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lestat de lioncourt. ([personal profile] damnedest) wrote2034-06-28 12:42 pm
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-24 04:33 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-25 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-25 04:07 am (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-25 04:31 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-28 03:59 am (UTC)(link)
Has Louis not gotten what he wanted?

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-29 05:00 am (UTC)(link)
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?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-29 06:31 am (UTC)(link)
"You will."

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-29 11:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Part of Louis wants to press. Wants to hear that Antoinette was nothing, has been nothing.

But he has heard that before. It has never proven true.

Lestat didn't love her, but Antoinette was something to him. Louis wouldn't have cared otherwise.

"She gave you things I haven't," Louis says slowly. Testing. Waiting, maybe, to see what Lestat will do. What kind of honesty or otherwise he'll receive in exchange for the grotesquery of Louis standing before him wearing Antoinette's blood and probing after Lestat's infidelities.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-30 05:10 am (UTC)(link)
Here is the difficulty: their fight changed everything.

And maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it has always been so. Louis is difficult. Withholding. They argue. They hurt each other. Louis doesn't say any of the things he knows Lestat wishes to hear. (Loves him so much that it can't fit into the words he wants to offer, so much it freezes him in place when he tries. But didn't the rest, the way the were together, could that ever be—)

All their affections are spun glass, these past years. Easily shattered. Rarely taken out of their casing.

But there is real pain in this confirmation. Hurt that twists in Louis' chest, draws his eyes away from Lestat's face in spite of how even Louis has kept his voice. Lestat holds fast, a grounding clutch of contact against Louis' impulse to turn fully from him.

"Used to like a challenge, back when," Louis says quietly.

But Antoinette was present then too. The charm of a challenge had worn thin early, didn't hold any sway long years in.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-09-30 02:56 pm (UTC)(link)
"Left me."

Words that feel scraped raw. Said almost to himself. Louis, sitting with this painful confirmation. The culmination of long nights thinking of Antoinette. Easier. She was easy in all the ways Louis was not.

And now she is gone.

They will have to make it work. They will have to find their way. Louis took him back. He will have Lestat as he is, all the pain and spite and fractures they have made of each other.

He'd been so numb for so long. But he has to feel it now. Hurt. Hurt by this, relieved to be caught up in Lestat's hands, repulsed by his own actions and the scent of it clinging to him.

"I told Claudia I'd have you. That it don't matter, none of it, because I'd still have you."

It should matter. The damage. Louis has held it. Will continue to hold it. But in the end—

"You still wanna stay?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-01 12:39 am (UTC)(link)
No protest. The rawness of it doesn't abate. Long nights alone. Long nights sealed together in this house, where Louis punished Lestat year after year before he sank too deep into his own misery for the practice to hold his attention. Lestat had gone, and Louis had felt no pleasure in it then, just as he feels no particular pleasure in what he has done now.

Could be. Were.

The way it was before they came all apart.

"I want it to be," Louis offers. The simplest answer; it's finding their way back that's complicated. "I been missing you too."

And even when Lestat had returned to Rue Royale, the tenderness of their love had not rekindled. Louis was changed. They were changed.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-01 04:20 am (UTC)(link)
Louis, in all his melancholy and spite.

Something a little fractured in his expression for this thing Lestat describes. The diverging path where Lestat found him by the river. Where they walked together instead, and Louis did not do this thing.

He doesn't regret it. But he regrets the way Lestat had fallen to the floor.

"I don't wanna share you."

A ward against the possibility of another.

Louis is possessive. Jealous at heart. Lestat' fingers hook in at his waist and soothes the part of Louis hat worries, already, about the potential for some other diversion.

"We gonna put these clothes in the fire, and that'll be the end of it. Okay?"

The last dalliance. They go on to something better from here.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-01 05:16 am (UTC)(link)
They'll argue about it again. The old hurts. Seven years of silence and sniping by turns. Things that aren't settled but are outweighed now by the greater transgression:

The drop.

The magnitude of what had been broken. Louis' body. The trust he'd had in Lestat. All that he had thought he'd known.

Louis closes the doors on it. Lestat holds him closer. Smells of nothing but himself. (He had never come home smelling of Antoinette; too clever for such a small misstep.) Louis permits himself to lean in to him.

"Okay," first, and then, "I don't want the apologies anymore."

Has six years worth already anyway.

"Just want you. And us. The way we said it was gonna be."

He'd fix it with Claudia. Louis would. He would be a bridge. He would mend the fences. Maybe it would mollify her that Louis had done something, satisfy Claudia's need to even scales.

He'll worry tomorrow. Later. He has other things to hold his attention tonight.

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