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“I’d like to talk about something.”
Louis cocks an eyebrow, but doesn’t turn around. “Yeah, alright.”
The request is a little formal, but Lestat is—careful, these days. Stilting, sometimes. Louis hears it in his voice, that hesitancy, when he says, “Something in your book.”
That’s what Lestat still calls the interview, to Daniel’s eternal annoyance.
Louis dares a peek over his shoulder, fighting off the urge to tense up. “Oh?”
Lestat stays languid on the couch, swirling the remainder of a smooth Merlot and A negative around his wine glass. He is the picture of ease, entirely unbothered, but Louis knows better. There’s something to it, to him asking this now.
Louis should have seen it coming. Lestat has been working on a book of his own with Daniel, alongside a documentary of life on tour, because of course he fucking is.
Louis is genuinely fine with it. He’s kind of excited, in a sick way. To hear it in Lestat’s words. To try to see it as he did.
But the last time they talked about the book, dug into details, the resulting fight rivaled their old blowouts. It was their first proper argument since they’d reconnected.
They didn’t speak for a month, not even through the garish Bitmoji things Lestat loved texting him, and while that’s a blip for their kind—they’d been through much worse, hadn’t they?—it felt far too long.
Louis reached out first. Invited Lestat to his place in between rehearsals, and that was that. They didn’t talk about it, and nothing has come up since. It’s been a happy six months. Warm. Familiar and new, all at once.
They’re dating. Fucking, sure, but mostly making a concerted effort to enjoy each other's company. It's a courtship, again. Louis will be damned if he loses that.
So he takes a breath and asks, “What do you want to talk about?” He attempts casual and misses it only by a few modulations of his voice. He clears his throat and doesn’t turn from where he sits on the floor, picking through Lestat’s vinyl collection.
“You killed a man in France.”
That…is not what Louis expected. He slips a St. Vincent record from its sleeve and traces its groove. Puts it on the record player.
“In a park?” Lestat carries on, his voice wavering just that much. “You thought he was me.”
Louis’s stomach lurches. “It was…one of those times,” he says weakly. He hopes it’s enough. It might be all he can manage.
Lestat had been fascinated by Louis’s hallucinations. The first time he’d asked after them, a bit smugly, Louis burst into tears.
Daniel was the first to ask if he was schizophrenic, but far from the last. People were writing articles about it, dissertations, academic fucking papers about psychotic disorders and an eternal mind. He thought he was prepared for the speculation. He was wrong.
It freaks Louis out.
He can’t think about it too hard, because his brain snags on the absurd, questions like would antipsychotics even work on a brain with locked chemistry? and is there a directory for vampire psychiatrists? He could ask Dr. Faheed. He still might, but it feels like an admission. Louis doesn’t know.
It’s one of those things they just don’t talk about.
The silence draws on, so he forces himself to look up. Lestat’s perfect calm ripples with a furrow in his brow. With the way he’s looking at Louis.
“It’s less about the experience,” Lestat says, “And more about what you said. Or, what…I did.”
Louis looks at him. His heart is racing very quickly.
“I asked you to kill me again,” Lestat says quietly. His intonation gives away nothing, but Louis panics.
“You didn’t—” he rushes to say. His voice sounds strange. All choked.
Lestat waves that away. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
Louis doesn’t feel like being on the floor for this conversation, but when he stands, it feels like he’s looming.
So he picks his way across the living room and sits beside Lestat. Closer than his instinct tells him, which means it’s just approaching how close Lestat would prefer to have him. It’s a gesture for his benefit, an attempt to soothe whatever is churning between them right now.
“May I hold your hand?” Lestat asks, deadly serious, and oh, how things have changed. The man who would take and take until the universe winks out into nothing—but that’s not fair. Because he’s asking now.
“Yes,” Louis says, instead of any of that, and Lestat looks a fraction relieved. He takes one of Louis’s hands in both his own and begins to trace its lines, the whorls on the tips of his fingers. “Do you think I think that?” he asks quietly.
