Feels like a fair question, even for all the ways Louis has withheld, veiled the extent to which Armand had—
Changed him. Louis has been changed. (Does not assign any other word to their life together.) Nearly eighty years, and what is left of Louis? What is his? What had been planted in him? What is a defect in Louis, one he came by honestly, and need excise?
Who is he without Armand? Without Lestat? Without either of them?
Hesitantly, Louis threads fingers into Lestat's hair. Strokes down his scalp to his nape and back again as Lestat rests his head. As Louis puts this question to him.
Louis, stating he needs something. It's hard to deny him anything, and this is true of things that run counter to what Lestat desires most. He could throw a tantrum, or just open his mouth and let everything he wishes to say tumble out. How desperately alone he feels. How he can make things better for Louis, including himself. How fearful he is of another eighty years slipping by.
Can't feel soothed for the hand in his hair, though he wants to be. Still, it's nice enough to linger. Washed of products and, to his eye, a little lank for it. To touch, though, the mix of strawberry blonde and platinum highlights are softer than usual.
Shifts. Balances his chin there on Louis' shoulder. "What do you need, mon cher?"
It sparks such a complicated rush of feeling. Affection for how easy Lestat offers it. Misery, for how it confirms what Louis knows he needs.
If they lean into each other, Louis will take all of the wreckage and let it calcify. It'd be so easy to just be with Lestat, to be all broken pieces and grow into him, never excavate what eighty years away had made of him.
Here, now, Louis allows himself the luxury of his fingers in Lestat's hand. He can still taste him.
"I don't know myself anymore," Louis whispers. "I got back all these pieces of myself and I don't know where they fit."
The first time Louis has said this aloud in so many words. Has spun for fight to fight, amassing wealth, artwork, flexing his own power, but in the wake of it all there's this. Uncertainty. Wreckage.
"I just need time. Can't be anyone's companion this way."
Anyone's. Might as well say Lestat. Daniel would be exasperated, rolling his eyes about Louis leaving this open-ended as if there's anyone else.
It makes him shiver, just once, the non-impossibility of Louis finding someone else as he finds himself. Someone without all this history and pain and disaster, someone who doesn't toy with him or need him so desperately he could dissolve into ash. It all feels too far away for Lestat to get his jaws around now. Maybe later.
Let me help, he wishes he could say. Don't burn anything, but let me help. Lestat, feeling at times like a man on his knees in the wilderness, hands cupped around a struggling flame, willing it to live, to burn brighter. Louis who needs time, not him. His desperate love.
"I know you," whispered back. Then, withdrawing, taking his weight off Louis to look at him. "I do. And you know me."
Unfortunately, says a small, cracked smile. "Can we text still?"
Indulges himself with fingers skimming Lestat's cheek, cupping his face. A trade, as Lestat sitting up requires Louis to cede his toying with Lestat's hair.
"Text me. Call me."
And then, relenting a little, "Between the times I come see your shows."
A blurry line Louis is drawing here. Not all the shows, but some. Appearances periodically because Louis doesn't know how to stay away. He was away so long. So much time lost and wasted away. He can't stomach losing more, being fully out of contact.
Blurriness or not, there is relief that reads as much in Lestat's expression as the incremental adjustments of his posture. Transparent as stained glass. He would not like to perform knowing Louis would never be there. He would not like to cancel the tour, not really, for all that he complains about its demands. He would not truly like to go into the ground.
Not yet. Not while the Many bay for Louis' blood.
"Good," he says. Curling a hand around Louis' arm, still gentle. So many things he would like to say, each one more selfish than the last. Tries to find something that isn't so. "And you can text me. Call me."
Of course. He is not the one establishing distance between them. But all the same, he would like it if Louis did these things.
"About anything," he adds, voice still strung taut in his throat.
They'd talked for hours in New Orleans. Well into the dark, hours and hours of winding conversation. Louis had spent eighty years missing it. Missing him. Dreaming Lestat because he couldn't bear the absence of him.
So it's no hardship to say, "Yeah, okay."
They'll talk.
