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.
A twinge of misgiving; a twinge of relief. Apologies feel like something he can wield, more of a tool than a weapon. A gift, maybe. Something to get his hand around and offer. Being denied it—
Better, though, for the way Louis leans in to him. For what he says, for what he wants instead.
Lestat nods, yes, this is what he wants to, and he is going to have to trust it, with Louis trusting him. A squeeze of his hands before they withdraw, and he pulls shirt tails out from Louis' waistband. Catches his wrist to undo the button at the cuff. For burning, without forgetting.
Louis might have done all this himself, had Lestat not caught up to him. Touched him. Held him while they tried to unravel the newness of the state Louis has plunged them into.
But Lestat begins divesting him of blood-soaked shirt, and Louis quietly permits him. Yes, they want the same things. Yes, they will have to place their weight upon the tenuous, much-fractured trust between them.
Lestat's fingers are working carefully at his cuff. Louis makes a soft sound, finding himself suddenly impatient. Unable to bear the smell of her blood.
"Just—"
A break. Louis' fingers hooking at the collar, tugging. Buttons scatter. The fabric comes loose, and Louis begins to twist out of the drying fabric.
Lestat's hands come up, hover through this initial twist of activity. Decides, he will allow Louis to attend to this himself. He will likely not match the correct urgency, and this isn't exactly the appropriate time to set about tearing his clothes off. So: he waits until the shirt is shucked off, and then goes to take it from him.
"I can take these downstairs," he says, an offer that has the tone of intention. He does not really wish to leave Louis alone, but he less wants the scent of Antoinette to linger any more than it does now in their most private quarters, in their house. Logistically wise.
So much blood. He could have had it all to himself. No sense complaining about the waste.
His hand had already been in motion, towards their fire, before Lestat takes hold of the fabric. Louis' grip tightens, then loosens. Relinquishes the torn shirt.
"Outside," is about logistics too. Louis reels a step backwards, tugging his belt loose. Shucking off trousers. Blood lingers, splotchy patches on Louis' skin where it had soaked through layers of clothing.
Remembers Lestat suddenly, that first morning. Stripping out of his clothes, standing naked alongside his coffin. How the whole world had been rearranged around Louis, and Lestat had been the only fixed point.
This moment feels like a warped echo. The world unsteady, all things in the air. Lestat, steady, in spite of what Louis has done. What they have done to each other.
It is what he wants to be, after crumbling, after yelling, after clawing for unearned sympathy, something about the fractures he can see in Louis evoking the instinct to make himself useful. Reliable. The instinct that is a century and more the senior. A maker and mentor, or so this is who he should be. Lestat takes the clothes, watching Louis all the while.
Blood on his skin. Likely too dead to be safely licked away. A perverse thought that, of course, his mind produces, confronted with Louis' naked form.
"The incinerator," he confirms. A step away. "I'll be back in a moment."
Louis nods. A moment, to dispense with the clothes. The blood. Lestat goes and his scent lingers in the room. It evokes something near tangible. His presence remaining even while he is gone, down the stairs and out the door, into their little courtyard. Lestat and Claudia had hunted. Perhaps the incinerator still burns, and there is no work needed but to open the door to toss in Louis' discarded clothes. Jacket, shirt, trousers, all things fed to flame as Louis, alone in their room, stands between hearth and mirror.
Antoinette, clinging to his skin. The twisting urge to do harm, to claw her away.
She has ever had a gift for lingering, Antoinette. She is in the grooves of his skin, nail beds and knuckles, smeared and splotched across his body.
He does not step into the fire. But he thinks of scorching, of boiling. Whether it would cleanse her from them in a way Louis' violence couldn't. Is wrenched back from it by feet on the stairs.
The clothes are tossed in, and Lestat removes a cigarette from his pocket as he sets his mind on rumpled, bloodied cloth and wills it to combust, which it does. Focuses that fire, lets it burn with no fuel at all but his own command. If he wanted to cry for her it would be now, but the tears don't start. He is home, welcomed home. Nothing else matters.
He gets through half his cigarette and then everything is ash, so he pitches it in after the pile in the incinerator and returns to the stairs. There is not so much night left, which is reassuring. While Louis considers his own fire, Lestat leaves the dust of his own behind and considers sleep.
Not yet, however. "Oui," he says, as he enters their room. A look up and down of Louis, who has simply waited for him. "We should get you cleaned up, mon cher. And then come to bed with me."
The moment passes. The impulse to step into the fire, slipping through his fingers. Dissipates as Lestat's presence fills the room, draws Louis back into the present. To their room, to his own body.
A long moment passes where Louis searches Lestat's face. Maybe for tears, maybe for regret. For any sign that Lestat has taken the time to assess the wreckage, and reconsidered. That all their circling argument and tenuous dreams for the future have been weighed against what Louis took from him and were found wanting.