“Think what?” Louis asks. He’s already regretting the closeness; his head spins at any proximity to Lestat. The physical presence of his body, his scent, his fucking eyes—
Lestat’s fingers are newly calloused. He’s learning to play the bass—because he thinks it would be amusing to record all the instrumentation for the album himself, because he’s a perfectionist, because he’s a control freak—and the new roughness drags across Louis’s life line. Maybe it’s some kind of cosmic joke, the metaphor too obvious. Unfit to print.
Maybe Louis doesn’t care. Has never cared.
“The only way you know how to love,” Lestat prompts. His voice is low and strange, gone a little deeper. Louis cannot make sense of the emotion behind it.
He flinches. He can’t help it. “Is there a point to this?” he snaps, withdrawing, because if he doesn’t, he might fucking cry, and that’s not happening, not on their quiet night in.
“I just want to know why,” Lestat blurts. “Do you think that, still? About yourself?”
“Jesus, Lestat.”
“I must know.”
“Oh, you must.”
“I only mean…” Lestat shakes his head, already disagreeing with himself. “I don’t know how to say. I just want to know,” he repeats.
It’s so fucking earnest, is the thing. And he’s been trying and failing to understand Louis for so, so long.
Louis had a part in that. A big fucking part.
So. “I believed it,” he says, voice catching. He forces himself to breathe and continue. “I believed that about myself. You were…a waking dream. It was me talking to myself, processing through you. ‘Cause I couldn’t let you go, and I didn’t know…I needed someone.”
Lestat gnaws on his lip. “You needed me,” he says, and Louis would think he might sound a little happier about that, until he says, “To hurt yourself.”
A thousand acrid, sharp rebuttals rise to Louis’s lips. He swallows them. “Yes,” he says again.
Lestat looks at him. His eyes are heavy, full, but what they’re full of, Louis doesn’t know. “Would you, then?” he says eventually.
“What?”
“Show me. Kill me again.”
“God, Lestat.”
“Louis.”
“What do you mean? What on earth could you possibly—”
“Show me how you did it to me in your dream.”
“Why?”
Is this a punishment? A way to hurt Louis for using Lestat’s image like that? Layers upon layers. The underpainting, velatura, varnish: painting the picture of what they mean to one another.
“To make sense of it,” Lestat says, still so serious, but there’s something else there, now. A longing. His pupils dilate. He shifts in his seat, just that much, and Louis catches his intention all at once
“Are you—?” Louis asks, and his voice comes out all breathy. It’ll be mortifying if he’s read this wrong.
But he hasn’t, because Lestat nods. “J'ai dit la vérité quand je l'ai dit. I was glad it was you. I would be glad again.”
Leave it to Lestat to get a boner about his own murder, Louis thinks somewhere outside himself, shocked and fond in turn. His husband’s boundless vanity.
(Louis still thinks of him like that. They never stopped being married, despite it all.)
His eyes flick to Lestat’s mouth. His lips are still a little red from the wine and blood, staining his teeth. The imperfection makes everything better, somehow. More real.
And there was something to it, wasn’t there? That closeness? Louis never understood Lestat more clearly than when he slit his throat. He understood everything: how tenderly he hated him, and how wretchedly he loved him.
He has to be sure, though. So: “You hoping for a smaller death, maybe?”
The peal of laughter Lestat lets out is a tolling bell, a resonant, heavy sound. “Such a way with words, mon cœur.”
It doesn’t break the tension. It kicks it up a notch.
They stand at the same time, rush into each other’s arms at the exact same time. They stare at each other, wild-eyed, pupils blown out. Matching darkness.
“How did you see it?” Lestat asks.
“You were up against a wall. We’d…” Louis swallows hard. Saying we feels perverse. He can’t remember the face of the man he’d used as proxy—he’d only seen his face when it was in ruin. When he had ruined it.
“We’d been kissing,” Louis says anyway.
“Had we,” Lestat says quietly. He grabs at Louis’s hips and pulls him forward, stepping back until he hits the wall and Louis is pressed to him entirely. He meets him, open-mouthed, careless and wet, like Lestat has always kissed. Like Louis likes it.
When they pull away, Louis’s breath comes hard and harsh. He’s panting enough to flutter Lestat’s hair. It’s up in a bun, not how Louis imagined at the time, so he pulls it down, tangling his hands into the waves.
