Yes, some of this Lestat must have known. But some of it he does not. After all, did Louis not hear him call for banishment? See Armand in his place of privilege, watching? He feels something coil sharp in his chest as he listens.
An odd and sudden gravity, to evoke the last time they'd seen each other, those decades ago. Its evocation prickles cool across Lestat's skin, but he refuses himself the urge to look down or away. Watching Louis all the while. Uncurling a finger, letting his knuckle touch the weave of his coat at his shoulder.
"What did you know," he must ask, "when you were on the stage?"
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."
Lestat does not think he remembers a Sam with a scythe, but he also did not ask this to quibble over the details. Regret, already, for the way Louis has gone quiet and still, his own nervous quiet stillness setting in as he tries to understand. Armand, taking the credit, such as it was. Of course he would see it that way.
Of course Armand would see it as opportunity. Would adapt to the surprise and betrayal of it. Adaptive, is Armand.
Finally, Lestat offers, "I didn't know," not that Louis is asking. Or perhaps Louis doesn't wish to know these things. Still, it is given. His finger remains where it is, resting curled there. "I thought you knew I had done what I did. I thought—"
He wets his lips, now looks away. Yes, a thorny memory lane. "I thought perhaps it wasn't enough."
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.
Or—did it? Lestat tips his head, trying to will himself back there, back to Magnus' dungeon, back to Louis standing tall and cold over him, back to the taste of Claudia's ashes in the back of his throat. Was there a moment where he wanted to snap it, when Louis was condemning him? But I saved you, he might have said, this thing he thought Louis understood.
Maybe he had the impulse, and tamped it down. The weight of what he had failed to do, crushing the thing he had accomplished. "Besides," comes out a little lighter. Inappropriately, of course. "You weren't saying anything that wasn't true."
Lestat returns his attention to Louis. Nothing in his manner has changed, no withdrawal, maintaining connection with this singular light touch. His eyes are wetter, the crack of his smile wavery. This can't be called a shift in status quo.
Dips in closer a little to add, specify, "What you had hesitated over, a few short years back."
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.
Good that they can't read each others' minds, sometimes. That Louis won't know that twist of apprehension when his eyes drop to Lestat's throat, or, worse still, the odd prickle of something like anticipation, bedroom warmth.
No longer is it true, that the last time he was held lovingly was when his throat was being opened. But this had been true for decades.
Breathing slowly, aware of this minor point of contact. Choosing for it to be an anchor point. A welcome thing. They are here, not there. Lestat is alive, not dead. Louis remembers him.
Their hearts still beat in time. Easy as it ever was.
"You."
No satisfaction now, years later. Louis gave him death, of a kind. Now he's here, dug Lestat out of the ground.
"I killed all the rest of them," is something Lestat had to know. "It wasn't enough."
Well, they are vampires. Death does not have to mean finality.
But he understands. Remembers his own quiet refusal, and what came after. Felt it like a building collapsing within himself. Kept it all contained. Watched as if from a great distance as his erstwhile companion kissed his daughter's murderer. How it had felt like an unfair distribution of forgiveness.
"I might have burned," Lestat says, finally. "And lived to remember it. I'm not really sure."
He had sounded sure, he knows, speaking truths he believed, but he hasn't had an opportunity to test these things. He does not want to go into a fire. He does not want to step into the sun. (His hair, you know.) But perhaps he could. One day, he will know for sure, and he will have to determine what to do with that information.
It's for the best. It's true to Louis' nature, to punish Lestat far more cruelly than the fire would have.
Because Lestat has been punished. Louis saw it.
(It does not occur to Louis, not really, that he has punished himself too.)
"I believed he saved me. Believed it for a long time."
It had all come together in Louis' mind. When he had recited it to Daniel, Louis had seen it in his mind's eye: Armand, exertion written all across his face.
Lestat's fingertip remains, holds Louis in the moment. No perilous slip backwards into that memory, onto that stage.
Perhaps the accursed script had done its work even better than Armand could have anticipated, better than Lestat would have imagined. Stoking Louis' hatred and anger and dread so brightly that he could not accept Lestat's improvised apology any better than he could see Lestat's attempt to rescue him.
An attempt only. He was still cast into a slow death. He was still rescued from it by Armand. Claudia is dead. What material difference exists?
Well, a profound one, it would seem.
"When?" he asks. Better to keep going, at least for tonight. They could stay on that stage until dawn, if they let it keep them.
