How painful it is, at first. Sweat slicks Lestat's palms, a human response to injury while he allows himself, happily, to lean his weight against Louis, in his arms, chin tipping further aside. Eyes open, still, watching the patterns in the wooden boards of the wall, and—
Ah, there. Louis begins to drink. Lestat can feel it, heart fluttering when it no longer possesses control of the rhythmic flow of his own blood, even as Louis begins so gently. No, he did not think this would happen again either. That Louis would ever choose to allow it.
Armand had spoken of vermouth. If so, if true, then Lestat's blood and the love it contains recalls the sweet variety, caramel and cherry and clove, cloying and insistent. A ballroom that is remembered as thick and redolent with plantlife, although it was not; a rundown shack, water streaking down the humid, dirty glass like sweat beneath closed shutters, the overgrown vines snaking up the side walls as though their admirer did not move from one spot for some time; a desperate heart beat, something like panic and excitement and fierce love while trying not to let his voice shake so much as he tells a frightened Louis of a promised home while fire thickens the air with smoke.
Sensory, frantic, a familiar clamour that is perhaps all the more vibrant for the way the maker-fledgling divide is gone. Lestat, anyway, is not trying to convey anything, he is only bleeding.
His fingers stroke soft at the nape of Lestat's neck as he drinks. Louis had always intended to stay out of Lestat's mind, maintain his privacy. But as he drinks he feels himself sinking into the vibrant rush of emotion, the flood of sensations and memory.
Louis is holding Lestat so tightly. Keeps him clutched to his body and caught in his jaws, existing in a blurry space where Lestat is himself and prey simultaneously.
How many nights had they spent falling into each other? Lestat giving Louis his throat and then coaxing him away, murmuring, diverting, and Louis releasing Lestat from his bite.
It's been almost a century. Lestat tastes as Louis remembers and different. Subtle changes. Overwhelming, because Lestat always is, always will be. Their heartbeats fall into perfect synchronization.
The whorls in the wooden boards begin to swim, warp, blur, at which point Lestat closes his eyes. Sinks.
He thinks of all those nights too, bedsheets and low electric lights or the velvet dark interior of a coffin. Louis, hungry, and Lestat eager to feed him, anxious for him to be well, to be happy. This feeling now, a desire to provide, a thrill to be doing so on its most basest level. A long dining table, laden with food, meat he has killed himself being carved and devoured. A purpose, and for a long time, the only one he had.
And then there is sensation. How good it feels, divorced of purpose, how selfish the offering can be. Louis holds him now and Lestat feels his body respond, growing hard between them even as his fingertips tingle, as his sense of gravity shifts. All the more intense, for being human. A memory slips through, of arms of wrought iron holding him, bare feet in cold snow, his terror and anger being pushed aside by the raw pleasure brought about by a vampire's bite.
He had echoed the word no over and over, even as his body said something else. Here, none of that, and what a relief it is to sink, to give in, to relax into the thing he wants. To feel like he is loved by someone he loves.
'Je t'aime,' wends its way through their cursemarks.
And Louis drinks all of these things down. This swirl of memory, the chill of snow, the laden table, the closeness of their coffin. All these pieces of Lestat, swirling in the blood, in his mind. He is laid open. Louis could dive in, delve deep, see all things that Lestat had refused to share.
The desire is there. But Louis can't. Won't.
Lestat whispers love to him through their cursemarks and Louis puts his answer directly into Lestat's mind as Lestat had once spoken to him:
I missed you, Louis tells him. I dreamed of you.
Slowly, slowly, a loosening of Louis' jaws. Transitioning to broad licks, laving the deep marks his fangs left behind. Lapping up the flowing trickles of blood, not yet knitting the wound closed. His grip doesn't loosen. If anything, Louis holds him impossibly tighter.
You taste like home.
Their home, what they made together. It had all come apart, but there had been love. It had been good, even amidst all that had gone so wrong.
