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Chapter Text

There is someone in Louis’ fortress. He knows this before he sees the intruder, because there is the distinct sound of someone scraping the wooden boards. Louis knows the sound well because last summer he and Paul had carved their initials on the highest place they could reach on the back wall. 

Paul is likely the reason for the intrusion, Louis thinks vexedly as he picks up his bat from underneath his bed, because he keeps leaving the window facing the side yard unlocked for all sorts of critters and little rodents to come right in. It’s one of the reasons he isn’t allowed in Louis’ fortress very often, the other being that he’s a big old tattletale and if he were to see whatever animal that Louis is about to find having crawled its way inside, he’ll be running to tell momma faster than flash. 

Gracie isn’t allowed entrance at all, on account of being three years old, a girl, and a total crybaby.  

Louis sighs, braces himself, and pushes aside the small wooden bookshelves hiding the wicket door behind. 

The last time a rat had sneaked in through a rain pipe, momma had come close to locking the entrance completely and disallowing Louis from ever playing there again. It had taken Louis a whole week of begging and getting daddy on his side to convince her to change her mind. To salvage his fortress. And so, as scared as he is to face whatever is there, a strange sense of resolve fills him as he wriggles through the crawl space and into the hidden room. 

With quiet, slow movements, he raises his bat, but the nervous quick glance around reveals no rats—or squirrels, or raccoons, or, God forbid, a big old skunk! 

Louis lowers his bat and wonders if he’s imagined the noise after all, until a flash of yellow catches his eye—right there, on top of the cupboard daddy had built for him where Louis keeps his favorite toys. He quickly raises the bat again with shaking hands, his breath catching in his lungs. Louis' mentally listing all the rodents daddy has taught him—capybaras, chinchillas, rats, lemmings, and the one with the funny name that Louis can’t now remember. Except none of them are yellow. He contemplates running away, then, faced with this unknown, and calling daddy instead. But then the figure moves—up, up, and up, until a pair of wide blue eyes are peeking up at him from behind the cupboard. 

Louis blinks. Not a rodent or critter at all. 

“Hello?” Louis says, tilting his head. 

The blue eyes get even wider then, blink once, and then quickly disappear behind the cupboard once more. Louis lowers the bat as the boy rises slowly and faces him. 

“Who’re you?” Louis asks. 

He's only a little bit taller than Louis, he thinks. 

The boy is quiet as he fidgets with the hem of his t-shirt, baggy and too big on him, with letters and a logo on it that are far too worn and faded for Louis to decipher. There’s a big bandaid on his cheek that also looks too big for his face and his blond hair is tousled and messy in a way that would have momma calling him an unkept and wild boy, dragging him back in with a spray bottle and brush. 

“Who are you?” Louis repeats. 

The boy furrows his weirdly pale brows. “Who are you?” he asks back, and he sounds strange in the way Lily’s parents sound strange when they speak English. 

“You first,” Louis says, arms folding in front of him, because this is his fortress, and this boy has entered without permission. 

The boy blinks, considering, and then says, “Lestat.”

“Lester?”

“No,” the boy grimaces like Louis' words had been deeply offensive. “Le-stat.” 

He says it slooowwly, like Louis is stupid, and Louis doesn’t like that very much, so he scoffs and says, “what sorta’ name is that?”

The boy pouts and folds his arms too. “It is mine.” 

“How’d you get in here?”

Lestat points a finger at the window to the far left of the room where he’s left it wide open on his way in. Paul isn't gonna be allowed in here for at least a month, Louis decides. He briefly considers barring him access for forever, but then he might go complaining to momma, and then Louis won't be allowed in here either. 

And that won’t do. 

Louis sighs. “I’m Louis De Pointe Du Lac,” he announces, because even though this boy is an intruder, momma always says it’s proper to formally introduce oneself. 

Lestat’s eyebrows raise. “Es-tu français?”

“Non,” Louis says, surprised to hear the French. He focuses very very hard to piece the right order of words together. “Mais je parle français.” 

Lestat gapes a bit, eyebrows raising. He says some more things in rapid French, so fast that Louis has to stop him and ask him to slow down. 

“Why are you here?” Lestat asks slowly and in English instead.

Louis sighs. This boy must either be stupid or rude. “This is my fortress,” he says, chin raised high. 

“Forest?” Lestat repeats in that funny way that he speaks, eyebrows furrowing. 

