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.
Maybe he is, maybe so. It feels like a twisting, certainly, and Lestat crumples for a moment, a childish folding towards the temptation to dissolve into tears.
Stubborn, his refusal to do so, or at least to let it stop him. He pushes Louis' hands away, "qu'importe," voice shuddering and thick, his fangs dropped against his will even as he tries not to curl his fingers, avoiding the use of his claws. He doesn't want to hurt Louis. If he hurts Louis, then nothing means anything anymore.
"Don't let it worry you," is wet, wild-eyed defiance. An echo, Louis' words in the limousine rearranged, thrown back. A smile, now, fangs on display, a harsh laugh. "Nothing can harm me. Nothing touches me. And anyway, what would you do about it? Mm?"
Forgets himself, shoves Louis in the chest, a challenge. "You fuck off and disappear at every turn, and what does it matter. I'm fine," is so convincing.
Were Louis to choose, he would prefer the tears to what they are doing now. To this moment where Lestat's eyes gleam wet anyway but he is explosive, furious, fangs and claws and neither soothed by proximity. Maybe made worse by Louis' closeness. Lestat shoves him and Louis feels his temper flare, heat rushing to his head.
Lets himself be shoved, lets himself stagger-sway backwards. Fists clench, breath blown out hard. And then another, a breath in and blown out. Hurt. Not by the shove, by what comes before. Accusations slung to him. Louis' need for space, thrown back at him. Perhaps held against him, all this time. His jaw tightens, biting down on the impulse to snap. To bare teeth back in return.
A conscious choice being made, forcing himself to be calm rather than let himself follow Lestat into this spiral. (White knuckling composure, more than he cares to let on.)
Louis steps back, puts two fingers lightly, carefully, to the red marks on Lestat's chest. A silent rebuttal. Something has touched him. Something has harmed him.
"You're fine? This is all fine?" Low, appeal growing hot as Louis speaks. "You ain't convincing me, maybe you wanna try something else?
He could have brushed some makeup over these bruises. Drank enough blood to get rid of them. Lestat could not state with honesty if leaving them so exposed was a conscious decision stronger than fuck it, but his chin tips up as Louis touches them. His own hand twitches like he could slap this gesture aside.
But maybe he is doing all of this for attention after all. He should let Louis' fingers linger.
"Then tell me about myself," he says, voice at a constant, low hum of upset vibrato. "You're so good at it, knowing all of me inside and out, better than I do myself even. Explain to me how this is not fine and what you do instead is more worthy, and none of my business."
At some point, pressing in closer, leaning into these accusing fingers. Letting them twinge slow fading bruises.
What happens if Lestat shatters? What happens if Louis pushes and Lestat breaks and—
Lestat steps into him. Louis' fingers press down, dimpling the skin. Neither of them have ever been good at retreating. Louis' temper is smoldering, catching, fed by frustration and the worry he's been carrying around with him since the very first stop on the tour. Lestat invites and Louis' jaw tightens and he thinks, Say nothing and he also thinks—
Fuck it.
"Because it ain't about punishment when I do it."
Is somewhere in the middle?
Punishment for them both. Punishment for Louis. Punishment for Lestat.
Or maybe it is only that Louis has only so many frames to apply, and he is using this one.
It hurts, and Lestat could not exactly say why, or describe the nature of the injury. What Louis is saying sounds true, impressed into him as his fingertips lay firm against tender, bruised skin. Tears break, spill, and it's annoying, annoying to display this kind of weakness when what he would prefer to show is strength.
Lestat turns, pushes Louis' hand aside with more resignation than anger, his other hand coming up to dash away streaking tears.
"Well I cannot do nothing," he says, voice thick, more misery than hostility, but both tangled together, fraught. "And nothing is all you have asked of me. All of this,"
turning back to him, a swing of an arm that gestures to, perhaps, the world at large, the club they just left behind, the baying of wolves at the edge of the woods,
Are they going to argue about this, or argue about them, about what Louis needs, what Lestat needs, the looming incompatibility of the two?
