Archive of Our Own ^beta

On November 12th, 1930, a drunk mistakes the accelerator for the brake and hits a woman—a local torch singer, formerly employed at the Azalea, currently residing in Algiers—crossing the street. She's dead an hour later.

It's in the newspaper the next day, which is how Louis finds out about it—a couple nights after the paper went to print, because he'd spent those days combing papers from Atlanta and Chicago and that irony of possible ironies, St. Louis, and anything else he could get his hands on for Claudia, any glimpse of her, and so it takes some time before he resettles the newspapers covering the bed he's lying in and finds the New Orleans paper. He only flips through it half-heartedly. It's not like he knows anyone outside 1132, anymore. Except Grace and Levi and the children, who he hasn't seen since his mother's wake. Except Claudia, who is quite certainly not in New Orleans, and probably not in Louisiana at all. He's pretty sure about that. Mostly.

He's staring listlessly at the obituaries, contemplating whether or not he should get up and grab himself the rat sniffing cheerfully at the feet of Lestat's favorite chair, when he realizes what he's seeing. Antoinette Brown, dead. And not dead of an odd unseasonal fever the doctors have no explanation for or fist-through-skull or anything else particularly Lestat-like. Just a car accident. Happens to dozens of people every day.

Huh, he thinks—a vicious little part of him adding in, see what he does now—and picks out the Phoenix paper. 

After draining the biggest, drunkest bastard of the lot in the back alley, Lestat flops back onto the barstool (which seems oddly less easy to sit on now) and puts himself to considering the little knot in the wood of the counter, right beside his left hand. The rings of age in long-since felled wood. The fellow he drained, when Lestat got to him, was thinking of a man he killed two days ago. It was the reason why he got drunk in the first place. To forget it. Now the echoes of his kill's kill—the knife and the wet red and the horror of the realization, set in a minute too late, that the last blow was one there's no getting up from—are rattling in Lestat's head, along with the echoes of Louis that have long since taken up permanent residence, and that he could never seek to extinguish.

The man sitting at his right leans over and says, helpfully, "It's the missus, ain't it?"

The fellow's eighty if he's a day, leaning as casually on the bar counter as human bones of that age generally manage to do, and he's drinking whiskey like cool well water on a hot dry day. Lestat squints at the whiskey mournfully. Drunker looks like more fun than this wobbly state halfway between sober and decently unaware of the universe. Drunker would be nice. He could always eat the bartender. The man's been thinking longingly of the end of his shift for the last two hours and sneaking sips of terrible vodka when no one's watching, it'd be a mercy killing.

"What?" he says, distractedly.

"Sorry, shoulda introduced myself. Awful rude of me. Samuel Marshall."

"A pleasure, Mr. Marshall," Lestat says. "What was it you were saying?"

"Your current situation, Mr.—?"

"Lioncourt," Lestats supplies. Well aware that his accent is growing thicker, and without any interest in stopping it. Not like anyone here cares. Not like anyone here would know the difference between a Parisian's edge, that accent he carved into his tongue for the stage, and the Auvergne's. Put on the mask, the sound, the makeup. Put aside your own skin.

"My, you're not from around here, are you," says Marshall cheerfully, and seems to consider that subject well and done with, because he moves on, back to explaining his prior statement. "Nobody dressed as well as you are gets drunk like that unless it's a problem with the missus."

"I have no wife," Lestat says, morosely.

"Ah," Marshall says knowingly. "She say no?"

It's not entirely false an assumption, provided a willingness to see past the inaccuracy of the pronoun. It's just that Louis' rejection didn't happen when Lestat offered himself to him on the altar, or even the day after. It's just been happening for years, now. Slowly. Moss growing on gravestones no one cares to maintain.

His brothers are dead. Nicki is dead. Gabrielle has no need of him. Louis has no desire for him. Antoinette is dead. Claudia is—unreachable, now, if she ever was anything other. 

He reaches for the bottle just behind the bar, yanks the cork out barehanded. The bartender opens his mouth, about to protest; Lestat slaps down a couple bills of green American money without looking at the denominations and takes a long drink. The label says it's rum. It tastes like ashes and grave-dirt.

Marshall is still waiting for an answer. Lestat says, "No."

Marshall leans in and says in a hoarse whisper, “Ah, but it’s a someone you’ve got, isn’t it? And you fought?” He winks. “Take my advice, I was married sixty years, before she went home to God.” He says it casually, but Lestat can taste the pain in it. The still-young sorrow.

Lestat considers mentioning the fact that he is, in fact, multiple times this man’s age; that he could have snatched this man’s grandparents out of their little wood cribs. Considers saying that whatever this little mortal fellow thinks he knows of companionship and love pales beside what Lestat has seen, what Lestat found in Louis, what Lestat is losing, slow and quiet—

Someone interrupts before he can decide what he wants to say. "You that man Lioncourt? Used to own that fancy club with—what's his name."

Lestat lifts his head, glacial. It's a big, florid man doing the talking, old enough to have wanted to be a patron at the Azalea when she was in full bloom, not rich enough to afford fulfillment of that desire. Space for a lot of blood in a man like that, and he seems to have done his best to replace all of it with alcohol. He's still talking, and every word is vile, vile words about Louis and Louis' business and what Louis and Lestat might possibly spend their time at home doing. Lestat tunes out the words, narrows in on the man's heartbeat. Pounding.

"Mr. Marshall," he says, "Would you be so kind as to hold my drink for me?"

Marshall considers the big drunk, Lestat, and the nearly empty bottle of rum. He says, "Of course, Mr. Lioncourt," and even gets the emphasis right. Lestat likes Marshall. 

Lestat does not like the drunk. He stands up, smiles at him. "Shall we take this outside?"

The fellow sneers at him. "Spoiled rich boy like you, any day," the drunk spits. His friends at the other table laugh. Lestat laughs, too. It is funny. The bartender gives them both wary looks and thinks Jesus Christ I hope they don't kill each other in here, I don't want to have to tell the boss. Blondie looks like one the cops might come looking for, too. Hell, I'm hungry. It's a lucky night for him, because Lestat has no intention of killing the big drunk inside.

"Splendid," says Lestat, and weaves past him towards the back door. The drunk follows. Fool. Lestat closes the door behind them both and smiles at him again, this time with all his teeth. The drunk shrieks.

“Oh,” says Lestat, “what was it you thought you were getting? Someone to beat up in the back alley so you can feel better about yourself? About the way your wife looks at you after you empty yourself inside her? About your rusting car and crumbling house and the job you lost for drinking for work that you haven't told her about yet?”

The drunk backs up, eyes wide, doesn’t say anything. His head is running syrupy, thinking about his girl at home and the friends back in the bar and how he never did go to confession again like he should’ve and the dog he killed by accident going too fast down the main road when he was twenty-five—

"No one," says Lestat, pointedly, precisely, "says such things about my Louis to my face and survives," and advances.

/

He flops back down next to Marshall ten minutes later, loose and satisfied, blood warm in his veins, and takes the rum back. "Thank you."

