A breath of a laugh, nearly, a look back down at the cup in his hands.
Very well. Lestat raises the cup, turning it, and tells Louis, "It tastes muddy," a long awaited complaint, but one offered with a twinge of a smile. "Like if the bayou could bleed."
But here, he drinks. He takes a longer draw this time, two swallows, and his tongue cleans off his teeth beneath his lips. Not quite dead blood, but close in how empty it is. None of the syrupy life sparkling through it. But, all the same, something satisfying about the way it settles in his belly, suffuses through him.
A small hummed sound, acknowledging it. Already feeling a little less dislocated from reality.
Muddy, Louis can live with, because Lestat does not put aside his cup.
"I think I've grown accustomed to the taste."
Or to hunger, living with his hunger. Ever present, his most faithful companion.
But he doesn't want Lestat to feel it. They need only tide him over, wait out the storm. Then Lestat can eat his fill.
In the meantime—
"Are you sure you want to talk about this now?"
Though if not, it'd beg the question: when? Louis has no sense of schedule, of what his life will look like now. He had needed to see Lestat. Now that he's here, Louis is less certain of what comes next. Has an understanding of what he needs, but less of where his feet should carry him, what he would even find back in Dubai when he returned.
He drinks down another mouthful, wonders after it, after Louis wishing to live honestly. Another surge of curiousity. Does Louis hunt anymore, or is it just the bagged blood? Supplementing with rats, again? How had it been with Armand, who had not even a trace of pity in his heart for mortal lives? Armand, more patient than Lestat, but perhaps just as invested in Louis' survival.
Swallows the blood, and his questions, looking back up at Louis. A moment of study, and then he says, "If you are not, then I am not."
He rotates the cup in his hands, adds, "Only, I am not sure how long we have."
This settles inside of him, aches. Eighty years for a few days. Not dramatic at all, he thinks, to equate this to a man dying of thirst and given a sip of water. Not enough, but desperately sweet. But he is nodding, yes, the storm damage, figuring out how to tell it, and his gaze dips down to the offered second cup. An instinct to say, Louis needs to eat too.
But that's just the same annoying bullshit when Louis would defer back in the day, when he'd let time spool out between hunts, find some excuse despite how clear the need was. So. Lestat flicks some hair back and finishes his present cup, thick warm blood swallowed down.
He takes up the second cup, a little gesture like Happy? as he brings it up.
"Perhaps," he says, "if the weather improves, we can tour somewhere familiar. You can tell it to me there."
He is thinking of Jackson Square, a preferred bench. It's still there, barring disastrous hurricane consequences.
Yes, Louis is happy. Unconcerned with his own hunger, for the moment.
"Bet you know the town better than me now," Louis admits. Lestat who has been here, stayed this whole time while Louis ranged far afield. Says to him, "You gonna take me on one of our walks? Like we used to?"
The very beginning of their courtship, long looping walks where Louis spoke and Lestat listened, asked questions, responded in kind. Louis had missed him. Had dreamed him, even consumed by his own guilt for doing so, to reach back for even a shadow of the comfort their companionship had been.
A little surreal, to think of reprising any part of the life they'd had together. Surreal to be here, sitting alongside him, close enough to feel Lestat's skin warming as he downs a full cup of blood, starts on another.
They had been friends once, hadn't they? Yes, a different pull at play, his attraction mirrored back to him in Louis' dark brown eyes, whether or not the then-mortal knew it, could name it, but Lestat thinks: Louis had been so quiet and thoughtful, deep layers of great sensitivities beneath his rougher exterior, and he thinks he himself had been warm and charming and funny. And interested.
He is interested now. Louis, all his depths, his glass green eyes. What remains, what changes. "I will," he says. "You can see how you like it now."
Not that Lestat has a deeply intimate grasp on the city's more recent transformations, but it doesn't really matter. What is new he can discover, what is the same, he can point to. He feels that perhaps he has been at home too much. Perhaps a storm wrecking his house is for the best.
Well, he has other questions. Most of them seem bundled up in what they plan to talk about. He lands on, "What kinds of art do you sell?"
Louis is strangely proud of it, of his success. And he wants Lestat to know it, even if Lestat doesn't fully grasp the minutia of what Louis does. He is still capable of operating a business. He is a success. He did it on his own, building up wealth again.
