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lestat de lioncourt. ([personal profile] damnedest) wrote2034-06-28 12:42 pm
divorcing: (Default)

[personal profile] divorcing 2024-12-29 11:41 pm (UTC)(link)
"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.

But still.
divorcing: (Default)

sweats

[personal profile] divorcing 2024-12-30 01:08 am (UTC)(link)
A huff, soft laughter.

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."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-12-30 08:50 pm (UTC)(link)
"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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-12-31 04:14 am (UTC)(link)
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.
divorcing: (Default)

[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-01 05:19 am (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-02 05:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Some quiet fracture in his chest.

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.
divorcing: (Default)

we did it

[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-03 05:43 am (UTC)(link)
Louis follows him down. Not into the coffin, but knelt alongside it, watching Lestat settle and feeling some uneven pulse of his heart. Longing, Louis knows. But something satisfied too, worries assuaged by the sight of Lestat safe and warm and ensconced in Louis' own coffin. He'll rest and wake steadier, and this knowledge is what prevents Louis from asking some question about playlists, about Lestat's opinions on this or that song, whether he's seen any given movie.

They had talked for hours, in the beginning. It had felt like this.

"Thanks," comes soft, Louis hanging just slightly over the edge of the coffin.

Lingers.

Eventually, murmurs, "Bonne nuit." French again, after so many years letting the language atrophy on his tongue.

Closes the lid. Lays a hand along the smooth surface, lingering still, before Louis lifts himself from the floor and into bed.

And this too is as it was. Louis sleeping later, longer. Never the first to wake between them. Whether or not Lestat lets himself out is his own business. The coffin opens from the inside.
Edited 2025-01-03 05:43 (UTC)
divorcing: (Default)

[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-04 05:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Armand had needed so little sleep. Louis had sometimes woken beside him while Armand silently swiped this and that across the smooth surface of his tablet, or in years before, holding a book, turning pages. Louis, centuries younger. Louis, still beholden to the pull of sun and moon.

Sometimes he'd woken alone. Less and less, in Dubai.

All these memories passing in a tangled flash as he comes to consciousness. A moment lingering in the space between sleeping and waking, not yet able to place his surroundings.

A moment where Lestat must be a dream

And then Louis reaches for him, touches his face, and remembers all at once everything that's passed between them the night before. Lestat, here. Real.

"Hey," Louis greets, voice still rough with sleep. Fingers lingering on Lestat's cheek as he asks, "You been awake long?"

Remembering. Their shared coffin. Lestat, the warmth of him, how perfectly he fit alongside Louis. How often Louis woke to his touch, his eyes bright in the dark.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-04 11:21 pm (UTC)(link)
A humming contemplation of this possibility. Of remaining here, Louis beneath the covers and Lestat atop them, a thin barrier between the pair of them acting as a reminder for Louis' self control.

"Rachida can bring us a cup."

A cup each, something Lestat seemed inclined to tolerate the night before. Louis is choosing to believe Lestat doesn't wish to lure a guest or two into bed with them.

"We could go out after," Louis murmurs, watching Lestat's face. "See what the storm did, you show me what's left of all our favorite places."

Places they'd visited little and less in those last dwindling months together. Always together, but rare to linger and enjoy each others company in those days.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-05 02:21 am (UTC)(link)
His fingers slowly, reluctantly, leave Lestat's face as he speaks. A necessary concession, so Louis might lift his phone from the nightstand and send a brief text. Breakfast in bed. Stall the question of a true hunt, whether Lestat cares to try, whether Louis is capable.

"I kept track of the Azalea," Louis admits. "For a while I thought..."

A trailing pause, Louis' expression abashed. He'd wanted it so badly, back then. Wanted a business. Wanted the boot off his neck. Wanted it badly enough to involve Lestat, use his money for it. Lestat hadn't minded but Louis had. Still does, maybe. A point of pride that he's made so much of his own money that he'd never find himself in that position again.

"Thought about buying it again, sometimes."

A dream. A dream like Lestat was a dream for years and years. Buy the Azalea, remake the past to a more pleasing outcome.

"Timing was never right," Louis dismisses. Turns his palm up, inviting the graze of fingers.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-08 06:55 am (UTC)(link)
"I don't know."

Decades cycling through different possibilities.

His most destructive impulses that would have seen the building razed down to ashes. His most wistful (destructive too, even masquerading as longing) wanting to recreate something thoroughly lost to him.

Lestat touches his palm and Louis' fingers twitch up. Acknowledging. Not quite trapping.

"Might have leased it out," he says finally. "Let someone make their own dream out of it."

A dream that would look very different from Louis'. Maybe last longer.

"Don't matter now," is not unlike a person shaking themself from a daydream. Setting aside these thoughts, shifting focus back to Lestat's face. "You think there's anything left of the park for us?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-09 03:23 am (UTC)(link)
Deep roots.

Louis hums. He finally closes fingers fully around Lestat's, running his thumb over Lestat's knuckles. Toys with his fingers, the pleasure of this small bit of contact.

"I don't mind a little mud on my boots."

A flash of memory: Lestat, lifting him with stunning ease. Louis, laughing. Held, and carried, and set down only on the safety of a curb, shoes and hem spared the ordeal of mud.

Louis' fingers run along Lestat's knuckles.

"You want me to have something suitable sent up for you from whatever shops are open?"

Louis, pretending he hadn't already dispatched Rachida. Hasn't quietly worried over the thought of Lestat's changed measurements, sought forgiving garments to accommodate what Louis no longer knows by heart.

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