoping to achieve in this millennium. To punish you so that no one else will try it, or to stop you from saying more than you already have."
Lestat shakes his head. "I will drag us all into the light of visibility. We will be made undeniable in the eyes of the world. The young and unworthy will die, and the old will return to their graves, and the rest of us will live as something more than what we are now."
He looks back up, smiles a crooked smile, and adds, "I would also like a Grammy."
Some connective tissue to Louis standing on a dark balcony, saying The vampire is bored. To the quiet revulsion in his voice explaining the Conversion.
Louis doesn't want such a thing to come to pass.
But he is less willing to see Lestat put himself in the way of it. His once-companion, trying to alter the tides.
(Say nothing of what Louis has been doing.)
Louis cups his cheek, his jaw, fingers curling familiar there.
"Lestat," comes soft, exasperated, fond. "I liked it better when it was just about the Grammy."
It was never about just the Grammy, Louis guesses.
"But you ain't gonna stop. There ain't nothing I can say."
Also funny, considering the reverse. How unyielding Louis is and always has been.
No wonder Louis must get such a fucking kick out of it. Unrelenting, no yielding, no quarter.
Except maybe Lestat just likes this, the way he is being held and talked to, the familiar intimacy of it, the unique blend of feelings in the way Louis says his name. Lestat holds tunic fabric tightly, balled fists between them, like clutching something that brings him comfort.
"I won't stop," Lestat agrees. "But you can say whatever you like."
A little flicker in his expression, a disturbed ripple, and he says, "Why are you unhappy with me? Why must it be that you want every vampire after your blood and yours alone?"
Complicated question. Louis doesn't know how to answer it without saying too much, laying himself too bare. Reluctant to do so. They've argued. Lestat is very good at finding weak points even without Louis showing him where to find them.
And beyond that—
It is about Lestat. It is about Lestat in ways Louis thinks he wouldn't like.
"Lestat," like a sigh, an exhale. Louis curbing the impulse to lean his forehead against Lestat's. "It ain't..."
A soft sound, nearly a smile. Swaying in against Louis, reeling him in that fraction of an inch.
"I'm your maker," Lestat says, almost a whisper in the close space between them. Easily recalled, making this assertion so angrily in his limousine, wanting it to mean something. Means something different, now, a claim for himself rather than a claim over Louis. "I can withstand what you have already been withstanding."
He is difficult to kill, if he is anything. And if there is some other meaning to Louis' fear, he slides by it unknowingly.
It had made him so angry, the way Lestat had said it before. A raw nerve of a creature, kicking at the reality of the imbalance between them. Of the way Lestat exerted it, the way even teasing had been unbearable.
Lestat says it now, and Louis breathes out. A memory: We are joined by a cord—
Easier to hear, the way Lestat says it now. Easier to hold onto the point he's trying to make, not get swept up in bad temper, open up old wounds.
His thumb strokes Lestat's cheek, back and forth, as Louis' eyes search his. Asks, quietly, "Do you want to withstand it?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
Reading too much into it, perhaps. But those past moments had always felt so true. His heart aches beneath warm hand.
"Why shouldn't I," has a defensive tremor to it. Wanders his fingertip along the waistband of Louis' pants as he does so. "My mangled story, flung out into the world to be feasted upon. What use is there to its reanimation if no one is paying attention? If they do not believe it?"
It's not the answer. The answer lays beneath his tongue like a little blade.
no subject
A reversal of roles, though to what extent Louis cannot truly say.
Louis holds behind his teeth the truth: he hadn't wanted the book. He had meant to take it all back, erase it.
But it would remove any possibility of Lestat reconciling with Daniel. So Louis does not say this.
"It ain't just your story."
Their story. Louis' story.
Claudia's story.
"It ain't you they wanted to punish before. I wanted it kept that way."
Lestat is touching him. Louis' heartbeat is too fast, uneven. Reacting even if Louis' face is studiously schooled into neutrality.
no subject
It feels all the same to him, his outing, the brewing war, the ripple effects of the book he didn't contribute to but nevertheless is a weighty part of. The punishment, mention of which invites a defense set to Lestat's mouth and jaw.
A breath pulled in before he continues, "We have already endured one unfair trial," chin lifting. "You already suffered greatly for it. You're asking me to allow it again."
no subject
Old habits. Daniel would scoff.
But it is still painful. Painful to remember, made more so by the realization of what it was he endured. How foolish he'd been. How much time he'd lost afterwards, living with the architect of his daughter's death.
A breath. His fingers curl in slightly at Lestat's chest.
"I'm asking you not to allow this."