Lestat groans and bucks into him, but Louis’s hands go to his waist and pin him to the wall. “You were—there. Like that.”
“Like that,” Lestat echoes, going still. His hair is in his eyes. His mouth is a deeper red now. Kiss bitten.
“I only trusted you,” Louis says, and his voice breaks. “I couldn’t—I wasn’t safe, I knew we weren’t safe, but you—”
That we takes the air from Lestat’s lungs. He blows it out in a graceless exhale, a flinch. “Lou.” He’s pleading for something.
“And you told me to show you,” Louis goes on. He feels fevered, the words pulled from the back of his skull.
A memory slams into his brain: a pastor visiting the Quarter when he was a kid. The man prayed over the crowd, thrashing and crying out in tongues. The kind of shit you’d never see in Mass. Maman shuffled them away, him and Grace, glad Paul wasn’t there to see. She was scandalized.
Louis didn’t want to look away. It scared him, but he couldn’t stop watching. It was like the man was possessed, and Lestat looks at him the same way now, with frenzied devotion in his eyes. Louis wants to ask why. Wants to beg Lestat to explain: what can you see in me? What is it that you’ve always seen in me?
“I showed you,” Louis chokes, eager to get it out. “How I love.”
He takes Lestat by the shoulder with one hand and cradles the back of his skull with the other. Louis shakes him gently into the wall, cushioning his head.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Lestat almost protests—Louis can see the words forming in his mouth, go on and show me, make it real, but he doesn’t speak. He swallows heavily. Louis watches the knot of his throat move.
It’s good he didn’t push; if Lestat asked him to do it properly, as he really did, he’d say no, he’d call this off entirely. He can’t. It would be too close to that fucking night when Lestat threw him through a wall. When Louis dented the coffin, slamming Lestat’s head into it. When everything came after.
Now, Lestat pulls Louis closer, jutting his hips forward in a slow, filthy grind. They used to do this for hours in the coffin, closeness for the sake of closeness, writhing together until they came or the sun pulled them into sleep. It all turned into the same thing, one slow, continuous motion.
Louis feels lightheaded. He can hardly breathe. The memories juxtapose: the coffin’s silk lining on his cheek, the wind ripping at his swollen face. Lestat’s thigh slotted between his own. Lestat’s bloodied face hardened with resolve.
“What next?” Lestat asks, just as breathlessly.
So close to the question: and then what?
“I don’t remember,” Louis says helplessly. The dark room came next. It lurches up at the edges of his vision, smothering the room in red before he can blink it away.
Lestat looks at him and looks at him. “I can show you,” he says. “What I remember?”
Louis doesn’t know what he means. He nods anyway.
So, when Lestat moves forward, Louis goes, too. Lestat turns, pressing his back to Louis’s chest.
Then Lestat kneels. He’s facing away from him. “Come to me,” he says. Or Louis thinks he hears.
Louis’s legs sort of wobble and give up on him, but it gets him where he was directed. He kneels behind Lestat, following him down, and tucks his chin over his shoulder. His hands scrabble to Lestat’s chest, to clutch him as well as he can.
“That’s how you held me,” Lestat confirms quietly. His voice is low, but there’s something so alive thrumming in it. A frenzy, adrenaline. He is desperate for something.
Do I owe him this? Louis wonders deliriously. Does he owe me this?
Lestat takes Louis’s hand and pulls it up to his throat. He leans into it. “Do it,” he says, his voice buzzing under Louis’s palm.
“Lestat,” Louis says. His voice is wretched.
“Je suis aussi vivant que je ne le serai jamais,” Lestat says. “Nous sommes en sécurité.”
Louis flinches with his whole body. Lestat absorbs it, still clutched close. They tremble together.
“I don’t understand,” Louis says. It tilts into a question. He is struck with the urge to beg. For what, he doesn’t know.
They’re both already on their knees for this.
Lestat pulls Louis’s hand to his cheek and leans into it. “I don’t either,” he says. “But I want to. Please, Louis.”
That’s all it takes, Louis supposes, for him to fully lose his mind because he takes his hand from Lestat’s cheek and brings it back to his neck, extending his pointer finger.
