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.
"I am human," for instance. "We are not in New Orleans. Or the planet Earth. We are not beset upon by the trivialities of a shared home or a shared street, of the debate of how we occupy our time. You have had a great many occasions to rescue me, tend my wounds. I could gift you daylight."
Lestat reaches out to Louis' other hand, taking it gently. Maybe he is not wearing his ring now, it being the night time, but he fidgets with his fingers anyway.
"I wish you would say it," he says, nearly a whisper.
It's not new. Louis knew this. Knew Lestat wanted it.
But it is wrenching all the same to hear it aloud.
Says instead, "Lestat," hushed, anguished.
The ring is close at hand, set out on Lestat's nightstand. A sliver of home, old habits. Their lives mingling, overlapping cuff links and ties, rings and watches. Distinct, always, but tumbled together on dressing tables and inside armoirs. Their lives had settled together easy. They have only barely begun to try here. Now they don't have to.
Louis' fingers turn, lace through Lestat's. Hold tight.
"Can't you feel it?"
All the ways Louis says it without the words.
It's not enough. It will never be. But he wanted it to be something.
He had promised he could, he thinks. That night in the church, he didn't need Louis to speak it. Only to nod, to reach for him. Lestat had promised his own love would be so sufficient that he could give it to Louis and wait for its return. Had wanted to dedicate himself to doing so.
Lestat sures up his grasp of Louis' hand. It feels shameful, to state the wish out loud. Make a demand of it.
"I felt I had tricked myself," he confesses, watching their hands. "Long ago. That I had felt it as a delusion, and I would believe it of you every so often and be happy that way until sense returned and reminded me that you could never. Not the one who had taken your life. The one who had hurt you so."
And so, sometimes it is still that way. Imagining the love telegraphed to him in other ways. Phantoms of it, or hallucinations, or something spectral.
He'd said the words over and over to Armand. Almost eighty years saying them aloud and it had been so easy.
It had been different. The feeling had not been so overwhelming.
Lestat had done these things. He had taken Louis' life. He had hurt him.
But that was not the whole truth.
"You gave me a Gift," Louis reminds him. "Ain't your fault it took me so long to see it."
Hard won knowledge. It had been a gift. Louis had felt it like a curse for so, so many years. Punished Lestat for it. Punished himself when Lestat was gone.
Here, now, Louis keeps hold of him. Long years apart, Louis wandering through the wreckage of his life, but he'd found his way back.
"You won't be human forever. Then you drink from me, like we used to."
And maybe that would make it easier. Maybe that made things easier then, when they'd made that a habit, before everything fractured and fell apart. Long years even before their fight when Louis hadn't been letting Lestat near him, not his veins, not his bed. They've been far away.
It is a sweet offering. And yes, there had been little question about what lay at the heart of them when one could simply open a vein, when one was willing to bleed.
Lestat lets out a sigh.
Then lists forward, pressing forehead to Louis' shoulder, his chest, knowing there is no universe he will push Louis away. And more than just an offering of blood, there is another kind of offering, a like we used to. Perhaps they can never really go back to what it was like when they were their happiest, and perhaps they don't want to, not really, but still. Something familiar, something shared.
"Let me think about it," he says, there, not quite muffled. "And then I will say there is such a place as you imagine. And then I will have you tell me that we are companions. That you choose me. That you will never leave. Over and over you will say this. I will try as well."
These are the things that might make it easier. A patience, a tolerance, for his worse instincts.
Louis puts his arms around him and Lestat moves in closer, arms sliding around him in return. Either he will wind up in Louis' lap or tip them both back into bed, either suits him just fine, stealing affection and comfort as a balm to restless feelings as directly as a cat seeks warmth.
Does this while Louis makes these promises. Tangles with, presses closely. Reminds himself how certain he had been that he would never feel this again, perhaps not from anyone, but certainly not the only one he wanted it from.
But a little room maintains for the sake of conversation. Negotiations.
Lestat, studying Louis' face. Active crying has ceased, at least, just leaving him a little raw at the edges. Considers this thing, untested. They had fought so much, before. It had felt like disaster each time. They came back together and avoided the injuries, kissed around them.
"I promise," he says. "Certainly I cannot promise to be on my best behaviour always."
He's had eighty years of best behavior. Or worst behavior, and then best behavior overwritten onto it. Erasing the worst. Omitting it.