A slide of his hands. Fingers crest the edge of red markings, injuries healing shockingly slowly.
no subject
Lestat lets himself shutter closed. Dips his fingers past the first knuckle under Louis' waistband, gives a taunting tug. His eyes are wet. It doesn't matter.
"What makes you feel you can ask that of me," he queries, teeth shown between consonants, "when I can ask nothing of you?"
no subject
But then Lestat is gone.
An impossibility to simply ignore Lestat's fingers, but Louis refuses to let it draw his focus. Keeps his eyes on Lestat's face, the wet gleam of his eyes.
Not quite arguing, not yet, but something unyielding in Lestat feels as if it will tilt them in that direction. Louis deciding how much he wishes to indulge, to permit this.
"What are you asking of me?"
A starting point. Circling back, trying to find some kind of equilibrium once more.
no subject
This is true. They have spoken of it all before, of what Lestat wants and needs, and what Louis can give him and when. What intimacies Lestat has dragged from him have been stolen, taken, tricked, manipulated into manifesting, because he is a manipulator, he has had time enough to learn all the things he is. Cry about his maker and enjoy the coddling, and then what?
"You will do as you do," he says. "And I will do as I do. Besides," a little jolt of a shrug, some attempt to loosen himself of is own tension as he draws in closer. "They will come for me anyway. All I did was remind them of their cowardice for dawdling."
Another little tug at Louis' waistband. "We did well, didn't we? Tonight, destroying them?"
no subject
Louis no longer finds it very convincing. And it is fraying his own resolve, his own understanding of what he needs, the push and pull of it set against Lestat as he exists now, as he has been existing now.
"We did."
Swaying into that tug, permitting it. A moment of indulgence, before Louis says, "You asked me what I was doing before. Now I'm asking you. What're you doing, Lestat? What're you doing with this tour?"
no subject
Gently, delicately, working Louis' tunic loose. Gathering the fabric.
"I want a different world," he says, head tipping. "They are trying to kill you out of some misguided desire to put the genie back into the bottle. To protect their secrecy for whatever bullshit they are hoping to achieve in this millennium. To punish you so that no one else will try it, or to stop you from saying more than you already have."
Lestat shakes his head. "I will drag us all into the light of visibility. We will be made undeniable in the eyes of the world. The young and unworthy will die, and the old will return to their graves, and the rest of us will live as something more than what we are now."
He looks back up, smiles a crooked smile, and adds, "I would also like a Grammy."
no subject
Some connective tissue to Louis standing on a dark balcony, saying The vampire is bored. To the quiet revulsion in his voice explaining the Conversion.
Louis doesn't want such a thing to come to pass.
But he is less willing to see Lestat put himself in the way of it. His once-companion, trying to alter the tides.
(Say nothing of what Louis has been doing.)
Louis cups his cheek, his jaw, fingers curling familiar there.
"Lestat," comes soft, exasperated, fond. "I liked it better when it was just about the Grammy."
It was never about just the Grammy, Louis guesses.
"But you ain't gonna stop. There ain't nothing I can say."
Also funny, considering the reverse. How unyielding Louis is and always has been.
no subject
Except maybe Lestat just likes this, the way he is being held and talked to, the familiar intimacy of it, the unique blend of feelings in the way Louis says his name. Lestat holds tunic fabric tightly, balled fists between them, like clutching something that brings him comfort.
"I won't stop," Lestat agrees. "But you can say whatever you like."
A little flicker in his expression, a disturbed ripple, and he says, "Why are you unhappy with me? Why must it be that you want every vampire after your blood and yours alone?"
no subject
And beyond that—
It is about Lestat. It is about Lestat in ways Louis thinks he wouldn't like.
"Lestat," like a sigh, an exhale. Louis curbing the impulse to lean his forehead against Lestat's. "It ain't..."
Maybe it is.
But regardless.
"I'm afraid for you."
Fine. Something said aloud. A piece of it.
no subject
A soft sound, nearly a smile. Swaying in against Louis, reeling him in that fraction of an inch.
"I'm your maker," Lestat says, almost a whisper in the close space between them. Easily recalled, making this assertion so angrily in his limousine, wanting it to mean something. Means something different, now, a claim for himself rather than a claim over Louis. "I can withstand what you have already been withstanding."
He is difficult to kill, if he is anything. And if there is some other meaning to Louis' fear, he slides by it unknowingly.
no subject
Lestat says it now, and Louis breathes out. A memory: We are joined by a cord—
Easier to hear, the way Lestat says it now. Easier to hold onto the point he's trying to make, not get swept up in bad temper, open up old wounds.
His thumb strokes Lestat's cheek, back and forth, as Louis' eyes search his. Asks, quietly, "Do you want to withstand it?"
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)