He digs the sharp point of his nail into Lestat’s throat.
It’s a mockery of the real wound, barely a scratch for their kind, but it does the trick; Lestat moans like Louis is taking his cock. Like he’s being ridden.
Louis feels the sound through the pad of his finger and drags across the knot of Lestat’s throat. Lestat presses at Louis’s hand, urging him to make a deeper cut. So he does. His other hand gropes at Lestat’s chest, clawing down his stomach. Slips into his pants, finds his cock, hard and hot, and wraps around him. Lestat chokes and thrusts into Louis’s tight fist.
When the cutting is done, Louis wraps his hand around Lestat’s throat and squeezes, holding him there, too. He squeezes blood from the wound. It’s hot between Louis’s fingers. Lestat makes a sound like a sob, and he’s coming. Hair trigger. Volatile. Delicate—he always has been, hasn’t he?
His head tips back onto Louis’s shoulder. He keeps thrusting past his orgasm, torturous, overstimulated. Chasing it, always chasing it. Louis understands. Louis has to stop him by letting go, palming his hip. “Calme-toi, maintenant,” he says, and Lestat listens, like he’s under a spell. Maybe he is. They both are.
“You,” Lestat starts, and his voice breaks. Louis lights up with panic, white hot—did he injure him, truly? He’s torn out his throat. He’s done damage that can’t be undone. He did it wrong. He did it wrong.
He won’t be able to sing.
Then Lestat turns to face him. There’s wonder in his eyes. There’s blood dripping down the long column of his throat, smeared by Louis’s hand, but it’s a superficial wound. He speaks again, and doesn’t gurgle (it’s fine, he’s alive, he’s alive): “Thank you.”
Louis lets out a hysterical little giggle. “Thank me?”
“Your attention is a gift,” Lestat says simply.
Maybe it has always been that simple, and they just kept fucking it up. Maybe this means something else, now.
Lestat takes Louis’s palm and licks it, cleaning his own blood. He works Louis’s hand like he’s sucking cock, detailing each finger, eyes rolling like nothing brings him more pleasure. It’s not a performance, at this point—Louis knows this is real. It’s real.
Louis is not breathing. Not even pretending to be living. He is enraptured by this. Enthralled. His cock aches. He’s still clothed, they both are, mostly.
“The last thing I remember,” Lestat murmurs against his palm, “Is how gently you lowered me to the floor.”
Louis thinks of Lestat’s glassy eyes flicking back and forth. He remembers Lestat slumping from his arms into a mess of limbs, a heap, but that memory falters. He told it that way to Daniel, it was written like that, but it wasn’t—Louis was gentle. He’d put Lestat down and went with him, sinking down on the blood-soaked rug at his side. That’s when Louis had started screaming.
He can think of nothing to do now but echo the memory. Looking Lestat in the eyes, Louis pushes him gently, hands catching at his shoulders, and lowers him to the floor.
“Comme ça,” Lestat sighs. His hair fans out behind him, a dark gold halo for a struck-down angel. Louis is glad, bizarrely, that they can’t read each other’s minds, because the poor attempt at poetry embarrasses him even as a subconscious observation. He laughs again, can’t help it. Of all the things to be ashamed of—
Maybe there’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore.
The thought hits him like a blow. He’s never felt that way. Never thought it, and certainly never felt it.
But Louis feels it now.
He’s still leaning above Lestat, one hand on the ground beside him, the other in his lap. Louis wants to go with him, farther than the floor, into the earth. A shared grave, a respite from the waking world. Maybe they’ll dig a hole and sleep away a few decades. Until it all hurts less.
“Just like you remember?” he asks.
Lestat stares up at him like he’s hung the moon in the sky. His eyes are dilated beyond belief. “Well. There was blood on my face, wasn’t there?” he says slowly. “On my mouth?”
Louis doesn’t understand until Lestat reaches up for his belt. His hands shake too hard to manage, and Louis sputters out another laugh. “You’re insane,” he says, voice going high. He’s close to hysterical. “That’s insane, Lestat.”
Lestat just smiles up at him, beatific and unhinged. Lovely thing. Monstrous thing. “Donne-moi,” he croons. “Je le veux, Louis. Louis.”
