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.
There is a slightly sullen cast to his expression, doubt for the idea of happiness and refusal to forget these recent errors. Knows, all the same, that Louis is speaking sensible things to him. Hopeful things. We, and us.
Slammed the door on Paris. On his own turning. Begged them to move on from Claudia, whom he'd convinced himself would never return, because they never return. Bemoaned the shattered mantle, unrepaired. Longs to burn the bloodied clothes from Louis' body.
"I meant what I said," feels like a retreat, but offered anyway. "That I love only you. Have loved only you."
He had said the words to Antoinette, meant them in a fashion, but it was nothing, nothing really.
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.
Silent, first. Reluctance that is in itself a confirmation. That Antoinette gave him things he did not get at home. What would be the point, otherwise?
"She is generous with her affections," Lestat says, and his breath catches, but doesn't bother dredging up a corrected tense. It doesn't matter. "Desperate to bestow them on me. It came easily. Sometimes—" His hands giving a squeeze, as if to ensure Louis would not vanish, withdraw. "Sometimes I just wanted things to be easy for me."
Sex, love, laughter. His voice strangles a little in his throat as he says, "And I know I don't deserve it."
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.
Lestat doesn't move his hands, as if sensing that Louis would use it as a reason to slip away from him.
"But I hurt you so badly," feels a little like he has had to excavate these words from some deep, buried place. "And now it is that I will have always hurt you badly. I haven't known how to..."
One of those rare trailings off, when he means too many things to say at once. How to make Louis love him again, how to repair the damage that remains. His hands gentler on Louis' arms, thumbs reflexively stroking through the sleeve fabric.
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—
Minor, reflexive resistance for the idea of leaving, of abandoning, when he has felt himself abandoned—and Lestat lets it pass, for the tone in Louis' voice, the clear hurt of it. He did leave. He did to Louis what, had Louis done to him, would have shattered his world. His hands tense again on his arms, relax.
And then it's a little uneasy, his relief for what comes next. Feels it anyway. How wretched, though. It sounds like doom more than love.
"Yes," Lestat answers, anyway. "Always. I am nothing without you."
An echo, as true now as it had been then.
"But I miss you," nudged over the line. "I miss the way things could be between us. Can they be this way again?"
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.
Lestat slides his hands back down Louis' arms, and shifts to touch his waist. A loose embrace, but more defined in intention. Holding him, even with space in between.
"When I went to her home tonight," he says, "I looked for you. I thought, maybe he will be along the river, or on the bridge. Perhaps we could walk somewhere else together, if so." Too much to claim that he might imagine them talking together as well, resolving things—a nostalgic wish, rather, but one he means all the same.
But he still went to her home, when he might have sought Louis out in earnest.
He has never asked: was Louis truly going to leave, that night Claudia came back? Louis never said. There has been no room to ask it. Lestat will have to decide for himself if it matters. Louis had said, he would still have him, no matter what Lestat did.
"I'm not leaving you," offered instead. "And I would have you as you are as well."
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.
That simple Okay? gets around his heart, squeezes. Holds Louis closer. Doesn't mind the blood. It's just blood, blood that needs burning.
"No more. I promise." Lestat wondering, did he ever say those words? He can't remember. He had promised, and so maybe they'll ring hollow now. "I promise," he says again, a little flicker of anguish in his voice, his expression. "I'm sorry."
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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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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Slammed the door on Paris. On his own turning. Begged them to move on from Claudia, whom he'd convinced himself would never return, because they never return. Bemoaned the shattered mantle, unrepaired. Longs to burn the bloodied clothes from Louis' body.
"I meant what I said," feels like a retreat, but offered anyway. "That I love only you. Have loved only you."
He had said the words to Antoinette, meant them in a fashion, but it was nothing, nothing really.
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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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"She is generous with her affections," Lestat says, and his breath catches, but doesn't bother dredging up a corrected tense. It doesn't matter. "Desperate to bestow them on me. It came easily. Sometimes—" His hands giving a squeeze, as if to ensure Louis would not vanish, withdraw. "Sometimes I just wanted things to be easy for me."
Sex, love, laughter. His voice strangles a little in his throat as he says, "And I know I don't deserve it."
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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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Lestat doesn't move his hands, as if sensing that Louis would use it as a reason to slip away from him.
"But I hurt you so badly," feels a little like he has had to excavate these words from some deep, buried place. "And now it is that I will have always hurt you badly. I haven't known how to..."
One of those rare trailings off, when he means too many things to say at once. How to make Louis love him again, how to repair the damage that remains. His hands gentler on Louis' arms, thumbs reflexively stroking through the sleeve fabric.
"I've run from it instead, I think."
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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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And then it's a little uneasy, his relief for what comes next. Feels it anyway. How wretched, though. It sounds like doom more than love.
"Yes," Lestat answers, anyway. "Always. I am nothing without you."
An echo, as true now as it had been then.
"But I miss you," nudged over the line. "I miss the way things could be between us. Can they be this way again?"
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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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"When I went to her home tonight," he says, "I looked for you. I thought, maybe he will be along the river, or on the bridge. Perhaps we could walk somewhere else together, if so." Too much to claim that he might imagine them talking together as well, resolving things—a nostalgic wish, rather, but one he means all the same.
But he still went to her home, when he might have sought Louis out in earnest.
He has never asked: was Louis truly going to leave, that night Claudia came back? Louis never said. There has been no room to ask it. Lestat will have to decide for himself if it matters. Louis had said, he would still have him, no matter what Lestat did.
"I'm not leaving you," offered instead. "And I would have you as you are as well."
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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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That simple Okay? gets around his heart, squeezes. Holds Louis closer. Doesn't mind the blood. It's just blood, blood that needs burning.
"No more. I promise." Lestat wondering, did he ever say those words? He can't remember. He had promised, and so maybe they'll ring hollow now. "I promise," he says again, a little flicker of anguish in his voice, his expression. "I'm sorry."
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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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