He feels there is a weight to it, Louis' voice in his mind without taking the road paved by the Duchess. The sense of a vampire in his mind, he could do whatever he wants there, and there is something of an anxious psychic clench that does not try to push him out or conceal so much as grasp after, a reaching hand in the dark.
Louis missed him, dreamed of him, calls him home. There is no coherent response for this, just a liquid, overflowing happiness, a sense of awe.
And then he becomes more aware of the room, the present moment, the warm contact of Louis' mouth grown softer. Another rush of feeling, that perhaps can no longer be tasted, but: pride. Baseless, maybe, but pride nonetheless for Louis ending it as he chooses, no encouragement required. Lestat hums a content sound as his wounds are tended to, grip on Louis' clothes loosening, tightening.
"It ain't such a neat mark," Louis tells him, a conclusion drawn only from the drag of his tongue and subsequent kisses, softly applied to damp skin.
A little critical. A little longing. Louis would drink Lestat down to nothing. He would have all of him. Everything.
They are swaying. Not dancing, but movement. Lestat remains held, tucked in close to Louis' body. A little roll of hips, acknowledging and meeting Lestat's own. Fingers straying down his spine, touching possessively as he kisses up and back down Lestat's throat.
"How you feeling?" comes as a whisper, Louis' lips brushing the shell of Lestat's ear.
"It's yours," a counterpoint. Neatness irrelevant.
Lestat winds his arms around Louis' shoulders, holding on. Lightheaded, yes, but it is pleasant enough as the ache of the bite slowly diminishes, fades entirely. The specifics coming back into focus, the kisses at his throat and the placement of Louis' fingertips.
"Like a leaf on a lake," he answers, a smile against Louis' jaw, shaping a kiss there too. See, he is here. He is well. "Like all that remains of my blood has dedicated itself to a second task. How do you feel?"
Some things never truly change. He is hungry. But it is quieter now, diverted into other avenues and appetites. Preoccupied by the trickling drips of blood oozing from the bite Louis has left unhealed, as requested.
"Better," he answers. Not satisfied because how could he be? Lestat must remember how he'd had to coax Louis away from his throat. It is the same feeling, curbed only by Lestat's mortality and several decades of near tot restraint.
"You should have some water," Louis says into the delicate skin of Lestat's throat. "Something to eat."
Practicalities, divorced from the sway of their bodies and Louis' roaming fingers.
In response, Lestat concentrates on getting his balance on his own two feet—not to move away or even really stand under his own power, but to push against Louis, insist on their closeness, make himself a little less limp in his fledgling's arms even if he wouldn't mind just swooning in place. Slides a hand up Louis' spine, scratching blunt fingernails along the nape of his neck.
"And such little thought given to what I want," he chides, teasing.
Louis is only teasing himself, worrying at the bite, tending to every stray drop of blood. Lestat's pulse is evening out, settling, even before his fingers find their way to Louis' nape. He breathes out against damp skin, doesn't yet lift his head from Lestat's neck.
"Tell me about what you want," Louis invites. "You want me to bite you on the other side, even out the effect?"
Maybe that is what Louis wants, wishes for. Maybe.
There is also his bed, close to hand. There is a locked door. It is night and the boarding house is not yet quiet, but quieter than it was before Lestat had entered and closed the door behind him.
Louis is not done holding him. They had done so little of this in New Orleans before, and Louis can only assume the hurricane broke them apart in spite of the gravity of their reunion. He is indulging.
Louis says it, and Lestat wants it so immediately. There is simply no universe in which he would discourage Louis from taking the blood he needs, or simply wants. To be greedy, to take more than his share.
The soft sound he makes conveys this, knowing and amused and warm all at the same time.
"Yes," he tells him, lifting his head a little, the end of his nose nudging Louis' temple. "But under the condition that you take me to bed first."
Or during. He will not be too strict on the order of events.
Conditions, as if Lestat is as durable as he had been in New Orleans. (More durable than Louis had even known.
