Half the blankets that typically adorn Lestat's bed have been kicked away, wound up either puddled on the floor or bunched up at around the footboard.
Louis is keeping Lestat draped acros his chest, fingers sliding up and down his back. They're sweaty, and sated, and Lestat is human; he can't go again just yet even if Louis can. Sprawled together, Louis' fingers trailing along Lestat's skin, he thinks maybe—
"Les," he murmurs. "You with me?"
Trying to gauge whether or not this is the right moment. Whether they should try to talk now about offers and promises and things Louis wants that'll change everything for them both.
It can be frustrating that he can't just go and go. But it is also blissful to feel that warm blanketing fatigue, to lay limply and held and petted. Just give him a minute, mon cher, he does not say out loud but thinks lazily, finding himself in no real rush. The sun isn't soon. Louis' hands are making pleasant patterns on his back.
A summoning, then. Lestat turns his head, answers first with the graze of his blunt human teeth against Louis' shoulder.
Resettles. "Yes," in other words. "Despite your best efforts."
"I'll have to work harder next time," sounds teasing, might be serious.
But it's not for right now.
Louis lifts shoulders from the mattress, leans to catch Lestat's mouth as he turns towards Louis. The scrape of teeth stirs up interest, impossible not to, but Louis doesn't do anything with it. Touches Lestat's face.
"I wanna tell you something," he says softly. This had all felt like the best approach, to talk when both of them are spent and tangled up and Louis' spent some time devoting himself to making Lestat come apart a few times. But he isn't sure now, that it won't turn out he's misjudged. "And you gotta tell me how you hear it, and what you think about it. Okay?"
A big ask, maybe, given the topic. Given the track record they're tiptoeing past these days.
Considers: what if he kisses his way down Louis' body and swallows his cock, would Louis want to tell him something then? Would talk be necessary, and they can just touch and touch?
He tips his head into Louis' hand. No, there is really nothing he can say but, "Okay," which he does. More fond than trepidatious despite an instinct to shy away, relaxed as he is, warm as he is. No, he wants to hear anything Louis has to say to him, he is sure. Maybe Louis will say that he thinks Lestat should grow his hair out even longer, or that on reflection after a hundred years his dick is a little too big but Louis will aim to work through it.
It is not what Lestat is expecting to hear now, but—
The thing itself doesn't feel like it comes from pure nowhere. It does not hit him with shock like something like this might have done. (Not like Claudia, Lestat made speechless at the thing being asked. The rush of dread that followed.) He lowers his head to rest chin against Louis' chest. What will rush in now?
Oh yes, here it is. A hurt, a jealousy, a fear. Familiar except for the way he feels it all while Louis touches him this way, while they are tangled together bare and sated and sticky.
Louis made an offer. Wrench had refused, they would not be speaking of it. It is already done. It may as well have already happened.
It is a real effort not to touch Lestat's mind and see what he could find there. What he's yet to say.
Louis waits. He puts fingers into Lestat's hair, twirls the long silky ends between his fingers. It is a good day. The monster is far beneath the skin. Has not come snapping to the surface when Lestat hears what Louis has to say.
Lestat would prefer to perhaps sink into the ground. Or better yet into Louis' body, and not like that, but a kind of fusing, a possession, finding a place to be inside of his rib cage and held there until further notice.
And he is not angry, he finds. Not even angry in the way that feelings that are not anger can become it. At least, not yet.
"You want to make him yours," he offers, finally. Louis had said: tell me what you hear.
Yes, maybe. It's in Louis' nature, to possess. To hold close every single thing dear to him. Daniel, watched so intently for so long. Wealth, hoarded close.
Now, Lestat, wrapped up in his arms. Kept.
Wrench, stolen away.
Maybe there is something in Louis that considers the Gift and sees a way to possess.
But he shakes his head and it feels true.
"Ours," Louis murmurs, as if it is not—
Complicated.
He lifts his hand, draws knuckles soft down Lestat's cheek.
"Feels like he could slip away if we ain't looking," Louis says softly. "Like he's got a foot in his grave already."
Lestat draws a hand in from where it was thoughtlessly braced, covers Louis' hand with his own, turns his head to kiss Louis' knuckles.
And he thinks of Nicki. He thinks of Nicki the way he thought of Nicki on the terrible night of Claudia's turning. He had shouted his lessons into a void, unfathomable and unfathoming. And here, his Saint Louis wishes to save another. Or take a lover. Or both.
"And he will be bound to you," he says. "Always. His melancholy, his hopes, his desires."