Louis remembers a coffin conversation, I don’t like going to bed angry, the question they will ask each other for eternity: how could I say no to you?
Louis handles his belt, takes himself in hand, and strokes hard. It’s only a moment until the heat in his stomach arches up his spine, seething into the stem of his brain and burning everything away
When he blinks away the sunspot white-out of orgasm, he sees Lestat just as he asked for, splayed beneath him, blood splattered across his cheekbone and mouth. Lestat pants hard and swipes his tongue over his lips.
The wound on his neck hasn’t started to heal, but it’s only been moments, hasn’t it? He reaches out and touches the thin line he carved into Lestat’s throat.
Louis bursts into tears.
Lestat’s face falls. He sits up, reaches out for Louis. But he falters.
Louis should pull himself together. Pull back. Get it together. He’s being ridiculous.
He lets himself fall forward into Lestat’s arms instead.
Lestat gathers him immediately. “Mon cher cœur,” he says softly, just in his ear. “It’s alright.”
“I didn’t want to,” is all Louis can say. “I didn’t want to.”
Lestat inhales sharply. “Just now?” He sounds horrified.
Louis shakes his head desperately. “Then,” and he’s crying too hard to speak. To breathe. This is exactly what he didn’t want, this overwrought bullshit, this feeling of being flayed open. Bare, small. Stupid.
Lestat holds the back of his head, cradling him close, then tilts Louis towards the pulse jumping in his throat. “Let me show you,” he says again. “Drink, Louis.”
Louis doesn’t know what Lestat means, but he is helpless to stop it. He bites in gracelessly, choking down his tears as life, his Maker, flows onto his tongue.
Images swell through the blood. Louis is looking at himself, him and Daniel, the last time he and Lestat visited New York. Louis fusses over a cowlick of Daniel’s, teasing him, and Daniel scowls and shrugs his shoulders in a very teenage kind of way, but still lets Louis tuck his hair behind his ear. Then they’re snickering about something, bumping shoulders as they walk side-by-side. Lestat follows, observing them.
Louis sees himself in New Orleans, in the shack, during that fated reunion. He’s almost glowing in Lestat’s recollection, an entirely alien creature in his beauty, even grieving. There’s a fervent rush of helplessness when Louis gathers Lestat in his arms and kisses his temple.
Then, in the same parlor decades earlier. Louis is reading out loud to Lestat as he plunks on the piano. Lestat wants to stop playing, to better soak in the sound of Louis’s, but Louis was still skittish in these early days. If Lestat looks at him too closely, Louis shies away and will stop his recitation, so Lestat runs through simple melodies as Louis reads him Kate Chopin.
A hesitation, in the blood, in Lestat’s marrow, before it relents and shows him—
Louis is perched on the settee with a little angel at his feet. Claudia sighs and squirms as he carefully braids her hair, but delights in her reflection when he finishes the look with carefully tied bows. The tip of Louis’s tongue is stuck out as he concentrates.
The other examples glide easily, memories sliding into one another—she’s standing on Louis’s feet, shrieking with joy as he walks them through a simple waltz. Her silvery laugh as Lestat teases Louis for something or another, the easy way she tucks into Louis’s side, slipping under his arm on the couch. Moments Louis had lost, returned to him.
Even in the dark years of strained recollection, the ones Louis remembers as thoroughly failing everyone around him…Lestat remembers differently. He remembers the careful way Louis tracks Claudia moving through a room. Remembers the soft look on his face, a look Louis has never seen, when she speaks. Remembers color and grief and longing. Despite it all, Lestat remembers so fondly.
“That’s how you love,” Lestat murmurs. His voice buzzes against Louis’s lips through his latch. “Quietly and fiercely and desperately and wonderfully. Comme un saint, comme un homme.”
Louis is dazed, so overwhelmed he can’t help but cry harder. Lestat doesn’t mind. He strokes Louis’s head, cups the back of his neck. “Everyone knows it but you,” Lestat says. “Everyone who is loved by you is touched by fate’s favor.”
His love as a blessing, not a curse.
There, on the floor, in Lestat’s arms and his blood, Louis almost believes it.