Louis rolls his eyes. He doesn’t know the word in French and doesn’t really care to remember. “This,” he says instead, making a wide motion with his arm at the room around them, “is mine.”

Lestat pouts and shrugs. “I didn’t see your name on it,” he says in French. 

This boy is both stupid and rude, Louis decides. 

“That’s my house, right there,” Louis points towards the door leading to his bedroom and house. Well, it’s his parents’ house, technically, but it’s where he lives! “And this,” Louis points around again, putting a firm and final foot down, “is mine.” 

Lestat frowns in turn, and points in the direction of the opened window, “ma maison.” 

Louis is momentarily confused until he thinks, Oh, this boy must be with the new family that had moved into the next door neighbor’s guest house who had “an ostentatious amount of furniture for people who were renters.”   Or so momma had said, peeking out the window with a dissatisfied eyebrow raised. Daddy had tsked and said, “Now, now, Florence, remember Matthews 7:1."

Louis isn’t sure what ‘ostentatious’ means, but he thinks maybe Lestat is ostentatious for breaking into his fortress without permission. 

“That’s rude,” he says, instead, because he doesn’t think Lestat is smart enough to know what ‘ostentatious’ is and Louis’ not sure if he’ll pronounce it right. “You have to ask permission before entering.”

Lestat frowns, eyes roaming around the room as though properly seeing it for the first time—the big tent that daddy had moved here that Gracie no longer played with—it was stupidly pink, but Louis had allowed it in place of having no tent at all—the little green toy soldiers lining the bookshelves holding his and Paul’s books, the small storage containers packed to the brim with the family ski equipment.

“C'est vraiment tout à toi?” Lestat mumbles. 

“Oui,” says Louis, “see there,” he points at the wall by the flat mattress, “those are my initials. Mine and my lil’ brother’s.”

“Oh.” Lestat looks down at the small piece of metal in his hands that Louis is just now noticing and that momma and daddy would never let him keep around, and then back at the space behind the cabinet where he had been sitting. Small carved out gashes line the wooden floor where they didn’t used to. That must have been where the noise had come from, Louis figures. When Lestat notices that Louis has caught sight of them, he looks down at the untied shoelaces of his Converse and blushes. 

“Désolé,” he mumbles, “I did not know it was your… fotes. ”

And Louis can’t help it, the giggle that bursts out of him at the way he says the word. “For-tress,” he corrects in between bouts of laughter. Lestat grimaces, his blush deepening with embarrassment or anger, hands clenching at his sides, and then he's quickly making it for the window he'd come from.

Or he tries to, because when he takes a step, he suddenly stops, makes a pained noise, and kneels down on the floor.

Louis stops laughing. “What’s wrong?” he asks, “are you hurt?” 

Lestat doesn’t answer, just keeps sitting with his head bowed down holding on to his knee. His hair is so long and messy that it’s fully covering his face, so Louis kneels down and peeks his head in under the cascade to take a look at him upside down. “What’s wrong?” he asks again, Lestat’s hair tickling his nose. Tears are streaming down his cheeks, and one of them drips down on Louis face as he watches him. 

Louis waits and sits with him for some time and Lestat stays quiet for so long that Louis decides that maybe he doesn’t like talking very much at all. So he inspects himself.

Lestat’s legs are skinny and pale like the rest of him, except that one of his knees looks bigger and redder than the other.

“Did you fall?” Louis asks. He pokes a finger at the knee where it's red and then feels bad when Lestat’s head shoots up and he winces. “Sorry,” Louis quickly says, “does it hurt very much?”

Lestat just pouts, so Louis tries in French, “Es tu tombe?” but that just seems to make him even more upset. More tears slip down his cheeks. Lestat angrily wipes away at them and hides his face behind his hair again. 

Now that Louis is really seeing—and not so mad anymore at Lestat’s rude intrusion of his fortress—he thinks his cheeks had been blotchy from the start and his eyes red like Gracie’s get after a very loud meltdown at the zoo. 

Louis frowns. “Est-ce que ça fait mal?” 

Lestat shakes his head no.

He must be embarrassed about falling then, Louis decides. Louis understands. A few weeks ago he had sprinted so fast towards the back door trying to get to the pool that he’d ripped right through the mesh screen and then down he’d gone right on his face. Paul had laughed and laughed at him for a good ten minutes and so Louis decides not to laugh at Lestat now. He tells him about his fall instead, shows him the little cut on his left cheek that’s almost fully healed and that daddy had said wouldn’t scar—and that even if it did, it would make Louis look very cool and manly. Lestat doesn’t respond, still, but when Louis reenacts the collision a sudden loud laugh bursts out of him that has his cheeks reddening one moment and smiling shyly the next. 