"Awful company around here," says Marshall, "but still better than the jazz they play in that poor excuse for a bar a block over."

Lestat perks up. He'd gone in there first, had a look round for someone very drunk to have a nibble on, and held it out for only about thirty seconds. The band was truly, terribly awful. "Do you play?"

"Used to," the man says, serenely. "Saxophone. Haven't got the breath for it now, more's the pity. But I can still tell real music from a band of youngsters who got an instrument in their hands ten seconds before they got on stage." 

"You are a man of taste, Mr. Marshall," says Lestat. The world is liquid and heavy.

Marshall tips his glass in acknowledgement. Lestat takes a sip of the rum, grimaces, and puts it down. 

"You know, Mr. Lioncourt," says Marshall, "it's a rare man who walks out of a bar and comes back in drunker than he was."

Lestat is not interested in this line of conversation, so he says: “Indeed. I believe you were in the middle of saying something when we were so rudely interrupted.”

"Ah yes," says Marshall, winks. "The trials and triumphs of long marriages," and starts talking. Lestat licks blood off the inside of his teeth, washes it down with the alcohol, and listens.

/

One of the big drunk's friends follows him part of the way down the street, after he takes his leave of Marshall and heads for the Quarter. He can hear the heartbeat thudding. Can hear him thinking.

It's getting to be a little too loud, all of it.  Lestat wishes he were out in the mountains of the Auvergne again, out in the woods and the snow and the silence. New Orleans is a thunderstorm in his head. Usually he loves her for it.

It's a block further down when the man finally gets together the courage to jump him. Tries to shove him up against the alleyway wall and press a knife to his throat and fails at even the first half of the plan, seeing as Lestat 1. knew he was going to do it before he knew it himself and 2. can't be shoved around by humans unless he wants to be. And he isn't in the mood.

"Jesus fucking Christ," the man gasps, terrified, "What the hell are you?"

Lestat yanks the knife out of his grip and tosses it down the alleyway. Takes the man by the neck and slams him up against the wall instead. "Well, drunk," he says. "Totalement perdu, if I am to be perfectly honest."

"What did you do to Barry," the man says, almost whining in terror.

"Barry? Is that your tiresome, very inebriated friend?"

"He's the one you took out back and came back without, you sick fuck—"

"If there is sickness here," Lestat growls, "it is in the words he spoke, the loathsomeness he spewed about Louis and our love, and not in me." The golden moment's passing. Wearing off. He's on the trembling edge of it again, waiting for an avalanche.

"Are you going to kill me," the man squeaks. 

"Mm. Yes," says Lestat, and sinks his teeth in. The spill of blood on his tongue, and it's the rush of liquid pleasure it always is—tinged with an edge of horror-terror, the failing gasp of the man's breath, the bitter hatred in him—until it isn't anymore, and it's not New Orleans alleyways but a tower room outside Paris and his body is failing him and he's saying No no I don't want this I don't want it No and Magnus is saying You are dying Wolfkiller ask for it and you will live forever and Lestat says No says No says No and Magnus' throat between his teeth and the blood the blood the blood saying You love him now you love him lie down let it go no pain—

He drops the man. Sick wet thud on the cobblestones. The red, spilling. No. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. He needs—Louis. He needs to go home. That was the plan. Marshall has good taste in jazz so maybe he has good ideas, too, was right when he said go home, talk, maybe bring flowers and a kiss. Always worked for me. Anything's better than this. Life without change, whether it's a townhouse in New Orleans or a castle in the Auvergne he can't leave. The newspapers piling. The vineyard decaying, year after year.

There was something in the blood—not sickness, not alcohol. Something stronger. The soldier's drug, morphine? Heroin? 

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Throws up blood a block further down, in the gutter. Another few blocks after that, and the feeling's fading, back to the beautiful clarity of that space between drunk and too drunk to do anything but weep. The sky's clear. Moon's out. And there are the green gates of 1132, a pale almost-white in this light. There's lamplight growing in one of the upper story windows. The room Louis was in, when Lestat left.

He leaves his coat on the coatrack, his suit jacket on the sofa, strips out of the vest going up the stairs and leaves it lying on the grand piano's bench. Undoes his tie and the first four buttons of his shirt before he steps through the door.

And there's his love, scowling down at yet another newspaper, little rat corpses piled in a little heap on the carpet where they were flung. "Louis," Lestat says happily, and sprawls down onto the bed beside him. 

Louis looks up with a jolt, rolls away. Lestat bites down on a mournful noise and buries his face in the pillow Louis was using instead. There's a speck of blood on it. Lestat licks at it experimentally. Hm. Rat. Thoroughly dead. 

"Lestat," Louis says, warily. Lestat abandons the pillow and reaches out for Louis, for the smooth line of his hip, his shoulders, tries to pull him close.

"You smell like cheap rum and the gutter,” Louis says, a little derisive. A little disgusted. Pulls away from Lestat’s hands, gets up and off the bed, rifling through the heap of newspapers to find something. A rat squeaks and runs for it; Louis gives it a dilated-pupil hungry look but doesn’t give chase. The lamplight in his hair. He’s wearing a soft cable-knit cardigan today, dark blue. Lestat considers baring his throat for him; is still considering it when Louis walks back to stand on the edge of the bed, right in front of him. Close enough to touch, so Lestat does; hands to his hips, nuzzle at the junction of hip and leg. Wishes he'd taken off all his clothes before coming in. He likes it, being naked when Louis isn't. Almost as much as he likes being naked when Louis is too.

“Where you been?” Louis says, an edge to it. Still calm. Collected. Beautiful, obviously. Always.

Lestat hums, mouths at the inside of Louis' thigh. Tastes linen and sweat. “Bar,” he says, muffled. “There was a very unpleasant, very drunk fellow there.” I killed him in your name, he considers saying.

“So what, you ate him? How drunk are you?”

“Very,” Lestat says, cheerful. Does he dare push up Louis’ cardigan and then untuck his shirt? Press his face to skin?

He doesn’t get the chance. Louis says, "Oh yeah? Got anything to do with this?" and flings down the newspaper, open to the obituaries. Takes a step back, so Lestat can't reach him without getting up off the bed. A dangerous warp to his mouth.

Lestat picks up the newspaper out of vague curiosity and a lack of anything else to do with his hands. There it is. Antoinette Delilah Brown, dead. The wake will be on Sunday. Lestat wonders, absently, if anyone will go. Sometimes she'd tried to talk about her life, about family and friends, after the sex was over. Usually he didn't listen. Laid there and wished it was a different voice talking. Hollow. Carved out. He tosses the paper off the side of the bed.

"She's dead, so you drink yourself stupid and come here hoping you can fuck me instead," Louis snaps, sharp. Oh, he's furious now, glorious and lit up with it. There's that spark. Lestat thinks yes, yes, there you are— "Is that it?"

"And if it is?" Lestat says; it's not what this is, of course it's not, the very thought frankly preposterous but he'd say anything now if Louis would just keep looking at him like that.

