"You pushed her," bursts out of him. Retreading, falling back into the old argument. Lestat rises and Louis doesn't, held in place by some flinch of a thing in his body that hasn't quite fractured enough to forget—
There was a time when Louis met him where Lestat landed. Lestat pushed and Louis pushed back.
He'd stopped doing that, after the fall. Refrains from it now.
"You pushed me out too, when I wouldn't—I couldn't forget her."
Lestat, quick to suggest the dismantling of Claudia's room. Quicker to dismiss the possibility of her return. Stranded Louis alone with his grief.
Old hurts. Lestat's raised voice. Louis winding tenser, bracing unconsciously against it.
"She," a dramatic first syllable, a pointed finger, "was acting a menace who required discipline, and it was you who pushed me away while she spiralled beyond our control. Out the door, out of town."
They've had this fight. Echoing around their increasingly cluttered townhouse, usually smothered out when someone's patience extinguishes. Some other wound, now, bleeding freely beneath the surface. Confessing on his knees to his feelings of abandonment, dismissed. Claudia, Claudia, Claudia.
"And then you hid in it, your sorrow. I could not come near it without some nasty little comment, or better yet, your silence. La putain de tempête sans fin de ton silence."
Maybe he hadn't noticed that first time, but he had noticed later. A terrible ugly resentment for Lestat's absence, for seeking amusements elsewhere when Louis could do nothing but hoard his miseries like pale gold.
The chair scrapes, shoved back as Louis stands. A defensive movement, getting to his feet. Refusing to look up any longer.
"You pushed. You wanted to push her out like she were never there."
Teetering away from the thing Louis knows they're meant to address. This is familiar ground. Easy swipes, easy wounds. Antoinette is dead and they are here, digging claws into each other again.
Louis had punished him. He knows this to be true. But Lestat had left. Had been bored of him before Claudia went, was bored of him while she was gone, was tired of him now. The question doesn't bear asking. Louis hadn't been enough. Maybe would never be.
"Years!" he barks back. "Years I spent, waiting, before I sought something other than the misery of our home."
Something other than. Antoinette, dead on the floor, while they argue over her. Lestat steals a glance to her, it, to it, the object on the floor, braces against the sobbed feeling in his chest, willing it not to break. Someone who did love him, who was free to show it, dead now.
But that's not a sorrow he can reveal here. For all that Louis says he can't leave him, won't, wants and needs him.
"And that isn't true," comes out quieter. Forlorn. "I missed her as well. Not that you could look up for a moment to see it."
A thing better left unsaid. It claws too directly at the thing in Louis' chest, jealous and hurt and angry and shamed all at once.
Antoinette, possessed of all things Louis was not.
No immediate rejoinder. Louis, visibly struggling with himself. With old hurt. With new ones. With the miserable distrust that says how could he know for certain Lestat had been years away from this little apartment, waiting for Louis to emerge from the deep pit of his misery?
"You didn't show it to me."
Unfair, maybe. Louis had been drowning. Had blamed himself, blamed Lestat in turn. Hadn't had the eyes to see, couldn't say for certain what had been there then.
That Louis pauses, appears to struggle, stops Lestat from saying the easy things. That Louis was himself blind to it, absorbed in his own misery, guarded by blame and so ready to bring it to bear, and so on. Accusations and old wounds.
But the thing Louis says is true besides. Any hurt over Claudia hidden, a habit for concealment. And besides, "I was angry," with a small gesture. "At her, at you. Myself, certainly." His fury that had maintained by the time she stepped through their door, not ready to forgive her for the ruin she had made of his family, and then—
Well, she had stated her intentions then. No chance for reconciliation.
"And yes, I wished for us to be happy again. I wished for you to look up and see that I was there and be glad for it. But it was only resentment. Hatred, even. What was there for me to show when you despised me?"
They're years late to this argument. Years too late for Louis to express what Lestat surely knows: that Louis couldn't be happy, couldn't stand the thought of either of them being happy with Claudia gone.
And he does struggle, in this moment. Struggles with anger, with resentment. Emotion breaking through thick layers of ice.
"I couldn't be happy. Couldn't, without her."
Unclear if he can be find his happiness now, if doing this will change anything. How long until his melancholy becomes intolerable? Until Lestat finds another?
A minor shift, side-stepping away. Antoinette's body still on the floor. Louis creating space between them.
'And you were sick of me. You still are," leads inevitably to: "I heard you. It weren't just then."