It had been a perfectly calibrated thing, Armand's script. Louis understands now how much must have come from their time together, from his own folly in letting Armand into his own head. Perhaps some from Lestat in the end. Perhaps more from Claudia's diaries, surely read before they were displayed. Louis is reluctant to ask for an accouning, to try and divide up the pages, parse out who contributed which piece.
It doesn't matter. The harm had been done. The play had done its work.
Claudia is dead.
Against all odds, Louis is (still) alive.
"Few days ago."
So, recent.
"Had a someone visiting me. He tracked down a copy, tossed it on our table. Made himself an undeniable point."
There had been deniability about what came after they'd left Daniel in San Francisco. Doubt, enough that Armand's explanation found fruitful ground in which to root itself. That must have been frustrating for Daniel.
But there was no deniability about the cruel spiky notes in the margins of that script.
Intrigue, despite himself, a sharper glint in the eye. Pausing over how to feel about it. How to feel that some other guided Louis to this conclusion. Too opaque, still. Lestat shifts on the bench, breaking contact but posture aimed more towards Louis in the twist of his spine, bent knee.
'Our table'. Another little glimpse of some mysterious life. A table that belongs to two, in a house that must also belong to two. A house in Dubai, he recalls.
A flood of feeling. An ache after the gentle, fond tone in Louis' voice. A moment of selfish fury that Louis have people to feel fond about when he has been alone. A rush of tenderness that Louis might speak of something, someone, without any melancholy or pain at all. And jealousy. This as well.
Overwhelming, and contained to a single unnecessary swallow, a twinge at his mouth. "And so I have Daniel to thank," he asks softly, a tip of his head, "for this unexpected reunion?"
A trailing pause. Louis' knee grazes Lestat's thigh as he shifts, a brief, agitated motion. Held over from those long restless years in Dubai, picking at something misaligned in him and unable to wear down the rough edge of it.
There are so many things Louis doesn't want to say. Isn't ready to say.
"I felt a long time like something wasn't right. I just didn't understand what it was. I needed him to look for me, and see what I couldn't."
A simple lie, but Lestat can just imagine it, the precariousness. The long years. At any moment, Louis could reconsider things, could view things differently for himself, and it would all come crumbling down. Even as Louis says this, that he needed a third party to come in and help him look, Lestat imagines how it must have felt like a frail deck of cards indeed.
And it's satisfying, grimly, to consider that Armand was likely as miserable as either of them. Burdened with his own arrangements, yet again.
It had made a terrible kind of sense. They'd tried to kill him. Lestat had come to be sure they suffered before they were killed. He could be cruel. Louis had seen it, in New Orleans. Cruelty that took his breath away.
(Is not quite thinking of their fight, of being dragged into the air. Louis thinks of mortals, mortal suffering, the games Lestat had played when he'd hunted.)
Nevertheless, Louis is less convinced of what he had believed for nearly eighty years.
"Us," is a soft correction. Louis fingers stealing across the bench, hooking up under Lestat's.
There had been three of them.
Lestat had made a choice. Louis doesn't think he'd made it out of malice.
Armand's explanation, fraught, of limitation. Louis is sure too that this had been borrowed.
The tears come, thick and glossy, without immediately falling. Lestat curls his fingers, keeps them hooked together, and his expression is probably familiar: a transparent attempt not to cry while already halfway there.
A look away, then, while keeping Louis' hand. Necessary. Easy to feel alone again. Easy to feel like there is no one in this world for him.
"I didn't know," after a moment. Gathering his thoughts. Measuring how he might distribute this burden. His voice wavers in his throat. "I didn't know if I would be able to save you, if I tried to save her. Perhaps I could have done it, but I couldn't be sure. So I didn't try."
And what parent doesn't even try? Now that he knows better, how a family is supposed to be.
Maybe this had been Armand's design too. Lining them up so, sentencing them one by one, and trapping Lestat into a choice.
Louis' thumb runs along Lestat's finger, caught in his own. Listens, lets the words settle between them.
Holds his hand properly, tighter.
"She was clear of it," Louis says, so quietly. "But she came back for me."
Louis had been in a bad way that night she left. Claudia saying things to him that he barely heard. The two of them going. Louis, bleeding out the sensation of Madeleine in their absence.
No wonder she came back. Their daughter, his Claudia. She had always come back for him.
"She wouldn't have been on that stage if it weren't for me. No choice for you to make."