A thought there and gone, banished.) Louis knows that he cannot take as much as he would like.
And yet.
The bed is close, it would be simple enough to back Lestat onto it. But Louis lifts him instead, a momentary sacrifice of the bruising grip Louis had held Lestat in while he drank.
"We can negotiate," Louis promises. Trace blood at his mouth, skin flushed warm, Louis' appetite is all there on the surface. It is there in his eyes, still blown black with desire even after what he's already taken.
Desirous of more, and of more beyond that. Questions, "You gonna stay here with me tonight?"
A quieter desire, but just as vulnerable as the baring of his hunger. Louis, letting Lestat see these desires. Letting himself ask, tread along the blurry lines of their newly healed and still unnamed relationship.
Lestat goes easy, knees hiking up at Louis' hips even for just this short journey to the bed. A little like a housecat in the body of a mountain lion, happy to be there in Louis' arms, gazing at his face and drinking in all these details. Without thinking, he kisses at the smear of blood at Louis' lips, predictably unsqueamish for the taste of blood.
Sweeter still, this asking. Gently wanting him. It makes him want to laugh and cry at the same time, but thankfully he just says, "Yes," as he thumbs over Louis' cheek. Presses, just gently, over where a fang is concealed.
"When your eyes are this way," he tells him, "it reminds me of yours before you were turned, nearly."
Before. The human Louis was once, the night they met, how they met again after. The long year the spent together, every night in each others company.
He isn't sure of what to say.
The room is small, the bed is close. Louis lays Lestat out and follows after, straddling his hips and ducking his head to lap again at the bite. Lay himself out alongside Lestat, leg hooked up around Lestat's hips.
Finally, quietly, "I never knew you this way."
Human.
"Your eyes are almost nearly the same as they were then."
He gives a longer breath out as he is laid down, content to tangle their legs together as Louis does so beside him. Like they are sharing a coffin again, nose to nose.
Lestat gives a hum of doubt that his eyes should be so similar, but Louis would know best, he is sure. He curls his hands in Louis' woolly layers again, feeling the throb of the half-healed wound at his throat, still tingling from the last stroke of Louis' tongue.
"I wonder if you would recognise me," he muses, voice low, quiet between them. "If we would get along."
Louis' fingers trail across Lestat's cheek, his jaw, trail lower to find the ring of marks left by his teeth. The skin is already reddening, bruising. Louis feels a rush of satisfaction, pleasure. Pleased to have marked Lestat, feeling some complicated thrill over the way it lingers.
He is still comfortably aroused, holding his breath while Louis' fingers trace down his cheek to mark. The tangling hold he has of Louis briefly tightens in satisfaction, a non-urgent but all the same pressing need to be close, to have that contact, muffled through winter layers though it is.
A thump from a room upstairs, a smattering of conversation down the hallway outside.
"I had an apartment in Paris that sounded like this," Lestat tells Louis. "At all hours. Certainly, sometimes it was me. I would not choose it again," to be clear, a fingertip touching exposed skin past Louis' collar. "But it felt like the best of all worlds, for a time."
Until a townhouse in New Orleans. Until art on the walls, abandoning a coffin to sleep crowded in the other.
Louis is quiet. Torn. Here is Lestat, offering up easy what Louis had once wanted. What Claudia had pried after.
Claudia. Claudia and her little dressing table, her mirror, her coffin with its pink satin lining. Claudia in Paris, scratching at the confines of the body she'd been bound in. Their apartment together. It had sounded sometimes like this too.
(Spare no words for San Francisco. Sausalito. New York. Apartments and houses, places where Louis had made a home without either of them.)
It is hard to remember. It would be difficult to speak aloud.
Louis turns his head, ducks to place lips to the untouched stretch of skin at Lestat's throat opposite the bite he'd left. Kiss there, testing his own self-control.
"I wish you'd been with us," Louis says, there against the skin. Hush, treading over painful territory. "When we were there."