"Whatever interests me," is true, but so is: "Whatever I know will fetch a sizeable profit."
He leans back, a familiar slouch back against the couch. Talking like they used to, comfortable with each other, Louis' hand stretched along the back of the cushions as he explains, "If I like something enough, I put it into my private collection."
And, the offer, most quietly made, "Maybe I'll show it to you, if you'd like."
Implicit invitation. A kind of promise. Yes, they will see each other again. Louis doesn't intend to vanish. He only needs time, time enough to know himself.
In the meantime, they can talk. Lestat will drink from Louis' oversized mug. This piece of art, this bit of music. The storm howls outside. Easy exchange of things they like, things they have discovered in the passing years.
Eventually, even with the storm outside, Louis tells Lestat, "You need to get some sleep."
Louis is well outside any internal clock. Hours and hours ahead, still aware that it's about time for a vampire in New Orleans to take to coffin.
In turns, Lestat relaxes into the evening. He allows a third cup of not-quite-dead blood to be pushed into his hands. Allows the ever-present fog in his mind to roll back a little, enough for him to know it was there.
He asks Louis questions, and none of them are the ones that needle him. About art, about Dubai, his building. He shares, too, his thoughts on the past eighty years of music—most of them, perhaps surprisingly, are positive despite having been found practicing a classical piece, of claiming to have ambitions to replace Martha Argerich.
He asks if Louis has heard of Nirvana. He asks if Louis has heard of a small YouTube content creator who does amusing analysis of contemporary classical music. Did he ever see the Marilyn Monroe films? Did he watch The Golden Girls?
Scattered, these offerings. Dependent, in part, of what technology may have fallen into his hands and when.
But he would like to see Louis' art collections. He would like it very much.
An unexpected closing of the conversation, and Lestat glances to the windows. Impossible to tell where the sun is in the sky, between the storm, the boards, the curtains, but yes, he can sense it.
"As do you," he says, looking back at him. "Even if you insist on only feeding me and not yourself."
"I'm okay," is an old refrain, one Louis attempts to correct, adding, "We can eat together when the sun sets."
A promise. Yes, he will eat. It's worth it, keeping his hunger close to see Lestat coming into clearer focus. Steadier. Color improved.
"I have a coffin," Louis tells him. "I'd like you to stay in it today."
Another small offering. A coffin to heal what the blood hasn't. Maybe. Louis isn't certain exactly what kind of harm Lestat needs to repair, only that there are fractures. That there is something that needs to be tended to, like there are broken pieces in Louis that need tending to.
The one coffin, he supposes. Lestat leans to set down his empty cup. Being cared for, taken care of, somehow both pleasant as well as chafing. Call it vampiric instinct, stupid and useless. Louis, his fledgling, who he should be taking care of instead, who he has failed too many times previously for such an urge to be worthy.
So yes, itchy, for no good reason, but also warming. A scratchy blanket. That will do, as far as metaphors go. "And you will sleep where?"
Watching Lestat's face as he says this, thinking of long years in shared beds with Armand. How often they had slept alongside each other. The way they had learned to fit together, and how that had frayed, slowly, quietly, as Louis' restless unease grew.
Thinking too of Lestat and the bed in their townhouse before, how they never slept in but would tear the covers off sometimes, pillows shoved aside, how they'd lay together on the mattress after, breathless and sweating. Thinking of Lestat taking him to coffin after, folding in alongside each other in the dark.
A pang in his chest. Wanting. Wanting that closeness again. (Or maybe he's just lonesome, and putting too much on Lestat.)
"I'll be alright," Louis repeats. "Be right here when you open that lid in the morning."
Well yes there's a bed, but where is Louis going to—
Fine.
Lestat purses his lips, not wholly content with this assurance, this predicament, but first he moves. Stands, moves for the broad windows. Not quite the same self-possessed swagger that Louis recalls, but still, a habit for gliding, touching the edge of the curtains with a graceful for hand. Checking its density, flicking it back to look at the wood covering the glass.
"What if they remove the boards?" he asks, even as he checks whether the curtains can be drawn completely. They can. But also, they're only curtains.
"I'm a light sleeper," is probably not a joke that Lestat will find very funny, even without full context of what Louis has gotten up to in the course of seventy-seven years.
He stands, stepping around and out from behind the coffee table.
The nonchalance might be a little misplaced. Their bedroom in Dubai hadn't featured windows. Armand had been present, rarely asleep. Different circumstances.