He had all the worst of Lestat. Lestat had all the worst of Louis.
Louis keeps him held, settled into his lap. Fingers drawing up and down his back, encouraging Lestat back into a draping kind of lean. Close, Louis' hands say. Stay close.
"I want you. Wanna figure out what we look like when we aren't here."
Lestat slouches however Louis encourages him, resting the weight of his torso against Louis', staying folded up in his arms. There is no one else, he thinks. No one who holds him this way, no one who can love him, no one and no one and no one. No one else who wants him like that, who wants him so completely, who even could.
"Me too."
Maddening. Shades of the maddened despair he had felt in his solitude, save that Louis is hear and holding him and saying these things.
"You will fight with me," he says. Circling back, feeling for a specific. "You won't go quiet."
The silence is the worst. The silence is what kills him.
Is he truly so changed from who he was? Is he capable of staying present, always?
His fingers skim up Lestat's back, cup his face. Study him, traces of salt water on his skin, wide blue eyes. He puts his thumb over the little scar at the corner of his mouth.
"I promise I'll try," he tells him, as honest as he can be. "You promise me you won't let me stay quiet."
They'd started leaving each other before Lestat had ever been expelled from their home. Louis retreating inwards. Lestat fleeing the house when the sun set. Leaving each other by degrees before everything gave way.
No one else who will care to touch him this way, thumb at the little scar like it has its own virtues contained within it. Like Lestat has virtue contained within him.
"I promise," he says. "You promise you will remember you said that."
A little levity, this one, spoken softly as he leans in, nudges Louis into a kiss. But he will do it. He will not let Louis retreat from him. He will not give up, run off into the night.
They kiss. Louis keeps Lestat's face held firmly in his hands as they break apart again, eyes roaming over his features. Soft strokes of his thumb.
"I'll remember."
A precious thing, memory.
Terrible, to feel grateful for the ability to remember. To know that nothing will be taken from his mind. He'll remember this promise. He'll remember all their fights. He'll remember everything.
"I'm gonna remember," he tells him. "I want to."
Everything. These promises, this place. Everything. Their fresh start, he wants all of it.
Lestat allows his own capture, studying Louis back. Keeping a loose hold, arms around him. It is the two of them all at once, anxieties about what it means for Louis to love another easing if only because Louis is holding him so closely, imparting to him important information.
"Have you been forgetful?" he asks, with a whisper. Truer than he knows. For now he thinks of it as the fuzzying of time, smoothing out edges, both pleasurable and hurtful. He can imagine. Louis has led a full life, in their time apart.
It feels a little like being caught, trapped up between two less than ideal routes.
They are trying to be better. Louis is trying not to withhold.
"Not on purpose," he murmurs, which explains next to nothing. He was forgetful. He has been told he wished to be. It is difficult to believe that, but there is the possibility. A small possibility he had, once.
But how many times since? How much had Armand adjusted?
Louis can never know. He will have to recover all the pieces on his own.
Lestat isn't sure what he is coaxing, only that he senses some unsaid thing. The shape of it is not clear to him. The shape of it is too monstrous to discover on his own. Even now, he can still be surprised by the depravities of his kin.
"No?" he queries. "What are you forgetting?"
Spoken with a tone like: maybe he can remind him, in a sexy way, but there is curiousity to, a desire for an answer.
The question prompts a flex of anxiety, of anger. What he knows of now is monstrous, yes. But what about the rest? What else is missing? Could Louis uncover it without Daniel to ask the right questions?
Lestat is in front of him now. Asking. His weight is warm and wonderful. A miracle. For so long, Louis had thought he'd never see Lestat again, and now they are here. Even the specter of Armand can't fully dampen the miracle of it.
And so, as long minutes pass, Louis finds his way to admitting, "Not sure how much, yet. But I know...I got an idea of what. Of how I lost 'em."
Memories. Fights, lifted away. Smoothed into serenity.
He thinks now of Louis dragged from the stage. The depths of hunger he was made to feel. Of harming himself in San Francisco, the nature of that injury unclear to Lestat, and so too the nature of recovery. Thinks further back, glimpses of Louis, broken and battered. Vampires are ever healing things, but then, how can he be certain? How long might injuries last?
And then, yes, he does think of Armand. But not for long—
The shift in tone does not bring forth an answer. Instead—
"I'm sorry, Les. I didn't mean to drag this out."