Whatever he finds, Louis' shoulder loosens. Turns further towards Lestat, back to the fire.
"Okay."
As Louis reaches out a hand. Invitation without forward momentum, beckoning Lestat from the doorwar.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
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 subject
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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
Better, though, for the way Louis leans in to him. For what he says, for what he wants instead.
Lestat nods, yes, this is what he wants to, and he is going to have to trust it, with Louis trusting him. A squeeze of his hands before they withdraw, and he pulls shirt tails out from Louis' waistband. Catches his wrist to undo the button at the cuff. For burning, without forgetting.
no subject
But Lestat begins divesting him of blood-soaked shirt, and Louis quietly permits him. Yes, they want the same things. Yes, they will have to place their weight upon the tenuous, much-fractured trust between them.
Lestat's fingers are working carefully at his cuff. Louis makes a soft sound, finding himself suddenly impatient. Unable to bear the smell of her blood.
"Just—"
A break. Louis' fingers hooking at the collar, tugging. Buttons scatter. The fabric comes loose, and Louis begins to twist out of the drying fabric.
no subject
"I can take these downstairs," he says, an offer that has the tone of intention. He does not really wish to leave Louis alone, but he less wants the scent of Antoinette to linger any more than it does now in their most private quarters, in their house. Logistically wise.
So much blood. He could have had it all to himself. No sense complaining about the waste.
no subject
His hand had already been in motion, towards their fire, before Lestat takes hold of the fabric. Louis' grip tightens, then loosens. Relinquishes the torn shirt.
"Outside," is about logistics too. Louis reels a step backwards, tugging his belt loose. Shucking off trousers. Blood lingers, splotchy patches on Louis' skin where it had soaked through layers of clothing.
Remembers Lestat suddenly, that first morning. Stripping out of his clothes, standing naked alongside his coffin. How the whole world had been rearranged around Louis, and Lestat had been the only fixed point.
This moment feels like a warped echo. The world unsteady, all things in the air. Lestat, steady, in spite of what Louis has done. What they have done to each other.
no subject
It is what he wants to be, after crumbling, after yelling, after clawing for unearned sympathy, something about the fractures he can see in Louis evoking the instinct to make himself useful. Reliable. The instinct that is a century and more the senior. A maker and mentor, or so this is who he should be. Lestat takes the clothes, watching Louis all the while.
Blood on his skin. Likely too dead to be safely licked away. A perverse thought that, of course, his mind produces, confronted with Louis' naked form.
"The incinerator," he confirms. A step away. "I'll be back in a moment."
no subject
A moment.
Louis nods. A moment, to dispense with the clothes. The blood. Lestat goes and his scent lingers in the room. It evokes something near tangible. His presence remaining even while he is gone, down the stairs and out the door, into their little courtyard. Lestat and Claudia had hunted. Perhaps the incinerator still burns, and there is no work needed but to open the door to toss in Louis' discarded clothes. Jacket, shirt, trousers, all things fed to flame as Louis, alone in their room, stands between hearth and mirror.
Antoinette, clinging to his skin. The twisting urge to do harm, to claw her away.
She has ever had a gift for lingering, Antoinette. She is in the grooves of his skin, nail beds and knuckles, smeared and splotched across his body.
He does not step into the fire. But he thinks of scorching, of boiling. Whether it would cleanse her from them in a way Louis' violence couldn't. Is wrenched back from it by feet on the stairs.
"Lestat," before asking, "It's done?"
no subject
The clothes are tossed in, and Lestat removes a cigarette from his pocket as he sets his mind on rumpled, bloodied cloth and wills it to combust, which it does. Focuses that fire, lets it burn with no fuel at all but his own command. If he wanted to cry for her it would be now, but the tears don't start. He is home, welcomed home. Nothing else matters.
He gets through half his cigarette and then everything is ash, so he pitches it in after the pile in the incinerator and returns to the stairs. There is not so much night left, which is reassuring. While Louis considers his own fire, Lestat leaves the dust of his own behind and considers sleep.
Not yet, however. "Oui," he says, as he enters their room. A look up and down of Louis, who has simply waited for him. "We should get you cleaned up, mon cher. And then come to bed with me."
no subject
A long moment passes where Louis searches Lestat's face. Maybe for tears, maybe for regret. For any sign that Lestat has taken the time to assess the wreckage, and reconsidered. That all their circling argument and tenuous dreams for the future have been weighed against what Louis took from him and were found wanting.
Whatever he finds, Louis' shoulder loosens. Turns further towards Lestat, back to the fire.
"Okay."
As Louis reaches out a hand. Invitation without forward momentum, beckoning Lestat from the doorwar.