How can Louis fault him for choosing? Louis had chose too, in New Orleans. He'd chosen Lestat. He isn't blameless. Claudia had forgiven him, but Louis had still betrayed her long before that night.
He had told Louis that he can't. Can't live with this burden alone, can't escape out from under it. Had felt it like a lightening, Louis reaching across with his words, prying some of it loose. Knows now, in this moment, it won't be so easy as that.
But that's alright. It feels better to ache and hurt in a different kind of way than the odd, paralysing grief of decades. To hold Louis' hand tightly as he feels himself partially come undone, a shivery breath coming out shallow, urgent.
He is meant to be learning about Louis and his awakening. Abruptly, all he wants is to be held and told that nothing is his fault.
But—
"Is this how you forgive me?" he asks. His tone is all fondness. "By blaming yourself?"
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Yes, some of this Lestat must have known. But some of it he does not. After all, did Louis not hear him call for banishment? See Armand in his place of privilege, watching? He feels something coil sharp in his chest as he listens.
An odd and sudden gravity, to evoke the last time they'd seen each other, those decades ago. Its evocation prickles cool across Lestat's skin, but he refuses himself the urge to look down or away. Watching Louis all the while. Uncurling a finger, letting his knuckle touch the weave of his coat at his shoulder.
"What did you know," he must ask, "when you were on the stage?"
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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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Of course Armand would see it as opportunity. Would adapt to the surprise and betrayal of it. Adaptive, is Armand.
Finally, Lestat offers, "I didn't know," not that Louis is asking. Or perhaps Louis doesn't wish to know these things. Still, it is given. His finger remains where it is, resting curled there. "I thought you knew I had done what I did. I thought—"
He wets his lips, now looks away. Yes, a thorny memory lane. "I thought perhaps it wasn't enough."
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(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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Or—did it? Lestat tips his head, trying to will himself back there, back to Magnus' dungeon, back to Louis standing tall and cold over him, back to the taste of Claudia's ashes in the back of his throat. Was there a moment where he wanted to snap it, when Louis was condemning him? But I saved you, he might have said, this thing he thought Louis understood.
Maybe he had the impulse, and tamped it down. The weight of what he had failed to do, crushing the thing he had accomplished. "Besides," comes out a little lighter. Inappropriately, of course. "You weren't saying anything that wasn't true."
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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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Lestat returns his attention to Louis. Nothing in his manner has changed, no withdrawal, maintaining connection with this singular light touch. His eyes are wetter, the crack of his smile wavery. This can't be called a shift in status quo.
Dips in closer a little to add, specify, "What you had hesitated over, a few short years back."
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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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No longer is it true, that the last time he was held lovingly was when his throat was being opened. But this had been true for decades.
"If what, chéri?"
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Lestat, who hadn't been in the mood.
Lestat, who had hardly risen to meet Louis when he'd spoken, accused.
Lestat, who is still touching him now.
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Lestat traces the stitching along Louis' coat at the shoulder with his fingertip, eyes darting to this point of contact.
"Who is to say you didn't succeed?"
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Their hearts still beat in time. Easy as it ever was.
"You."
No satisfaction now, years later. Louis gave him death, of a kind. Now he's here, dug Lestat out of the ground.
"I killed all the rest of them," is something Lestat had to know. "It wasn't enough."
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But he understands. Remembers his own quiet refusal, and what came after. Felt it like a building collapsing within himself. Kept it all contained. Watched as if from a great distance as his erstwhile companion kissed his daughter's murderer. How it had felt like an unfair distribution of forgiveness.
"I might have burned," Lestat says, finally. "And lived to remember it. I'm not really sure."
He had sounded sure, he knows, speaking truths he believed, but he hasn't had an opportunity to test these things. He does not want to go into a fire. He does not want to step into the sun. (His hair, you know.) But perhaps he could. One day, he will know for sure, and he will have to determine what to do with that information.
"Hadn't we all had enough horror for one week?"
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Because Lestat has been punished. Louis saw it.
(It does not occur to Louis, not really, that he has punished himself too.)
"I believed he saved me. Believed it for a long time."
It had all come together in Louis' mind. When he had recited it to Daniel, Louis had seen it in his mind's eye: Armand, exertion written all across his face.
Lestat's fingertip remains, holds Louis in the moment. No perilous slip backwards into that memory, onto that stage.
"I know it was you now."
And he knows it wasn't without great cost.
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An attempt only. He was still cast into a slow death. He was still rescued from it by Armand. Claudia is dead. What material difference exists?
Well, a profound one, it would seem.
