No blood taken. A waste. A blessing. He doesn't know. The thought spins in his mind like a penny as he considers the coldness of her flesh beneath his hands, looks at her slack and quiet face, eyes open in slits, fresh makeup applied. She had become self-conscious of her age, in recent times. Sometimes they were sweet together, and he would kiss her laugh lines until she, well, laughed. They both liked to do that.
Playacting at something. He could be a lot of things in this house. Twenty years worth of it.
"Did you like it?" he asks, unconscious echo. A voice on a record, dripping with river water, smashed into shards. He looks up. Tears, yes, filling his eyes, but no weeping. He isn't certain he will, tensely guarded against the instinct.
Showing his teeth a little between syllables. "Did it give you pleasure?"
The answer wavers between yes and no. Both. Either. Whatever he says will be salt in the wound Louis has gouged into Lestat.
"Relief," skirts away from both.
Louis says it and feels it like a lie. Relief had been such a brief sensation. It's gone now, ebbed away as Louis sat quietly and thought on the things Lestat had said, on the state of their house. How much of that remains, regardless of whether Antoinette draws breath?
"Were you ever going to make good?"
He'd agreed. Louis had taken him back, and Lestat had agreed to the handful of terms involved. They were some years on. Claudia had the finger somewhere still, tucked away, for what little good it'd do now.
Maybe they can speak of it frankly now. Years on. Years of the same promise, over and over, until Louis had stopped asking. Until, like a fool, he'd thought he didn't need to ask anymore.
An odd thing, perhaps, in his dignified three-piece suit, his tie, polished shoes, giving into the collapse on the ground, closer to childish than anything else. Wants to dig his claws in against the shift in focus, from Louis' wound against him to Lestat's long lie. The justice in this thing that's happened.
He had come home, tossed the bloodied newspaper in front of them, the severed finger and the ring on its grey knuckle. Louis had looked him in the eye and said thank you. Claudia had said that we leave the damage so that we never forget the damage. She would never forget, never allow Louis to forget.
An answer like a great stone placed upon Louis' chest.
Did you?
"But you didn't."
Almost a question. Louis knows the answer. Knows that he was not enough. That he would have Lestat still, would have had him even if Antoinette still drew breath. That even now, Louis wishes to go to him.
"Couldn't part with her."
So Louis had done it for him. Cruel, cruel, cruel. And he feels nothing. Dead inside, the urge to claw his skin off, to throw himself back in the river. Antoinette had known instantly when she saw him. It solves nothing, changes nothing.
And there is no pleasure in watching Lestat crumple to the floor beside her corpse. A waste. It has been a waste.
Lestat levels his focus back across and up at Louis, enough of the shock absorbed to do so. Tearful, but tears still unshed. A smile, nearly, but the bright way bloodshot eyes throw ice-cold blue into relief drains the potential for warmth.
"She was for you," he says, voice soft. "In the beginning. Why should I deny you the chance to come collect?"
He would like to be angry. The idea of being angry makes him nauseous. The conflict of this, roiling inside of him. He has no grand plan for this conversation, no sense of urgency to fix things. Louis will leave him now, probably. He will panic then, or he won't.
Years have passed, but Louis has an acutely clear memory of Lestat looking at him from the curve of Antoinette's neck. Her squealed gasp of delight at Lestat's attention. How the room had smelled of her after, days and days until her perfume faded.
"In the beginning she was all for you," comes out sharper, rising out of his hush tone. "I brought her into our home and you went to feed on vermin instead."
Her scent on his skin, her voice on a record. A lure, time and time again. And now—
Ridiculous to bring up a twenty year old conflict and cast it new light, but so much of that time has been eaten by separation, both physical or otherwise. The certainty that he would have felt something very differently had Lestat found Antoinette's corpse at Louis' hands, before.
Old argument. A curl of heat stealing into Louis' dead tone. How it had felt, walking out. How it had felt, watching Lestat light up for someone else.
"Then you kept on, all this time."
Louis' had time to think on the promises made. To explore the edges of the deep wound he'd carried away from Antoinette's that night, all the nights after.