No one stops being sad when they are made a vampire. He does not have to tell Louis this.
Treading into perilous territory. Painful territory.
A murmur, lower, "I ain't made another. Not since."
And stops.
Madeleine.
Who was Louis' only a technicality. Madeleine was Claudia's. Louis had been her instrument, but he'd felt Madeleine all the same. A tug in his soul. He'd tried to bleed her out of his body. He'd vomited up a bellyful of blood. He'd slashed his wrists and bled out all over the floor and he hadn't died and he'd felt her anyway.
It had felt unbearable, to feel someone so closely.
(To know Lestat had felt them both so closely, him and Claudia.)
A nod. Understanding, at least as far as the unsaid thing is concerned.
Yes, his, what, grand-fledgling? How strange to think of that, this lineage inching longer, and then burned, cauterised. Here, growing again.
He runs his thumb over Louis' knuckles, sensing that retraction. The dark pull of memory. They must stay here instead, where they are together. "I am thinking," he says, voice lower, quieter, "that you will drink from him. You will know him. You will love him. Just as I know and love you."
A tight kind of smile as he allows, "Perhaps already you do," with only the faintest wobble to his tone.
Louis' thumb draws along Lestat's knuckles. The back of his hand. Looks into his face and observes the tremor in his voice, the expression on his face. Reaches up with his off hand to cup Lestat's cheek, press his thumb to the corner of his mouth.
"Lestat," comes as a murmur, hushed.
Caught in the assertion. Can't say yes, won't say no. No words to put for all the attachments he feels for Wrench. No way to measure them against what he feels for Lestat. All things that can't be vocalized, and live inside his body instead.
This is what he wants to hear. No, not love, but care. Not love, but affection. Not love, but concern, or amusement, or pity. Louis does not say these things.
Maybe it was always going to be this way. Maybe Louis will always want a third. Someone to retreat to, or partner with. Someone better than Lestat at this or that thing. Someone calm and adaptable, someone who expects so little, who is made happy so easily despite his sadness. Someone Louis has chosen for himself.
It all feels a little off kilter. If they are in a land on a round globe that spins in space, Lestat feels like it spins at a new degree, tilted, uncertain. Maybe it will fling itself from orbit, go careening into frozen depths, or collide into a star. His eyes sting and prickle, and Louis' hands are holding him so gently, like the grip on the delicate hand of a dying elder at their deathbed maybe, or an injured bird who may or may not recover, no one is sure—
Moving, levering himself away, some creaking sound of protest muffled by gritted teeth.
Lestat does not believe he is crying, not yet. From the outside, his eyes are wet, becoming brighter for it. His voice is thicker, shakier. There is a tumultuous cascade of thought going on in his skull, like steady ground turning to quicksand, burying sentiments and promises of togetherness and being chosen, making Louis say it, and he had hesitated, hadn't he, when Lestat had said companion, he was not imagining it—
"Not a decade, maybe not," he is saying as he draws himself up onto his knees. "But fifty years, one hundred," his voice rising out of their little whispers, a louder bark.
Not a human dalliance, a brief flicker of life to be extinguished in time, but another vampire. A vampire who hasn't hurt him, who will make a better eternity, who is no tyrant at all, who is incapable of shouting this way, of feeling this way.
Lestat rises and Louis rolls up to mirror him, meet him there.
"No," firm, reaching out a hand to set to his skin, his shoulder, his back. Whatever will be permitted to keep them linked, even in this small way. His pulse has kicked up. He is aware of it, but Lestat is human. Won't hear it. "No, it ain't gonna be like that."
Does it matter how many times Louis says this, when he can't say the words that matter?
Rare but not unheard of for Lestat to refuse Louis' touch. When he is angry enough, petty enough. It is a near thing now.
But never when it is a tender touch. A stopping touch, a grab, yes, but it is all very different when Louis is reaching for him, when his voice is this way. No vitriol here, no sniping, which does little to stop tears from escaping the corners of his eyes or for the unflattering way he feels his sinuses fill as if allergic.
"Then what is it like?" he asks, still swift and hard in tone, but a structural waver, a crack down the centre.
Or maybe all of it. All three of them, separate and together. The configurations they exist in. How they would grow into them and past them as the decades passed.
Whatever. Whatever it is, whichever it is, the vision Louis has when he imagines his growing vampire family, his maker and fledgling.
Meanwhile, plucking at the sheets that had been shoved aside. Dragging a corner over his lap, sullen. Louis can find his own modesty, if he would like some.