Feels despair like a cold knife. Louis, discontent. Claudia's companionship, outstripping the value of Lestat's alone. Its an ugly kind of jealousy, envying a child's love for her father, that father's love for his child, but in all the tangling configurations—sister, daughter, infant death—it is the two of them, and he is a third.
This is how it seems. Unfair, first, and now inevitable. Claudia has never hurt Louis. Louis has never hurt Claudia. Lestat is quiet, first, before drawing in a breath.
"All of it," lacks specificity. A choice. Heat cooling from Louis' voice.
He could repeat it. Could pull out what he'd heard, how it hooked all the way back, six years, seven years, back to Claudia spitting venom across the room as she pulled the veil from Louis' eyes. The housewife, and the mistake.
"You want me to hear it?" is only a question on a technicality. "You want me to find you with her?"
Not a laugh, just a 'hm' sound, detachedly amused in its own odd way. Yes, he could have been more careful. Hidden it better. And then what? Lestat considers the puddled blood on the floor. Wonders at what Louis heard. Decides it doesn't matter.
"Yes," Lestat says, finally. "I draw it out of you, your feelings for me. Your jealousy. Reminds us both of something."
He looks back at him, a tight smile. A minor glimmer of arrogance in the tip of his head.
"If you'd have killed her when things were better between us, I'd have you in bed by now."
That arrogance. It wedges under Louis' skin. Brings out anger and fond exasperation both.
Knows it to be true, more or less, what Lestat says. Arrogant, yes, but maybe when things were good. It has always been difficult. Lestat has had time to discover how to needle Louis into reactions, demonstrations of what he has never been able to say aloud.
"Told Claudia I'd take you," Louis says slowly. Looks away from Lestat to Antoinette. What he's done. How useless. "That I'd have you anyway, even if you lied about her."
Things gone unsaid: Even after what he's done.
"What's my jealousy reminding us of?"
Louis, swimming the Mississippi, record in hand only to smash it in front of Lestat. Louis, looking up to watch Lestat kissing Antoinette on the balcony of the Fairplay. Louis, leaving their home burning with jealousy and shame with Antoinette's giggles in his ears.
It was jealousy. It was something else too, something Louis gave up on arguing about after Claudia.
Told Claudia, and Lestat feels some anxious knot in his chest. Unsurprising, of course, it would be more confusing to think that Claudia didn't know, but the knowledge she does, and that she and Louis have already spoken of it—
He did miss his daughter, when she was his daughter. He doesn't know who this grown woman is, only that she loathes him.
Wrenches himself away from these thoughts, a flicker of a blink as he returns focus to Louis. Louis, looking down at his kill. Lestat finds himself stepping nearer. The urge to reach for him. Keeps his hands to himself, but says instead, "That you love me," and it sounds like he is taking a risk in saying it. Like Louis might bat it aside, finally confess to him that he doesn't.
A soft, watery laugh. "That you did love me, at least. For a time."
Before he drove Claudia away. Before he shattered Louis on the earth for failing to do so. Before he gave him every reason not to start again.
Lestat, standing close to him. Lestat, talking of their love. Lestat, demurring to the past tense.
Six years. Seven years before that.
Past tense, a joke of a thing. If those lean years hadn't killed their love, then nothing would. Louis feels it still. Loves him still. Would take a thousand years of arguing, of the way they hurt each other, than suffer Lestat's absence.
Louis reaches, impulsively, to take Lestat's face in bloody hands and draw him in to a kiss.
A small sound in the moment Louis' lips meet his, immediately muffled, extinguish. Shock, momentary, hands flying to rest on Louis' arms—
And then the inevitable falling in, Lestat kissing him back, a hand gripping at his collar, a hand curling around the back of his neck. Reeling him in tighter, clinging onto him desperately. Some guarded thing in him breaks, and regret and shame and fear all release themselves into his blood like a poison.
He wants to say sorry, over and over. Promise to never do it again. Promise to never hurt him. Hard words, difficult words, as difficult as the word love leaving Louis' mouth, both easier expressed into a kiss.
The impossibility of love in the past tense. He loves Lestat endlessly. Loves him even when he hates him. There is nothing for it. Louis would have to cut himself apart, dig out his own heart to stop it.
Terrifying still, to love this much, this deeply. The word remains caught in his throat.