Or maybe Louis is. Maybe always was, and Lestat only remembers it differently because he had a habit of sleeping last, waking first. And maybe it's changed. They hadn't shared coffins so much in their last few years together. They had done it so constantly in the past, before.
Before the worst of it. The urge to ask Louis to share forms and dies, Lestat's mouth even parting to say it before it withers. Wets his lips instead, looks towards the coffin that's been placed at the foot of the bed, like a travel trunk. He supposes that's what it is.
Moves across to another window. Checks this too, fussing with the curtains.
It's been some time since Louis slept in a coffin. He doesn't volunteer this. They're delaying so many conversations, and have spent the passing hours so pleasantly. Louis would spend another night letting Lestat lob various pop culture references at him, comparing where their experience of the world has overlapped these past years.
He doesn't want to speak of the intimacies he and Armand had cultivated. Doesn't want to think on them. His thoughts flinch away from long years of memories. (How long until he has to begin testing these memories for accuracy? How long until he has to commit himself to trying to find missing pieces where he had never expected them?)
"I'll sleep with the blankets over my head," sounds a little like teasing still, punctuated by the creak of the trunk opening. "Lestat, the curtains will be enough. The door is locked and bolted. It's only us."
"Don't rush me," a light scolding. "If this room is as impervious to sunlight as you say—"
But, fine. Lestat attends one last window to ensure the curtains drawn properly before turning from it, looking back to where Louis has opened the coffin. Moves nearer, inspecting its insides. Pillowy silk, clean, a marked departure from his own that is, as they speak, likely filling with flood water. That would have been an uncomfortable, waterlogged evening.
Resists the urge to check the door as well. A show of trust, then. He at least feels sharp enough now that there's no clutch of fear that he will sleep and wake up and it will be as if none of this happened, but still. Some small lingering anxiety that, at the very least, Louis himself will vanish.
So, he dawdles. Observes, "The storm blew in fast," as he folds his arms. "It will probably leave just as quickly, don't you think?"
"I think it will be gone when we wake," Louis agreed, straightening upright beside Lestat. "As if it were never here."
Except for the damage. All the damage.
Louis' fingers find the center of Lestat's back. Thinking of all the hurricanes they weathered together. Thinking of their home here, now a stop on a tour and their story mangled and exaggerated.
"But we'll be here."
The pair of them, enduring. Surviving a storm, again.
"I'll be here, I promise," Louis offers, quieter. Wondering if this is what troubles him. The sense of having dreamed their reunion. That he could blink and it would all be gone.
A simple assurance, the kind you might make to a child reluctant to go to bed for fear of nightmares, but it tangles up in him anyway. That Louis will be here when he wakes, a guaranteed thing.
Lestat thinks he has been rather good at not letting emotions get the best of him tonight, but his eyes prickle, world turning rosy. He wants to say some tender thing now, but each potential word feels impossibly heavy and impossibly delicate, like it will collapse under the weight of meaning, sincerity. He is glad Louis is here. That Louis found him again. That he inhabits a world where he will wake and see him.
Just presses a smile at him, I know, touching his hip in answer. Hoping this conveys something of it, without forcing him to say it and shatter all apart.
It's not an unfamiliar expression on Lestat's face, except that Louis had nearly forgotten it. Hadn't thought of it for years and years, had remembered all the other expressions Lestat wore but none of the most fragile. The sight of it twists in Louis' chest. He lifts his hand, cupping Lestat's cheek.
Yes, he understands.
"I'll close you in," Louis murmurs. "Like I used to."
Not quite like they used to.
Louis closing the door to their room, then joining Lestat. They'd shared more often than not. They'd learned how to fit together so thoroughly that it had been instinct, required no thought at all.
Maybe Louis' body still knows. He isn't certain. Can't be sure what's left to him now.
Lestat presses his hand over Louis', indulging in this momentary press of contact. Then, takes his hand, uses it like needless balance as he goes to step into the silk-lined interior of the coffin.
Considers maintaining his dignified, prettily tearful silence as he stands on the plush silk, and then decides differently—
"I would imagine you with me," a little like it is dragged from him, a shake of his head preceding words as he decides to speak again. "Even before all of the unpleasantness, when we were being petty and slept apart, I'd feel as though we were still sharing as we preferred. And then after..."