No burning desire for modesty in this moment. Louis stays naked, moves along the bed to put himself in Lestat's eyeline. Lestat can look at him or not. Louis wants to see his face, wants to look at him.
"He thinks he's in a cage," Louis says quietly. "I want to give him a way out of it."
And then, softer, "Like you did for me."
Lestat, who saved him. Saved him before Louis was ever dragged onto the stage in Paris.
"He can take it and go, if he wants. Maybe he will, and I'll ask him to come back when he's done roaming. But I ain't never gonna leave you."
Louis will say this again and again. Maybe Lestat will believe him, will have this in lieu of the things Louis can't put voice to.
"Do you see a place for him with us? You gotta tell me, if you don't. If you can't."
Lestat's mouth is a stubbornly unhappy line, ever expressive, and tension carried in a tight brow as he lets his gaze settle on the bed between them.
Still, it is not so bad, this vision. Enough that the beartrap clutch of his despair lets off the pressure by some fine degree, where it squeezes his heart. Still, it is hard not to think about Louis' appeals from long ago, how it would be for him and Louis and Claudia, the family they would make. That he would never leave. Louis had been so panicked. The one in front of him is not.
And Lestat, well. He had been intolerable. They had killed him to escape him. No amount of new perspective can change that this is so.
But he doesn't want to refuse just as he doesn't want to agree. Refusing requires something more certain than the chaos he is feeling now.
"I will have to think about it," comes out as a slightly precious whisper.
His heart catches as Louis reaches out, touches him. Risks it. Lestat drags his focus up to meet his eye, as watery as his own is. A minor crumbling follows this entreaty, but perhaps this is a better sign than the steely haughtiness that denotes another lashing of fury.
Louis has asked him for this, to speak, to explain. They have told each other that they are going to be better.
"I don't know," is not deflection, then. A restless little touch, fingertips brushing Louis' wrist, hand dropping. "I don't know. It lies with me. The thing that needs to be better for us is me."
For a given definition of better in this fucking place, where everything is stretched and strained to the limit.
But they've had excuse not to talk about so many things because they've been here. Because the world had been far away, and now it is looming close. They have opportunity to go home. They have opportunity to bring Wrench with them.
And Lestat says this and reminds Louis of himself. How he had felt, walking in New Orleans. Picking up pieces of himself, carefully resettling each one within his body.
"We're different, you and me. It's been different, hasn't it?"
Enough so that it'll be different there. It has to be.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
let me here
Louis is keeping Lestat draped acros his chest, fingers sliding up and down his back. They're sweaty, and sated, and Lestat is human; he can't go again just yet even if Louis can. Sprawled together, Louis' fingers trailing along Lestat's skin, he thinks maybe—
"Les," he murmurs. "You with me?"
Trying to gauge whether or not this is the right moment. Whether they should try to talk now about offers and promises and things Louis wants that'll change everything for them both.
no subject
A summoning, then. Lestat turns his head, answers first with the graze of his blunt human teeth against Louis' shoulder.
Resettles. "Yes," in other words. "Despite your best efforts."
no subject
But it's not for right now.
Louis lifts shoulders from the mattress, leans to catch Lestat's mouth as he turns towards Louis. The scrape of teeth stirs up interest, impossible not to, but Louis doesn't do anything with it. Touches Lestat's face.
"I wanna tell you something," he says softly. This had all felt like the best approach, to talk when both of them are spent and tangled up and Louis' spent some time devoting himself to making Lestat come apart a few times. But he isn't sure now, that it won't turn out he's misjudged. "And you gotta tell me how you hear it, and what you think about it. Okay?"
A big ask, maybe, given the topic. Given the track record they're tiptoeing past these days.
no subject
Considers: what if he kisses his way down Louis' body and swallows his cock, would Louis want to tell him something then? Would talk be necessary, and they can just touch and touch?
He tips his head into Louis' hand. No, there is really nothing he can say but, "Okay," which he does. More fond than trepidatious despite an instinct to shy away, relaxed as he is, warm as he is. No, he wants to hear anything Louis has to say to him, he is sure. Maybe Louis will say that he thinks Lestat should grow his hair out even longer, or that on reflection after a hundred years his dick is a little too big but Louis will aim to work through it.
Or something. "What is it, chéri?"
no subject
Offer.
He doesn't think the word fits what Lestat had made to him on the altar in New Orleans. Appeal. Proposal. Not an offer.
He's not sure it fits what he'd given Wrench either. But it's the word he chooses now, explaining to Lestat.
A moment of quiet, breaking off. Touching Lestat's face. Remembering.