Clumsy, grasping hands. Clinging. Louis' fingers digging in at Lestat's jaw as they kiss, blood smearing tacky across skin.
Still can't say it. Can't say it even after murdering his mistress, after saying all the worst things. Coming back to Lestat, over and over, bringing all his flaws, his melancholy, his shortcomings to lay at his feet.
"Come home," Louis says, breathless, nose brushing Lestat's. "Come back home with me."
Not love, but what is love if not the home they've made together? How they've held it together through the worst of their time together, the lean years where all they had were their resentments? Home, where they have been happy together. Where their coffin sits. Where they have made a life.
As if they were not just yelling at each other, digging their claws into vulnerable points. As though Lestat had not crumpled on the ground and waited with every expectation for Louis to walk away, feeling the vibrations of his footfalls through the floorboards, left alone with his mistakes. As if this were yet again some trifling diversion to an inevitable thing.
Another kiss, unwilling to let go just yet. "Let me fix it again," Lestat murmurs against his mouth. "Let me make it whole. Please."
Properly, this time. Not the illusion of repair, distrustful, resentful.
Come home and argue may very well be what they are agreeing to. But better the argument than the silence. It hasn't served them. Lestat playing dutiful husband, vanishing every evening. Louis sinking deeper and deeper into melancholy, numb to all that orbits him.
Lestat whispers this to him and Louis shivers. Tightens his grip.
"Yes," Louis answers. The only answer. Inevitable. He'd told Claudia as much. Louis will take him. Would have Lestat any way he could, wants him in all his infuriating imperfections. Tells him again, "Come home. Want you to come home with me."
Fight, argue. Reconcile. Find their way back to each other.
There have been moments where the long periods of time in which Louis refuses to state his love plainly have been a torment. A lens through which Lestat can look back on everything and see how foolish he's been. Then, other times, when the statement itself is merely one possible expression of so many: Louis' breathing slowing as they lay together in the same coffin, his hand overlaying Lestat's as it lays on his chest, the grip around his waist as they turn a dance step around the room, (Antoinette laying dead on the floor,) and now, this desire for home.
He can bask in it, for a moment. Press his forehead to Louis', get a hold of the pace of his own breathing, clutching him closely. Louis has said he wants him. Needs him. There must be love beneath it, within it. Lestat knows it is there, the way he reaches for Louis, and so it must be there when Louis reaches back.
"Okay," half-whispered.
If there is a twinge of desire to see Antoinette's body properly disposed of, Lestat stamps it down. Not now. Maybe the next night, if no one comes by discover her. He does not want Louis here for it, whatever it will be. He will not take her to their incinerator. Something in between wishing to protect whatever feelings he may have for the task, and the desire for the kind of privacy one might want when dressing a wound, attending to some personal thing.
Here, instead, Lestat resists a look to her. Backs off a step. Louis is bloodied. He knows some discreet backways, they both do. The lights in the apartment, turned off, and he shadows along on Louis' heel.
The first ugly twinge of jealousy sated: taking Lestat with him, leaving this apartment for good.
It will be difficult. Hard, as Lestat had once cautioned. Even tonight, they have dragged out the tangled snark of hurt feeling between them to toss back and forth.
But perhaps this will change it all. Perhaps it will be easier now. No longer the threat of Antoinette in the wings, offering all things Louis cannot, does not. No longer the uncertainty. There is something affirming. Here, they are choosing. Louis has made a point. Lestat had kissed him anyway.
The house is empty. Pointedly, perhaps. Claudia, about her own business. Perhaps turning her face from Louis' choices.
They come in through the courtyard. No blood-soaked show for suspicious neighbors. The night has begun to feel unreal to Louis, all things tilting sideways as they return to their home. Take this renewal through the door, find all things as they had left them.
"You should've had something," falls out of Louis' mouth, unconscious awareness of Lestat, even as he considers he has no idea if Lestat had stopped to eat before he went to Antoinette. If the marks in her were for pleasure instead of necessity. Burns at the thought, in spite of everything.
Blandly. A quick diversion with Claudia, who had entertained it despite knowing what she knew. It had felt like a good sign of things, even as they'd conducted their business with an ever constant layer of chilliness that has yet to thaw. Now he is not so sure it will, ever.
But Lestat can scarcely trust what he is and is not sure about. Here they are, and his lies uncovered, and Antoinette is dead, and he is home again. Whatever ache lingers for her murder has worked itself out in the quiet walk through dark backroads, flattened subordinate to his focus on Louis, to trepidation for whatever comes next of them.
