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?"
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?"
What a baffling thing for Louis to say, that he picked Lestat over Claudia. He recalls months of conspiracy, he recalls being unable to win Louis back to his side, he recalls his blood flowing from his opened throat and waking to misery, torment, abandonment, and his fledglings off on their grand adventure. It reads on his face, a moment of transparent bewilderment, before he manages to tamp this down into something more neutral, or so he hopes. A look down and aside might help.
Well, he supposes, he is alive and Claudia is not. And of course, it would be just like his most spoiled daughter to believe she did not have enough of Louis just because Lestat was not dead forever. His twinge of resentment is almost affectionate.
"We might blame Armand," he manages. Move on. Continue. "Wherever he might be."
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.
Untangling, Louis says, and Lestat wonders if he knows exactly how many knots he might have to cut through before he can truly call it done. If there even is such a thing. He might say, Louis is himself an entanglement, a snarl between Lestat and Armand, but perhaps that can wait. Or perhaps it never needs saying.
Perhaps it's not even true, but it feels true. Feels just like Armand, to braid himself into Lestat's life this way. All the while, his hand is pliant under the inspection that Louis' hand makes of it. Playing a little, in the curl of his fingers.
"Hard won freedom," he adds, looking back up at him. Still tearful, simply because that rise of feeling hasn't gone away, but less teetering, a thin-pressed smile as he looks at Louis. Louis, who is here, and beautiful, and soft-spoken, and holding his hand.
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?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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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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Well, he supposes, he is alive and Claudia is not. And of course, it would be just like his most spoiled daughter to believe she did not have enough of Louis just because Lestat was not dead forever. His twinge of resentment is almost affectionate.
"We might blame Armand," he manages. Move on. Continue. "Wherever he might be."
This, too, is a question.
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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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Untangling, Louis says, and Lestat wonders if he knows exactly how many knots he might have to cut through before he can truly call it done. If there even is such a thing. He might say, Louis is himself an entanglement, a snarl between Lestat and Armand, but perhaps that can wait. Or perhaps it never needs saying.
Perhaps it's not even true, but it feels true. Feels just like Armand, to braid himself into Lestat's life this way. All the while, his hand is pliant under the inspection that Louis' hand makes of it. Playing a little, in the curl of his fingers.
"Hard won freedom," he adds, looking back up at him. Still tearful, simply because that rise of feeling hasn't gone away, but less teetering, a thin-pressed smile as he looks at Louis. Louis, who is here, and beautiful, and soft-spoken, and holding his hand.
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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?