Louis stands there, panting, a little wild-eyed. Like he hadn’t thought through what to do if Lestat didn’t try to deny it. Lestat wonders, absently, whether taking off his pants right now is more likely to get him Louis close and warm and mouth on mouth or if it’ll just get him kicked out of the bedroom. Or maybe Louis will stab him like he dreamed about doing when they first met, in the Fair Play. He’d take either, if it meant—the heat. The fire. Something other than the cold, something other than what’s waiting in the back of his mind.

“There’s something wrong with your head,” Louis says, finally.

“Yes,” says Lestat, holding his breath.

Louis is showing just a hint of fang. Just the tiniest sliver of white, as his chest heaves. “I hate you."

"Yes," says Lestat.

"You," Louis says, seemingly out of words. His fangs fully bared now. "It's your fault she's gone." He's not talking about Antoinette anymore.

"Yes," says Lestat.

"Our daughter," Louis says, cracking on it, and Lestat feels sour and rotting inside, wishes Louis would stop saying that, even though he knows why he does it, of course, sees it for the weapon it is. Claudia. Claudia. Claudia. Lestat made her for Louis. Let her drink from him until she had enough to live. Watched Louis help her up from the floor and wanted to crawl at his feet, ask, is it good enough? Can you be happy with this? And Louis touched his shoulder and smiled at him exhausted and sooty and radiant and walked out of the room.

He said it when he brought her home, too. Our beautiful little daughter. And Lestat, fool that he was, had, for a moment, almost believed—

She called him Uncle Les, until she didn't, anymore. And here is Louis, digging deeper into it, saying Here, look at what you'll never have. Look at what you'll never have.

"She’s gone," says Louis, "she's gone—does it even fucking matter to you—going out with Antoinette again, entertaining yourself? Was the woman even a good fuck, or was it just the best you could get, if you couldn't have me—"

Lestat doesn't want to listen to this. Louis snarling at him is fun, he likes that, but not this, Louis shattering in front of him and looking like he's one inch from storming out the door or maybe walking into the fireplace. Lestat knows what it looks like, when a vampire burns. He knows what Louis was going to do, after confession in that church. What he would've done, if Lestat hadn't offered him another way out. 

“What can I give you,” says Lestat. “To make up for it. What can I do.”

 The moment stretches and stretches. Louis is—breathing hard, still, his hands clenched fists at his sides. Lestat waits, looking up at Louis through his eyelashes. Come on. Come on. And, finally, it snaps—

"How about you suck me until I'm hard enough to fuck her out of you," Louis hisses, wild-eyed. Shoves Lestat down onto the bed with, if not all of his strength, then a considerable part of it, climbs on after him. Lestat goes down laughing, even as his skull collides with the headboard hard enough to crack the wood. Louis goes in for a kiss, tongue-first, and Lestat gasps, licks into his mouth. Bites at his lip. Louis has one hand in his hair and one hand on his shoulder, nails digging in. Lestat hopes with all his leftover attention that it'll leave marks, kisses Louis with the rest of it, until Louis says, panting into his mouth, “Enough,” and pulls away. His mouth wet and red.

Lestat lets Louis push him down; flips them, so he can lay Louis out on the bed and go for his fly, yanking it down in one quick movement. Mouths at his still mostly soft cock through cotton.

Louis fists a hand in his hair—a bit too hard to be sweet, a bit of sting, but Lestat doesn't mind that—and grinds up against his face, and Lestat luxuriates in it, the heat, the scent, the sound of Louis' heartbeat, double-time. He yanks at Louis' waistband and Louis lifts his hips enough to let Lestat pull pants and underwear down just enough to get at his cock. There's a grayish tint to Louis' skin—not eating enough—which would distract Lestat enough to get him thinking sour unhappy thoughts if he were any less drunk on the rum and the drunks' blood and Louis, close again and wild with it. Lestat takes the head of that lovely cock into his mouth and closes his eyes so he can sink into that feeling, hands in his hair and the fever-high, Louis in his mouth and the sweet gasping sounds Louis makes when Lestat licks at him, when he lets fangs brush soft velvet skin. Louis bucking into it, none of his usual control, and Lestat is desperately hard now, rutting against the mattress as hard as he can manage while still focusing on Louis, caught up and burning.

If he had the space in his head to think about it, he'd be remembering the little garret room in Paris, before Magnus. He and Nicki did a lot of sleeping together, then. It was a good way to keep warm. Sometimes they'd just lie there and kiss until they fell asleep. Sometimes Nicki was frustrated and upset and they did it like this, and that was all right, too. Lestat didn't mind, if it was what Nicki needed.

It's a good thing he doesn't have that space. To think about it. That he can't quite put together the parts of thought and memory and dream needed, that he can instead narrow the world down to Louis' hands in his hair and Louis' cock in his mouth and the sheets and newspapers crinkling beneath them and the sharp edge of a hardcover book digging into his hip. 

But there's just not enough blood in Louis for it; he hardens a little, flushed with what there is left in him, but it's not enough, and Louis pushes Lestat off with a frustrated noise. "Fuck," he gasps, fists his own cock almost angrily, like he can get it to work if he just goes at it long enough, hard enough.

It looks like it must hurt, so Lestat grabs his wrist, thoughts a little fuzzy but clear enough to know— "Don't," he says, hoarse, "you need blood for that, not—"

"What, you going to hunt rats for me?" Louis snaps. "Quick grocery run to the animal market?"

Lestat blinks at him. "No." Bares his throat.

Louis stares. "You want me to—"

“I drained three men tonight, I certainly have enough."

"Three? Were any of them sober?" But Louis is considering it, Lestat can see it in his face. 

"Come on, mon cher," Lestat says, aims for the seducing tone, the purr. "Take it from me." Like what I took from you, he doesn't say. Instead: "It's yours." I'm yours.

He can see it, the moment when the caverns of Louis' reluctance cave in. Louis takes his face in both hands, tilts it to the side. A little rough, but Lestat goes with it willingly, staring at the wide dark pupils of Louis’ eyes, the hunger in his beautiful face. And Louis sinks his teeth in, and it's rapture, their heartbeats, beating as twins, the blood pounding in them, and Lestat closes his eyes and leans into it and—

Magnus is draining him and Magnus says with his mouth stained red, The light going out of your blue eyes, like all the summer days are gone and the audience is laughing and Nicki says All a misunderstanding my love and Magnus presses him down onto the dirty bed spread out on the fur and velvet cloak and Armand says And the veil will always come down between you and Magnus is going up in flame and the letter says We could not prevent what happened and the fire is lit around the stakes in the forest clearing and the audience is still laughing.

He thrashes, screams, shrieks, but he is too weak to stop it, not enough of the right thing or too much of the wrong one, wolfkiller alone in the snow with the dogs torn open and the mare screaming but helpless on that bed. He is not Lestat now, he is the thing that walked two hours or maybe ten down the mountain carrying an almost-death, the thing pinned down and pleading in the tower room, the thing too weak to dig itself out of a grave it buried itself in. The thing not burning now, even though it can smell fire, somewhere.