A tip of his head, wandering his gaze aside. Like the staggering expanse of time has a depth to it, a gravity threatening to pull him out of orbit. Still here, though, says a squeeze of his hand. "When I permitted myself a little romance, I'd think perhaps you would go to coffin and imagine the same. Your fingers clutching a curl of my hair. Your body in my arms, carved out of the darkness."
Back to Louis' face. "Did you imagine me that way?"
Their hands still linked, Louis' thumb running back and forth across Lestat's knuckles as they stand here together. As Lestat says this thing and Louis feels himself wavering, eyes pricking with tears as he looks back at Lestat.
Had Louis imagined him?
"Yeah," he admits, voice thick. "I imagined you. It was like you were there with me in any room I was in."
When he felt loneliest. Weakest. When he couldn't keep the ache of missing Lestat in check, and then weeks, months, denying himself again out of guilt and self-loathing. He can't say he never imagined them folded into a coffin together, but it has been so many years since Louis has been habitually sleeping in his coffin. Easier to set the temptation to dream Lestat into the space with him aside when he wasn't closing himself into that quiet, dark space.
And now, aching with the reality of time wasted. Years lost to a lie. Louis feels it all over again, looking back at Lestat over their interlaced hands.
Leans across the edge of the coffin from where he stands within it, pulling Louis closer by the hand so he can wind an arm around him. Tuck his face in there against his shoulder. Not the same collapsing urgency as the gravitational pull of mutual grief, the hurricane muted where it rages beyond sturdy walls and boarded windows, but perhaps they can be permitted this—another embrace, because they have missed one another.
The urge to say, You weren't, you were so far away.
It had been Louis and Armand together for so long. Louis and Armand and the grief Louis carried, the pain, this longing that he could never shed and hated himself for. Lestat takes him into his arms again and Louis turns his face in against the warmth of his neck. Breathes.
(Some curl of satisfaction, noting the way Lestat smells like him now.)
"You're here," skirts away from the thought. Dreaming Lestat into rooms and around corners and into the dark, seeing him on dance floors and hotel lobbies, hearing him in snatches of music. Years and years, finding pieces of him in every place he and Armand went.
"We don't gotta do that anymore."
No need for dreaming. Here they are. They missed each other, and they don't have to anymore. Louis should let go, but he doesn't. Holds on, because it is such a luxury. Holds on because Lestat won't.
It is a long and lingering hug, soaking up that sense of reality, of Louis' heart really beating against his own, his real breath against his neck. He can take this with him into the coffin, even as Louis says that need not do any imagining, but it is also true because they can have, at least, this.
"Okay," murmured, finally. "You can close me in now."
Untangles in stages, as if his hands were independently reluctant to let go, creeping along Louis' back, clutching his arm and shoulder, smoothing to flutter against his chest before finally breaking away.
The interior of the coffin smells clean and like Louis. Lestat lays amongst it, the generous pillowy interior, and—
There's a book in here, making a soft little sound as he tugs it free from a sewn in compartment beside him. Looks it over, fond creases at his eyes. Of course. Offers it up.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Very well. Lestat raises the cup, turning it, and tells Louis, "It tastes muddy," a long awaited complaint, but one offered with a twinge of a smile. "Like if the bayou could bleed."
But here, he drinks. He takes a longer draw this time, two swallows, and his tongue cleans off his teeth beneath his lips. Not quite dead blood, but close in how empty it is. None of the syrupy life sparkling through it. But, all the same, something satisfying about the way it settles in his belly, suffuses through him.
A small hummed sound, acknowledging it. Already feeling a little less dislocated from reality.
no subject
Muddy, Louis can live with, because Lestat does not put aside his cup.
"I think I've grown accustomed to the taste."
Or to hunger, living with his hunger. Ever present, his most faithful companion.
But he doesn't want Lestat to feel it. They need only tide him over, wait out the storm. Then Lestat can eat his fill.
In the meantime—
"Are you sure you want to talk about this now?"
Though if not, it'd beg the question: when? Louis has no sense of schedule, of what his life will look like now. He had needed to see Lestat. Now that he's here, Louis is less certain of what comes next. Has an understanding of what he needs, but less of where his feet should carry him, what he would even find back in Dubai when he returned.
no subject
Swallows the blood, and his questions, looking back up at Louis. A moment of study, and then he says, "If you are not, then I am not."