He gives him a once over. Antoinette's blood, staining his nice clothes. I can smell her on you, he thinks in Louis' voice. "Come," he says. "I want you out of this."
Yes. No. Stood in their home, watching Lestat look at him, Louis has a moment of agony wondering: Suppose this fixes nothing?
He can't afford to entertain that thought just now. Antionette's blood has soaked through to the skin. Lestat's expression is unreadable. One hand lifts, as if Lestat calling attention to it has drawn the blood to the front of his mind. Some pinch of a thing very like distress working briefly across Louis' brow. Feeling the weight of what he's done, wanting to separate himself from it.
Antoinette. Louis had hated her for so long, and now it is done. He wears the evidence of it still.
"Alright."
Up the stairs, down the hall, across the hardwood floors. Should go into their washroom. Louis goes instead into their bedroom, past the bed.
Clothes he means to put into the heart. They cannot be salvaged. This sits in his mind, intention that can be distracted or interrupted, should Lestat intervene.
No intention to intervene. He will purchase Louis new clothes. A new array of suits and shirts, perhaps, a new elegant wardrobe to house them, already imagining what elaborate things he might provide to patch over this current hurt, although these thoughts come impulsive and frenetic, disoriented. Into their bedroom they go.
"I want you out of those things," an echo, "so that we can forget her together."
His hand going out, tentatively, a touch to Louis' elbow to reel him back a little near to him. "Louis," he says. Voice soft. There is a mantle in their parlour that remains broken at Claudia's insistence. "Can we?"
Does Louis want to forget? Forget long years of anguish, of jealousy? Of awareness of how Antoinette can be things to Lestat that Louis couldn't? That Antoinette, lovely and feminine and white, could hang off his arm at the Azalea and any other place they pleased? That she was a refuge, while Louis was the thing Lestat had fled?
Lestat touches him, and Louis allows himself to be drawn in. The blood has soaked through to the skin. Louis' fingers lift to Lestat's face, skim along his jaw. Thumb at his chin, watching his face.
"I don't want to."
It's theirs. It's Louis', sure as the recollection of their fight. The parts of their companionship that are ugly, painful. That live in Louis' body still.
"Don't wanna forget it, patch it over like none of it happened," Louis admits slowly, piecing the words together, intention coalescing as he speaks. "You think that's the only way we do this? Forgetting?"
There is a pleading look cast back at Louis, tempered from anger by the gentle hand at his face, his desire to understand. His hands, resting light at Louis' elbows.
Accustomed to burying the past, running roughshod into the future. Will Louis look at him, and see something other than his betrayal? The hurt he's inflicted? The oldest resentment between them, of having made him what he is? The weight of all these things, threatening to break something. Living in a ruin. His ruin. His hands squeeze.
"Eternity is a long time to carry things with you," he says. "I want to make you happy again."
An assertion that has no bearing on Louis taking Lestat back. They hurt each other. They argue. It's not reason enough to stay away. Louis can't be without him. He knows this.
"We remember it. We do things different than we did then."
They'd meant for a new beginning when Lestat returned to Rue Royale. They'd meant to make changes. They'd lived with the wreckage. They'd landed here anyway. Louis had forced Lestat's hand this time, done what Lestat had been meant to do. Maybe that'd make the difference.
"I don't want to pretend none of it happened. I want us to remember it and do better this time around."
History, their history. How could they cut it away? It's been years and years. They'd lose too much, too many parts of the path that led them here.
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There was a time when Louis met him where Lestat landed. Lestat pushed and Louis pushed back.
He'd stopped doing that, after the fall. Refrains from it now.
"You pushed me out too, when I wouldn't—I couldn't forget her."
Lestat, quick to suggest the dismantling of Claudia's room. Quicker to dismiss the possibility of her return. Stranded Louis alone with his grief.
Old hurts. Lestat's raised voice. Louis winding tenser, bracing unconsciously against it.
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They've had this fight. Echoing around their increasingly cluttered townhouse, usually smothered out when someone's patience extinguishes. Some other wound, now, bleeding freely beneath the surface. Confessing on his knees to his feelings of abandonment, dismissed. Claudia, Claudia, Claudia.
"And then you hid in it, your sorrow. I could not come near it without some nasty little comment, or better yet, your silence. La putain de tempête sans fin de ton silence."