We. Louis, Claudia.
It's a complicated wish. It could never have been. Louis had dreamed Lestat there a thousand ways, but the reality was that Claudia wouldn't have tolerated it. Louis couldn't have let himself have it.
But everything would have been different if he had been with them. Everything.
Lestat closes his eyes as the other side of his throat is kissed. Spoken against. An internal pause at this invocation, us, that wrenches his heart around, and he is quiet.
Tender territory. What little he knows of Louis and Claudia's adventures in Paris nevertheless paint a picture of a period of happiness, of a life built without him. Free of him. Louis, who has missed him, has said so, wishes he was there, and Lestat can only say—
"Me too."
And try not to laden his voice with the weight of it, the hurt and the sorrow, and maybe come out successful.
It feels like a precipice, a nickname of old like a hand tugging him back from the edge of it. A sharp drop, otherwise, into some cold place.
It is warm here, held closer, kissed, murmured to. Maybe if Lestat was not counting on Louis to taste his blood again, he would say nothing, let it all evaporate into the warmth around him.
But he will taste, Lestat is sure, so he says, "What has changed?" A thicker quality to his voice, eyes now glossy but kept concealed where he closes them, tucked in so closely to Louis. "You escaped me. Why come back?"
The answer is all tangled up in their circumstances. Trapped in a place with no way out, with only each other to lean on. Louis knows it has changed things.
He knows Lestat isn't asking about how they live here.
The question is about New Orleans. The water-logged cottage. The hurricane. Their embrace in the middle of it all.
"Everything changed," Louis says quietly. "It all changed after I found out what was true about that night."
He slides a hand up between them, fingertips finding the edge of Louis' jaw. Brushing his thumb down his cheek, down to his chin, a gesture that perhaps Louis' nerve endings know well from a thousand times Lestat has touched him this way before.
"If I am the same thing I was when you left," he presses. A crooked little smile, all affection beneath the rest. "You know me anywhere."
Remembering the waiver signed as a hurricane bore down on the city. Private humor in that moment, the acceptance of true risk for the first time in so many years.
"But it ain't gonna be the same."
It will be something else. New. Different.
They are both of them changed. If the passing years have changed Louis, they have changed Lestat too. They've spoken not at all about it, but Louis is certain of it.
"It ain't gonna be perfect. But I don't want that."
Seventy-seven years of serenity, of all discord smoothed away. Louis can't abide it again.
It won't be the same, and it's taken as the assurance it's intended to be. Louis entering his shack and speaking such insight, reflection, wisdom, as though he had not spent decades hating and hating after all.
Lestat nods, barely, and it only needs to be that much with how close they are. Then, he noses in closer still so he can kiss Louis' mouth, like he had not been able to do for so long, like he had felt was a transgression even before that, when all things fell apart.
Gentle, sweet, brief.
"We visit Paris," he tells him. "When we leave this place."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Ah, there. Louis begins to drink. Lestat can feel it, heart fluttering when it no longer possesses control of the rhythmic flow of his own blood, even as Louis begins so gently. No, he did not think this would happen again either. That Louis would ever choose to allow it.
Armand had spoken of vermouth. If so, if true, then Lestat's blood and the love it contains recalls the sweet variety, caramel and cherry and clove, cloying and insistent. A ballroom that is remembered as thick and redolent with plantlife, although it was not; a rundown shack, water streaking down the humid, dirty glass like sweat beneath closed shutters, the overgrown vines snaking up the side walls as though their admirer did not move from one spot for some time; a desperate heart beat, something like panic and excitement and fierce love while trying not to let his voice shake so much as he tells a frightened Louis of a promised home while fire thickens the air with smoke.
Sensory, frantic, a familiar clamour that is perhaps all the more vibrant for the way the maker-fledgling divide is gone. Lestat, anyway, is not trying to convey anything, he is only bleeding.
no subject
Louis tastes neither.
