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."
Lestat has already turned down Louis' offer to drink and dance with him. He thinks of that moment often with a sickly regret, as if he had done something profoundly against his own nature, and for no good reason at all. Now, it's the first thing he thinks of, and doesn't say it. A direct violation of the distance being asked for.
And won't he spend the whole time, thinking of it that way? Of violating Louis? Again? His gaze lowers, and finds that he doesn't want to decline the offer either, to extract a promise.
A little bit of comedy now, the two of them chronicled by Daniel.
Louis has been careful not to let himself think too much of what Lestat's interview will be. What shape it will take. What Lestat will tell Daniel, things he has never told Louis.
Jealousy is fast on track to outpace hunger as his constant companion, at this rate. Louis is trying not to think on that too deeply either.
Not a very auspicious beginning, his series of interviews. In the midst of his upset at Louis' silence, impatient, unforthcoming, untrusting. Lestat knows what would make it that little bit more tolerable.
"When you have the inclination," he allows, "I would like you there sometimes."
No inclination towards no only surprise that this is what Lestat chooses to ask.
His fingers sweep along the shell of Lestat's ear. Fusses, tucking a stray lock of hair back, touching his face. Working his way towards a question:
"You gonna be able to say all you need to say with me there?"
Would Lestat stop himself, for fear of hurting Louis with his truth?
And beyond that, Louis doesn't trust his covetous he is of all the pieces of Lestat's story that Lestat has never shared. Long years together where Lestat obscured, kept his past hidden away. Louis wants very badly to hear it. Leans back and away from that desire, worried that it will become an inclination to pry, to disrupt.
Nerves tingle in the wake of glancing fingertips, the subtle rearrangement of golden locks. This time, despite how aware he feels of that touch, Lestat manages not to tip into it like a touch-starved stray. A little dignity. Why not.
"Perhaps it won't work. Perhaps I will ask you to go away from it." A shrug. "Come anyway, and we'll see."
Lestat makes it sound easy. Come, listen while Lestat says all the things he may have never said to Louis. Go, if Lestat decides he does not wish for Louis to hear any of it after all.
Louis' thumb maps across his cheek. Grazes the scar at the corner of his mouth once more.
"Yeah," Louis says. A little helpless in the face of this request, of how he wants to give Lestat anything to make up for the distance Louis is creating between them. "Yeah, okay. I'll come sit with you while you and Daniel talk."
He thinks it's good. Louis' hand at his face is good, the little nudge across his scar, evidence of a history, evidence of a history undiscussed. The things he would like Louis to know. The things he would find difficult just saying to him.
All Lestat would like to do is reach out and grab Louis and pull him down into his plush coffin with him. They can listen to music and cuddle in the low violet lighting. But all of that, he knows, is in the too much category, so he draws in a breath, considers getting a grip for the first time since he lost it a little while ago.
"If you were a fan of me, would you mind very much waiting an hour past doors opening?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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And won't he spend the whole time, thinking of it that way? Of violating Louis? Again? His gaze lowers, and finds that he doesn't want to decline the offer either, to extract a promise.
"The interview, then," he says.
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A little bit of comedy now, the two of them chronicled by Daniel.
Louis has been careful not to let himself think too much of what Lestat's interview will be. What shape it will take. What Lestat will tell Daniel, things he has never told Louis.
Jealousy is fast on track to outpace hunger as his constant companion, at this rate. Louis is trying not to think on that too deeply either.
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Not a very auspicious beginning, his series of interviews. In the midst of his upset at Louis' silence, impatient, unforthcoming, untrusting. Lestat knows what would make it that little bit more tolerable.
"When you have the inclination," he allows, "I would like you there sometimes."
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His fingers sweep along the shell of Lestat's ear. Fusses, tucking a stray lock of hair back, touching his face. Working his way towards a question:
"You gonna be able to say all you need to say with me there?"
Would Lestat stop himself, for fear of hurting Louis with his truth?
And beyond that, Louis doesn't trust his covetous he is of all the pieces of Lestat's story that Lestat has never shared. Long years together where Lestat obscured, kept his past hidden away. Louis wants very badly to hear it. Leans back and away from that desire, worried that it will become an inclination to pry, to disrupt.
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Nerves tingle in the wake of glancing fingertips, the subtle rearrangement of golden locks. This time, despite how aware he feels of that touch, Lestat manages not to tip into it like a touch-starved stray. A little dignity. Why not.
"Perhaps it won't work. Perhaps I will ask you to go away from it." A shrug. "Come anyway, and we'll see."
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Louis' thumb maps across his cheek. Grazes the scar at the corner of his mouth once more.
"Yeah," Louis says. A little helpless in the face of this request, of how he wants to give Lestat anything to make up for the distance Louis is creating between them. "Yeah, okay. I'll come sit with you while you and Daniel talk."
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He thinks it's good. Louis' hand at his face is good, the little nudge across his scar, evidence of a history, evidence of a history undiscussed. The things he would like Louis to know. The things he would find difficult just saying to him.
All Lestat would like to do is reach out and grab Louis and pull him down into his plush coffin with him. They can listen to music and cuddle in the low violet lighting. But all of that, he knows, is in the too much category, so he draws in a breath, considers getting a grip for the first time since he lost it a little while ago.
"If you were a fan of me, would you mind very much waiting an hour past doors opening?"
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