An accident. Caught up making promises, and promising something Lestat couldn't understand. How could he know how much it mattered to Louis, knowing his own mind? Lestat hadn't been in any of the rooms where Louis had lost time, lost fights, lost pieces of himself.
He hadn't meant to do this. Invoke this. He'd wanted to make the kind of promises that'd make what came next better. Guiding principles. And then this thing Louis needed, had to have. He could have kept it to himself, and never seen any kind of pain on Lestat's face.
He has missed something, then. All this fuss about his terrible choices here, his fragile humanity and impulsive monster, the trouble he has invited and endured, his running to Louis' arms or calling for him his rescue, and now only to learn there is some fracture in Louis he is not aware of. (Perhaps Wrench knows it, mutters some fitfully selfish voice in him, crushed as soon as it emerges.)
"Don't," he says, instead. "No apologies."
It cannot be something that Louis soothes him about, Lestat knows. That cannot be their new way of being. Not now, certainly, when he feels a little sickened by himself.
"We can speak of it. We have all night." It is an offer. The offer to defer, too, but Lestat unwilling to imply he does not want an answer.
An unintentionally funny reassurance. Not dissimilar to what had been said that first night, him and Daniel and a mountain of drugs, an assortment of alcohols. They'd had all night, and then some.
Here, naked in Lestat's bed, Louis turns over the words. The expression Lestat wears.
Would he have told Lestat? Maybe. Maybe eventually. Vampires live long. It is unlikely he will never again cross paths with Armand. Or that Lestat will never meet him.
(A curling flare of anger. Hatred. It has nowhere to go.)
"You remember what I said when we talked first, about what we gonna be to each other here?" signals a decision, even if Louis is approaching the answer at an angle.
Lestat's hand has traveled up to stroke his fingertips gently through the hair at the nape of Louis' neck. Sits patiently, allowing himself to be studied, allowing Louis to do his thinking even as he desperately wishes he could look into his mind himself. Thinks about the promise he has just made, of not letting Louis retreat into quiet.
Not exactly the same, this, but maybe similar. Maybe Louis needs someone to draw things out. (Ha.)
"I'm sure I do," he tells him. "What words spring to mind exactly?"
A pause, then Louis shakes his head. Visibly reconsiders his approach. He doesn't want to try and explain how it felt to be here, to tell Lestat he has spent so much time trying to sort through wreckage.
He hadn't planned on telling Lestat any of this. Maybe he should have. Maybe it just felt—
It felt like he had time. More time, to figure out what he could say. How he should say it.
"Me and him," where him can only be one person. "Fought, sometimes. I don't know how much."
How much more was there? How many arguments? How much did Armand take from Louis' mind?
"I'm not sure. Because he'd fix it. In my head."
Abrupt. Direct. Here is what was done. This is what Armand has done.
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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."
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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."
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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.
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Yes, it has been different.
"I am human," for instance. "We are not in New Orleans. Or the planet Earth. We are not beset upon by the trivialities of a shared home or a shared street, of the debate of how we occupy our time. You have had a great many occasions to rescue me, tend my wounds. I could gift you daylight."
Lestat reaches out to Louis' other hand, taking it gently. Maybe he is not wearing his ring now, it being the night time, but he fidgets with his fingers anyway.
"I wish you would say it," he says, nearly a whisper.
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But it is wrenching all the same to hear it aloud.
Says instead, "Lestat," hushed, anguished.
The ring is close at hand, set out on Lestat's nightstand. A sliver of home, old habits. Their lives mingling, overlapping cuff links and ties, rings and watches. Distinct, always, but tumbled together on dressing tables and inside armoirs. Their lives had settled together easy. They have only barely begun to try here. Now they don't have to.
Louis' fingers turn, lace through Lestat's. Hold tight.
"Can't you feel it?"
All the ways Louis says it without the words.
It's not enough. It will never be. But he wanted it to be something.
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He had promised he could, he thinks. That night in the church, he didn't need Louis to speak it. Only to nod, to reach for him. Lestat had promised his own love would be so sufficient that he could give it to Louis and wait for its return. Had wanted to dedicate himself to doing so.
Lestat sures up his grasp of Louis' hand. It feels shameful, to state the wish out loud. Make a demand of it.
"I felt I had tricked myself," he confesses, watching their hands. "Long ago. That I had felt it as a delusion, and I would believe it of you every so often and be happy that way until sense returned and reminded me that you could never. Not the one who had taken your life. The one who had hurt you so."