He rotates the cup in his hands, adds, "Only, I am not sure how long we have."
no subject
How long will he stay?
(If he stays too long, he'll never leave.)
Louis puts his mug onto the table in front of Lestat. Silent offering. Drink this too.
"A few days," he says quietly. Nonspecific. "Wanna give you a hand with the storm damage before I go."
Maybe buy a cell phone. Exact some promises, some assurances. Bully this millenial a little.
"I'm just...trying to figure out how to tell it. What happened."
no subject
This settles inside of him, aches. Eighty years for a few days. Not dramatic at all, he thinks, to equate this to a man dying of thirst and given a sip of water. Not enough, but desperately sweet. But he is nodding, yes, the storm damage, figuring out how to tell it, and his gaze dips down to the offered second cup. An instinct to say, Louis needs to eat too.
But that's just the same annoying bullshit when Louis would defer back in the day, when he'd let time spool out between hunts, find some excuse despite how clear the need was. So. Lestat flicks some hair back and finishes his present cup, thick warm blood swallowed down.
He takes up the second cup, a little gesture like Happy? as he brings it up.
"Perhaps," he says, "if the weather improves, we can tour somewhere familiar. You can tell it to me there."
He is thinking of Jackson Square, a preferred bench. It's still there, barring disastrous hurricane consequences.
no subject
"Bet you know the town better than me now," Louis admits. Lestat who has been here, stayed this whole time while Louis ranged far afield. Says to him, "You gonna take me on one of our walks? Like we used to?"
The very beginning of their courtship, long looping walks where Louis spoke and Lestat listened, asked questions, responded in kind. Louis had missed him. Had dreamed him, even consumed by his own guilt for doing so, to reach back for even a shadow of the comfort their companionship had been.
A little surreal, to think of reprising any part of the life they'd had together. Surreal to be here, sitting alongside him, close enough to feel Lestat's skin warming as he downs a full cup of blood, starts on another.
no subject
They had been friends once, hadn't they? Yes, a different pull at play, his attraction mirrored back to him in Louis' dark brown eyes, whether or not the then-mortal knew it, could name it, but Lestat thinks: Louis had been so quiet and thoughtful, deep layers of great sensitivities beneath his rougher exterior, and he thinks he himself had been warm and charming and funny. And interested.
He is interested now. Louis, all his depths, his glass green eyes. What remains, what changes. "I will," he says. "You can see how you like it now."
Not that Lestat has a deeply intimate grasp on the city's more recent transformations, but it doesn't really matter. What is new he can discover, what is the same, he can point to. He feels that perhaps he has been at home too much. Perhaps a storm wrecking his house is for the best.
Well, he has other questions. Most of them seem bundled up in what they plan to talk about. He lands on, "What kinds of art do you sell?"
no subject
Louis is strangely proud of it, of his success. And he wants Lestat to know it, even if Lestat doesn't fully grasp the minutia of what Louis does. He is still capable of operating a business. He is a success. He did it on his own, building up wealth again.
"Whatever interests me," is true, but so is: "Whatever I know will fetch a sizeable profit."
He leans back, a familiar slouch back against the couch. Talking like they used to, comfortable with each other, Louis' hand stretched along the back of the cushions as he explains, "If I like something enough, I put it into my private collection."
And, the offer, most quietly made, "Maybe I'll show it to you, if you'd like."
Implicit invitation. A kind of promise. Yes, they will see each other again. Louis doesn't intend to vanish. He only needs time, time enough to know himself.
In the meantime, they can talk. Lestat will drink from Louis' oversized mug. This piece of art, this bit of music. The storm howls outside. Easy exchange of things they like, things they have discovered in the passing years.
Eventually, even with the storm outside, Louis tells Lestat, "You need to get some sleep."
Louis is well outside any internal clock. Hours and hours ahead, still aware that it's about time for a vampire in New Orleans to take to coffin.
no subject
He asks Louis questions, and none of them are the ones that needle him. About art, about Dubai, his building. He shares, too, his thoughts on the past eighty years of music—most of them, perhaps surprisingly, are positive despite having been found practicing a classical piece, of claiming to have ambitions to replace Martha Argerich.
He asks if Louis has heard of Nirvana. He asks if Louis has heard of a small YouTube content creator who does amusing analysis of contemporary classical music. Did he ever see the Marilyn Monroe films? Did he watch The Golden Girls?