His bottom tooth is missing. Louis shows him the one on his top row that’s all wiggly and weak and that Lestat confirms when Louis lets him touch it with a tentative finger. 

“Paul says they’ll have to pull it out with a string,” Louis tells him solemnly. “Paul's my lil’ brother," he clarifies. He gives the tooth another wiggle, “that sounds scary, don’t it?” he confesses.

“Oui,” Lestat says, worriedly. 

Louis sighs and tells him about when he noticed it start moving after taking a bite of an apple, and that he hopes Paul is lying or wrong about the string since he’s a whole year younger than Louis and so not as smart, and had Lestat’s momma and daddy ever had to pull his tooth out with a string?

They sit for some time, cross-legged on the wooden floor, and though Lestat doesn’t confess to him how he’s fallen like Louis does, he’s at least stops crying. They play with the green toy soldiers and talk. Or Louis talks, mostly, but Louis doesn’t mind it very much because he likes talking and Lestat listens well. He tells Lestat about the fortress, about Gracie and the ugly pink tent in the middle of the room, and how he and Paul had climbed on a tall chair to engrave their initials onto the wall and almost fallen in the process, and does Lestat have a fortress in his house?

From time to time, Lestat gets confused, so Louis has to stop and think hard and say things in French instead until he understands. And then eventually Lestat starts talking too and he says some words wrong again, but Louis tries hard not to laugh at him in case he cries again and because momma says it's rude and unbecoming. One time, he'd been grounded for a whole week because he'd giggled when Lily's momma had said stars instead of stairs. 

Lestat is in the middle of telling Louis about the town he’s from all the way in France with the hard name that Louis can’t pronounce and which makes Lestat laugh in turn, when a voice from somewhere outside calls, “Lestat! Combien de fois dois-je t'appeler?” and Lestat stands so quickly that he winces again. This time, though, he doesn’t cry or lose his footing. 

“I have to go now,” he tells Louis.

Lestat’s already climbing out the window before Louis can tell him that, maybe if he asks permission next time, he can come to Louis’ fortress again and play with his new Rock’em Sock’em robot toy.

Chapter Text

“You cheated!”

“Did not!” 

“Did too!”

Louis sighs. If they keep going like this, they’ll spend the next hour going back and forth, and then daddy will hear and tell them to stop playing in the fortress altogether, and so he puts the board pieces down and says, “Fine, let’s just play somethin’ else.”

Paul narrows his eyes, but relents. 

It’s an easy sort of summer day, the ones filled with the comforting heat of the sun, and that accompanying gentle breeze that makes it just cool enough to make the little fan daddy has installed in the fortress unnecessary. Louis swings his feet together where he's sat on the hardwood floor; back and forth, watching the untied shoelaces swing this way and that. He shuffles around the cards in his hands once more and waits in boredom as Paul’s little eyebrows knit in intense concentration. 

Even at five years old, Paul is serious and thoughtful in the choices he makes. 

“Any day now,” Louis sing-songs.

“Shut up, Louis,” Paul mutters, picks out one card from his set, then changes his mind a puts it back.
Louis sighs dramatically and lays his head down on the floor. The wooden boards of the ceiling are lighter than the ones lining the floors, and in one corner, a single plank is a completely different color. On one similarly boring summer day, Louis had counted the number of boards up there, but he’s forgotten the number now.

Louis doesn’t know it yet, but these are the moments that he will miss the most—these easy, simple summer days when the sun is high, when the sky is as clear and calm as the thoughts in his mind, when the knots haven’t yet made a permanent home in his stomach, and the world’s weight and cruel eyes are nonexistent. 

When the only things that torment his little brother’s mind are what moves will win him their card game. 

They’re finally on their second round—Louis is letting Paul win this time—when Louis catches the movement outside. When he peeks his head out, all he sees is a small bundle laid out against green grass, until a ray of sunshine shimmers against gold. 

“Lestat!” Louis calls. Lestat, laid out in the side yard shared between their homes, lifts his head lazily and squints at him, his hair falling into his eyes. Louis waves, and Lestat waves back. 