Feels a wave of heat at Louis' words. An odd combination of things. Anger, indignation, for his claim being backhanded away. A rare sense of shame for the lie exposed. In the midst of it, like a beating heart, arousal too. Misplaced entirely, certainly, but there all the same. This poisonous and most unhelpful desire to hear Louis speak harsh, jealous, possessive words.
"Yes," Lestat says, unable not to press that little bit harder. "All this time. Every night you fed off your jealousy and did nothing. Every night the vampire couldn't bring himself to show his fangs."
The cigarette has long since cooled down to nothing. Just ash, inert and useless. Louis draws a finger through it, looking away from Lestat.
Senses the way Lestat is needling them towards familiar argument. Tries to decide before the decision is made for him, whether or not he cares to be led into a fight they've repeated time and again.
"How many times you promised me you'd do it?"
Over and over again. Louis, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Looks down at Antoinette, unmoving, cooling. The sign of his blood drinking on her neck. He had always liked to leave her marked, and she liked it too. Or pretended to. It didn't matter. She would take what he gave her, whether it was affection or something colder. She would give him—
Well. She wouldn't any longer.
"I couldn't part with her," an echo. Concession. "She gave me comfort. I've needed comfort. That is how it felt to me."
Because Louis broods. Claudia snipes. And Lestat needed to be fortified against them.
Louis wishes he'd never heard any of it, had never stood in the dark and listened to their talk, to the sound of their kissing. Claudia had been so terribly still, watching him, and Louis had felt—
He'd thanked Lestat. He'd felt real relief, thinking they could all three move forward together. That something had shifted, when nothing had.
"Comfort," falls from Louis' mouth like a stone.
It's been difficult. But has it always been? Was it difficult at the start?
"I know you don't care to hear it," comes out fast, but not as angry as it could. A fact, thrown Louis' way, more interested in escaping the accusation that Lestat hears in Louis' voice: what comfort does Lestat deserve, after all his mistakes? Of taking Louis' life from him, of taking Claudia's life from her, of letting Louis slip through his fingers, of his lies and failures to kill Antoinette, who always cared to hear it.
Not a matching gallery, of course. Lestat has his own. But he can imagine Louis', hanging these marks against him on pristine walls, to be perused at his leisure. Claudia, refusing to let him take any of them down.
"Are you going to leave me now?" comes out more shaky than he wanted.
Something piercing in it, this straight forward answer. Catching him. If he hadn't expected a yes, maybe Lestat would have anticipated silence, condemning silence. Another six year absence, maybe longer, a return to a prior sentencing now without Antoinette to assist in idling away the time. But Louis says no. Reaffirms it.
Lestat sits silent for a moment, considering him, then moves. Away from Antoinette's body, heedless of blood on the floor as he goes on hands and knees to where Louis is sitting.
Gentle, touching the side of his knee. "I love only you," he says. "I swear it."
He is still upset, he thinks, but it's dizzying how much of it seems to evaporate on contact of that news. That he has not lost Louis, that this wasn't some last punishment to see him properly alone. That Lestat is needed, and wanted. Feels some desperate, clawing thing in him that wants to drag Louis to the ground with him.
Restraint. Stays here kneeling at his feet, that one point of contact, and an unwavering focus. "Did you kill her," he starts, voice still tender in his throat, "to have me back to yourself?"
Louis isn't sure he believes this. He had said it aloud to Claudia, asserted it as truth. Lestat has said it before, delineating between Louis and she as if it were so simple.
He does know that he believes the rest of what he had told Claudia that night. That Lestat had his own demons, even if Louis doesn't know their names. That Lestat would have killed Antoinette if he thought Louis would have him as he was.
Louis cannot look at her corpse.
Instead, he looks into Lestat's face.
Tells him, "I don't like sharing you."
Won't ask this time if he is enough. Everything is too fragile to broach the topic.
No laughter, this time, but the scrape of the next exhale has something a little wry to it. Like, message received.
"Okay," Lestat says.
This is where he should swear it, he knows. And he will, he thinks. Not just because Antoinette is dead, as though she were irreplaceable to him, but something more broadly final in her crumpled body just near him. He swallows, a brief break in eye contact as he considers the thing he wants to say.
Well. There is nothing for it. He says, "I don't like to be squandered."