His fingers stroke soft at the nape of Lestat's neck as he drinks. Louis had always intended to stay out of Lestat's mind, maintain his privacy. But as he drinks he feels himself sinking into the vibrant rush of emotion, the flood of sensations and memory.
Louis is holding Lestat so tightly. Keeps him clutched to his body and caught in his jaws, existing in a blurry space where Lestat is himself and prey simultaneously.
How many nights had they spent falling into each other? Lestat giving Louis his throat and then coaxing him away, murmuring, diverting, and Louis releasing Lestat from his bite.
It's been almost a century. Lestat tastes as Louis remembers and different. Subtle changes. Overwhelming, because Lestat always is, always will be. Their heartbeats fall into perfect synchronization.
There is nothing else in the world but them.
cw non-con flashbacks
He thinks of all those nights too, bedsheets and low electric lights or the velvet dark interior of a coffin. Louis, hungry, and Lestat eager to feed him, anxious for him to be well, to be happy. This feeling now, a desire to provide, a thrill to be doing so on its most basest level. A long dining table, laden with food, meat he has killed himself being carved and devoured. A purpose, and for a long time, the only one he had.
And then there is sensation. How good it feels, divorced of purpose, how selfish the offering can be. Louis holds him now and Lestat feels his body respond, growing hard between them even as his fingertips tingle, as his sense of gravity shifts. All the more intense, for being human. A memory slips through, of arms of wrought iron holding him, bare feet in cold snow, his terror and anger being pushed aside by the raw pleasure brought about by a vampire's bite.
He had echoed the word no over and over, even as his body said something else. Here, none of that, and what a relief it is to sink, to give in, to relax into the thing he wants. To feel like he is loved by someone he loves.
'Je t'aime,' wends its way through their cursemarks.
no subject
The desire is there. But Louis can't. Won't.
Lestat whispers love to him through their cursemarks and Louis puts his answer directly into Lestat's mind as Lestat had once spoken to him:
I missed you, Louis tells him. I dreamed of you.
Slowly, slowly, a loosening of Louis' jaws. Transitioning to broad licks, laving the deep marks his fangs left behind. Lapping up the flowing trickles of blood, not yet knitting the wound closed. His grip doesn't loosen. If anything, Louis holds him impossibly tighter.
You taste like home.
Their home, what they made together. It had all come apart, but there had been love. It had been good, even amidst all that had gone so wrong.
no subject
Louis missed him, dreamed of him, calls him home. There is no coherent response for this, just a liquid, overflowing happiness, a sense of awe.
And then he becomes more aware of the room, the present moment, the warm contact of Louis' mouth grown softer. Another rush of feeling, that perhaps can no longer be tasted, but: pride. Baseless, maybe, but pride nonetheless for Louis ending it as he chooses, no encouragement required. Lestat hums a content sound as his wounds are tended to, grip on Louis' clothes loosening, tightening.
"Leave it," he murmurs. "Let it linger, chéri."
no subject
A little critical. A little longing. Louis would drink Lestat down to nothing. He would have all of him. Everything.
They are swaying. Not dancing, but movement. Lestat remains held, tucked in close to Louis' body. A little roll of hips, acknowledging and meeting Lestat's own. Fingers straying down his spine, touching possessively as he kisses up and back down Lestat's throat.
"How you feeling?" comes as a whisper, Louis' lips brushing the shell of Lestat's ear.
no subject
Lestat winds his arms around Louis' shoulders, holding on. Lightheaded, yes, but it is pleasant enough as the ache of the bite slowly diminishes, fades entirely. The specifics coming back into focus, the kisses at his throat and the placement of Louis' fingertips.
"Like a leaf on a lake," he answers, a smile against Louis' jaw, shaping a kiss there too. See, he is here. He is well. "Like all that remains of my blood has dedicated itself to a second task. How do you feel?"
no subject
Some things never truly change. He is hungry. But it is quieter now, diverted into other avenues and appetites. Preoccupied by the trickling drips of blood oozing from the bite Louis has left unhealed, as requested.