Louis drops the cards, ignoring Paul’s complaints and climbs out of the window. Momma doesn’t like when he does this, but she’s not thought to remove the little crate Louis keeps underneath the window. Or perhaps she hasn’t noticed it yet. 

“What are you doing?” Louis asks, looking down at him. Out here, under the sun, Lestat’s hair and eyebrows look almost silver. Mousy-white, Louis thinks amusedly, and suddenly all he can picture is Snowball, Lily's little hamster that died out of nowhere last summer and made her cry for weeks.

Lestat squints up at him through equally silver eyelashes. “Je suis allongé,” he says. 

“Hmm.” That sounds altogether too boring, so Louis asks him if he wants to catch worms with him. 

“Worms ?” Lestat asks, and it sounds funny when he says it. Everything sounds funny when Lestat says it.

“You sound funny,” Louis tells him, giggling. Lestat scrunches his nose at him. Worm is a funny word to start with, Louis figures. He can’t remember how to say it in French so he turns to Paul, sitting on the windowsill looking terribly unhappy at Louis’ departure, no doubt. “Paul, how you say worm in French?”

“You say ‘Louis De Pointe Du Lac!’” Paul shouts back, folding his arms in front of him. 

“That’s my lil brother, Paul,” he tells Lestat. “He thinks he’s real funny, but he’s not!” Louis says the last bit loud enough for Paul to hear. “I’ll just show you!” Louis decides, then grabs Lestat by the hand, pulls him up, and leads him into the fortress. 

“What is worm?” Lestat asks again. 

“You’ll see,” Louis tells him, “Paul, this is Lestat,” he introduces. 

Paul tilts his head and studies him for a moment. Lestat is wearing the same shoes and shorts that he’d been wearing the last time Louis had seen him, but his shirt is a different color and the bandage on his cheek is smaller. 

“Hello, Paul,” Lestat says with a little wave. 

"You don't know what a worm is?"

"Non."

Paul's eyes narrow. “Why you sound like that?”

Louis groans. “He’s French, Paul,” he explains. “You know, like Lily and her mom and pop. He doesn’t speak English that good.”

Paul just purses his lips and glares at Lestat some more.

“You wanna catch worms with us?” Louis tries. Paul tilts his head again, and then, like he’s made a serious decision, lifts his chin up and says, “no, thank you.” Then he turns his back on them and picks up the cards where he’s left them. 

Lestat blinks and turns to Louis, his lips downward in a frown. Paul gets like this sometimes, all grumpy and gloomy, so Louis shrugs and guides Lestat through the small door and the little crawlspace leading to his bedroom.

“This is my bedroom!” Louis announces, a bit proud at the realization that he gets to show it off. He doesn’t think he’s ever shown someone his bedroom before, aside for Lily, who hadn’t looked all that interested in his toys at all. But Lestat seems very interested, so Louis spends a good amount of time showing him all of his toys, his superhero figurines, the names he’s picked for them even though they already have names, and then the game boy that daddy had brought for him on his birthday. He wants to show Lestat all his books next but then, suddenly, he remembers the worms again and out they go into the hallway, past the living room and finally out into the backyard. 

Louis has found a particularly muddy part of the ground between the Hydrangeas—that Louis must be absolutely careful playing next to lest he step on them —and the little statues of naked flying babies. 

“Cherubs,” Louis corrects. That’s the word.

When Louis had called them naked flying babies, momma had pursed her lips and said, they’re called cherubs, Louis. Don’t be crass, but Louis still forgets sometimes. 

“See,” Louis says pointing down into the mud, at the worms that are thankfully still there. Except, Lestat looks distracted, his eyes are up roaming and looking about at the yard—from the patio and swing, to the fountain on the far left that Paul had accidentally fallen into last spring, towards the cherubs and then finally his head lifts up and up towards the roof. 

“This is your house?” he asks.

Louis nods. What a silly question, Louis thinks, they were just inside. 

Lestat’s eyebrows lift, “all ?”

“Ahuh. Daddy says that my great-great-great grandpa built it,” Louis tells him. Or was it two ‘greats?’ Louis can’t quite remember now. “But the fortress is mine!” he quickly adds, “just mine.” But then he thinks on it some more. “Well…I let Paul play there too sometimes and daddy and momma sometimes come down and put a buncha’ stuff there and take up soooo much space, and Gracie—she’s my lil' sister, she’s a baby and cries all the time—well, she’s not allowed at all, cus she gets all snotty and drops all my toys about.” 