Scattered, these offerings. Dependent, in part, of what technology may have fallen into his hands and when.
But he would like to see Louis' art collections. He would like it very much.
An unexpected closing of the conversation, and Lestat glances to the windows. Impossible to tell where the sun is in the sky, between the storm, the boards, the curtains, but yes, he can sense it.
"As do you," he says, looking back at him. "Even if you insist on only feeding me and not yourself."
no subject
A promise. Yes, he will eat. It's worth it, keeping his hunger close to see Lestat coming into clearer focus. Steadier. Color improved.
"I have a coffin," Louis tells him. "I'd like you to stay in it today."
Another small offering. A coffin to heal what the blood hasn't. Maybe. Louis isn't certain exactly what kind of harm Lestat needs to repair, only that there are fractures. That there is something that needs to be tended to, like there are broken pieces in Louis that need tending to.
no subject
So yes, itchy, for no good reason, but also warming. A scratchy blanket. That will do, as far as metaphors go. "And you will sleep where?"
no subject
Watching Lestat's face as he says this, thinking of long years in shared beds with Armand. How often they had slept alongside each other. The way they had learned to fit together, and how that had frayed, slowly, quietly, as Louis' restless unease grew.
Thinking too of Lestat and the bed in their townhouse before, how they never slept in but would tear the covers off sometimes, pillows shoved aside, how they'd lay together on the mattress after, breathless and sweating. Thinking of Lestat taking him to coffin after, folding in alongside each other in the dark.
A pang in his chest. Wanting. Wanting that closeness again. (Or maybe he's just lonesome, and putting too much on Lestat.)
"I'll be alright," Louis repeats. "Be right here when you open that lid in the morning."
no subject
Fine.
Lestat purses his lips, not wholly content with this assurance, this predicament, but first he moves. Stands, moves for the broad windows. Not quite the same self-possessed swagger that Louis recalls, but still, a habit for gliding, touching the edge of the curtains with a graceful for hand. Checking its density, flicking it back to look at the wood covering the glass.
"What if they remove the boards?" he asks, even as he checks whether the curtains can be drawn completely. They can. But also, they're only curtains.
no subject
He stands, stepping around and out from behind the coffee table.
The nonchalance might be a little misplaced. Their bedroom in Dubai hadn't featured windows. Armand had been present, rarely asleep. Different circumstances.
But still.
be strong eppy
Or maybe Louis is. Maybe always was, and Lestat only remembers it differently because he had a habit of sleeping last, waking first. And maybe it's changed. They hadn't shared coffins so much in their last few years together. They had done it so constantly in the past, before.
Before the worst of it. The urge to ask Louis to share forms and dies, Lestat's mouth even parting to say it before it withers. Wets his lips instead, looks towards the coffin that's been placed at the foot of the bed, like a travel trunk. He supposes that's what it is.
Moves across to another window. Checks this too, fussing with the curtains.
sweats
It's been some time since Louis slept in a coffin. He doesn't volunteer this. They're delaying so many conversations, and have spent the passing hours so pleasantly. Louis would spend another night letting Lestat lob various pop culture references at him, comparing where their experience of the world has overlapped these past years.
He doesn't want to speak of the intimacies he and Armand had cultivated. Doesn't want to think on them. His thoughts flinch away from long years of memories. (How long until he has to begin testing these memories for accuracy? How long until he has to commit himself to trying to find missing pieces where he had never expected them?)
"I'll sleep with the blankets over my head," sounds a little like teasing still, punctuated by the creak of the trunk opening. "Lestat, the curtains will be enough. The door is locked and bolted. It's only us."
no subject
But, fine. Lestat attends one last window to ensure the curtains drawn properly before turning from it, looking back to where Louis has opened the coffin. Moves nearer, inspecting its insides. Pillowy silk, clean, a marked departure from his own that is, as they speak, likely filling with flood water. That would have been an uncomfortable, waterlogged evening.
Resists the urge to check the door as well. A show of trust, then. He at least feels sharp enough now that there's no clutch of fear that he will sleep and wake up and it will be as if none of this happened, but still. Some small lingering anxiety that, at the very least, Louis himself will vanish.
So, he dawdles. Observes, "The storm blew in fast," as he folds his arms. "It will probably leave just as quickly, don't you think?"
no subject
Except for the damage. All the damage.
