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?"
Lestat tips his head to indulge in this touch. Perhaps they should have every difficult conversation like this, in soft voices with soft hands. Perhaps they could say anything to each other, then.
He withholds, still. There are certain vulnerabilities he can't expose without an undoing. But what he does offer is not nothing.
Again, resisting the urge to turn the question around. Did you think I couldn't handle it?
There is no way to ask the question without a tone, without accusation. It is a sore point, something that is half about Lestat, half about Armand, half about himself.
No.
Diverted impulse. Louis watches him. Says, "No, I don't think that."
A capacity for endurance. For suffering. A shared quality, Louis thinks.
Lestat releases Louis' shirt, relaxing a fraction by the way Louis cedes this point. This clutching is replaced by a slithering, presumptive circling of his arms around his once-companion's waist, backs of his knuckles resting against his spine, feeling the crisscross of leather beneath shirt material.
"Then you should know," he says, "I do only what I want."
That is who he is. Narcissist, undeserving. Lestat is only for Lestat. There were so many good quotes, dedicatedly penned by Daniel Molloy.
He is tired. He is angry. He won't indulge one, can't indulge the other, and so chooses to remain caught up in the circle of Lestat's arms, breathing. Letting the words settle. Deciding how to rebut them. If there is merit in rebutting them.
They are talking around things. Misaligned. Out of step with each other on every other movement.
Long moments of quiet. Of Louis watching his face. Lestat says this thing and maybe Louis said it before, maybe Daniel wrote it down. Maybe Lestat has divined it from the pages of the book Louis has yet to read but contain whatever Daniel has distilled from two weeks of conversation.
Louis sighs, and Lestat's expression sets sharper, defensive.
And Louis says this next thing, asks it so gently, and it feels like a kicked nest of hornets in him. Of course, the thing about that metaphor is that the hornets are already in there and already angry, an existing injury aggravated, but maybe from the inside looking out, it feels like damage freshly applied. What is the offensive thing that Louis says, here?
Nothing. Except suddenly he remembers his own agony, that morning over fifty years back, and how revolting it felt to be so preoccupied with that agony when it must be worse, so much worse, for the one who has injured himself. How useless his love, bleated into the void.
"Do you think I'm doing it for attention, then?" rattles out of him, instead of anything he would prefer to say. "To make you come rescue me?"
Melancholy and self-destruction isn't his game, after all, everyone knows. His eyes blur with thickened tears, disentangling himself from Louis. "I told you what I am doing. I've been truthful. I've been patient. I am trying," pushing him away for good measure, "and then there you are, once again, looking at me and behaving like I am a nasty little addiction,"
and when he's scared, he ridicules, he had never really remembered what Claudia had said that night, and remembered even less what he himself had said,
"returning to your own sick like you can't help yourself,"
storming towards where he'd thrown his corset, out of some expectation for intimacy,
"because I refuse to just do what you think I would be doing, selfish and blind and heedless, letting you get torn apart by the wolves while I sing my songs and roll through lovers and be everything you don't even want,"
never mind, he throws the garment at Louis with impotent viciousness,
A split second where Louis seeks to hold onto him, to stall Lestat's retreat before he is shoved.
The motion carries Louis a staggered step back. Louis permits it. Desires the space, any space, when Lestat's voice is pitching higher and higher, sonorous within this space. Some broken piece of Louis that flinches still, and Louis hates it, hates it, hates it but has never been able to excise it.
Trying to piece through all these things, what he has heard before, what is new, what it all means. The corset slaps his chest, falls to the floor, and Louis steps over it. Makes himself move rather than be still, be absent.
And Louis too, is thinking of Claudia. How incisive she was, how perceptive. What would she see in this moment that Louis doesn't?
He crosses the room anyway, despite the prickling awareness of how fast this could turn ugly. Their tempers. Their strength, both of them capable of far more now than they were then. Louis' own disadvantage. It cannot have shifted.
Still, he reaches for Lestat anyway. A bid to reel him back. A little like trying to reach for a feral cat, but reaching anyway.
"It ain't that way," he is protesting, appealing. Biting back and shoving away the impulse to match this energy.
It would be easier. It had felt good, it always had, to fight with him.
But there is no guarantee as there was before that they will fall into bed together. Smooth over the hurt and the damage. Find their way to an understanding. (Had they found understanding in New Orleans. Sometimes. Less and less as the years went on.) Louis holds onto the urge to implode, trying for—
Something.
For whatever is beneath and between all these shouted word.