Lestat takes in every single word Louis says with an intense sort of concentration—the bleach-light eyelashes and the rays of the sun making the blue of his eyes more piercing and severe. It’s a bit freaky, but Louis likes the way Lestat looks when he listens to Louis—like he’s interested in what Louis has to say. 

“You can come play there too, sometimes,” Louis tells him. 

Lestat’s eyes widen. “I can?” 

“Ahuh. But you gotta ask first. It’s proper.” 

Louis thinks maybe Lestat doesn’t understand what the word proper means and wonders how he’ll explain it, but Lestat nods and says, “Okay. I ask.” 

“Look,” Louis tries again, pointing down at the worms squiggling around in the mud.

Lestat kneels down to inspect. “Ver ,” he says.

“Huh?”

“En français.”

They spend so long playing—collecting the worms into a jar, letting them go, watching them squiggle and race in the mud—that by the day darkens around them.

Once, Louis had played this game with Tommy from the blue house across the street, until he’d squeezed one of the worms so hard it had died. And then Tommy had said, “this is gross,” and hadn't played with Louis ever since. 

But Lestat doesn’t seem grossed out much at all, and he doesn’t squeeze the worms like Tommy had, and Louis thinks that maybe Lestat likes playing with him. 

Until momma catches them, that is.

“We’re not gon’ keep them, momma,” Louis explains and explains, and even when he reassures her that they’re gonna let them go right after, she still gives Louis an earful about how unsanitary and disgusting it is and how he just must wash his hands immediately, right now, right away. 

Lestat, who for some odd reason had made a beeline hiding behind Louis as soon as momma had walked out, stays quiet. When momma finally does catch sight of him, he blushes and looks down at his shoes. 

He does that a lot, Lestat, Louis thinks amusedly. 

“Momma, this is Lestat,” Louis announces, “he’s French and he’s our neighbor!”

Momma hums, gives Lestat another look, and then smiles. “Hello, dear.”

Lestat’s “hello, madam,” is barely audible.

“Can we wash our hands together, momma? Please, please, please.” 

Louis doesn’t wait for a response in case she says no, pulling Lestat inside by the hand. Lestat resists at first, but when Louis tells him about the big aquarium they have in the dining room, he follows.

“Big,” Lestat simply states, looking at the goldfish swimming around and letting out tiny air bubbles. They really are. Louis thinks it’s because Paul is feeding them too much, but Paul says that’s how they’re supposed to be—fat and orange. 

Lestat is standing on the other side of the aquarium so his head looks funny through the glass. Louis laughs and they spend some time making faces at each other from opposite sides. Louis tells him each of their names; Max, Pepper, Lily, Cheeseball—Lestat giggles at this one the most—and Cheddar. He tells Lestat how he and Paul had come up with the names, and then shows him how to feed them. 

“Paul says it’s made of dried worms,” he tells Lestat and wrinkles his nose at the thought. Lestat looks a bit grossed out himself, but he takes a bit of the flakes from the TetraMin can anyway, and drops them into the water. 

“Ils sont drôles,” Lestat says, smiling brightly, and giving the glass a light tap with his finger. 

Once, when Louis was littler, Grandpa Arthur had sat him down and shown him his polaroid camera—how he used it, how he cleaned it, how the photos appeared out of the thin slot. He’d even explained its inner mechanism, but Luis hadn’t quite understood much of that. 

So I don’t forget, he’d explained. There’s things in life you always gotta remember .

These days, Grandpa Arthur doesn’t take photos with his polaroid much at all, and he doesn’t always remember who Louis is when he sees him, and daddy says he has something called “Al-zhei-mers” because he’s old and so his memory’s not so good anymore.

But there are times, Louis thinks, when his brain is a little bit like grandpa Arthur’s polaroid—clicking away and taking snapshots of moments that etch onto his memory forever. 

Like the time he and Paul climbed all the way on top of the roof when momma wasn’t looking and watched the sun come up until the sky had turned all pink and Paul’s eyes had gotten strangely misty and wet. Or when father Mathaius had patted Louis on the shoulder and told him what a good job he'd done reading the daily bible verse on Sunday mass. When momma had looked down at him with a curled lip and worried eyes and said, "Paul holds himself better than you," and when Grandpa Arthur had called Louis by daddy’s name and daddy had sat down on the couch for hours and hours and looked terribly sad.