Thumb runs lightly over the scar. A second pass sweeping Lestat's lower lip in the process.
"Will you wait for me?" Louis asks, hesitant. Quiet. "Not asking you to stop fucking anyone you want. Just..."
Maybe he needs to tell Louis to stop touching him so, because it drives him fucking insane, and the impulse to do anything but try to encourage misbehaviour is severely undermined each time his body optimistically begins to redirect his blood flow. But of course, that would mean Louis probably respecting his wishes.
Which is unacceptable.
"What if you did?" he asks, a twitch at his mouth.
This twitch of Lestat's mouth prompts a slightly firmer press of Louis' thumb. Reflexive. Indulging while they are here in this room, alone, all of Lestat's staff unlikely to bother them.
Louis should know. Louis should know he can ask anything of Lestat, if he does so while touching him this way (or not touching him at all). Or—
Well. They had their difficulties in this area, maybe so. But it was never what Louis thought. Of this, Lestat is certain. Mouth parting for a moment, a nudge of his chin up against that touch so he can speak.
Louis is still as he was: he wants Lestat all to himself. Jealous. Covetous. He has to struggle with the knee jerk impulse to say yes, to press his thumb into Lestat's mouth.
Struggles past this initial desire to remind, "You been lonely."
As much as it scorches Louis to think of Lestat taking that loneliness to anyone else.
Lestat's eyes shade a little, a breath leaving him. Ha.
"It doesn't help," leaves him before he can really think of an alternative response. "They aren't..."
Well. They aren't Louis. Also: aren't important, aren't sufficient. Aren't so vital to him to risk the thing he wants properly. He lapses into quiet, though. Is this another game he is initiating without asking? Trying to gift Louis some part of him, unasked for?
A small shake of his head probably unseats Louis' hand, but he collects it in his own instead. "Ask it of me," he says, "if it is keeping you from me. That's all."
Laced fingers, looking into Lestat's face, Louis finds himself wavering.
Wavering in his resolve, wavering between two possibilities.
"I got jealous, before," Louis starts. Amends to, "You made me jealous."
Assuming Lestat is not going to deny this. That some of it had been deliberate provocation.
"I wouldn't mind being jealous, sometimes," is a concession because Louis is still thinking of Lestat talking about loneliness. Now, then in Paris during the trial, then in New Orleans in their opera box. Thinking too of how Lestat wound him up and how good it felt to give in after, reach a breaking point and fall into him.
Louis sighs, a little frustrated, a little tired.
"I don't wanna share you after," can't be any surprise. "But maybe I gotta live with sharing you now. While I'm away."
And yes, Louis isn't always going to be away. But it doesn't feel like enough to shift this offering.
One hundred years ago, Lestat had toyed with the notion that they could promise each other their hearts and then fuck whoever they desired. It seemed like a sensible measure for an eternal love affair, and he had been selfish about it, greedy, and just as manipulative as the accursed book has accused him of being. And foolish. Jealous.
And now—
Louis says he wouldn't mind being jealous sometimes, and Lestat's smile is rueful. He has, by now, stopped actively crying, because it is hard to feel so desperately unlovably alone as Louis touches him, speaks to him gently. The impression of their kiss, still burning.
"I like you jealous," can't be some big surprise, but he says it like confession anyway.
Circling back to that night. Some apprehensive thing tightening his ribcage, a burning hot memory made of hurt and anger at this latest rejection, the great cacophony of the room as he destroyed close to every single object inside of it. Weeping in his immense self-pity, after, and all of everyone too afraid to approach the room. Finally emerging, on his own, opaque sunglasses and an intent path for the hotel room.
And the blur of time that's followed, spiraling, down to the misery of now. A different sort of misery, anyway.
He can feel his state of being constantly on the brink of tears threaten to spill, his vision become redder and blurrier, so he nods first, just in case. "I won't taunt you," he offers. Won't he? Some tiny voice in him, querying: can he trust himself? What makes him think any action he has taken in the past several months has been informed by rational self-control? Is he not still pretending, in this moment?