"Better," he answers. Not satisfied because how could he be? Lestat must remember how he'd had to coax Louis away from his throat. It is the same feeling, curbed only by Lestat's mortality and several decades of near tot restraint.
"You should have some water," Louis says into the delicate skin of Lestat's throat. "Something to eat."
Practicalities, divorced from the sway of their bodies and Louis' roaming fingers.
no subject
So says Louis.
In response, Lestat concentrates on getting his balance on his own two feet—not to move away or even really stand under his own power, but to push against Louis, insist on their closeness, make himself a little less limp in his fledgling's arms even if he wouldn't mind just swooning in place. Slides a hand up Louis' spine, scratching blunt fingernails along the nape of his neck.
"And such little thought given to what I want," he chides, teasing.
no subject
"Tell me about what you want," Louis invites. "You want me to bite you on the other side, even out the effect?"
Maybe that is what Louis wants, wishes for. Maybe.
There is also his bed, close to hand. There is a locked door. It is night and the boarding house is not yet quiet, but quieter than it was before Lestat had entered and closed the door behind him.
Louis is not done holding him. They had done so little of this in New Orleans before, and Louis can only assume the hurricane broke them apart in spite of the gravity of their reunion. He is indulging.
no subject
The soft sound he makes conveys this, knowing and amused and warm all at the same time.
"Yes," he tells him, lifting his head a little, the end of his nose nudging Louis' temple. "But under the condition that you take me to bed first."
Or during. He will not be too strict on the order of events.
no subject
A thought there and gone, banished.) Louis knows that he cannot take as much as he would like.
And yet.
The bed is close, it would be simple enough to back Lestat onto it. But Louis lifts him instead, a momentary sacrifice of the bruising grip Louis had held Lestat in while he drank.
"We can negotiate," Louis promises. Trace blood at his mouth, skin flushed warm, Louis' appetite is all there on the surface. It is there in his eyes, still blown black with desire even after what he's already taken.
Desirous of more, and of more beyond that. Questions, "You gonna stay here with me tonight?"
A quieter desire, but just as vulnerable as the baring of his hunger. Louis, letting Lestat see these desires. Letting himself ask, tread along the blurry lines of their newly healed and still unnamed relationship.
no subject
Sweeter still, this asking. Gently wanting him. It makes him want to laugh and cry at the same time, but thankfully he just says, "Yes," as he thumbs over Louis' cheek. Presses, just gently, over where a fang is concealed.
"When your eyes are this way," he tells him, "it reminds me of yours before you were turned, nearly."
no subject
He isn't sure of what to say.
The room is small, the bed is close. Louis lays Lestat out and follows after, straddling his hips and ducking his head to lap again at the bite. Lay himself out alongside Lestat, leg hooked up around Lestat's hips.
Finally, quietly, "I never knew you this way."
Human.
"Your eyes are almost nearly the same as they were then."
no subject
Lestat gives a hum of doubt that his eyes should be so similar, but Louis would know best, he is sure. He curls his hands in Louis' woolly layers again, feeling the throb of the half-healed wound at his throat, still tingling from the last stroke of Louis' tongue.
"I wonder if you would recognise me," he muses, voice low, quiet between them. "If we would get along."
no subject
Soft. Certain.
"I'd know you anywhere."
Louis' fingers trail across Lestat's cheek, his jaw, trail lower to find the ring of marks left by his teeth. The skin is already reddening, bruising. Louis feels a rush of satisfaction, pleasure. Pleased to have marked Lestat, feeling some complicated thrill over the way it lingers.
no subject
A thump from a room upstairs, a smattering of conversation down the hallway outside.
"I had an apartment in Paris that sounded like this," Lestat tells Louis. "At all hours. Certainly, sometimes it was me. I would not choose it again," to be clear, a fingertip touching exposed skin past Louis' collar. "But it felt like the best of all worlds, for a time."