And someone says, "What the hell?" in a voice that carries nothing of Paris, of the snow on the mountains, instead a bayou lilt. It's raining, somewhere. The not-burning-thing can hear it.

The voice says "Lestat!" panicking, and the thing becomes Lestat again because it needs to be, the voice needs something and the dreadful thing loves that voice, it knows that much. And Lestat opens his eyes and sees that there is no fire, just a candle burning on the table, and he is in the far corner of the room for some reason, newspapers scattered across the floor and the lamp knocked over, glass shattered across the Persian carpet. The room that is not in Paris or the Auvergne, the room that is their room in New Orleans.

And Louis is crouching maybe twice an arm’s length away from him on the carpet, eyes wide and shocked, mouth red with blood. Flecks of the same red on their sheets. On the floor.

Lestat puts a hand to his throat. His fingertips come away red and wet.

He stares at it, uncomprehending, for a long moment. Looks up. Says: “Louis?”

Louis deflates in something like relief, shoulders slumping. “What was that?” he asks, an edge to it that Lestat might have taken offense to, but he can’t—can’t—head sludgy and cold. “Did I—"

Louis is moving closer which is usually a good thing but the thing rears its inhuman head in him when he does it now and it’s the wrong face looking down at him for just a moment and now there’s a hand reaching out too close so he says, “No.” Holds onto this consciousness with both hands and all his nails so that he’s not the thing bleeding onto red velvet and wolf fur again. “No. No.”

“Lestat,” says someone, a narrow tremble to the voice, and the face is Louis’ again. The hands are Louis'. Drawn away. Lestat blinks. “Baby, you're scaring me. Come back."

Lestat needs to, so he does. He blinks, again. Fuzzy edges to the world. There are the walls. There is the floor. There is the ceiling. There's Louis. Get it together, Lestat, look at his face. Why must you always go to such extremes? Behave habitually like a wild thing? His own voice in his head turned, without ceremony, to Augustin's.

Lestat shakes it off. Says, the words echoing oddly in his own ears, “I am perfectly fine, chéri, there is no need for such histrionics."

“Fine?” Louis echoes incredulously, sitting back on his heels. Lestat manages to focus his gaze in on him. “Fine? That was not fine!”

His hands are—trembling, still. He focuses on that long enough to make them stop, then tries, fuzzily, to stand. Standing seems like the thing to do, the thing he might do if he were all there, if he’d been put together right and not jagged like this. Halfway up, and the world tips—a swaying black moment, and then he's back in himself, and Louis has one hand on his elbow and one on his waist—when did that happen?—and is keeping him from tipping over and smashing another lamp to the floor. Louis' voice is tight, scared, when he says, "Come on. Come on, Les, just to the bed, okay? Come on. Or the coffin, would that be better?"

"I don't think I can get through the tunnel," Lestat says, dizzily.

"The tunnel—what tunnel?"

Lestat blinks. Is there more than one? He doesn't want to go into the dark again, the suffocation, the despair. He wants to stay here. Louis is looking at him with soft concern. His mouth still painted red with Lestat's blood. Some of it smeared over his chin. Lestat wants to lick it off. 

"I'm not going in there," he says.

"Okay," Louis says, "okay, we won't."

Lestat reaches out for Louis' face, for the red on it; Louis startles. Flinches away. Lestat snatches his hand back.

Right. New Orleans. New Orleans. Not Paris, not the castle, not the forest clearing. No tunnel to crawl through; he made the coffin room here vibrant and beautiful and warm. 

And Louis doesn't want him—like this. He can't. There is no reason to. Louis' beautiful hands. Warm on his hip. Magnus touched him there, too. Phantom burn. He fucked it up again. He fucked it up. Louis shouldn't have to—

"Les," Louis starts, hesitantly. Lestat smiles at him, or at least he thinks he does. Pull it together, Lestat. Takes a careful step away. Louis' hands fall away. A sudden chill. 

"There is no need to coddle me, Louis," Lestat says. Adjusts his shirt cuffs. Reaches to neaten the knot of his tie, before he remembers he abandoned it outside the door. His fingers brush against the sealing-over ragged edges Louis' teeth tore in his neck instead. Did he try to pull away while Louis still had fangs in him? He doesn't remember. "A momentary lapse. Think nothing of it. Shall we go to coffin?"

"A lapse," Louis repeats. 

"Yes," says Lestat. "It happens, I am told, even to me. I take it you do not wish to sleep? Would you prefer to continue where we left off?" Doesn't know if he wants Louis to say no—so Lestat can slink off to the coffin or the piano instead, wait for the trembling and whatever it is the third man had consumed besides cheap terrible alcohol to wear off—or if he wants Louis to say yes. He wouldn't—he can't turn it down. If Louis wants it, for once. If Louis wants him.

If he doesn't let Louis drink from him again, if he makes sure to stay face-down, Louis might not notice if he—slips again. 

"No," says Louis, appalled, recoiling. "I just watched you get—we are not having sex now."

Oh. That makes it simple, then. "Very well," Lestat says. Smile. The audience is looking. Hands up ready to cover their mouths for the next gale of laughter. The piano is across the room and out the hallway. The coffins are in the other room; around the bed and then through the double doors. "I believe I shall retire, then." If only Louis would stop looking at him, because he's not sure he can make it without his head going blank and pale again, and he doesn't want Louis to see it.

"Lestat, I didn't mean—" Louis exhales, runs his hands through his hair. "Goddamn," half to himself. He looks upset. 

"Your fly is undone," says Lestat. He can see the shape of Louis' cock, half-hard, through the gap and the white cotton beneath. "You may wish to amend that, if you are going to grace any of this city besides our townhouse with your presence."

Louis does his pants up without looking away from Lestat. Pity. Lestat had hoped he would look down, so that Lestat could make it at least to the chair, maybe light a cigarette and pretend he's lounging seductively and not just too unsteady to get back up. Louis says, "You're trying to distract me."

Merde. "Not at all," says Lestat, smiling at him. Are his hands trembling again? The room certainly is.

"All right then," says Louis. "Go on. Go to coffin. I'll come after." He puts his hands in his pockets and doesn't take his eyes off Lestat. Why must he do this now, after refusing to so much as glance at him for months—

Irrelevant. There's nothing Lestat can do about it. He glares at Louis, just to make a point, and resolves to walk firmly and unwaveringly, ideally with a hint of saunter, all the way to the doors and through them. Unfortunately, his body has other ideas; it only takes a couple of steps, and then he loses a second again, gone black and empty, and when he comes back the corner table's on the floor, another lamp shattered, books scattered, and Louis is holding him again, solid arm around his waist. Petting his hair. Lestat's head is groggy and clouded but there's enough left to know that he has to savor that.

"Back with me?" Louis asks, softly.