Shut up, tiny voice. He's busy trying not to ruin his life.
"I only wanted you however you wanted me," he says. "I felt that, perhaps, you didn't any longer."
A slight smile. Brat that he is, Louis can only assume that someday, eventually, Lestat will taunt him. It is in his nature. It is in their nature to needle each other. To hurt, and then find their way to some reconciliation.
Easier to consider that now than it had been then. Louis can at least appreciate the gesture, the aspiration.
"I do."
Saying this like handing Lestat a knife. Something transparently clear, an intrinsic fact about Louis, said aloud. Of course he wants Lestat.
"I want you all to myself," Louis tells him. Had Daniel written that into the book? Louis' recollection of the sentiment, delirious with hunger and desire as he looked across a ballroom at Lestat? The slight smile widens as Louis repeats back to him, "I don't like sharing."
It had been infuriating at the time. Galling. Louis remembers how angry he'd been as Lestat told him this, after proposing the very thing himself. Maybe they are far enough from it that Louis can invoke the argument, an eternity ago, without touching on all the rest.
Louis smiles this way as he says these things and so, gets away with it. Lestat mirroring it, a small flex of an expression. Feels a little numb to it, as if he has felt so many feelings over the past forty-eight hours that it is difficult to stir up new ones, receive and internalise the information that Louis does want him—
But all the same, coils around these words. Holds them jealously. They belong to him now.
He tips his head, as if peeking under covers. "Just not yet."
A whisper. Brings Lestat's hand to his mouth, breathes a kiss to his knuckles.
"But I think about you. Been thinking of you every night."
Every night can so easily mean every night of the tour, every night since the party. But Louis means every night, every night since they parted ways in New Orleans. Every night since he left Paris. Claudia had jabbed his chest, accused, and it was true: Louis carried Lestat in his heart, thought of him often, had summoned him as a dream because he couldn't stand their separation.
And now, their fraught reunion. This careful separation, a blurry distance that Louis finds equally hard to tolerate.
The kiss to his hand is accepted, and then, Lestat straightens his fingers so he can gently brush them against Louis' cheek. Relaxes again, holding Louis' hand.
"Then," he says, "when you are ready, I will be here. Waiting for you."
His voice is soft and eyes wet, but he permits himself a little curl of a smile as he considers him across the short distance between them. "And I will fuck who I want," as he traces a line in Louis' palm with a fingertip. "And think of you every night."
And probably continue to go insane. But if he owes Louis anything—and he certainly does—it's sparing him from such burdens. Find better outlets, better insulating barriers. But perhaps it will be better now.
It is not unlike the first time they attempted a similar arrangement. Louis feels a very familiar reticence, the urge to dig heels in and protest despite knowing how unfair it would be to deny Lestat his dalliances.
Still, very quietly, Louis asks, "It'll be just us? When I get myself figured out?"
When Louis can be good for Lestat, when they can be good for each other. The fans won't vanish. The fame won't vanish. There will still be stadiums of people begging for Lestat's attention. What will it mean for them then?
Jumping too far ahead. Presumptive. Louis can't help himself.
It is far ahead. Presumably so. But even beyond distance of time, it feels like the distance is one of possibility. Louis says 'when', and Lestat catches his eye as he considers it more so than the question at hand. It is an easy promise to make when it might amount to nothing.
Instead, he says, "Are you promising in return?" Keeps his focus even, his voice measured. "That you will come back to me?"
Louis emerged from Dubai, and flew across the ocean to New Orleans. Home. The only home he'd ever known because it had been where he and Lestat made a life together, raised Claudia together.
Home, to Lestat.
Louis runs fingers lightly over his cheek, fingers tightening in Lestat's as Louis touches him. Thinks to kiss him again. Thinks of Lestat on their balcony, ornate wig discarded at his feet, the look on his face speaking of New Orleans as he lit Louis' cigarette.
"Give me a little time, baby," Louis says again. Honey-toned in spite of the way his voice strains, fraying around the way they're denying each other. Wanting Lestat running alongside the way Louis wants what he's been asking for, wants the space to find himself on his own. "I'm on my way."