A little flush of emotion. Anger? Louis can't pin it down entirely.
"What's squandered?"
It goes hand in hand with the jabby I know you don't care to hear it Lestat had offered earlier, Louis knows. Some little hurt that Lestat has carried along with him, something Louis can guess at the shape of but pushes to hear him say aloud.
An answering clutch of feeling, also only possibly anger. Disbelief at the question being asked, the way it's asked, a briefly out of body experience where knees set on floorboards go numb, weightless and anchored only by that grip to Louis' knee.
"I," Lestat says, deliberately, a telling quaver to his tone that speaks of wrangled control, "have devoted all of myself to you. Every second, every inch, every thought I have. You don't see it."
There is a steely conviction to these words, never mind he is saying them in the home of his now dead on-and-off again mistress of twenty years.
"Time and time again, you discard me. Not unfairly," his grip, hardening, "but sometimes unfairly."
Aware, maybe, of the utility of pressing the issue. That maybe if they have it out, they can leave it behind them.
But Louis is very aware of where they are too. Of Antoinette's body on the floor behind Lestat.
"When?" he invites. Doesn't attempt to flex his leg out of Lestat's grasp. "When did I throw you away?"
Long years locked inside together, Louis eaten up by grief over Claudia. Before, walking out, leaving Lestat to Antoinette. Louis' thoughts circle and skid away from these moments, away from guesses.
Seven years, these complaints thrown against the brick wall of Louis' misery, and then a fight, and then the long time away, and then no room at all for complaint beyond the petty. Unshed crimson replenishes itself. Some small hurt, Louis had imagined.
"Seven years you barely spoke to me, scarcely looked at me, never mind anything more. And it was then that I went back to her," having already failed to kill her, it's true, but that same night he'd promised to do it soon, Claudia had fled. "And you watched me go. You allowed it. You didn't care."
His voice splinters there. Anger, shame, sorrow, all of those things.
"She was gone," comes almost without conscious intent. "Our daughter."
Sister tossed aside, the two of them alone in this room without daughter in question to object.
Louis had blamed Lestat. But the reality is—
"And it was me. She went running from me. You holding that against me?"
Side-stepping. But Louis doesn't know what else to say. He'd fallen into a black hole. He knows it. Couldn't find his way from it. That is still in him. Brooding, Lestat had said. Louis broods. Sorrow comes too easy.
"She was gone," and on his feet, a too-smooth flowing of movement by the time the crack of his voice is loud enough to strike the walls around them, "and I was there."
A not unfamiliar burst of tearful rage. A corpse on the ground, ignored. The smell of spilled blood, fresh death, ignored. Louis' words, catching back up, and Lestat's smile is more grimace than anything else as he flips a hand at him.
"And you held it against me. Over and over, you said this."
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Playacting at something. He could be a lot of things in this house. Twenty years worth of it.
"Did you like it?" he asks, unconscious echo. A voice on a record, dripping with river water, smashed into shards. He looks up. Tears, yes, filling his eyes, but no weeping. He isn't certain he will, tensely guarded against the instinct.
Showing his teeth a little between syllables. "Did it give you pleasure?"
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"Relief," skirts away from both.
Louis says it and feels it like a lie. Relief had been such a brief sensation. It's gone now, ebbed away as Louis sat quietly and thought on the things Lestat had said, on the state of their house. How much of that remains, regardless of whether Antoinette draws breath?
"Were you ever going to make good?"
He'd agreed. Louis had taken him back, and Lestat had agreed to the handful of terms involved. They were some years on. Claudia had the finger somewhere still, tucked away, for what little good it'd do now.
Maybe they can speak of it frankly now. Years on. Years of the same promise, over and over, until Louis had stopped asking. Until, like a fool, he'd thought he didn't need to ask anymore.
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An odd thing, perhaps, in his dignified three-piece suit, his tie, polished shoes, giving into the collapse on the ground, closer to childish than anything else. Wants to dig his claws in against the shift in focus, from Louis' wound against him to Lestat's long lie. The justice in this thing that's happened.