"I didn't leave," Lestat grumbles. The world's soft and indistinctly edged again. His face is tucked into the curve of Louis' shoulder, taking in the warmth of him with every unnecessary breath, but as long as Louis doesn't bring it up he won't, either.

Louis ignores that remark, graciously. He just pulls Lestat's arm over his shoulders, pulls Lestat close with an arm around his waist, and starts off in the direction of the coffin room. Lestat lets it happen. He doesn't—it's not that he couldn't fight it, if he wanted to. But he doesn't have the energy to pretend he wants to. Louis' thumb has settled just above his waistband. If his shirt were untucked, it'd be touching skin.

They've nearly reached the big carved-wood double doors when the nausea comes up again, quick like riptide. Lestat shoves Louis away before the first wave hits, so he won't vomit all over Louis as well as all over himself; sees the half-shocked, half-hurt look on his lover's face before he stops being able to see anything but the floor and his hands and his hair, hanging down around his face like a dead willow's long limbs as he chokes on the foul taste of a now-dead man's blood. His body heaving and retching without his permission, the blood coming up in sick waves. Humiliation, on his knees on the floor and helpless and gagging and no half-decent performance of seduction to be made of it. Surely this is too much, he thinks as he throws up blood. Surely any second now he'll hear familiar footsteps, growing distant. 

But it doesn't happen. Louis' heartbeat stays steady and near. Lestat coughs up another mouthful of blackened and clotted blood and his hair is in his face, the strands flecked with red, and then they're—not. Louis' hand on his back. Louis tucking the wayward strands behind his ears. Louis kneeling next to him on the carpet. 

Lestat wants to smash something or say something or maybe just throw himself at Louis and do his best to crawl inside his lover's ribcage and stay there, cradled as close to the beautiful beating heart as Louis will let him get. But he doesn't, because his body is heavy and slow and won't do anything except choke up blood, filling the otherwise still townhouse with thoroughly unmusical retching noises.

And then it's over—nothing left to gag up, feel as it stains his chin and probably the neck of his shirt, too, drips onto the growing filthy puddle and the pale skin of his hands—and it feels like there's nothing left in him at all.

Louis says, softly, "You good now, baby?"

No. Yes. Doubtful. Don't let go. Lestat pushes himself up with shaky hands. Stomach turning again at the rancid smell of the blood. Louis is close and warm and hasn't walked away yet so Lestat allows himself the indulgence, leans boneless against Louis' side and lets the familiar smell settle him. The cardigan's wool and dye. Old books' dust. A trace remnant of cologne. 

"It wasn't just alcohol in there, was it?" asks Louis.  He's probably looking critically at the stinking puddle of red. Lestat can't tell, eyes closed.

"No," he says, after a silence that stretched a beat too long. 

"Drugs?" 

"Somebody's homebrew experiment, I believe." Most of it is gone now, presumably, left with the blood, but some of it is still trembling in his veins. In his head. A belated thought occurs to him. Louis had— "Chéri, you drank from me. Are you—"

"Fine, I think. Don't think I got enough for it to have an effect, I didn't drink much before you—well. Can taste it a little, though."

Lestat's still caught up on the realization of that second-last sentence, brain running slow. That's right—he'd ended it probably only seconds in, Louis can't have gotten enough to satisfy him, not with a young vampire's hunger and not with the way he's been starving himself. 

"Are you hungry?" he asks, reaching blindly for Louis' face and managing to touch his cheek. Louis shouldn't be hungry. It's Lestat's job to hunt, to make sure there's enough. That no one he loves has to live hungry. "I could—"

"Don't think that's a good idea right now," Louis says, which Lestat might have been offended by, were there not the soft affectionate edge to the words' tone.

"I would. If you wished it."

"I know."  That's good, that Louis knows. Louis' hand stroking across Lestat’s back. "Come on. Let's get you lying down."

They make it to the coffins this time, but Lestat only remembers half the steps they took to get there. He's drifting, aimless, in his head or maybe outside it, and Louis is his only anchor. Louis pauses in front of the two coffins, frowning pensively, and then seems to reach some sort of decision; opens his, letting go of Lestat to do so, and steps in and sits down, arranging himself carefully at the upper end. Lestat only watches blankly, swaying a little where he stands, until Louis reaches out for him again. A hand, held out.

Lestat takes it. Manages to climb in on top of Louis without stepping on anything important.

"Come on, shirt off," says Louis softly. Lestat looks down, muzzily. That's right. The front of his shirt is stiff and ugly with the blood he'd thrown up.  He undoes the buttons, throws it out of the coffin, and settles down to sleep, curling along Louis' side with his head on Louis' chest. He still feels a little grimy, a little off-kilter, but the feeling is very distant, and Louis is very close. Louis tugs the lid shut, closing them into the warm dark together. Lestat closes his eyes and sinks into the feeling of it. But eventually, the silence is broken.

"I saw," Louis says quietly, "in the blood—you were—"

If Lestat were any closer to sober, any less spun out and drifting, he might get up. Say something sniping. Shut the line of conversation down sharp and cold. But Louis has one hand in his hair and the other holding him, and he doesn't need to think it through, not right now. If Louis asks, Lestat will answer.

Louis decides, finally, on: "Was that your maker?"

"In the tower?" Lestat murmurs, glassy. It feels soft and far away. He is aware, on some level, that he had—reasons. For not wanting Louis to know what happened in that tower room. But they seem unimportant, and Louis knows glimpses of it now anyway. Why not give him the rest? Why not give him everything? "Yes."

Louis’ voice has an odd quality to it Lestat hasn’t heard before when he says, “You didn’t want him to—turn you.”

“No,” says Lestat. Louis is so perfectly warm. “He took me from my room in Paris, where Nicki and I were sleeping.” Does Louis want to hear about Nicki? Too late, he’s said it already. Can’t see Louis’ face. “Fed on me every night for a week.” Among other things. “Locked me in a room full of corpses, all of them with my physique. My coloring. My eyes, staring back at me. Dead and rotting, all of them. Some of them for years, I think.” A breath. “I thought I would die, too. I wanted to die, rather than—" He stops.

“Be turned,” Louis supplies, quietly, when Lestat doesn’t continue.

“Yes.”

After a moment Louis adds, hesitantly, "There was a fire."

"After he made me into this," Lestat says, "he showed me where he kept coffins and his treasure.  Then he set the fire and walked into it." A tremble, and he continues: "I begged him not to. I nearly went after him."

"He left you alone."

"Yes. I could have gone back to Nicki, of course. But I didn't—" Nicki standing on the stage. Violin in hand. Speaking, sickly-sweet like arsenic—my love. The light coming out of you. "I thought it would be better for him. If he did not see me again." It would have been. It would have been.

"He the one with the violin? That you were thinking of?"

Inhale. "Yes." Nothing else. Talking about Nicki is harder than talking about Magnus. Nicki was—his first music, besides church and the players. His first real love. His escape. His devastation. 

A silence. Louis asks, "What happened to him?"

