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.
Louis shakes his head, and Lestat brings his hand around to cup Louis' cheek, gentle, a stroke of his thumb along his jaw intended to be soothing. Bidding him to say whatever difficult thing is on his tongue, hiding in his throat.
A new familiarity. Louis and his private torments. But not kept quiet, not shut away behind walls of derision and blame. More like the older days, the vulnerable days, when Lestat had been someone he could speak to.
The fond nostalgia retreats to make room for what Louis does say.
The edge of a thumbnail when that touch to Louis' cheek goes still. "He would have you forget it?" Lestat asks. "Your fights."
A swift arithmetic. The things Louis has said already. The promises he has made.
He is still trying to understand this thing, the enormity of it, like a snake who was overambitious about the mammal he is attempting to swallow. Working its way down. But in this one thing, Lestat feels certain.
"You would not. And it does not matter," here, a little more feeling, a little tremble of rising temper. "It doesn't matter because this is not a thing he should do. You aren't some— you aren't a mortal who needs deceiving, and you chose him," little flickers of indignation, clashing, syntactically chaotic as the audacity of these actions from the gremlin all gather together, spark.
Anger with nowhere to go. They are not even in the same dimension as the target of their ire.
But they are here together, in this strange little chapter of their new beginning. A chapter they are not going to erase, that counts towards their future, a strange but important mark. Lestat shifts, less like he is laying against Louis and more a straddle over his legs, the bed creaking.
"You are the most frustrating person to argue with," Lestat says, quiet, warm. "We would go in circles with one another, always returning to the one flaw, like the Lady Macbeth's spot of blood, unscrubbable. And you can stay angry so well, so much better than I can, so perfectly composed in your furies, so purposeful in your departures. The indignities I would endure to back into your good graces."
Hands stroking down Louis' shoulders, back, throat. "But then you would smile at me," he says. "Like the sun rising again after a night that has endured more hours than expected. Perhaps your mood had resolved itself or perhaps I have amused you, I don't mind."
And Armand is an idiot for wishing it all away. Blind and foolish, as usual.
Unexpectedly, Lestat gives him this. Sweet descriptions of what Louis had thought were the ugly parts of himself. Of their marriage. The arguments they had, how stubborn Louis had been, how long they'd drag on.
And Lestat speaks of it all fondly, voice so affectionate. Louis wouldn't have thought he could sound like that while they were talking about all the way they'd argued.
"You make it sound easy," Louis says quietly.
Wasn't it tedious? He knows Armand had made it sound so, when things had snapped during the interview. Not one big snap, but many small fractures leading up to the moment Daniel threw down a collection of pages for Louis to examine.
Armand had thought it tedious, both the arguing and the reconciliation.
Louis doesn't let himself dwell. Asrmand ins't here. Lestat is. They are planning their future, together. It doesn't seem to matter to Lestat that Louis has deep fingerprints in his mind where Armand molded it like so much clay.
"I liked it," Louis tells him. "I liked when you'd let me wind you up and take you to bed."
Because not every argument was deadly serious. Many of their fights in their early years had only been about creating conditions for falling into bed, making it all up to each other until the sun rose.
Not exactly what Louis needed right now, but maybe he'll need this memory of Lestat, in his lap, telling him sweet memories. Louis holds him tighter, kisses his collarbone.
"When did we stop doing that part? The smiling part?"
A quiet little exhale, at easy. No, not easy. But that doesn't make it undesirable. Tedious.
Lestat strokes his hands in circles over Louis' back as his bows his head, kisses him there, and he nuzzles against Louis' temple. Feels a little pang at that question.
"I have wondered about it myself," he says, which feels like an understatement. Obsessed about it, agonised about it, tortured himself with it. When did Louis stop looking at him that way? When did he feel himself become a brittler, more easily injured thing? It wasn't just the fight, although that had seemed to ensure everything broken would stay that way. "And I'm not certain."
He brushes a kiss against Louis' brow. "But you smile at me now."
Two weeks spent with Daniel, unraveling his life, and Louis doesn't have a clear answer either. Was it when he stopped eating? Was it when Lestat brought Antoinette home?
When?
The fight had smashed it all apart, but the cracks had been there. Louis just can't say where they had begun.
"I do," Louis agrees, because they have this much. "I plan on doing some more of that."
They'll fight, Louis knows. They've fought here. They've made it through all of that.
"Tell me you wanna be with me," he prompts. "Remind me you still wanna do all of that."
All of that.
The house. The intertwining of their lives. All the baggage Louis would drag into it with him. Does Lestat still want that?
As long as he does, Louis thinks they can manage the rest. Fit Wrench in between them. Realign the wreckage of Louis' life into something good.
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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."
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"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.