The tone, the endearment, the promise itself all suffuse through him as warmth. So much so that Lestat could almost feel resentment for it. Is it possible that he can make Louis feel such a way about him? That he could make Louis promise the world, if he asked?
But he doesn't feel resentment for it. Can't, due to all the aforementioned warmth suffusing and such. It is only familiar, and has been missed. Lestat answers the grip to his hand with a returned hold, drawing his hand in nearer. Tension bleeding from him, slouching a little into the plush side of his coffin.
"I will," he says. "And it will be only us."
Maybe he can extract more promises. Say it won't be eighty years. Say it can be counted in months at most. He opts for an easier pitch.
"If you say you will go to a show while you are in town."
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Feels like a fair question, even for all the ways Louis has withheld, veiled the extent to which Armand had—
Changed him. Louis has been changed. (Does not assign any other word to their life together.) Nearly eighty years, and what is left of Louis? What is his? What had been planted in him? What is a defect in Louis, one he came by honestly, and need excise?
Who is he without Armand? Without Lestat? Without either of them?
Hesitantly, Louis threads fingers into Lestat's hair. Strokes down his scalp to his nape and back again as Lestat rests his head. As Louis puts this question to him.
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Gentle. Resigned.
Louis, stating he needs something. It's hard to deny him anything, and this is true of things that run counter to what Lestat desires most. He could throw a tantrum, or just open his mouth and let everything he wishes to say tumble out. How desperately alone he feels. How he can make things better for Louis, including himself. How fearful he is of another eighty years slipping by.
Can't feel soothed for the hand in his hair, though he wants to be. Still, it's nice enough to linger. Washed of products and, to his eye, a little lank for it. To touch, though, the mix of strawberry blonde and platinum highlights are softer than usual.
Shifts. Balances his chin there on Louis' shoulder. "What do you need, mon cher?"
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It sparks such a complicated rush of feeling. Affection for how easy Lestat offers it. Misery, for how it confirms what Louis knows he needs.
If they lean into each other, Louis will take all of the wreckage and let it calcify. It'd be so easy to just be with Lestat, to be all broken pieces and grow into him, never excavate what eighty years away had made of him.
Here, now, Louis allows himself the luxury of his fingers in Lestat's hand. He can still taste him.
"I don't know myself anymore," Louis whispers. "I got back all these pieces of myself and I don't know where they fit."
The first time Louis has said this aloud in so many words. Has spun for fight to fight, amassing wealth, artwork, flexing his own power, but in the wake of it all there's this. Uncertainty. Wreckage.
"I just need time. Can't be anyone's companion this way."
Anyone's. Might as well say Lestat. Daniel would be exasperated, rolling his eyes about Louis leaving this open-ended as if there's anyone else.
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It makes him shiver, just once, the non-impossibility of Louis finding someone else as he finds himself. Someone without all this history and pain and disaster, someone who doesn't toy with him or need him so desperately he could dissolve into ash. It all feels too far away for Lestat to get his jaws around now. Maybe later.
Let me help, he wishes he could say. Don't burn anything, but let me help. Lestat, feeling at times like a man on his knees in the wilderness, hands cupped around a struggling flame, willing it to live, to burn brighter. Louis who needs time, not him. His desperate love.
"I know you," whispered back. Then, withdrawing, taking his weight off Louis to look at him. "I do. And you know me."
Unfortunately, says a small, cracked smile. "Can we text still?"
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Quickly.
Indulges himself with fingers skimming Lestat's cheek, cupping his face. A trade, as Lestat sitting up requires Louis to cede his toying with Lestat's hair.
"Text me. Call me."
And then, relenting a little, "Between the times I come see your shows."
A blurry line Louis is drawing here. Not all the shows, but some. Appearances periodically because Louis doesn't know how to stay away. He was away so long. So much time lost and wasted away. He can't stomach losing more, being fully out of contact.
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Not yet. Not while the Many bay for Louis' blood.