"I wasn't there," Lestat says, blankly. "He asked me to—I left. They wrote me a letter. Said it was his choice, to end it."

Louis is quiet, and then he says, "I'm sorry." Is he thinking of his Paul, taking the last step off the roof? Lestat wasn't there for that, either.  Doesn't know what the look on Louis' face was.

He doesn't know what to say to that, to the apology, so he doesn't say anything. Listens to Louis' heart beat, just beneath his ear. Louis' nails scraping gently against his scalp, just the right amount of pressure to ease the ache in his head. It's good. Nice. He could stay here forever, maybe. This moment.

“Why did you do it,” says Louis, hesitant and soft. “Why did you push her like that?” And he doesn't need to use the name for Lestat to know who he means.

Lestat gathers scattered thoughts together. “She needed to know,” he says finally. “You can’t bring all of them back. Sometimes they’re just gone.”

“She was an orphan before I found her, Lestat. She heard her aunt burn. I think she knows.”

Lestat can’t articulate it, not now, something between I watched the first dog go down with her back broken I saw her look to me I saw the wolves eat what they could I heard the noise it made and – the violin waiting when he came back to a room in Alexandria that was no one's home. Sitting in the snow with the cooling corpse of his mare and the cooling corpses of the wolves and the cold remnants of the corpses of his dogs and wanting nothing so much as to lie down between them, like he used to lie between them to sleep when the winter winds blew through the crumbling castle's cracks, and go cold, too. Wanting to put his face to the soft fur of the mastiffs' ruffs and let the spikes of their collars gash his neck open, so he could wear the same wound their bellies did. 

The letter in his hand. Nicki's death in it. 

He says, "I could go looking for her, and bring her back to you. If you wished it."

Waking up between the wagon tracks. Augustin's cold eyes. The days after. It's been a long time since he spent any energy on wondering if they would've kept him locked in forever, regardless of what his—of what Gabrielle demanded, if not for the fact that they would have starved a week into the winter without his hunting. 

"No," Louis says quickly, "No—I—"

"You want her to want it," Lestat says. 

"Yes," says Louis, then, frustrated, "No. I just want to know she's safe."

"She can call to you," Lestat offers, quiet. "If she needs you."

Louis says, "I know. I know. I just—I miss her." He's crying. Almost silent, but Lestat has good ears. Lestat isn't sure, now, if his touch would be a comfort or a curse, but he tries it—gentle stroke of his thumb along Louis' hip, press of his mouth to the edge of Louis' jaw—and Louis leans into it.  Doesn't pull away.

"Of course you do," says Lestat, on unsure ground but needing to do something, say something.  Louis is crying. "She's your daughter."

Louis sniffles. "Ours." And Lestat must have flinched, or made a noise, or done something, because Louis sits up a little, far as you can in a coffin with the lid closed, says, "What?"

And Lestat can't hold it back anymore, he's opened the gates of the battlements that hold back the secrets once tonight already and now the deadbolt won't click back closed, says, "I know I will never make up for what I took from you, Louis, but must you always—taunt me with it, I know she does not think of me as—"

"Lestat," Louis says, appalled, apparently shocked out of his tears. "What are you talking about?"

"I took your life from you," Lestat says, a little bewildered. "You said that."

"When did I—" Louis stills. "Oh."

"And I gave you hers, instead, broke the Second Law, but I am not—fool enough to think that gives me any right—"

"Lestat," says Louis firmly. Lestat shuts up. Here it comes. But Louis only says, quietly, "I don't know how she thinks of us now. If she thinks of us now. But she was always our daughter to me."

"Am I so pitiful now that you must appease me with lies," Lestat snaps, although it's half-hearted, lacking energy. The tiredness still seizing him. 

"I'm not lying," says Louis. "She only called you Uncle Les because—listen. The day after you turned her, she came to me and asked what the French for Daddy was, because she wanted to do it right. And I had to tell her it'd be—safer. For all of us. If she kept calling you Uncle, instead."

"Don't," Lestat manages, after a stuttering moment, and Louis is looking at him with—those beautiful eyes, not the first thing he'd loved about him but high on the list, "Don't—" not sure if he's going for don't lie or just don't say it, the immensity of the thing growing inside him, the thing beyond reach. Claudia's fourteen years unspooling in his head and then all of it after that—Claudia laughing, Claudia crying, Claudia killing joyfully, Claudia watching the smoke rise, Claudia nearly as drunk as he is now and screaming with a dead man lying on the table between them and what was he supposed to say? He did it. Louis asked but he did it. And she—and she—

He only realizes he's been trying—senselessly, heedlessly—to climb out of the latched-shut coffin when Louis says, touching him very cautiously, "Stop—you're going to hurt yourself."

And the little part of Lestat that takes care of talking when the rest of him isn't home says coolly "And willful self-destruction is a privilege you afford only yourself?" which he regrets, instantly, because Louis flinches from it, and maybe he'd wanted it to hurt him for a second there but he can't bring himself to keep wanting it once he's seen it done, so he tries to get knees and elbows and all that sorted out again so that he can kiss Louis' jawline, forehead, nose, say, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I—"

"Shh," Louis says, his hand settling on the nape of Lestat's neck. That telltale tremble.

Lestat quiets. But it's not enough, that great thing still eating up all the space in his chest, so he says, "Let me—give you something. Just ask." If he could, he'd like best—to be asked to go out into the woods, into the city, to the hunt. Bring back a dead thing, or a nearly-dead-thing, to lay the table with. Something he knows how to get done.

The silence, and then Louis says, finally, with a desolate little wobble to his voice: “Did you have anything to do with—” A pause, as he struggles again for the right words, and then settles on the simplest, the core of it: “Paul.” 

“No,” Lestat says, as appalled as Louis was a minute earlier, half-sitting up fast enough and incautiously enough that he cracks his head into the lid of the coffin (again)— “No—he was your brother. I would never.”

Louis’ throat working in the dark. Red tears falling, again. “Oh,” he manages. “I just—it’s something I’ve always worried about."

"I would never," says Lestat, again.

"I mean. You hated him.”

“I disliked him,” Lestat corrects. “For the way he acted as if he had a direct line to God. For the supercilious way he lorded it over you. For his disgust at what we shared, for his insistence on trying to bare it to your whole family over dinner. But I did not—no.”

“Why not,” Louis says. A little wet. A lot exhausted. “You—I mean. You kill. You don’t mind it, you don’t have the trouble with it I do. Why not give him that little push? Get him out of the way?”

Lestat blinks. “He was yours. You loved him.”

“Everybody’s someone’s,” says Louis.

“Not everybody is you,” says Lestat. Which is—too close, maybe, with the way Louis is looking at him, raw and shuddering. "Besides, he did have at least one redeeming quality."

Louis keeps looking at him like that. "What do you mean?"

"He did love you," Lestat says. "Very much, I think. So he must have had half an ounce of sense."