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Antoinette. Antoinette who is no more.
Maybe he hadn't noticed that first time, but he had noticed later. A terrible ugly resentment for Lestat's absence, for seeking amusements elsewhere when Louis could do nothing but hoard his miseries like pale gold.
The chair scrapes, shoved back as Louis stands. A defensive movement, getting to his feet. Refusing to look up any longer.
"You pushed. You wanted to push her out like she were never there."
Teetering away from the thing Louis knows they're meant to address. This is familiar ground. Easy swipes, easy wounds. Antoinette is dead and they are here, digging claws into each other again.
Louis had punished him. He knows this to be true. But Lestat had left. Had been bored of him before Claudia went, was bored of him while she was gone, was tired of him now. The question doesn't bear asking. Louis hadn't been enough. Maybe would never be.
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Something other than. Antoinette, dead on the floor, while they argue over her. Lestat steals a glance to her, it, to it, the object on the floor, braces against the sobbed feeling in his chest, willing it not to break. Someone who did love him, who was free to show it, dead now.
But that's not a sorrow he can reveal here. For all that Louis says he can't leave him, won't, wants and needs him.
"And that isn't true," comes out quieter. Forlorn. "I missed her as well. Not that you could look up for a moment to see it."
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A thing better left unsaid. It claws too directly at the thing in Louis' chest, jealous and hurt and angry and shamed all at once.
Antoinette, possessed of all things Louis was not.
No immediate rejoinder. Louis, visibly struggling with himself. With old hurt. With new ones. With the miserable distrust that says how could he know for certain Lestat had been years away from this little apartment, waiting for Louis to emerge from the deep pit of his misery?
"You didn't show it to me."
Unfair, maybe. Louis had been drowning. Had blamed himself, blamed Lestat in turn. Hadn't had the eyes to see, couldn't say for certain what had been there then.
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But the thing Louis says is true besides. Any hurt over Claudia hidden, a habit for concealment. And besides, "I was angry," with a small gesture. "At her, at you. Myself, certainly." His fury that had maintained by the time she stepped through their door, not ready to forgive her for the ruin she had made of his family, and then—
Well, she had stated her intentions then. No chance for reconciliation.
"And yes, I wished for us to be happy again. I wished for you to look up and see that I was there and be glad for it. But it was only resentment. Hatred, even. What was there for me to show when you despised me?"
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And he does struggle, in this moment. Struggles with anger, with resentment. Emotion breaking through thick layers of ice.
"I couldn't be happy. Couldn't, without her."
Unclear if he can be find his happiness now, if doing this will change anything. How long until his melancholy becomes intolerable? Until Lestat finds another?
A minor shift, side-stepping away. Antoinette's body still on the floor. Louis creating space between them.
'And you were sick of me. You still are," leads inevitably to: "I heard you. It weren't just then."
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Feels despair like a cold knife. Louis, discontent. Claudia's companionship, outstripping the value of Lestat's alone. Its an ugly kind of jealousy, envying a child's love for her father, that father's love for his child, but in all the tangling configurations—sister, daughter, infant death—it is the two of them, and he is a third.
This is how it seems. Unfair, first, and now inevitable. Claudia has never hurt Louis. Louis has never hurt Claudia. Lestat is quiet, first, before drawing in a breath.
"What did you hear?"
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He could repeat it. Could pull out what he'd heard, how it hooked all the way back, six years, seven years, back to Claudia spitting venom across the room as she pulled the veil from Louis' eyes. The housewife, and the mistake.
"You want me to hear it?" is only a question on a technicality. "You want me to find you with her?"
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Not a laugh, just a 'hm' sound, detachedly amused in its own odd way. Yes, he could have been more careful. Hidden it better. And then what? Lestat considers the puddled blood on the floor. Wonders at what Louis heard. Decides it doesn't matter.
"Yes," Lestat says, finally. "I draw it out of you, your feelings for me. Your jealousy. Reminds us both of something."
He looks back at him, a tight smile. A minor glimmer of arrogance in the tip of his head.
"If you'd have killed her when things were better between us, I'd have you in bed by now."
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Knows it to be true, more or less, what Lestat says. Arrogant, yes, but maybe when things were good. It has always been difficult. Lestat has had time to discover how to needle Louis into reactions, demonstrations of what he has never been able to say aloud.
"Told Claudia I'd take you," Louis says slowly. Looks away from Lestat to Antoinette. What he's done. How useless. "That I'd have you anyway, even if you lied about her."