And just now—as Lestat smiles his missing-toothed smile, eyes bright and shining and the fat goldfish swim about in the aquarium, catching flakes into their bobbing mouths—something in Louis' brain pauses the time. 

A click, and a flash, and the ink dries permanently.

Chapter Text

“Now you throw it back to me. Like this,” Louis explains, mimicking the throwing motion he used to toss the football. He raises his hands in anticipation, but Lestat is looking at the ball like it’s an actual, real-life alien. It’s a bit funny, but also not, since Louis really, really wants to play.

“Ca ne ressemble pas à une balle…” Lestat is mumbling, twirling the ball from one hand to the other, and studying it like a foreign object. Which to Lestat, Louis figures, it technically is. 

Most of the summer has been spent as such:

Louis will wake in the early hours of the morning when the sun is only just peeking out, impatiently sit through family breakfast because momma says it is proper to stay at the table until everyone is finished eating. Once everyone is sated, plates cleared and thanks said, Louis will send a tentative glance at momma, watch her purse her lips a bit and finally say, “don’t stay out too late, now,” and then and only then will Louis be allowed to excuse himself. Some days Paul will join him, and some days not, but, off Louis will go, out the door and into the yard, where most mornings, Lestat will wait for him. 

Lestat, Louis is surprised to find out, does not have to sit through family breakfast until everyone is done like Louis does, and Louis tries very, very hard not to be jealous. 

“Louis!” Lestat exclaims as soon as he sees him. That’s how he greets Louis every morning. No hello or good morning , just his name said with that thrill and excitement, like he hasn’t seen Louis in a long time or like it’s the best word he’s ever heard. 

No one says Louis’ name the way that Lestat says his name, and maybe it’s his tone or because he’s French and he talks real funny, but Louis decides that he likes the way Lestat says his name better than anyone else. 

“Good morning, Lestat,” Louis will greet him each morning, in return. 

The problem with it being proper to stay at the table until everyone is finished eating, is that most mornings, family breakfast drags on. And on and on and on to infinity. 

Daddy likes to read the newspaper while he drinks his really dark, bitter and frankly disgusting —Louis had snuck a secret sip in once, and regretted it greatly—coffee and share snippets of news he reads, or fun facts he comes across, like; they’ve finally caught the thieves from the French market, Florence, or what do you think the highest mountain is, boys? See if you can guess. 

Momma, on the other hand, likes to remind Paul and Louis of the chores they have to do during the day, while sipping on her green tea, and simultaneously trying to convince Gracie to eat. 

Paul doesn’t prolong breakfast most mornings, to be fair, probably because he also impatiently waits to be excused to play, but Gracie ? Gracie is the biggest culprit of them all. Gracie likes playing with her food more than she likes actually eating it and some morning, she decides that she also likes to throw Cheerios at Louis and giggle and shriek instead of eating them, and Louis has to sit there and not throw any back at her because momma says he has to be patient with her what with her being little and Louis being the elder. Louis likes it when momma calls him the elder very much, except for the times when Gracie is throwing Cheerios at his face, or when he has to let her play in the fortress because ‘she feels left out ’ —or cries and cries and cries— or when momma gets mad at Louis for things that Paul or Gracie do. 

By the time breakfast is over, Louis’s knee is bouncing like a tennis ball. 

One day, the divinity of these morning breakfasts with his family—the mundane chatter, the sweet taste of syrup on his tongue, the smell of the pancakes, the sound of the kettle going off, and the priceless carelessness of a childhood summer morning spent with those he loves will finally reveal itself and sink in. 

But at six years old, Louis is filled with equal parts anticipation, boredom, and impatience. 

This morning Gracie hadn’t thrown Cheerios at him, but she had thrown a big tantrum because she hadn’t liked the carrots that momma had cut up for her, even though she herself had asked for them. Babies are terribly weird , Louis had thought, not for the first time, though momma says that Gracie is a toddler now. 

When he’d finally gone outside, he’d found Lestat sitting criss-cross applesauce on the grass and looking terribly bored.

“Louis!” he’d exclaimed as he always did. 

Momma doesn’t know it, but some days when Louis wakes much too early for breakfast, when the sky is still a dark, dark blue, Louis will get out of bed, quietly enter his fortress and peek out the window. And sometimes , to his delight, Lestat will already be there and say “Louis!” in that same way he does, albeit more quietly at Louis’ urging.

This morning hadn’t been one of those times, but it had started out with a bit more confusion than usual. 