Louis crying. "Is that supposed to help?" he asks, half-desperate, "what the hell am I supposed to do with that—"

"You don't have to do anything with it," Lestat says, startled, wipes the blood-tears off Louis' face with his thumbs. Louis twists his face away, presses his eyes close, so Lestat settles his hands back at his sides. Lies back down, slowly, so Louis can press his face into Lestat's hair and not have to look at anything. Maybe it's the drugs, still, making it seem so clear. Maybe it's just the sun approaching. "It just is."

Louis shakes his head once, wordless and still crying, the tears dripping like the rain outside, the rain on the cobblestones and the roof tiles, and Lestat presses a kiss to his neck, another, and settles into it. Lets Louis cry the rest of it out into his hair the way he couldn't, maybe, on any other day, when the nervous energy and the need to say something, do something with his hands would drive him out and away. He's stopped thinking about Magnus, or Nicki, or Claudia. His head quiet, for once. Louis' breathing calming, inch by inch. One good thing done, maybe. And he can feel the sleep coming slow, a molasses tide; claws back into awareness long enough to say, "Louis, je t'aime," the most important thing, and then lets himself slide into the darkness without bothering to wait for an answer he is, by now, perfectly aware is not going to come.

After that, Lestat doesn't say anything more, just drifts off quietly, his breaths evening out, his heartbeat slow. Louis doesn't. It feels strange. He doesn't often watch Lestat sleep; when he wakes up, Lestat has usually already gotten up, puttering about the house or sitting composing at the piano or whatever it is he does. In the mornings, if they were sharing a coffin, it was always Louis who fell asleep first, the sun pulling him down into sleep while Lestat breathed quietly next to him, pale-eyed in the gloom.

Once Louis woke up and heard the piano, like he often did, but not Lestat's usual playing. Instead, his hands on the deep end, playing a dancing bass rhythm, while Claudia laughed a delighted child's laugh and plinked away tunelessly at the high notes. That was a good night. He hasn't thought of that in—months, now. It had seemed useless. Far away.

But now Lestat is sleeping, even though the sun hasn't come up enough to force Louis into sleep, too; sleeping curled against Louis, Louis' hand in his hair. Eyes closed. Still. And Louis is awake. 

He can still see the marks his fangs tore in Lestat's neck, when Lestat panicked and Louis didn't notice quick enough. Twin slashes, now nearly healed, almost horizontal. Earlier, before he'd taken it off, it had looked—the front of his shirt soaked with blood, his mouth, his neck. Stiff with it. Red with it.  Louis has seen dead men like that. It looked like—someone tried to carve him open. Knife to the neck.

He's been trying to hurt Lestat for seven years, provoking and sniping and ignoring coolly every chance he got. He had his reasons. They were good reasons, too, and Louis hasn't forgiven Lestat for what started all this, not really. Lestat hasn't even really explained. Just put shaky, emotional words together, one after the other, to every question Louis asked, half of which made no sense, the other half of which threatened to collapse the remnants of the walls Louis had built against him. Louis doesn't understand it, and Claudia is still gone—but. 

He did miss this. Doing it together, and not apart. 

Provoking Lestat was easy, and yes, he'd taken satisfaction from it, but it was an empty sort of joy, watching Lestat pace and snarl and curse in French. He'd hated him, and blamed him, and wanted to hurt him, and—he supposes, on some level, he'd considered Lestat an indestructible thing, because that was what he'd always been. Sure, he'd yell. Sure, he'd cry. But it was just that, and then it was gone, mercurial as clouds shifting on a windy day, or a windy night. The possibility that it had cut deeper, that he actually had the power to hurt Lestat, unravel him like this, had never truly seemed real. He'd sit on the couch or the bed and snipe without looking up from his book, without a shift to his tone. Lestat would react to whatever it was Louis threw at him and maybe cry and maybe stalk out of the room and maybe smash something, and Louis would keep refusing to look up, bland and indifferent as he could possibly make himself be, which was very, the way he'd been feeling. And then it was the next night, and Lestat would be Lestat again. As he always was.

Would it have changed anything, if he'd known? If he'd known, too, what he saw in Lestat's blood tonight? The images—or perhaps wrong to call them images, with how quickly it had happened; mainly what he'd gotten was a tide of emotions he couldn't pick apart then and barely pick apart now. A place in some woods that look nothing like Louisiana, where the ground is blackened around iron stakes. A place in some narrow stone room, with a figure, face the color of picked-clean bone, blocking out the flickering torchlight. A stage, a young man holding a violin, turning back, mouth already open to speak. Fragments of a history Louis knew nothing of. Fragments of his lover, bleeding on the carpet. 

And then they'd talked about Claudia and—and Paul, and Louis can't decide if the look on Lestat's face when he said I would never, when he said he loved you, is a salve or another open wound, because what now? What does he do with that? Does that fix it? He believes Lestat's answer, and maybe that's worse or maybe not. Knowing Lestat didn't do anything to make Paul step off that roof, that it was really just the two of them up there, in the end. Louis and Paul and the sunrise and love. And Louis didn't look back until it was too late.

If Lestat had no part in it, then all parts of it were Louis'. If Lestat had no part in it, Louis can let himself—keep him.

And as for Claudia—that's not over yet. And thinking of her again makes him want to speak to her, and he can't sleep anyway, can't dream her home, but he can try to reach her, even if it's in vain again, even if it gives him nothing.

So he closes his eyes and reaches out in his head with a strength that feels greater, now; a far longer reach. Says, quietly, Claudia? Claudia? Are you there? I just want to know you're doing all right. I miss you. I'm sorry. I think—I'm pretty sure he's sorry too, if it matters—just say something. Please—

And she says Louis? and her voice, oh to hear her voice again, but it's—cracked. Tearstained.

He jolts upright, which makes Lestat murmur something blearily in his sleep, patting at Louis' side. Claudia? Are you—

I'm fine, she says, and sounds so much like Lestat, just hours ago, saying the same words as he sat shaking on the floor, eyes wide and unseeing, after Louis felt in his blood—the pale face looming over him. The terror. The touch of those hands. I shouldn’t've—never mind. 

No! he sends back, probably sounding scared out of his mind, because he is, his daughter out there, somewhere, hurting, and he can't go to her, can't do anything. He holds onto Lestat tighter. Look, I—I'm don't want to push you, but—I'd like to see you. I'll come. You don't have to come back here, I'll come to you, and you can leave whenever you want to. Please. 

Heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat. Lestat waking up now.  Peering up at Louis with bleary eyes, hair a mess a songbird wouldn't nest in, red on his face from crying Louis hadn't quite dared to wipe off, saying, "Mon cher, it is—" and she says and what about him?

"—early," finishes Lestat, still mostly asleep, "Go back to sleep."

She says, you going to bring him along?

"I," he says, that nonsensical single syllable, maybe to her in his head and maybe out loud and maybe both.

Lestat blinking at him, saying "My love, are you—" and Claudia's voice: Is he there with you? "—well?" Right now?

"Yeah," he says to both of them, and then just to Lestat, "It's her. It's her."

Lestat frozen. His eyes flicker. He says: "Claudia?"