Things gone unsaid: Even after what he's done.
"What's my jealousy reminding us of?"
Louis, swimming the Mississippi, record in hand only to smash it in front of Lestat. Louis, looking up to watch Lestat kissing Antoinette on the balcony of the Fairplay. Louis, leaving their home burning with jealousy and shame with Antoinette's giggles in his ears.
It was jealousy. It was something else too, something Louis gave up on arguing about after Claudia.
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He did miss his daughter, when she was his daughter. He doesn't know who this grown woman is, only that she loathes him.
Wrenches himself away from these thoughts, a flicker of a blink as he returns focus to Louis. Louis, looking down at his kill. Lestat finds himself stepping nearer. The urge to reach for him. Keeps his hands to himself, but says instead, "That you love me," and it sounds like he is taking a risk in saying it. Like Louis might bat it aside, finally confess to him that he doesn't.
A soft, watery laugh. "That you did love me, at least. For a time."
Before he drove Claudia away. Before he shattered Louis on the earth for failing to do so. Before he gave him every reason not to start again.
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Six years. Seven years before that.
Past tense, a joke of a thing. If those lean years hadn't killed their love, then nothing would. Louis feels it still. Loves him still. Would take a thousand years of arguing, of the way they hurt each other, than suffer Lestat's absence.
Louis reaches, impulsively, to take Lestat's face in bloody hands and draw him in to a kiss.
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And then the inevitable falling in, Lestat kissing him back, a hand gripping at his collar, a hand curling around the back of his neck. Reeling him in tighter, clinging onto him desperately. Some guarded thing in him breaks, and regret and shame and fear all release themselves into his blood like a poison.
He wants to say sorry, over and over. Promise to never do it again. Promise to never hurt him. Hard words, difficult words, as difficult as the word love leaving Louis' mouth, both easier expressed into a kiss.
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Terrifying still, to love this much, this deeply. The word remains caught in his throat.
Clumsy, grasping hands. Clinging. Louis' fingers digging in at Lestat's jaw as they kiss, blood smearing tacky across skin.
Still can't say it. Can't say it even after murdering his mistress, after saying all the worst things. Coming back to Lestat, over and over, bringing all his flaws, his melancholy, his shortcomings to lay at his feet.
"Come home," Louis says, breathless, nose brushing Lestat's. "Come back home with me."
Not love, but what is love if not the home they've made together? How they've held it together through the worst of their time together, the lean years where all they had were their resentments? Home, where they have been happy together. Where their coffin sits. Where they have made a life.
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As if they were not just yelling at each other, digging their claws into vulnerable points. As though Lestat had not crumpled on the ground and waited with every expectation for Louis to walk away, feeling the vibrations of his footfalls through the floorboards, left alone with his mistakes. As if this were yet again some trifling diversion to an inevitable thing.
Another kiss, unwilling to let go just yet. "Let me fix it again," Lestat murmurs against his mouth. "Let me make it whole. Please."
Properly, this time. Not the illusion of repair, distrustful, resentful.
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Lestat whispers this to him and Louis shivers. Tightens his grip.
"Yes," Louis answers. The only answer. Inevitable. He'd told Claudia as much. Louis will take him. Would have Lestat any way he could, wants him in all his infuriating imperfections. Tells him again, "Come home. Want you to come home with me."
Fight, argue. Reconcile. Find their way back to each other.
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He can bask in it, for a moment. Press his forehead to Louis', get a hold of the pace of his own breathing, clutching him closely. Louis has said he wants him. Needs him. There must be love beneath it, within it. Lestat knows it is there, the way he reaches for Louis, and so it must be there when Louis reaches back.
"Okay," half-whispered.
If there is a twinge of desire to see Antoinette's body properly disposed of, Lestat stamps it down. Not now. Maybe the next night, if no one comes by discover her. He does not want Louis here for it, whatever it will be. He will not take her to their incinerator. Something in between wishing to protect whatever feelings he may have for the task, and the desire for the kind of privacy one might want when dressing a wound, attending to some personal thing.
Here, instead, Lestat resists a look to her. Backs off a step. Louis is bloodied. He knows some discreet backways, they both do. The lights in the apartment, turned off, and he shadows along on Louis' heel.
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It will be difficult. Hard, as Lestat had once cautioned. Even tonight, they have dragged out the tangled snark of hurt feeling between them to toss back and forth.