"I want to give Wrench the Gift. I wanna do that for him."
Maybe there. Maybe they start there instead.
no subject
The thing itself doesn't feel like it comes from pure nowhere. It does not hit him with shock like something like this might have done. (Not like Claudia, Lestat made speechless at the thing being asked. The rush of dread that followed.) He lowers his head to rest chin against Louis' chest. What will rush in now?
Oh yes, here it is. A hurt, a jealousy, a fear. Familiar except for the way he feels it all while Louis touches him this way, while they are tangled together bare and sated and sticky.
Louis made an offer. Wrench had refused, they would not be speaking of it. It is already done. It may as well have already happened.
"I see."
no subject
It is a real effort not to touch Lestat's mind and see what he could find there. What he's yet to say.
Louis waits. He puts fingers into Lestat's hair, twirls the long silky ends between his fingers. It is a good day. The monster is far beneath the skin. Has not come snapping to the surface when Lestat hears what Louis has to say.
Eventually, an entreaty: "Parle moi."
no subject
And he is not angry, he finds. Not even angry in the way that feelings that are not anger can become it. At least, not yet.
"You want to make him yours," he offers, finally. Louis had said: tell me what you hear.
no subject
Yes, maybe. It's in Louis' nature, to possess. To hold close every single thing dear to him. Daniel, watched so intently for so long. Wealth, hoarded close.
Now, Lestat, wrapped up in his arms. Kept.
Wrench, stolen away.
Maybe there is something in Louis that considers the Gift and sees a way to possess.
But he shakes his head and it feels true.
"Ours," Louis murmurs, as if it is not—
Complicated.
He lifts his hand, draws knuckles soft down Lestat's cheek.
"Feels like he could slip away if we ain't looking," Louis says softly. "Like he's got a foot in his grave already."
no subject
And he thinks of Nicki. He thinks of Nicki the way he thought of Nicki on the terrible night of Claudia's turning. He had shouted his lessons into a void, unfathomable and unfathoming. And here, his Saint Louis wishes to save another. Or take a lover. Or both.
"And he will be bound to you," he says. "Always. His melancholy, his hopes, his desires."
No one stops being sad when they are made a vampire. He does not have to tell Louis this.
cw emeto / suicide ideation
Treading into perilous territory. Painful territory.
A murmur, lower, "I ain't made another. Not since."
And stops.
Madeleine.
Who was Louis' only a technicality. Madeleine was Claudia's. Louis had been her instrument, but he'd felt Madeleine all the same. A tug in his soul. He'd tried to bleed her out of his body. He'd vomited up a bellyful of blood. He'd slashed his wrists and bled out all over the floor and he hadn't died and he'd felt her anyway.
It had felt unbearable, to feel someone so closely.
(To know Lestat had felt them both so closely, him and Claudia.)
no subject
Yes, his, what, grand-fledgling? How strange to think of that, this lineage inching longer, and then burned, cauterised. Here, growing again.
He runs his thumb over Louis' knuckles, sensing that retraction. The dark pull of memory. They must stay here instead, where they are together. "I am thinking," he says, voice lower, quieter, "that you will drink from him. You will know him. You will love him. Just as I know and love you."
A tight kind of smile as he allows, "Perhaps already you do," with only the faintest wobble to his tone.
no subject
Louis' thumb draws along Lestat's knuckles. The back of his hand. Looks into his face and observes the tremor in his voice, the expression on his face. Reaches up with his off hand to cup Lestat's cheek, press his thumb to the corner of his mouth.
"Lestat," comes as a murmur, hushed.
Caught in the assertion. Can't say yes, won't say no. No words to put for all the attachments he feels for Wrench. No way to measure them against what he feels for Lestat. All things that can't be vocalized, and live inside his body instead.
no subject
This is what he wants to hear. No, not love, but care. Not love, but affection. Not love, but concern, or amusement, or pity. Louis does not say these things.
Maybe it was always going to be this way. Maybe Louis will always want a third. Someone to retreat to, or partner with. Someone better than Lestat at this or that thing. Someone calm and adaptable, someone who expects so little, who is made happy so easily despite his sadness. Someone Louis has chosen for himself.
It all feels a little off kilter. If they are in a land on a round globe that spins in space, Lestat feels like it spins at a new degree, tilted, uncertain. Maybe it will fling itself from orbit, go careening into frozen depths, or collide into a star. His eyes sting and prickle, and Louis' hands are holding him so gently, like the grip on the delicate hand of a dying elder at their deathbed maybe, or an injured bird who may or may not recover, no one is sure—
Moving, levering himself away, some creaking sound of protest muffled by gritted teeth.
no subject
It is always this. Their oldest fracture, the first thing to break. Lestat wanting these words. Louis never able to give them to him.