"You getting it all twisted up in your head," is well-intentioned, and yet.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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?"
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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.
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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?"
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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?"
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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."
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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.
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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?"
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He withholds, still. There are certain vulnerabilities he can't expose without an undoing. But what he does offer is not nothing.
"You think I can't handle it?"
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There is no way to ask the question without a tone, without accusation. It is a sore point, something that is half about Lestat, half about Armand, half about himself.
No.
Diverted impulse. Louis watches him. Says, "No, I don't think that."
A capacity for endurance. For suffering. A shared quality, Louis thinks.
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Lestat releases Louis' shirt, relaxing a fraction by the way Louis cedes this point. This clutching is replaced by a slithering, presumptive circling of his arms around his once-companion's waist, backs of his knuckles resting against his spine, feeling the crisscross of leather beneath shirt material.
"Then you should know," he says, "I do only what I want."
That is who he is. Narcissist, undeserving. Lestat is only for Lestat. There were so many good quotes, dedicatedly penned by Daniel Molloy.
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Louis sighs.
He is tired. He is angry. He won't indulge one, can't indulge the other, and so chooses to remain caught up in the circle of Lestat's arms, breathing. Letting the words settle. Deciding how to rebut them. If there is merit in rebutting them.
They are talking around things. Misaligned. Out of step with each other on every other movement.
Long moments of quiet. Of Louis watching his face. Lestat says this thing and maybe Louis said it before, maybe Daniel wrote it down. Maybe Lestat has divined it from the pages of the book Louis has yet to read but contain whatever Daniel has distilled from two weeks of conversation.
Slowly, quietly: "Do you want to hurt yourself?"
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And Louis says this next thing, asks it so gently, and it feels like a kicked nest of hornets in him. Of course, the thing about that metaphor is that the hornets are already in there and already angry, an existing injury aggravated, but maybe from the inside looking out, it feels like damage freshly applied. What is the offensive thing that Louis says, here?
Nothing. Except suddenly he remembers his own agony, that morning over fifty years back, and how revolting it felt to be so preoccupied with that agony when it must be worse, so much worse, for the one who has injured himself. How useless his love, bleated into the void.
"Do you think I'm doing it for attention, then?" rattles out of him, instead of anything he would prefer to say. "To make you come rescue me?"
Melancholy and self-destruction isn't his game, after all, everyone knows. His eyes blur with thickened tears, disentangling himself from Louis. "I told you what I am doing. I've been truthful. I've been patient. I am trying," pushing him away for good measure, "and then there you are, once again, looking at me and behaving like I am a nasty little addiction,"
and when he's scared, he ridicules, he had never really remembered what Claudia had said that night, and remembered even less what he himself had said,
"returning to your own sick like you can't help yourself,"
storming towards where he'd thrown his corset, out of some expectation for intimacy,
"because I refuse to just do what you think I would be doing, selfish and blind and heedless, letting you get torn apart by the wolves while I sing my songs and roll through lovers and be everything you don't even want,"
never mind, he throws the garment at Louis with impotent viciousness,
"and for what!"
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The motion carries Louis a staggered step back. Louis permits it. Desires the space, any space, when Lestat's voice is pitching higher and higher, sonorous within this space. Some broken piece of Louis that flinches still, and Louis hates it, hates it, hates it but has never been able to excise it.
Trying to piece through all these things, what he has heard before, what is new, what it all means. The corset slaps his chest, falls to the floor, and Louis steps over it. Makes himself move rather than be still, be absent.
And Louis too, is thinking of Claudia. How incisive she was, how perceptive. What would she see in this moment that Louis doesn't?
He crosses the room anyway, despite the prickling awareness of how fast this could turn ugly. Their tempers. Their strength, both of them capable of far more now than they were then. Louis' own disadvantage. It cannot have shifted.
Still, he reaches for Lestat anyway. A bid to reel him back. A little like trying to reach for a feral cat, but reaching anyway.
"It ain't that way," he is protesting, appealing. Biting back and shoving away the impulse to match this energy.
It would be easier. It had felt good, it always had, to fight with him.
But there is no guarantee as there was before that they will fall into bed together. Smooth over the hurt and the damage. Find their way to an understanding. (Had they found understanding in New Orleans. Sometimes. Less and less as the years went on.) Louis holds onto the urge to implode, trying for—
Something.
For whatever is beneath and between all these shouted word.
"You getting it all twisted up in your head," is well-intentioned, and yet.
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