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lestat de lioncourt. ([personal profile] damnedest) wrote2034-06-28 12:42 pm
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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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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-08 11:40 pm (UTC)(link)
"If I tried to kill you there."

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-08 11:58 pm (UTC)(link)
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."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-09 12:20 am (UTC)(link)
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.

"I know it was you now."

And he knows it wasn't without great cost.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-09 02:02 am (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-09 03:36 am (UTC)(link)
"His name is Daniel," Louis answers. "He's a journalist."

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-09 05:29 am (UTC)(link)
"Yeah," Louis admits. "I don't think I'd have..."

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-09 11:18 am (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2025-02-09 22:08 (UTC)
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-09 11:34 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

"It ain't on you. It ain't."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-10 02:16 am (UTC)(link)
How easy it all comes back, his love for Lestat. Never gone, never forgotten, never dormant, but neglected, doused in guilt, and in recent years—

Long decades of feeling so little, existing at a distant remove from himself. Maybe it'd been easier. But nothing had ever been absent, only far from him. Quieter from it.

He feels it all now. His grip tightening around Lestat's hand, thinking of simply drawing him across the bench into his lap. The night is quiet, they are alone. There is nothing to stop them but Louis' own restraint, his shaky sense of transgression.

Repeats, after a stretch of quiet, "It ain't on you. I mean it."

Louis had made so many mistakes. And the one thing he'd done right, at such long last, it had been undone because Claudia had come back to him. Louis, always a shackle round her ankle.

Says, "I," and then stops. Draws a breath. "I picked you over her. It's how she saw it, I can't argue with it. It's how it was. Don't matter that she forgave me for it. How am I gonna blame you?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-10 10:10 pm (UTC)(link)
They could blame Armand, but it feels to Louis not unlike blaming a train for running on tracks. Louis didn't do enough to get Claudia off them. Wasn't enough, in the end.

But Lestat is asking a question.

Louis turns his fingers in his own, playing with bare knuckles. Where are Lestat's rings? What became of all his finery, the things that had been his before Louis had helped him strip all of New Orleans for the purpose of outfitting his home, which would become their home?

A question for after. Or not a question at all, only a challenge. Louis is good at finding items.

Silence stretches. Louis' thumb slips across the pad of Lestat's fingers, across his palm. Eventually:

"I threw him out. I'm not sure where he will go."

And this too, a little sickening to navigate. Some part of Louis feeling an ache, a kind of pity. He will hate this too, maybe. Hate it as he hated his persistent love for Lestat, a thing that felt like a betrayal.

"It's going to take some untangling."

Marriage, an intricate thing. All the shared pieces of their life will be there in Dubai when Louis returns, waiting.

"But it's done. Me and him."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-02-11 09:45 pm (UTC)(link)
What will untangling be?

Louis isn't sure. Knows that it will not be so simple as walking out of the penthouse and returning to find Armand gone. Their lives are interwoven. Louis still sleeps turned in to the space Armand once occupied in their shared bed.

Lestat's hand is warm in his own. Permissive, easy. Louis is indulging himself in this small contact, letting this touch be an anchor. They're here, this is real. No one is dreaming.

"It took a long time," Louis agrees. "But I got it. Gonna figure what to make of it now."

Who is Louis de Pointe du Lac now? Who is he after seventy-seven years with Armand? Seventy-seven years without Claudia, without Lestat?

Heavy questions. None are Lestat's to answer.

Louis' head tips towards him, inquisitive, inviting. What else?