But perhaps this will change it all. Perhaps it will be easier now. No longer the threat of Antoinette in the wings, offering all things Louis cannot, does not. No longer the uncertainty. There is something affirming. Here, they are choosing. Louis has made a point. Lestat had kissed him anyway.
The house is empty. Pointedly, perhaps. Claudia, about her own business. Perhaps turning her face from Louis' choices.
They come in through the courtyard. No blood-soaked show for suspicious neighbors. The night has begun to feel unreal to Louis, all things tilting sideways as they return to their home. Take this renewal through the door, find all things as they had left them.
"You should've had something," falls out of Louis' mouth, unconscious awareness of Lestat, even as he considers he has no idea if Lestat had stopped to eat before he went to Antoinette. If the marks in her were for pleasure instead of necessity. Burns at the thought, in spite of everything.
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Blandly. A quick diversion with Claudia, who had entertained it despite knowing what she knew. It had felt like a good sign of things, even as they'd conducted their business with an ever constant layer of chilliness that has yet to thaw. Now he is not so sure it will, ever.
But Lestat can scarcely trust what he is and is not sure about. Here they are, and his lies uncovered, and Antoinette is dead, and he is home again. Whatever ache lingers for her murder has worked itself out in the quiet walk through dark backroads, flattened subordinate to his focus on Louis, to trepidation for whatever comes next of them.
He gives him a once over. Antoinette's blood, staining his nice clothes. I can smell her on you, he thinks in Louis' voice. "Come," he says. "I want you out of this."
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Yes. No. Stood in their home, watching Lestat look at him, Louis has a moment of agony wondering: Suppose this fixes nothing?
He can't afford to entertain that thought just now. Antionette's blood has soaked through to the skin. Lestat's expression is unreadable. One hand lifts, as if Lestat calling attention to it has drawn the blood to the front of his mind. Some pinch of a thing very like distress working briefly across Louis' brow. Feeling the weight of what he's done, wanting to separate himself from it.
Antoinette. Louis had hated her for so long, and now it is done. He wears the evidence of it still.
"Alright."
Up the stairs, down the hall, across the hardwood floors. Should go into their washroom. Louis goes instead into their bedroom, past the bed.
Clothes he means to put into the heart. They cannot be salvaged. This sits in his mind, intention that can be distracted or interrupted, should Lestat intervene.
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No intention to intervene. He will purchase Louis new clothes. A new array of suits and shirts, perhaps, a new elegant wardrobe to house them, already imagining what elaborate things he might provide to patch over this current hurt, although these thoughts come impulsive and frenetic, disoriented. Into their bedroom they go.
"I want you out of those things," an echo, "so that we can forget her together."
His hand going out, tentatively, a touch to Louis' elbow to reel him back a little near to him. "Louis," he says. Voice soft. There is a mantle in their parlour that remains broken at Claudia's insistence. "Can we?"
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Lestat touches him, and Louis allows himself to be drawn in. The blood has soaked through to the skin. Louis' fingers lift to Lestat's face, skim along his jaw. Thumb at his chin, watching his face.
"I don't want to."
It's theirs. It's Louis', sure as the recollection of their fight. The parts of their companionship that are ugly, painful. That live in Louis' body still.
"Don't wanna forget it, patch it over like none of it happened," Louis admits slowly, piecing the words together, intention coalescing as he speaks. "You think that's the only way we do this? Forgetting?"
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Accustomed to burying the past, running roughshod into the future. Will Louis look at him, and see something other than his betrayal? The hurt he's inflicted? The oldest resentment between them, of having made him what he is? The weight of all these things, threatening to break something. Living in a ruin. His ruin. His hands squeeze.
"Eternity is a long time to carry things with you," he says. "I want to make you happy again."
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An assertion that has no bearing on Louis taking Lestat back. They hurt each other. They argue. It's not reason enough to stay away. Louis can't be without him. He knows this.
"We remember it. We do things different than we did then."
They'd meant for a new beginning when Lestat returned to Rue Royale. They'd meant to make changes. They'd lived with the wreckage. They'd landed here anyway. Louis had forced Lestat's hand this time, done what Lestat had been meant to do. Maybe that'd make the difference.
"I don't want to pretend none of it happened. I want us to remember it and do better this time around."
History, their history. How could they cut it away? It's been years and years. They'd lose too much, too many parts of the path that led them here.
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