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“Careful, now,” Louis says. Lestat sets them both feather-light onto his balcony, but Louis still winces. Both of them still weak from the extended separation of head and body; they’d taken turns flying from the site of Lestat’s accursed final performance, the other gripping tight arms around precious cargo. Still, it was Lestat who saw them home — to his home — the Queen’s blood rising up where his own strength would have failed.
The bloodletting has not reached Lestat’s adoptive home. Not yet. It will. The orgiastic groaning of vampires feeding is on the wind. Not very much longer, now. Louis pushes the class door open, barely makes it inside before he has to lean against a settee, eyes closed hard. Lestat follows the patter of closing down for the day, lowering the blinds to block out the rising daylight, locking the door behind him.
In the dim lamplight, signs of life are shocking. Could it have only been two days since he and Louis pattered around these floors, dancing around hard conversations? Playing house, Louis had called it, pretending not to taste Lestat’s longing in the very air around them.
“What the fuck are we gonna do now?” The line of Louis’ sutures is tender and carmine against the brown of his skin. They’re healing slowly. Lestat’s at least are the petal pink of newly healed skin.
“Well.” A decanter would be too much, and there are rocks glasses, upturned in a pleasant line on the countertop of the kitchen, each dried by the hands of a housekeeper Lestat’s never met face to face. Sharp nail against the reliable ulnar, a heavy pour into the glass, one finger, then two. Pressure is enough to stop the bleeding, healing fast enough to feel the puckering of skin knitting back together. “We’ve got options.”
“Yeah? And what are those?” Louis’ eyes are following him. With one hand, Lestat eases him down to properly sit. The other hand hands him the glass. A Louis in his better mind, one that wasn’t knitting cervical vertebrae back together, would have at least been coquettish. It’s been a long day, though, and he watches the glass in Lestat’s hand with a childlike hunger, chips of celadon calling out suuuuugaaaar. Lestat is tired, too, and cannot escape Paul’s words, loving Louis like he needs to be loved. Louis does not need teasing or withholding.
Louis takes the glass and reaches for him when Lestat tries to make a respectful retreat, a weak circle of fingers around his wrist. The bobbing of his Adam’s apple makes Lestat’s mouth water. Forty-eight hours of hell, the unfamiliar brush of death’s robe across his face, and here, Louis de Pointe du Lac, seducing him with basic bodily functions.
“We could run,” Lestat murmurs, taking liberties, now that he’s been summoned. He presses a still bloody thumb to the socket of Louis’ jaw, fingers curled around the back of his neck. “I’m certain you own a lovely twelfth home somewhere with long winters, the kind of nights that last for months.”
A thin stream of his blood down the corner of Louis’ mouth. Lestat’s tongue is there before Louis'. One of them moans, chests too close together to say who. Lestat kneels, and Louis' knees spread to accommodate him. They’d gotten this close before, in New Orleans. Only a handful of times. They’d been so careful, finding their way back to each other, chastely. And Lestat had been the fool, letting Louis’ anger and his own hurt thrust them apart again.
“Days last that long, too,” Louis breathes, and the glass thunks heavy to the floor beside them. “What else you got?”
Their mouths are brushing now, not a kiss, not properly. Just breathing each other’s air, sharing a space they haven’t inhabited in long decades. Lestat, the ideas man. Louis, the long-suffering, listening husband. They could go to Greece. They could go to the opera. “We could stay. Be worshiped like gods. The blood of Akasha in both of us now. I share myself with you, Louis. I thought of you. Not only you, I admit. But. Like those one reelers, you recall? Again and again, my Louis. You, at the end. So much blood shared between us.”
Louis huffs, mouth ticking up against Lestat’s. “All that songwriting did you some good, I see.”
“Or.” And here, Louis’ hand spasms and grips Lestat with more strength. Lestat cannot see, but he would guess that the tender line of Louis' flesh meeting flesh is beginning to fade. The blood, always the blood. “We could go to coffin. Decide the rest of our eternity tomorrow.”
“Careful,” Louis whispers now. “Careful. It’s been a while since I— ah.”
Lestat doesn’t want to, can’t know which one it's been: a long time since Louis shared the close and silken clutch of a coffin with another, or the exact number of days since someone seated themselves inside of Louis' body, groaning low at the hot, muscular squeeze of him. Knowledge of either would be the worst kind of torture, the thought of Louis so far away from his arms. Lestat bends close instead of answering, catching Louis’ mouth against his own and, for once, thanking the architects. This would be over, perhaps all of this would end, if Louis could hear the way he compulsively catalogs the differences between them. Sofia-Gabriella-Sofia was wetter, of course; slick red dripped from her like sap. But Louis is tighter, body holding Lestat as if Louis wishes for them to never part.
They both grunt when Lestat changes angles, cursing at the narrow walls surrounding them. Even with the lid propped, sharing a coffin is no longer second nature to either of them.
“Told you. Bed’s got its high points.” Louis is laughing, then moaning, hips rolling into Lestat’s thrust, body contracting around Lestat’s cock. “Shit, sweetheart. You miss me?”
And this. One of the many faces Louis refused to reveal to Dan, kept hidden from Lemuel and perhaps even Armand. The minx, the cocky, certain seductress, suckling sweetness from Lestat as if his thighs aren’t red with Lestat’s first spend: blood spurting between his thighs while Lestat stuttered, cheeks hot against his tender throat, apologizing for a lackluster performance, begging for just a moment, and he can go again.
Louis held him then, and his laughter had been fond, knowing. His nails dragged red rivulets along the thin skin at the base of Lestat’s skull, and that had been enough. That, and Louis’ secret little smile when Lestat asked if there really was anything special about Thomas Pitt’s newest business venture, lubricant for vampires.
Impossible to say if it was the slip of Lestat’s come, or the lube, or pink-tinged sweat that made the slide in and out of Louis so sweet. It was a homecoming. Eighty years of mistakes, every second a blunder that he was not stretching Louis, rearranging the insides of him to Lestat’s exact measurements.
“Get outta your head.” Louis wiggles a leg until it's wrapped around Lestat, nudging his thrusts faster, his hips closer. “Make me-ah! Make me come. You can brood later.”
Lestat cants his hips forward, knowing it's right when Louis arches up, moans loud and long. They speak to each other: declaring love, pleading for absolution, relearning the awful symmetry of their desires.
“Your wish,” Lestat pants, Louis’s steady yes-yes-yes in his ear. “Mon amour, your wish is my only desire, Louis, please, let, my love, my only, Louis, please let me hear y—”
Orgasm steals Louis’ breath. How could he have forgotten? Even in his vibrant mortality, as a man that no one but Lestat remembers now, he would tip his head back and stop breathing with one great gasp, body shuddering with the force of his pleasure. Now, Lestat bites the corner of his own mouth, presses their lips together, bloody. Louis needs no need for air, but he needs this, the same as Lestat needs him.
“Fuck.”
Louis' head bounces a little against the casket’s pillow as he relaxes from the cathedral of his coming. His mouth is scarlet, and when his blinking-open eyes catch Lestat’s, it is enough. Lestat’s toes curl against the bottom of the coffin, and the triple reinforcement creaks. The tears start before the last shudders have finished riding the healing curve of his spine. The juncture of Louis’ neck and shoulder captures his blubbering.
“Hey, hey,” Louis soothes over stuttered and sobbed French. Louis’ French is much improved, but still a few years rusted, and Lestat cries with big lungfuls of sobs, cock still hard inside of him. “Just make me feel good, cher. It’s alright. That’s all you gotta do tonight. Tomorrow is for planning. Just let me feel it.”