And so, sometimes it is still that way. Imagining the love telegraphed to him in other ways. Phantoms of it, or hallucinations, or something spectral.
no subject
It had been different. The feeling had not been so overwhelming.
Lestat had done these things. He had taken Louis' life. He had hurt him.
But that was not the whole truth.
"You gave me a Gift," Louis reminds him. "Ain't your fault it took me so long to see it."
Hard won knowledge. It had been a gift. Louis had felt it like a curse for so, so many years. Punished Lestat for it. Punished himself when Lestat was gone.
Here, now, Louis keeps hold of him. Long years apart, Louis wandering through the wreckage of his life, but he'd found his way back.
"You won't be human forever. Then you drink from me, like we used to."
And maybe that would make it easier. Maybe that made things easier then, when they'd made that a habit, before everything fractured and fell apart. Long years even before their fight when Louis hadn't been letting Lestat near him, not his veins, not his bed. They've been far away.
Now they're not. Don't have to.
no subject
Lestat lets out a sigh.
Then lists forward, pressing forehead to Louis' shoulder, his chest, knowing there is no universe he will push Louis away. And more than just an offering of blood, there is another kind of offering, a like we used to. Perhaps they can never really go back to what it was like when they were their happiest, and perhaps they don't want to, not really, but still. Something familiar, something shared.
"Let me think about it," he says, there, not quite muffled. "And then I will say there is such a place as you imagine. And then I will have you tell me that we are companions. That you choose me. That you will never leave. Over and over you will say this. I will try as well."
These are the things that might make it easier. A patience, a tolerance, for his worse instincts.
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"Okay."
Louis will be patient. He will be present. They will come to a solution together.
In the meantime—
"We gonna fight," he promises. "I'm not promising we ain't gonna fight, Lestat."
And he cannot explain exactly why it's so important without explaining Armand. What he had done. What Louis had perhaps asked for, perhaps allowed.
"But we're gonna come back to each other every time. Patch it up after we scream ourselves out."
Choice. Being allowed the ugliest parts of themselves, without any editing or erasing.
"Promise me," he asks. "Promise me we're gonna fight. And that we'll make up after."
Not like they used to. Maybe a little like they used to.
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Does this while Louis makes these promises. Tangles with, presses closely. Reminds himself how certain he had been that he would never feel this again, perhaps not from anyone, but certainly not the only one he wanted it from.
But a little room maintains for the sake of conversation. Negotiations.
Lestat, studying Louis' face. Active crying has ceased, at least, just leaving him a little raw at the edges. Considers this thing, untested. They had fought so much, before. It had felt like disaster each time. They came back together and avoided the injuries, kissed around them.
"I promise," he says. "Certainly I cannot promise to be on my best behaviour always."
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He's had eighty years of best behavior. Or worst behavior, and then best behavior overwritten onto it. Erasing the worst. Omitting it.
He had all the worst of Lestat. Lestat had all the worst of Louis.
Louis keeps him held, settled into his lap. Fingers drawing up and down his back, encouraging Lestat back into a draping kind of lean. Close, Louis' hands say. Stay close.
"I want you. Wanna figure out what we look like when we aren't here."
no subject
"Me too."
Maddening. Shades of the maddened despair he had felt in his solitude, save that Louis is hear and holding him and saying these things.
"You will fight with me," he says. Circling back, feeling for a specific. "You won't go quiet."
The silence is the worst. The silence is what kills him.
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Is he truly so changed from who he was? Is he capable of staying present, always?
His fingers skim up Lestat's back, cup his face. Study him, traces of salt water on his skin, wide blue eyes. He puts his thumb over the little scar at the corner of his mouth.
"I promise I'll try," he tells him, as honest as he can be. "You promise me you won't let me stay quiet."
They'd started leaving each other before Lestat had ever been expelled from their home. Louis retreating inwards. Lestat fleeing the house when the sun set. Leaving each other by degrees before everything gave way.
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"I promise," he says. "You promise you will remember you said that."
A little levity, this one, spoken softly as he leans in, nudges Louis into a kiss. But he will do it. He will not let Louis retreat from him. He will not give up, run off into the night.
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"I'll remember."
A precious thing, memory.