Until a townhouse in New Orleans. Until art on the walls, abandoning a coffin to sleep crowded in the other.
no subject
Louis is quiet. Torn. Here is Lestat, offering up easy what Louis had once wanted. What Claudia had pried after.
Claudia. Claudia and her little dressing table, her mirror, her coffin with its pink satin lining. Claudia in Paris, scratching at the confines of the body she'd been bound in. Their apartment together. It had sounded sometimes like this too.
(Spare no words for San Francisco. Sausalito. New York. Apartments and houses, places where Louis had made a home without either of them.)
It is hard to remember. It would be difficult to speak aloud.
Louis turns his head, ducks to place lips to the untouched stretch of skin at Lestat's throat opposite the bite he'd left. Kiss there, testing his own self-control.
"I wish you'd been with us," Louis says, there against the skin. Hush, treading over painful territory. "When we were there."
We. Louis, Claudia.
It's a complicated wish. It could never have been. Louis had dreamed Lestat there a thousand ways, but the reality was that Claudia wouldn't have tolerated it. Louis couldn't have let himself have it.
But everything would have been different if he had been with them. Everything.
no subject
Tender territory. What little he knows of Louis and Claudia's adventures in Paris nevertheless paint a picture of a period of happiness, of a life built without him. Free of him. Louis, who has missed him, has said so, wishes he was there, and Lestat can only say—
"Me too."
And try not to laden his voice with the weight of it, the hurt and the sorrow, and maybe come out successful.
no subject
Louis can't be certain it isn't just pain, pain for them both over what came of Louis and Claudia in Paris. If they had gone anywhere else—
The thought is simply stopped.
Louis has weighed it all out before. If they'd done this, gone there. It had nearly killed him. And it changes nothing. Claudia is still dead.
A pause, quiet, while Louis continues kissing at Lestat's throat. Sucks over his pulse. Tightens an arm about his waist.
Entreats, soft: "Les."
Old nicknames. It still comes easy.
no subject
It is warm here, held closer, kissed, murmured to. Maybe if Lestat was not counting on Louis to taste his blood again, he would say nothing, let it all evaporate into the warmth around him.
But he will taste, Lestat is sure, so he says, "What has changed?" A thicker quality to his voice, eyes now glossy but kept concealed where he closes them, tucked in so closely to Louis. "You escaped me. Why come back?"
no subject
He knows Lestat isn't asking about how they live here.
The question is about New Orleans. The water-logged cottage. The hurricane. Their embrace in the middle of it all.
"Everything changed," Louis says quietly. "It all changed after I found out what was true about that night."
What Lestat had done. What Armand had attempted.
Now Louis knew all of it.
no subject
He slides a hand up between them, fingertips finding the edge of Louis' jaw. Brushing his thumb down his cheek, down to his chin, a gesture that perhaps Louis' nerve endings know well from a thousand times Lestat has touched him this way before.
"If I am the same thing I was when you left," he presses. A crooked little smile, all affection beneath the rest. "You know me anywhere."
no subject
Remembering the waiver signed as a hurricane bore down on the city. Private humor in that moment, the acceptance of true risk for the first time in so many years.
"But it ain't gonna be the same."
It will be something else. New. Different.
They are both of them changed. If the passing years have changed Louis, they have changed Lestat too. They've spoken not at all about it, but Louis is certain of it.
"It ain't gonna be perfect. But I don't want that."
Seventy-seven years of serenity, of all discord smoothed away. Louis can't abide it again.
no subject
Lestat nods, barely, and it only needs to be that much with how close they are. Then, he noses in closer still so he can kiss Louis' mouth, like he had not been able to do for so long, like he had felt was a transgression even before that, when all things fell apart.
Gentle, sweet, brief.
"We visit Paris," he tells him. "When we leave this place."
is this how territory