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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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A new familiarity. Louis and his private torments. But not kept quiet, not shut away behind walls of derision and blame. More like the older days, the vulnerable days, when Lestat had been someone he could speak to.
The fond nostalgia retreats to make room for what Louis does say.
The edge of a thumbnail when that touch to Louis' cheek goes still. "He would have you forget it?" Lestat asks. "Your fights."
A swift arithmetic. The things Louis has said already. The promises he has made.
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Seventy-seven years. How much did Louis lose in that stretch? Was it just the fights? Were there other things taken away?
He doesn't know. He might never know.
"Yeah," is what he says now. "Armand told me I asked, once. Not sure if it's true."
Did he ask, in Sausalito? Did Louis say, Take all of that away?
He doesn't know. Maybe he did.
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He is still trying to understand this thing, the enormity of it, like a snake who was overambitious about the mammal he is attempting to swallow. Working its way down. But in this one thing, Lestat feels certain.
"You would not. And it does not matter," here, a little more feeling, a little tremble of rising temper. "It doesn't matter because this is not a thing he should do. You aren't some— you aren't a mortal who needs deceiving, and you chose him," little flickers of indignation, clashing, syntactically chaotic as the audacity of these actions from the gremlin all gather together, spark.
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Yes. Louis had chosen Armand.
Maybe he had chosen other things.
(We leave the damage, so we don't forget the damage, Claudia had said. Would Louis have failed her in this too?)
"No," Louis agrees. "He shouldn't have done it. But he did."
Tight, angry. Contained, quiet, because he can hear Lestat's anger. They don't need to fuel each other, not in this.
"And I been trying to figure out who am I now. After eighty years with him."
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But they are here together, in this strange little chapter of their new beginning. A chapter they are not going to erase, that counts towards their future, a strange but important mark. Lestat shifts, less like he is laying against Louis and more a straddle over his legs, the bed creaking.
"You are the most frustrating person to argue with," Lestat says, quiet, warm. "We would go in circles with one another, always returning to the one flaw, like the Lady Macbeth's spot of blood, unscrubbable. And you can stay angry so well, so much better than I can, so perfectly composed in your furies, so purposeful in your departures. The indignities I would endure to back into your good graces."
Hands stroking down Louis' shoulders, back, throat. "But then you would smile at me," he says. "Like the sun rising again after a night that has endured more hours than expected. Perhaps your mood had resolved itself or perhaps I have amused you, I don't mind."
And Armand is an idiot for wishing it all away. Blind and foolish, as usual.
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And Lestat speaks of it all fondly, voice so affectionate. Louis wouldn't have thought he could sound like that while they were talking about all the way they'd argued.
"You make it sound easy," Louis says quietly.
Wasn't it tedious? He knows Armand had made it sound so, when things had snapped during the interview. Not one big snap, but many small fractures leading up to the moment Daniel threw down a collection of pages for Louis to examine.
Armand had thought it tedious, both the arguing and the reconciliation.
Louis doesn't let himself dwell. Asrmand ins't here. Lestat is. They are planning their future, together. It doesn't seem to matter to Lestat that Louis has deep fingerprints in his mind where Armand molded it like so much clay.
"I liked it," Louis tells him. "I liked when you'd let me wind you up and take you to bed."
Because not every argument was deadly serious. Many of their fights in their early years had only been about creating conditions for falling into bed, making it all up to each other until the sun rose.
Not exactly what Louis needed right now, but maybe he'll need this memory of Lestat, in his lap, telling him sweet memories. Louis holds him tighter, kisses his collarbone.
"When did we stop doing that part? The smiling part?"
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Lestat strokes his hands in circles over Louis' back as his bows his head, kisses him there, and he nuzzles against Louis' temple. Feels a little pang at that question.
"I have wondered about it myself," he says, which feels like an understatement. Obsessed about it, agonised about it, tortured himself with it. When did Louis stop looking at him that way? When did he feel himself become a brittler, more easily injured thing? It wasn't just the fight, although that had seemed to ensure everything broken would stay that way. "And I'm not certain."
He brushes a kiss against Louis' brow. "But you smile at me now."
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When?
The fight had smashed it all apart, but the cracks had been there. Louis just can't say where they had begun.
"I do," Louis agrees, because they have this much. "I plan on doing some more of that."
They'll fight, Louis knows. They've fought here. They've made it through all of that.
"Tell me you wanna be with me," he prompts. "Remind me you still wanna do all of that."
All of that.
The house. The intertwining of their lives. All the baggage Louis would drag into it with him. Does Lestat still want that?
As long as he does, Louis thinks they can manage the rest. Fit Wrench in between them. Realign the wreckage of Louis' life into something good.
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are we approaching bow territory