"When?" he asks. Better to keep going, at least for tonight. They could stay on that stage until dawn, if they let it keep them.
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It doesn't matter. The harm had been done. The play had done its work.
Claudia is dead.
Against all odds, Louis is (still) alive.
"Few days ago."
So, recent.
"Had a someone visiting me. He tracked down a copy, tossed it on our table. Made himself an undeniable point."
There had been deniability about what came after they'd left Daniel in San Francisco. Doubt, enough that Armand's explanation found fruitful ground in which to root itself. That must have been frustrating for Daniel.
But there was no deniability about the cruel spiky notes in the margins of that script.
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Intrigue, despite himself, a sharper glint in the eye. Pausing over how to feel about it. How to feel that some other guided Louis to this conclusion. Too opaque, still. Lestat shifts on the bench, breaking contact but posture aimed more towards Louis in the twist of his spine, bent knee.
'Our table'. Another little glimpse of some mysterious life. A table that belongs to two, in a house that must also belong to two. A house in Dubai, he recalls.
"A friend?"
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Inescapable, the fond dip in Louis' tone. Daniel, who discovered the truth. Daniel, who Louis owes everything. Owes this moment. Their reconciliation.
Lestat stops touching him. Louis turns in towards him, an unconscious mirror.
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Overwhelming, and contained to a single unnecessary swallow, a twinge at his mouth. "And so I have Daniel to thank," he asks softly, a tip of his head, "for this unexpected reunion?"
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A trailing pause. Louis' knee grazes Lestat's thigh as he shifts, a brief, agitated motion. Held over from those long restless years in Dubai, picking at something misaligned in him and unable to wear down the rough edge of it.
There are so many things Louis doesn't want to say. Isn't ready to say.
"I felt a long time like something wasn't right. I just didn't understand what it was. I needed him to look for me, and see what I couldn't."
(What Louis wasn't allowed to see.)
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A simple lie, but Lestat can just imagine it, the precariousness. The long years. At any moment, Louis could reconsider things, could view things differently for himself, and it would all come crumbling down. Even as Louis says this, that he needed a third party to come in and help him look, Lestat imagines how it must have felt like a frail deck of cards indeed.
And it's satisfying, grimly, to consider that Armand was likely as miserable as either of them. Burdened with his own arrangements, yet again.
But also—
"That I didn't want to kill you."
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(Is not quite thinking of their fight, of being dragged into the air. Louis thinks of mortals, mortal suffering, the games Lestat had played when he'd hunted.)
Nevertheless, Louis is less convinced of what he had believed for nearly eighty years.
"Us," is a soft correction. Louis fingers stealing across the bench, hooking up under Lestat's.
There had been three of them.
Lestat had made a choice. Louis doesn't think he'd made it out of malice.
Armand's explanation, fraught, of limitation. Louis is sure too that this had been borrowed.
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A look away, then, while keeping Louis' hand. Necessary. Easy to feel alone again. Easy to feel like there is no one in this world for him.
"I didn't know," after a moment. Gathering his thoughts. Measuring how he might distribute this burden. His voice wavers in his throat. "I didn't know if I would be able to save you, if I tried to save her. Perhaps I could have done it, but I couldn't be sure. So I didn't try."
And what parent doesn't even try? Now that he knows better, how a family is supposed to be.
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Louis' thumb runs along Lestat's finger, caught in his own. Listens, lets the words settle between them.
Holds his hand properly, tighter.
"She was clear of it," Louis says, so quietly. "But she came back for me."
Louis had been in a bad way that night she left. Claudia saying things to him that he barely heard. The two of them going. Louis, bleeding out the sensation of Madeleine in their absence.
No wonder she came back. Their daughter, his Claudia. She had always come back for him.
"She wouldn't have been on that stage if it weren't for me. No choice for you to make."
How can Louis fault him for choosing? Louis had chose too, in New Orleans. He'd chosen Lestat. He isn't blameless. Claudia had forgiven him, but Louis had still betrayed her long before that night.
"It ain't on you. It ain't."
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But that's alright. It feels better to ache and hurt in a different kind of way than the odd, paralysing grief of decades. To hold Louis' hand tightly as he feels himself partially come undone, a shivery breath coming out shallow, urgent.
He is meant to be learning about Louis and his awakening. Abruptly, all he wants is to be held and told that nothing is his fault.
But—
"Is this how you forgive me?" he asks. His tone is all fondness. "By blaming yourself?"
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