Louis' fingers find the center of Lestat's back. Thinking of all the hurricanes they weathered together. Thinking of their home here, now a stop on a tour and their story mangled and exaggerated.
"But we'll be here."
The pair of them, enduring. Surviving a storm, again.
"I'll be here, I promise," Louis offers, quieter. Wondering if this is what troubles him. The sense of having dreamed their reunion. That he could blink and it would all be gone.
no subject
Lestat thinks he has been rather good at not letting emotions get the best of him tonight, but his eyes prickle, world turning rosy. He wants to say some tender thing now, but each potential word feels impossibly heavy and impossibly delicate, like it will collapse under the weight of meaning, sincerity. He is glad Louis is here. That Louis found him again. That he inhabits a world where he will wake and see him.
Just presses a smile at him, I know, touching his hip in answer. Hoping this conveys something of it, without forcing him to say it and shatter all apart.
no subject
Yes, he understands.
"I'll close you in," Louis murmurs. "Like I used to."
Not quite like they used to.
Louis closing the door to their room, then joining Lestat. They'd shared more often than not. They'd learned how to fit together so thoroughly that it had been instinct, required no thought at all.
Maybe Louis' body still knows. He isn't certain. Can't be sure what's left to him now.
no subject
Considers maintaining his dignified, prettily tearful silence as he stands on the plush silk, and then decides differently—
"I would imagine you with me," a little like it is dragged from him, a shake of his head preceding words as he decides to speak again. "Even before all of the unpleasantness, when we were being petty and slept apart, I'd feel as though we were still sharing as we preferred. And then after..."
A tip of his head, wandering his gaze aside. Like the staggering expanse of time has a depth to it, a gravity threatening to pull him out of orbit. Still here, though, says a squeeze of his hand. "When I permitted myself a little romance, I'd think perhaps you would go to coffin and imagine the same. Your fingers clutching a curl of my hair. Your body in my arms, carved out of the darkness."
Back to Louis' face. "Did you imagine me that way?"
no subject
Had Louis imagined him?
"Yeah," he admits, voice thick. "I imagined you. It was like you were there with me in any room I was in."
When he felt loneliest. Weakest. When he couldn't keep the ache of missing Lestat in check, and then weeks, months, denying himself again out of guilt and self-loathing. He can't say he never imagined them folded into a coffin together, but it has been so many years since Louis has been habitually sleeping in his coffin. Easier to set the temptation to dream Lestat into the space with him aside when he wasn't closing himself into that quiet, dark space.
And now, aching with the reality of time wasted. Years lost to a lie. Louis feels it all over again, looking back at Lestat over their interlaced hands.
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Leans across the edge of the coffin from where he stands within it, pulling Louis closer by the hand so he can wind an arm around him. Tuck his face in there against his shoulder. Not the same collapsing urgency as the gravitational pull of mutual grief, the hurricane muted where it rages beyond sturdy walls and boarded windows, but perhaps they can be permitted this—another embrace, because they have missed one another.
"I was," he whispers. "I was there."
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The urge to say, You weren't, you were so far away.
It had been Louis and Armand together for so long. Louis and Armand and the grief Louis carried, the pain, this longing that he could never shed and hated himself for. Lestat takes him into his arms again and Louis turns his face in against the warmth of his neck. Breathes.
(Some curl of satisfaction, noting the way Lestat smells like him now.)
"You're here," skirts away from the thought. Dreaming Lestat into rooms and around corners and into the dark, seeing him on dance floors and hotel lobbies, hearing him in snatches of music. Years and years, finding pieces of him in every place he and Armand went.
"We don't gotta do that anymore."
No need for dreaming. Here they are. They missed each other, and they don't have to anymore. Louis should let go, but he doesn't. Holds on, because it is such a luxury. Holds on because Lestat won't.
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"Okay," murmured, finally. "You can close me in now."
Untangles in stages, as if his hands were independently reluctant to let go, creeping along Louis' back, clutching his arm and shoulder, smoothing to flutter against his chest before finally breaking away.
The interior of the coffin smells clean and like Louis. Lestat lays amongst it, the generous pillowy interior, and—
There's a book in here, making a soft little sound as he tugs it free from a sewn in compartment beside him. Looks it over, fond creases at his eyes. Of course. Offers it up.
we did it
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