"Good," he says. Curling a hand around Louis' arm, still gentle. So many things he would like to say, each one more selfish than the last. Tries to find something that isn't so. "And you can text me. Call me."
Of course. He is not the one establishing distance between them. But all the same, he would like it if Louis did these things.
"About anything," he adds, voice still strung taut in his throat.
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So it's no hardship to say, "Yeah, okay."
They'll talk.
Thumb runs lightly over the scar. A second pass sweeping Lestat's lower lip in the process.
"Will you wait for me?" Louis asks, hesitant. Quiet. "Not asking you to stop fucking anyone you want. Just..."
Be there. Not to forget him.
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Which is unacceptable.
"What if you did?" he asks, a twitch at his mouth.
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"Ask you to stop fucking other people?"
Clarifying. A little doubtful.
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Louis should know. Louis should know he can ask anything of Lestat, if he does so while touching him this way (or not touching him at all). Or—
Well. They had their difficulties in this area, maybe so. But it was never what Louis thought. Of this, Lestat is certain. Mouth parting for a moment, a nudge of his chin up against that touch so he can speak.
"While I wait, and then after."
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Louis is still as he was: he wants Lestat all to himself. Jealous. Covetous. He has to struggle with the knee jerk impulse to say yes, to press his thumb into Lestat's mouth.
Struggles past this initial desire to remind, "You been lonely."
As much as it scorches Louis to think of Lestat taking that loneliness to anyone else.
"You ain't gonna be lonely still?"
Focus on the now, not on the future.
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"It doesn't help," leaves him before he can really think of an alternative response. "They aren't..."
Well. They aren't Louis. Also: aren't important, aren't sufficient. Aren't so vital to him to risk the thing he wants properly. He lapses into quiet, though. Is this another game he is initiating without asking? Trying to gift Louis some part of him, unasked for?
A small shake of his head probably unseats Louis' hand, but he collects it in his own instead. "Ask it of me," he says, "if it is keeping you from me. That's all."
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Wavering in his resolve, wavering between two possibilities.
"I got jealous, before," Louis starts. Amends to, "You made me jealous."
Assuming Lestat is not going to deny this. That some of it had been deliberate provocation.
"I wouldn't mind being jealous, sometimes," is a concession because Louis is still thinking of Lestat talking about loneliness. Now, then in Paris during the trial, then in New Orleans in their opera box. Thinking too of how Lestat wound him up and how good it felt to give in after, reach a breaking point and fall into him.
Louis sighs, a little frustrated, a little tired.
"I don't wanna share you after," can't be any surprise. "But maybe I gotta live with sharing you now. While I'm away."
And yes, Louis isn't always going to be away. But it doesn't feel like enough to shift this offering.
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And now—
Louis says he wouldn't mind being jealous sometimes, and Lestat's smile is rueful. He has, by now, stopped actively crying, because it is hard to feel so desperately unlovably alone as Louis touches him, speaks to him gently. The impression of their kiss, still burning.
"I like you jealous," can't be some big surprise, but he says it like confession anyway.
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Something Lestat would have proven even if Louis didn't already have an inkling.
"I been jealous," Louis says again. "But it's been so long..."
Eighty years since they touched each other with that kind of intent. And it had been a wreck. Ugly. Louis regrets the mess he'd made of it.
"I didn't want it to be like that. It didn't feel good to me, to have you like that."
Among other worries, other fears.
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And the blur of time that's followed, spiraling, down to the misery of now. A different sort of misery, anyway.
He can feel his state of being constantly on the brink of tears threaten to spill, his vision become redder and blurrier, so he nods first, just in case. "I won't taunt you," he offers. Won't he? Some tiny voice in him, querying: can he trust himself? What makes him think any action he has taken in the past several months has been informed by rational self-control? Is he not still pretending, in this moment?
Shut up, tiny voice. He's busy trying not to ruin his life.
"I only wanted you however you wanted me," he says. "I felt that, perhaps, you didn't any longer."
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Easier to consider that now than it had been then. Louis can at least appreciate the gesture, the aspiration.
"I do."