Terrible, to feel grateful for the ability to remember. To know that nothing will be taken from his mind. He'll remember this promise. He'll remember all their fights. He'll remember everything.
"I'm gonna remember," he tells him. "I want to."
Everything. These promises, this place. Everything. Their fresh start, he wants all of it.
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Lestat allows his own capture, studying Louis back. Keeping a loose hold, arms around him. It is the two of them all at once, anxieties about what it means for Louis to love another easing if only because Louis is holding him so closely, imparting to him important information.
"Have you been forgetful?" he asks, with a whisper. Truer than he knows. For now he thinks of it as the fuzzying of time, smoothing out edges, both pleasurable and hurtful. He can imagine. Louis has led a full life, in their time apart.
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Does he want to lie?
It feels a little like being caught, trapped up between two less than ideal routes.
They are trying to be better. Louis is trying not to withhold.
"Not on purpose," he murmurs, which explains next to nothing. He was forgetful. He has been told he wished to be. It is difficult to believe that, but there is the possibility. A small possibility he had, once.
But how many times since? How much had Armand adjusted?
Louis can never know. He will have to recover all the pieces on his own.
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Lestat isn't sure what he is coaxing, only that he senses some unsaid thing. The shape of it is not clear to him. The shape of it is too monstrous to discover on his own. Even now, he can still be surprised by the depravities of his kin.
"No?" he queries. "What are you forgetting?"
Spoken with a tone like: maybe he can remind him, in a sexy way, but there is curiousity to, a desire for an answer.
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The question prompts a flex of anxiety, of anger. What he knows of now is monstrous, yes. But what about the rest? What else is missing? Could Louis uncover it without Daniel to ask the right questions?
Lestat is in front of him now. Asking. His weight is warm and wonderful. A miracle. For so long, Louis had thought he'd never see Lestat again, and now they are here. Even the specter of Armand can't fully dampen the miracle of it.
And so, as long minutes pass, Louis finds his way to admitting, "Not sure how much, yet. But I know...I got an idea of what. Of how I lost 'em."
Memories. Fights, lifted away. Smoothed into serenity.
cw suicide mention
He thinks now of Louis dragged from the stage. The depths of hunger he was made to feel. Of harming himself in San Francisco, the nature of that injury unclear to Lestat, and so too the nature of recovery. Thinks further back, glimpses of Louis, broken and battered. Vampires are ever healing things, but then, how can he be certain? How long might injuries last?
And then, yes, he does think of Armand. But not for long—
"Louis," Lestat says. "What happened?"
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"I'm sorry, Les. I didn't mean to drag this out."
An accident. Caught up making promises, and promising something Lestat couldn't understand. How could he know how much it mattered to Louis, knowing his own mind? Lestat hadn't been in any of the rooms where Louis had lost time, lost fights, lost pieces of himself.
He hadn't meant to do this. Invoke this. He'd wanted to make the kind of promises that'd make what came next better. Guiding principles. And then this thing Louis needed, had to have. He could have kept it to himself, and never seen any kind of pain on Lestat's face.
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"Don't," he says, instead. "No apologies."
It cannot be something that Louis soothes him about, Lestat knows. That cannot be their new way of being. Not now, certainly, when he feels a little sickened by himself.
"We can speak of it. We have all night." It is an offer. The offer to defer, too, but Lestat unwilling to imply he does not want an answer.
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Here, naked in Lestat's bed, Louis turns over the words. The expression Lestat wears.
Would he have told Lestat? Maybe. Maybe eventually. Vampires live long. It is unlikely he will never again cross paths with Armand. Or that Lestat will never meet him.
(A curling flare of anger. Hatred. It has nowhere to go.)
"You remember what I said when we talked first, about what we gonna be to each other here?" signals a decision, even if Louis is approaching the answer at an angle.
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Not exactly the same, this, but maybe similar. Maybe Louis needs someone to draw things out. (Ha.)
"I'm sure I do," he tells him. "What words spring to mind exactly?"
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He hadn't planned on telling Lestat any of this. Maybe he should have. Maybe it just felt—
It felt like he had time. More time, to figure out what he could say. How he should say it.
"Me and him," where him can only be one person. "Fought, sometimes. I don't know how much."
How much more was there? How many arguments? How much did Armand take from Louis' mind?
"I'm not sure. Because he'd fix it. In my head."
Abrupt. Direct. Here is what was done. This is what Armand has done.
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are we approaching bow territory