He had come home, tossed the bloodied newspaper in front of them, the severed finger and the ring on its grey knuckle. Louis had looked him in the eye and said thank you. Claudia had said that we leave the damage so that we never forget the damage. She would never forget, never allow Louis to forget.
"I wanted to," finally. "I did want to."
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Did you?
"But you didn't."
Almost a question. Louis knows the answer. Knows that he was not enough. That he would have Lestat still, would have had him even if Antoinette still drew breath. That even now, Louis wishes to go to him.
"Couldn't part with her."
So Louis had done it for him. Cruel, cruel, cruel. And he feels nothing. Dead inside, the urge to claw his skin off, to throw himself back in the river. Antoinette had known instantly when she saw him. It solves nothing, changes nothing.
And there is no pleasure in watching Lestat crumple to the floor beside her corpse. A waste. It has been a waste.
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Lestat levels his focus back across and up at Louis, enough of the shock absorbed to do so. Tearful, but tears still unshed. A smile, nearly, but the bright way bloodshot eyes throw ice-cold blue into relief drains the potential for warmth.
"She was for you," he says, voice soft. "In the beginning. Why should I deny you the chance to come collect?"
He would like to be angry. The idea of being angry makes him nauseous. The conflict of this, roiling inside of him. He has no grand plan for this conversation, no sense of urgency to fix things. Louis will leave him now, probably. He will panic then, or he won't.
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Years have passed, but Louis has an acutely clear memory of Lestat looking at him from the curve of Antoinette's neck. Her squealed gasp of delight at Lestat's attention. How the room had smelled of her after, days and days until her perfume faded.
For Louis? No.
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Her scent on his skin, her voice on a record. A lure, time and time again. And now—
Ridiculous to bring up a twenty year old conflict and cast it new light, but so much of that time has been eaten by separation, both physical or otherwise. The certainty that he would have felt something very differently had Lestat found Antoinette's corpse at Louis' hands, before.
Before, before.
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Old argument. A curl of heat stealing into Louis' dead tone. How it had felt, walking out. How it had felt, watching Lestat light up for someone else.
"Then you kept on, all this time."
Louis' had time to think on the promises made. To explore the edges of the deep wound he'd carried away from Antoinette's that night, all the nights after.
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"Yes," Lestat says, unable not to press that little bit harder. "All this time. Every night you fed off your jealousy and did nothing. Every night the vampire couldn't bring himself to show his fangs."
A flick of his hand. "Until now. What a relief."
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Senses the way Lestat is needling them towards familiar argument. Tries to decide before the decision is made for him, whether or not he cares to be led into a fight they've repeated time and again.
"How many times you promised me you'd do it?"
Over and over again. Louis, waiting, waiting, waiting.
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Looks down at Antoinette, unmoving, cooling. The sign of his blood drinking on her neck. He had always liked to leave her marked, and she liked it too. Or pretended to. It didn't matter. She would take what he gave her, whether it was affection or something colder. She would give him—
Well. She wouldn't any longer.
"I couldn't part with her," an echo. Concession. "She gave me comfort. I've needed comfort. That is how it felt to me."
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Louis wishes he'd never heard any of it, had never stood in the dark and listened to their talk, to the sound of their kissing. Claudia had been so terribly still, watching him, and Louis had felt—
He'd thanked Lestat. He'd felt real relief, thinking they could all three move forward together. That something had shifted, when nothing had.
"Comfort," falls from Louis' mouth like a stone.
It's been difficult. But has it always been? Was it difficult at the start?
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Not a matching gallery, of course. Lestat has his own. But he can imagine Louis', hanging these marks against him on pristine walls, to be perused at his leisure. Claudia, refusing to let him take any of them down.
"Are you going to leave me now?" comes out more shaky than he wanted.
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Would he be stronger this time? Hold out for ten years instead of six?
Louis leans forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. Watches Lestat over Antoinette's corpse.
"No," Louis admits. Why pretend otherwise? Why pretend he won't have Lestat, even now? "I ain't leaving."
So perhaps the question becomes:
"You gonna stay?"
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Lestat sits silent for a moment, considering him, then moves. Away from Antoinette's body, heedless of blood on the floor as he goes on hands and knees to where Louis is sitting.
Gentle, touching the side of his knee. "I love only you," he says. "I swear it."