Louis nods. Can't manage anything else. Lestat stares at him, then slowly reaches up. Thumbs another half-fallen tear away from under his eye. Louis hadn't realized he was crying again. He closes his eyes. 

Claudia's voice. And? She's trying to sound put together. Collected. Calm. But he knows her. He raised her.

He thinks back, do you want me to come without him?

She thinks, will he let you come without him? Which means yes.

Lestat says, "What's she saying?" A shade of resentment, maybe. He never liked it, when they talked like this in front of him. Always knew.

Louis says, "I think something happened. To her."

A hesitance, then Lestat says slowly, "It's a vicious world out there."  

Louis thinks again, against his will, of what he'd seen in Lestat's head—if something like that—his daughter—he wets his lips, says carefully, "I'd like to go see her."

Pause. Something working behind Lestat's eyes. Maybe he's not all the way awake yet. Maybe not all the way sober. It seems to take forever, but then Lestat says, a realization, "She wishes you to come alone."

Louis can't get the words out, but Lestat must see the answer in his eyes, the lack of a denial, because Lestat opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it. Twists his face away, but not enough that Louis can't see it, every emotion written across his face. A short, sharp laugh that's halfway to a sob, and Louis can feel it dissolving, what the last few hours has remade between them, can feel it slipping away.

"Ill luck that you chose to invite me into your coffin again tonight. Otherwise you might have slipped away without waking me. No need for these awkward goodbyes." Lestat's reaching for the latch.

"That's not—Lestat," says Louis, reaches for him, fitting his hand to the curve of Lestat's skull, fine hair between his fingers, like that night on the altar. The coffin seems too narrow for this now, even though it had never seemed too narrow when they were caught in passion. Lestat stills for him, his face half-turned away. "Lestat. I'm not trying to leave you."

"So you won't be going?"

Louis can't say yes and can't say no. Lestat pulls away.

"You'll have to wait a few hours at least," Lestat says, scrabbling clumsily at the latch until he does get it open. At least he's not—doing what he'd done, earlier, when they'd talked about Claudia, and it undid Lestat so completely that he tried to climb out without opening the lid, slamming himself blindly against the wood until Louis was sure there'd be blood trickling down his face, if Louis could see it. "The sun will destroy you before you make it out of Louisiana."

He slams the top open, scrambles out rather ungracefully, nearly tripping over the little heap of the abandoned bloody shirt. Louis goes after him without thinking about it, catches him by the wrist. Claudia says, Louis? She sounds a little scared, now, not the way she did before but like she's scared for Louis, now. Scared he'll stop answering. Louis says, "Stop. Stop. Lestat!"

Lestat stops. He's trembling in Louis' grip. His hair falling into his face. Give me a minute, Louis sends to Claudia, reassuring as he can.

"I need to do this," Louis says, very carefully, "for me and for her." Tightens his grip when Lestat makes a feeble attempt at yanking out of it. "I'd like to come home to you."

"And when would that be?" says Lestat. The tremble in his voice, too, but he's softening, opening to it. "When you've grown tired of her? Shall I wait a decade? A century?"

"I don't know," says Louis; if Claudia needs a century, if he can give her a century, he can hardly pretend he'd— "I don't—I hope not too long." Changes his grip on Lestat to be a little less restraint and a little more caress, hopefully. Lestat doesn't use the chance to get away. "I'd miss you."

"As you missed me," says Lestat, caustic, "for these last seven years—"

"You were here," says Louis, "and I—am sorry." He tucks a strand of hair behind Lestat's ear. He'd like to see his face. Adds, gently as he can, putting all his conviction into it, hoping Lestat will know he means it, all the way: "She's our daughter."

Lestat doesn't reply, his fingers working over each other, until some sort of dam seems to break in him—he says, stiffly, "If she has found other vampires, ones capable of harming her—and you—neither of you could call to me. If you needed me."

"You think she's found other vampires?" The idea is startling, somehow, but it does make some sort of sense.

"I don't know she hasn't," Lestat retorts, a little sharp. 

"I'll be careful," Louis says. "I promise. Okay?"

Lestat turns to him, properly this time, says, desperate, "If you—Louis, I cannot lose you."

"I can take care of myself." Lestat seems ready to open his mouth again at that, so Louis takes a step closer, says, "I'll call you every night. They have telephones wherever she is, I'm sure. Okay? I won't disappear on you."

Lestat wants to believe it. Louis can see it in his eyes. He's on the tipping edge. His hands in Louis', the familiar fingers, the well-known rings, none of them a wedding ring but one or two that might almost be—which is when Louis gets an idea. "Hang on a minute," he says, whirls off toward the wardrobe and doesn't wait to see what Lestat does.

The waistcoat he wore last, a deep red, is hung neatly, and there. The gold chain. The watch dangling at the end of it, hunter-case with a little bit of fine filigree. He clicks it open, watches the smallest hand tick. A second, two. The glass is scratched. The gilt faded. He goes back to Lestat. "It's tricky to wind," he says, "but it runs all right. I don't expect you to wear it, or anything, but if you'd like—"

He takes one of Lestat's hands in his, nudges at him until he opens his fingers, lays the pocket watch in his palm. Lets the long chain coil gold beside it. Lestat turns the watch over in his hands and Louis knows what he sees there, inscribed in the back: the du Lac name. But not Louis'. His father's. 

Louis closes Lestat's hands around the watch and says, firmer, "I'm not trying to leave you. Keep it for me, until I come back?"

Lestat's throat bobs as he swallows. He says, hesitantly, "Louis."

"My father left it to me," Louis says. It doesn't even hurt. He tries to smile. "When he died. Most expensive things we had I sold, those first few years, until I could get some sort of business running again. Had to sell this one too, near the end of it. But Grace bought it back for me, with the money I gave her for a new dress. Said I had to keep something for myself."

He says, "I'm coming back. I promise." Considers, as he says it, the idea of I love you, but that's—Paul too close. He knows he wouldn't get it out, if he tried.

Lestat looks down at the watch again, or maybe at Louis' hands on his. He takes the last step closer there is left to take, and kisses Louis, softly, like it's an answer, like it's all the words neither of them know how to say.

Maybe it is. Why shouldn't it be? It's what Louis did once, as an answer to a different question, on the altar.

/

At dusk—Louis puts on his best suit. Packs a bag. Lestat watches him for a minute, face twisting up, and then whips away to play piano, all allegro, like it could take it out of him. He's wearing the pocket watch, even though they're out of fashion now. The thin line of gold against the grey of his waistcoat.

When he's done, Louis kisses Lestat once more, soundly, sweetly. He takes the steps through the gate and across the sidewalk and into the street. It's the first time he's been outside in—he doesn't remember. Some time. There's a light rain falling. He takes the step up into the car, turns the key to ignite the motor, the furious hum of it, and looks back over his shoulder one more time—Lestat, standing in the door, the light coming out all around him—before he puts his foot to the gas. 

To Claudia, he says: I'm coming.