"You want me to ask you to stop?"
As if he hasn't been asking this. As if perhaps he makes it some formal thing, that might sway Lestat. They are both of them stubborn enough to dig in heels, to hurt each other, to recklessly careen towards altercations.
Louis could make bigger threats. Endanger himself.
He holds this card to his chest. They are not quite fighting yet, and that would make this a real fight.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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!"
no subject
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.
no subject
Stubborn, his refusal to do so, or at least to let it stop him. He pushes Louis' hands away, "qu'importe," voice shuddering and thick, his fangs dropped against his will even as he tries not to curl his fingers, avoiding the use of his claws. He doesn't want to hurt Louis. If he hurts Louis, then nothing means anything anymore.
"Don't let it worry you," is wet, wild-eyed defiance. An echo, Louis' words in the limousine rearranged, thrown back. A smile, now, fangs on display, a harsh laugh. "Nothing can harm me. Nothing touches me. And anyway, what would you do about it? Mm?"
Forgets himself, shoves Louis in the chest, a challenge. "You fuck off and disappear at every turn, and what does it matter. I'm fine," is so convincing.
no subject
Lets himself be shoved, lets himself stagger-sway backwards. Fists clench, breath blown out hard. And then another, a breath in and blown out. Hurt. Not by the shove, by what comes before. Accusations slung to him. Louis' need for space, thrown back at him. Perhaps held against him, all this time. His jaw tightens, biting down on the impulse to snap. To bare teeth back in return.
A conscious choice being made, forcing himself to be calm rather than let himself follow Lestat into this spiral. (White knuckling composure, more than he cares to let on.)
Louis steps back, puts two fingers lightly, carefully, to the red marks on Lestat's chest. A silent rebuttal. Something has touched him. Something has harmed him.
"You're fine? This is all fine?" Low, appeal growing hot as Louis speaks. "You ain't convincing me, maybe you wanna try something else?
no subject
But maybe he is doing all of this for attention after all. He should let Louis' fingers linger.
"Then tell me about myself," he says, voice at a constant, low hum of upset vibrato. "You're so good at it, knowing all of me inside and out, better than I do myself even. Explain to me how this is not fine and what you do instead is more worthy, and none of my business."
At some point, pressing in closer, leaning into these accusing fingers. Letting them twinge slow fading bruises.
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What happens if Lestat shatters? What happens if Louis pushes and Lestat breaks and—
Lestat steps into him. Louis' fingers press down, dimpling the skin. Neither of them have ever been good at retreating. Louis' temper is smoldering, catching, fed by frustration and the worry he's been carrying around with him since the very first stop on the tour. Lestat invites and Louis' jaw tightens and he thinks, Say nothing and he also thinks—
Fuck it.
"Because it ain't about punishment when I do it."
Is somewhere in the middle?
Punishment for them both. Punishment for Louis. Punishment for Lestat.
Or maybe it is only that Louis has only so many frames to apply, and he is using this one.
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Lestat turns, pushes Louis' hand aside with more resignation than anger, his other hand coming up to dash away streaking tears.
"Well I cannot do nothing," he says, voice thick, more misery than hostility, but both tangled together, fraught. "And nothing is all you have asked of me. All of this,"
turning back to him, a swing of an arm that gestures to, perhaps, the world at large, the club they just left behind, the baying of wolves at the edge of the woods,
"is what I was made to do. So I will do it."
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"You want me to ask you to stop?"
As if he hasn't been asking this. As if perhaps he makes it some formal thing, that might sway Lestat. They are both of them stubborn enough to dig in heels, to hurt each other, to recklessly careen towards altercations.
Louis could make bigger threats. Endanger himself.
He holds this card to his chest. They are not quite fighting yet, and that would make this a real fight.
"What do you need me to ask you, Lestat?"