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It is only Louis.
"You swear it," is quiet acknowledgement. Affirming it to himself, this thing Louis knows but had never quite settled.
He is hyperaware of Lestat's fingers, a light touch through the fabric of Louis' pant leg.
"I ain't as much fun as her," is an understatement. "But I need you."
Amends to, "I want you."
On the way to, "And I'll take you this way. Any way I can have you."
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He is still upset, he thinks, but it's dizzying how much of it seems to evaporate on contact of that news. That he has not lost Louis, that this wasn't some last punishment to see him properly alone. That Lestat is needed, and wanted. Feels some desperate, clawing thing in him that wants to drag Louis to the ground with him.
Restraint. Stays here kneeling at his feet, that one point of contact, and an unwavering focus. "Did you kill her," he starts, voice still tender in his throat, "to have me back to yourself?"
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Louis isn't sure he believes this. He had said it aloud to Claudia, asserted it as truth. Lestat has said it before, delineating between Louis and she as if it were so simple.
He does know that he believes the rest of what he had told Claudia that night. That Lestat had his own demons, even if Louis doesn't know their names. That Lestat would have killed Antoinette if he thought Louis would have him as he was.
Louis cannot look at her corpse.
Instead, he looks into Lestat's face.
Tells him, "I don't like sharing you."
Won't ask this time if he is enough. Everything is too fragile to broach the topic.
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"Okay," Lestat says.
This is where he should swear it, he knows. And he will, he thinks. Not just because Antoinette is dead, as though she were irreplaceable to him, but something more broadly final in her crumpled body just near him. He swallows, a brief break in eye contact as he considers the thing he wants to say.
Well. There is nothing for it. He says, "I don't like to be squandered."
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A little flush of emotion. Anger? Louis can't pin it down entirely.
"What's squandered?"
It goes hand in hand with the jabby I know you don't care to hear it Lestat had offered earlier, Louis knows. Some little hurt that Lestat has carried along with him, something Louis can guess at the shape of but pushes to hear him say aloud.
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"I," Lestat says, deliberately, a telling quaver to his tone that speaks of wrangled control, "have devoted all of myself to you. Every second, every inch, every thought I have. You don't see it."
There is a steely conviction to these words, never mind he is saying them in the home of his now dead on-and-off again mistress of twenty years.
"Time and time again, you discard me. Not unfairly," his grip, hardening, "but sometimes unfairly."
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Aware, maybe, of the utility of pressing the issue. That maybe if they have it out, they can leave it behind them.
But Louis is very aware of where they are too. Of Antoinette's body on the floor behind Lestat.
"When?" he invites. Doesn't attempt to flex his leg out of Lestat's grasp. "When did I throw you away?"
Long years locked inside together, Louis eaten up by grief over Claudia. Before, walking out, leaving Lestat to Antoinette. Louis' thoughts circle and skid away from these moments, away from guesses.
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Seven years, these complaints thrown against the brick wall of Louis' misery, and then a fight, and then the long time away, and then no room at all for complaint beyond the petty. Unshed crimson replenishes itself. Some small hurt, Louis had imagined.
"Seven years you barely spoke to me, scarcely looked at me, never mind anything more. And it was then that I went back to her," having already failed to kill her, it's true, but that same night he'd promised to do it soon, Claudia had fled. "And you watched me go. You allowed it. You didn't care."
His voice splinters there. Anger, shame, sorrow, all of those things.
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"She was gone," comes almost without conscious intent. "Our daughter."
Sister tossed aside, the two of them alone in this room without daughter in question to object.
Louis had blamed Lestat. But the reality is—
"And it was me. She went running from me. You holding that against me?"
Side-stepping. But Louis doesn't know what else to say. He'd fallen into a black hole. He knows it. Couldn't find his way from it. That is still in him. Brooding, Lestat had said. Louis broods. Sorrow comes too easy.
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A not unfamiliar burst of tearful rage. A corpse on the ground, ignored. The smell of spilled blood, fresh death, ignored. Louis' words, catching back up, and Lestat's smile is more grimace than anything else as he flips a hand at him.
"And you held it against me. Over and over, you said this."
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