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lestat de lioncourt. ([personal profile] damnedest) wrote2034-06-28 12:42 pm
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-12 05:50 pm (UTC)(link)
The twirl yields a glimpse of bare back, the flex of muscle as Louis' arms lift to guide down a polo, lightweight and textured. Regrettably, Louis had pulled on his trousers first. Utilitarian today, maybe in anticipation of excavating Lestat's cottage, worn canvas fabric artfully distressed.

It is a marked deviation. Louis is experimenting, not yet sure he is interested but willing to give himself the day.

"Come here," Louis beckons, reaching out with one hand while the other tugs clinging knit fabric into place over his chest and stomach.

An excuse to take Lestat by the wrist, run his thumb over the delicate tracery of veins there at the inside of his arm before fastening the button.

"Feel okay?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-13 12:24 am (UTC)(link)
"Rachida is very good at her work."

And due for a raise, perhaps, if Louis is going to spend more time stateside.

Louis looks him over, smiling a little at the small gesture of Lestat pushing his hair back. Remembering too the life they had together.

In the present, admiring the graceful drape of the sleeves, the fall of fabric around Lestat's still-narrow hips. Louis likes it very much. He is still handsome, even thinner, even marked by years of neglect.

"It's only a beginning," Louis offers. "I was thinking of what you wore before."

Maybe no longer relevant. Or maybe only a touchstone from which Lestat will build something else from when (if?) he continues updating his wardrobe.

"Are you still hungry?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-13 05:43 pm (UTC)(link)
"You wouldn't be."

Dismissive. It is not a problem. Louis has endless reserves. It has been made very certain, established in the beginning and never one had the supply lapsed.

Louis has lifted his coat from where he had laid it the night before. Tests the fabric to find it still sodden and sighs. Seeks an alternative in his suitcase.

"We can go hunting," Louis offers, voice steadier than he feels. "For whatever you are in the mood for."

Rats, if Lestat wishes. Louis certainly has no standing to object.

And he is trying. Live honestly, he had said. Whatever form that takes.
Edited 2025-01-14 02:31 (UTC)
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-16 03:15 am (UTC)(link)
Would Louis?

It's possible there are better ways to find out whether or not Louis intends to hunt properly than by dragging Lestat along with him. By risking ripping open old scars less than twenty-four hours after they reunited.

Nights ahead, where I might live honestly, Louis had said.

"I'm not sure," is honest. Louis offers, "We can walk in the park. See what kind of mood catches us."

Even if Louis couldn't make himself ready now, couldn't risk beginning something as destructive as his hunts had once been, he would like to see Lestat return to hunting. He would like to know that Lestat will be able to feed himself.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-17 05:11 am (UTC)(link)
A level of nostalgia is inescapable.

Or no, not nostalgia. Relief. A pain Louis hadn't fully understood or registered quieted.

Homesickness ebbed away. Gone now as they walk side by side the way they had before, and like then Louis is thinking of Lestat. Aware of how he moves, imagining what he might be thinking. And like then, Louis doesn't let himself reach for him. They only walk close, elbows brushing, as they fall into step together once more.

The park is windswept, scattered with debris, but whole. And there are no other visitors that Louis can hear, though the sound of the city has followed them, a melodious backdrop as they walk along the same winding paths they'd once taken together almost nightly.

"I been missing this place," Louis confides. Complicated sentiment, maybe something Louis can try to untangle for Lestat someday. (Walking through parks alone in Paris, dreaming of Lestat, choosing parks with some similarity to stem the homesickness.)

"You wanna walk, or you wanna sit?"

As if they aren't due a conversation. One pressing matter at a time.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-18 02:21 am (UTC)(link)
"Our bench," Louis echoes, a murmur more for himself than Lestat.

Their bench, just as they left it. Their bench where they would spend long hours talking, nights together and then with Claudia. Louis runs fingers over the wood, down the wrought iron arms, before sitting. Hooks up an ankle, just as he'd done long decades ago.

They could talk about anything. Speak more on the Golden Girls, or the last movie Lestat remembers seeing. But those are things that might need to be saved, set aside, if Lestat's curiosity is such that he cares to ask his questions again.

"You okay?" Louis asks instead.

They don't need to talk about it. It's what the question means.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-19 06:09 am (UTC)(link)
Briefly disorienting; Louis had never thought he'd be here again, and now he is, and for a moment they have slipped out of time and into the past.