And now, another.
"I ain't leaving you. It ain't that way."
no subject
Lestat does not believe he is crying, not yet. From the outside, his eyes are wet, becoming brighter for it. His voice is thicker, shakier. There is a tumultuous cascade of thought going on in his skull, like steady ground turning to quicksand, burying sentiments and promises of togetherness and being chosen, making Louis say it, and he had hesitated, hadn't he, when Lestat had said companion, he was not imagining it—
"Not a decade, maybe not," he is saying as he draws himself up onto his knees. "But fifty years, one hundred," his voice rising out of their little whispers, a louder bark.
Not a human dalliance, a brief flicker of life to be extinguished in time, but another vampire. A vampire who hasn't hurt him, who will make a better eternity, who is no tyrant at all, who is incapable of shouting this way, of feeling this way.
no subject
"No," firm, reaching out a hand to set to his skin, his shoulder, his back. Whatever will be permitted to keep them linked, even in this small way. His pulse has kicked up. He is aware of it, but Lestat is human. Won't hear it. "No, it ain't gonna be like that."
Does it matter how many times Louis says this, when he can't say the words that matter?
no subject
But never when it is a tender touch. A stopping touch, a grab, yes, but it is all very different when Louis is reaching for him, when his voice is this way. No vitriol here, no sniping, which does little to stop tears from escaping the corners of his eyes or for the unflattering way he feels his sinuses fill as if allergic.
"Then what is it like?" he asks, still swift and hard in tone, but a structural waver, a crack down the centre.
no subject
Or maybe all of it. All three of them, separate and together. The configurations they exist in. How they would grow into them and past them as the decades passed.
(Louis, still thinking in decades.)
no subject
Whatever. Whatever it is, whichever it is, the vision Louis has when he imagines his growing vampire family, his maker and fledgling.
Meanwhile, plucking at the sheets that had been shoved aside. Dragging a corner over his lap, sullen. Louis can find his own modesty, if he would like some.
no subject
"He thinks he's in a cage," Louis says quietly. "I want to give him a way out of it."
And then, softer, "Like you did for me."
Lestat, who saved him. Saved him before Louis was ever dragged onto the stage in Paris.
"He can take it and go, if he wants. Maybe he will, and I'll ask him to come back when he's done roaming. But I ain't never gonna leave you."
Louis will say this again and again. Maybe Lestat will believe him, will have this in lieu of the things Louis can't put voice to.
"Do you see a place for him with us? You gotta tell me, if you don't. If you can't."
no subject
Still, it is not so bad, this vision. Enough that the beartrap clutch of his despair lets off the pressure by some fine degree, where it squeezes his heart. Still, it is hard not to think about Louis' appeals from long ago, how it would be for him and Louis and Claudia, the family they would make. That he would never leave. Louis had been so panicked. The one in front of him is not.
And Lestat, well. He had been intolerable. They had killed him to escape him. No amount of new perspective can change that this is so.
But he doesn't want to refuse just as he doesn't want to agree. Refusing requires something more certain than the chaos he is feeling now.
"I will have to think about it," comes out as a slightly precious whisper.
no subject
As much as Louis wants to push. Wants Lestat to say, Yes, Louis, okay.
But he'd pushed before, for Claudia. Frantic, on his knees. Begging. Promising.
He doesn't want it to be like that now.
Easing closer, carefully, into Lestat's space. Reaching to cup his face, despite the sense that this is pushing too far.
"Think about it," Louis says, then entreats, "Talk to me about it. What you're thinking. What you gonna need to make it easier."
no subject
Louis has asked him for this, to speak, to explain. They have told each other that they are going to be better.
"I don't know," is not deflection, then. A restless little touch, fingertips brushing Louis' wrist, hand dropping. "I don't know. It lies with me. The thing that needs to be better for us is me."
no subject
For a given definition of better in this fucking place, where everything is stretched and strained to the limit.
But they've had excuse not to talk about so many things because they've been here. Because the world had been far away, and now it is looming close. They have opportunity to go home. They have opportunity to bring Wrench with them.
And Lestat says this and reminds Louis of himself. How he had felt, walking in New Orleans. Picking up pieces of himself, carefully resettling each one within his body.
"We're different, you and me. It's been different, hasn't it?"
Enough so that it'll be different there. It has to be.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
cw suicide mention
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
are we approaching bow territory