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
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
To go together to Paris. To walk streets together. See what changed. See what remains.
To do it all without Claudia.
Louis kisses his mouth once more. Murmurs, "Yeah. We go to Paris."
And remember her. Their daughter. Claudia.