And then Lestat speaks and Lestat arranges himself just so and Louis wants to press him, just a little. Nothing happened. Something happened. Long years alone, dwindling down into disrepair alone in a shack, that is something.

But Lestat looks so earnest. Louis sighs, soft.

"I wasn't okay for a long time."

He was alive, yes. But being eaten by his own grief. Living with the restless understanding that something was amiss, and not able to see it until Daniel lifted the blindfold from his eyes.

"But I'm okay now," Louis tells him. "I came because I'm going to be okay, and this helps."

Being home. Being with Lestat.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-01-30 05:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Remember all the ways they had touched each other in the thirty year span of their marriage. Covert, careful.

The world has changed around them. Louis could lean across the bench and kiss Lestat if he wanted. Maybe someone would jeer. It would be a lesser thing than it was once.

Louis had leaned in and kissed Armand in Paris, ignored the sour shout the act had provoked. He and Armand had touched each other in public since. Louis had touched men in public since.

Lestat draws his knuckles down Louis' shoulder and Louis feels it again, the weight of all their years apart. All that they'd missed.

Tell me invites so much that Louis is briefly overwhelmed thinking of all that Lestat doesn't know. And so he says nothing right away, instead settling himself on the bench, crossing his legs, stretching an arm across the back of the bench.

"I asked him if he saved me, and he said yes," Louis relates. This first thing. The bedrock upon which almost eighty years of companionship had been built. "We left together, after speaking to you."

Things Lestat must have known, must have understood.

"I didn't know he'd lied to me. I didn't know what he'd done before. I didn't know it was his script and his direction."

There are other transgressions. Louis doesn't care to speak them aloud just now.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-08 06:00 am (UTC)(link)
What did Louis know? What did he know on that stage?

Lestat touches him, and Louis realizes, detached, that he does not want to be touched. He doesn't want to be touched and he doesn't want Lestat to stop.

Louis looks away, very still even as he lifts eyes to the sky above them.

What did he know?

Daniel had made guide rails, questions like touchstones, like scaffolding. Microphone, notepad. No more diaries then, not for recounting this.

Here, now, Lestat asks and Louis delves back into the tangle of recollection.

Louis thinks first of—

Hands lifting him out of his chair. Claudia, screaming her name. Losing his grip on her hands. Screaming and screaming and screaming—

No. Before that.

Madeleine, straight-backed and unrepentant, lifting a finger as the crowd jeered.

No. After that.

Claudia. He thinks of Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. The wilderness that was their daughter. Claudia, in her yellow dress. Claudia, forced into the chair beside him. She'd leaned into him, and he'd leaned back, and they were together.

No.

It is like touching a hot stove. Like holding a forearm in the sunlight.

(Maybe it will never hurt less.)

"I could see him from where I was sitting," Louis says quietly. "I remembered seeing him, behind Sam with his scythe. Holding all those mortals words in their throat."

A memory. All these years, it felt like a memory. A cornerstone upon which almost eighty years had been built upon.

"He told me he saved me," Louis repeats. "I asked, and he told me how."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-08 07:05 am (UTC)(link)
A story Armand told to him, over nearly eighty years, and Louis had come to believe it.

(Had Armand taught it to him in some other, more lasting way?)

Lestat's finger is warm where he's laid it. They are quiet together. Maybe Lestat is thinking of that stage too.

By and by, Louis turns back to look at Lestat, take in the familiar profile.

Eventually, softly:

"Is that why you didn't say?"

Maybe in some other world, Lestat did say. And Louis would have said the cruel thing, said something to hurt him the way Louis had been hurting, and maybe they would have both been better for the ugliness of such an exchange. It would have been honest, at least.

But that is not what happened.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-08 09:30 pm (UTC)(link)
"I was saying it to hurt you."

Because Louis was hurt. Because Louis was—

Not angry, not anymore. Empty. What was left was something colder, crueler. Pain with nowhere to go but out.

"I thought it was yours. Your play. Your revenge."

And that Armand had spoiled it for him, to some degree
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-08 09:45 pm (UTC)(link)
"Maybe I was."

He'd killed almost all the others. Sam, gone. Armand, spared. And Lestat—

Louis' eyes drop to his throat, lift back to his face.

"What would have happened?"

Held behind his teeth are all the things Daniel intuited, drew out of Louis over the course of those weeks in the penthouse. Louis cannot yet say to Lestat, I regretted it even before I finished doing it. Can't tell him that it was that regret Claudia punished him for with long months of fury. Well-deserved, maybe, but Louis couldn't have fed Lestat into the incinerator. He couldn't.

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