Saying this like handing Lestat a knife. Something transparently clear, an intrinsic fact about Louis, said aloud. Of course he wants Lestat.
"I want you all to myself," Louis tells him. Had Daniel written that into the book? Louis' recollection of the sentiment, delirious with hunger and desire as he looked across a ballroom at Lestat? The slight smile widens as Louis repeats back to him, "I don't like sharing."
It had been infuriating at the time. Galling. Louis remembers how angry he'd been as Lestat told him this, after proposing the very thing himself. Maybe they are far enough from it that Louis can invoke the argument, an eternity ago, without touching on all the rest.
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Louis smiles this way as he says these things and so, gets away with it. Lestat mirroring it, a small flex of an expression. Feels a little numb to it, as if he has felt so many feelings over the past forty-eight hours that it is difficult to stir up new ones, receive and internalise the information that Louis does want him—
But all the same, coils around these words. Holds them jealously. They belong to him now.
He tips his head, as if peeking under covers. "Just not yet."
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A whisper. Brings Lestat's hand to his mouth, breathes a kiss to his knuckles.
"But I think about you. Been thinking of you every night."
Every night can so easily mean every night of the tour, every night since the party. But Louis means every night, every night since they parted ways in New Orleans. Every night since he left Paris. Claudia had jabbed his chest, accused, and it was true: Louis carried Lestat in his heart, thought of him often, had summoned him as a dream because he couldn't stand their separation.
And now, their fraught reunion. This careful separation, a blurry distance that Louis finds equally hard to tolerate.
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"Then," he says, "when you are ready, I will be here. Waiting for you."
His voice is soft and eyes wet, but he permits himself a little curl of a smile as he considers him across the short distance between them. "And I will fuck who I want," as he traces a line in Louis' palm with a fingertip. "And think of you every night."
And probably continue to go insane. But if he owes Louis anything—and he certainly does—it's sparing him from such burdens. Find better outlets, better insulating barriers. But perhaps it will be better now.
Stranger things have happened.
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It is not unlike the first time they attempted a similar arrangement. Louis feels a very familiar reticence, the urge to dig heels in and protest despite knowing how unfair it would be to deny Lestat his dalliances.
Still, very quietly, Louis asks, "It'll be just us? When I get myself figured out?"
When Louis can be good for Lestat, when they can be good for each other. The fans won't vanish. The fame won't vanish. There will still be stadiums of people begging for Lestat's attention. What will it mean for them then?
Jumping too far ahead. Presumptive. Louis can't help himself.
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Instead, he says, "Are you promising in return?" Keeps his focus even, his voice measured. "That you will come back to me?"
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Louis emerged from Dubai, and flew across the ocean to New Orleans. Home. The only home he'd ever known because it had been where he and Lestat made a life together, raised Claudia together.
Home, to Lestat.
Louis runs fingers lightly over his cheek, fingers tightening in Lestat's as Louis touches him. Thinks to kiss him again. Thinks of Lestat on their balcony, ornate wig discarded at his feet, the look on his face speaking of New Orleans as he lit Louis' cigarette.
"Give me a little time, baby," Louis says again. Honey-toned in spite of the way his voice strains, fraying around the way they're denying each other. Wanting Lestat running alongside the way Louis wants what he's been asking for, wants the space to find himself on his own. "I'm on my way."
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But he doesn't feel resentment for it. Can't, due to all the aforementioned warmth suffusing and such. It is only familiar, and has been missed. Lestat answers the grip to his hand with a returned hold, drawing his hand in nearer. Tension bleeding from him, slouching a little into the plush side of his coffin.
"I will," he says. "And it will be only us."
Maybe he can extract more promises. Say it won't be eighty years. Say it can be counted in months at most. He opts for an easier pitch.
"If you say you will go to a show while you are in town."
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Maybe it'll be painful, watching Lestat from within a crowd or a private box. Maybe.
But Lestat needs him there. Louis needs to be there. He twitches a smile, head tipping a little as he watches Lestat relax.
"Could ask for something else, while you're trying to twist my arm. I'm here. I'll come."
A small offering.
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