Chapter Text
He might not be living up to the promise of the exclusive fan experience, Lestat admits to himself as he once again has to take his mouth off Louis’s cock, having tried to take him in deep and failed spectacularly.
“Fuck, Lestat—”
He looks up from where he kneels on the worn carpet in the boardroom, Louis swimming in his vision as he tries to blink around the blood welling in his eyes. They’d already been irritated by his night out, hence the sunglasses, so his mascara is surely running now.
Louis reaches down and touches his cheek, probably feels it heat with embarrassment. He takes his thumb and wipes a tear from the corner of Lestat’s eye.
“You okay?”
Lestat scoffs. “You patronize me.”
He takes the head into his mouth again, looking up at Louis through wet eyes. He suckles on the tip, enjoying the precum that blurts out as he gives Louis his best pitiful look.
“That’s good, honey,” Louis says, tangling a hand in his messy curls and pulling near his roots. “Good boy.”
Lestat moans around him. He takes a hand off Louis to reach down to his own hard dick, trapped between his leather pants and the floor and aching for attention. He gets a hand around it, finally, and nearly hisses with relief—
Someone raps sharply on the door.
“Five minutes, Lestat,” Christine shouts from the other side.
Lestat groans and stands from where he’s kneeling on the carpet. He grabs his phone from his pocket and sends a quick text, passing along the concert pass she’d sent him. It buzzes back immediately.
I'm driving with Do Not Disturb While Driving turned on. I'll see your message when I get where l'm going. (I'm not receiving notifications. If this is urgent, reply "urgent" to send a notification through with your original message.)
URGENT, he types, then deletes it before sending. Louis, real Louis, will see it when he gets where he’s going. Wherever that is. Lestat is barely privy to these things anymore. He sighs and walks out the door alone.
-
He needs to stop doing this, Louis thinks as Lestat fingers him open in the backseat of his car.
It just feels like it’s getting harder to turn down, especially when Lestat gets wild with it, always, moaning like he’s the one getting fucked.
“Your hole is so greedy, ma femme,” he says, his words slurring together, lilting up at the end as he scissors in and out. Louis is pushed against a window, his neck slouching uncomfortably against the car door. It’s worth it, though, for the angle.
“Don’t call me that,” Louis grunts.
“But you like it,” Lestat says.
“I don’t.”
“Your cunt likes it,” he points out, and it tightens around his fingers like clockwork. Louis moans.
“S’ just cause it’s taboo.” Not true.
Lestat clucks doubtfully. “Are you contesting the gender or the role?”
“Both,” he says. “We ain’t married.”
Lestat lets that hang in the air and Louis hates it. Wishes he would fight back like he did earlier and argue that their union was never dissolved, but he doesn’t even know if Lestat would say that now. He sighs and tucks himself back into his pants.
When he checks his phone he has a text from Lemuel, a simple Get home safe. He gives it a thumbs up. Lestat has sent him a ticket to tomorrow’s show. He doesn’t respond.
-
Louis follows him into the greenroom the next night, backs him against a wall and kisses him until his head is spinning.
“This is getting confusing, you know, when I know he’s out there,” Lestat says when he stops. “You’re losing your tact.“
Louis just looks at him witheringly. Lestat knows better to taunt him with the threat of going back inside his head, they both know he’d be too lonely. Even with Sofia now, there’s a coldness, and this muse is his—coal fire, he thinks bitterly, except not, of course. Maybe an ambient crackling fireplace Youtube video. Twelve hours of comforting ASMR provided that you remember a time when you felt the warmth of a real hearth. He thinks he does sometimes. Louis is palming his dick through his jeans now, so at least the friction gives him some kind of heat.
-
Lestat isn’t there when Louis kills Bruce, except he is, because Louis stared at his concert poster for hours. Center stage in their den and flipped so his mouth could be more conveniently fucked. “Well, I’m nothing if not accommodating,” he imagines Lestat would say. His stomach twists at the thought.
Whose idea had it been? Was it suggested by some faceless initiate to their godforsaken coven house, trying to fit into the culture, or did Bruce just need to take one more thing from him?
He feels empty as he wipes down his machete and throws it in his trunk. Worse than the Théâtre des Vampires, somehow. At least then he’d known it would have given Claudia a little pleasure to see them burn. He was at least closer to her then than he feels now, trying to unearth her after being buried for eighty years.
Except that he knows one way to be near her. A ten hour drive is nothing, at this point.
-
Louis isn’t there when Lestat crashes his car, except he is, because Lestat can’t stop seeing the turning in his mind. I was being hunted. How quickly he’d stooped to Magnus’s level, how little he’d deserved anything from Louis after that point. No wonder Louis felt the way he did.
He’s there when Lestat gets back to the tour bus, though, sitting next to his coffin. He watches silently as Lestat strips out of his singed clothes, then holds Lestat in his coffin as he falls asleep.
-
Lestat sits across from him at the diner sometimes. They can’t talk, don’t want to risk Louis accidentally saying something aloud, but occasionally their knees knock under the table or Lestat tries to initiate footsie and almost startles Louis into a laugh.
He knows it’s bad, because it makes him feel like what he’s doing is okay. Like there’s a way to see their family together again after all.
-
Lestat is having a nice conversation with Claudia when his phone buzzes on his bedside tablet.
He reaches for it and accidentally smacks it onto the floor. Claudia giggles.
Sometimes she’s younger, when they talk, and it’s worse because she doesn’t hate him yet. She’d been at the barricade at his show tonight, giddy in a way he only remembers from their earliest hunts together.
He’d missed his cue in Nothin’ to Lose, staring at her as the click track in his in-ears counted him down. The fans sang the line for him anyway, but Larry was pissed.
He boops the tip of her nose as he gets up from his seat to grab the phone, and she scrunches it and laughs. He laughs too, but he’s not sure if his heart’s really in it.
There’s a missed call and a text from Louis. I need your help with something.