“You said football,” Lestat had complained as soon as Louis had brought the ball out. 

“Yeah?” 

Lestat had tilted his head in bewilderment and Louis had had to explain American football to him. Eventually, He had gotten the hang of it, but, it seemed, he still couldn’t help marveling at the shape of the ball. 

“Come on,” Louis whines, “you gotta throw it back. 

Finally, Lestat shrugs and tosses it.

Given there’s only the two of them, the most they can really do is toss it back and forth, but Lestat throws and catches well, so Louis doesn’t mind so much. 

“Le rugby!” Lestat blurts out, out of nowhere, like he’s had an epiphany.

“Huh?”

“The balle,” Lestat says, “look like le rugby balle.”

And then it’s Lestat’s turn to explain what rugby is, and Louis gets the feeling Lestat doesn’t know the game too well himself or maybe he’s having trouble explaining it in english, but Louis listens anyway.They’re in the middle of taking turns kicking the ball from one corner of the fence to the other, when they hear the sound of a car pulling up in front of Lestat’s house and then suddenly Lestat has to leave. 

Louis whines, “but why? We only just started.” 

“Mon père” Lestat says, pausing to find the right words, “will look for me.”

This is one of the first ‘weird things’ Louis notices about Lestat’s family, that first bright summer of their friendship, and certainly not the last. 

There are some days when Lestat doesn’t come out to play at all. The first two times it had happened, Louis had knocked on their front door in hopes that he had slept in. The first time, a tall, thin woman had opened the door, looking ahead with a familiar set of pale eyebrows furrowing.

“Good morning,” Louis had said and she’d finally glanced down, noticing him with some surprise.

“Oh,” she’d said, “hello piccolino.”

When Louis had asked after Lestat, she’d glanced inside, and then turned back to him. “Lestat is a bit ill, today, dear,” she’d said. She had sounded funny too, but not the same way that Lestat did. “He’ll be staying inside.”

The blonde woman was Lestat’s momma, Louis had learned a few days later when Lestat had suddenly paused their game, grabbed him by the hand and led him towards the front of their house.

“Maman c'est Louis!” he’d told her while she’d stood on the porch, blonde hair bound up in a bun, a large mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other, “c'est mon ami!” 

“Hello, dear,” she’d said, a soft smile raising her thin lips. 

The second time Louis had knocked, an even taller man had opened the door, eyes the same exact blue as Lestat’s but with an iciness in them that Louis had never felt from Lestat. The man had simply looked at him and Louis had gulped, a strange nervousness filling his stomach. When he’d asked after Lestat, the man had simply said, “no,” and closed the door. 

Louis hasn’t tried since.

Then there are the days when one of Lestat’s older brothers will come looking for him before they’ve barely started playing at all. Augustine and Pierre, who look very much like Lestat but don’t act like him at all.

“Je n'ai pas toute la journée, dépêche-toi!” they’ll say, and Lestat will grimace and bid Louis a farewell and then Louis has to be bored the rest of the day.

Momma dislikes both Pierre and Augustine because they drive down their street very, very fast and listen to really loud music and Louis and Paul are not to associate with them at all because they act altogether like a bunch of delinquents. Louis doesn’t know what a delinquent is but he thinks he agrees when he catches Augustine shove Lestat into the grass one day.

The strangest days of all, however, are the ones when Lestat stays out so late into the evening that the sky has darkened, and momma is close to involving daddy in her efforts to drag Louis inside. Lestat is strangely even more sad on those days than the ones where he has to leave early. 

“Don’t you gotta go home?” Louis asks him one such evening when the moon’s already high in the sky and Louis himself is starting to feel sleepy and tired. 

Lestat shakes his head, dragging his shoes through the mud and making little shapes. One of his socks is a different color today. 

“Why not?”

“The door. C'est fermé,” Lestat says and then thinks for a moment and clarifies, “locked.”

Louis doesn’t understand. “Well, just knock and they’ll open, silly,” he advises and waves him goodbye. 

It’s only on the third time that it happens, and he finds Lestat in the same clothes he had been in the day before that Louis wonders—what if the door stays locked? How does Lestat get to bed? Where does he sleep? How does he sit down for family breakfast? When Louis asks him, Lestat just shrugs and points to the front porch of their house. 

And then a strange sense of unease that Louis doesn’t yet have a name for courses through him, his heart thudding in his chest, stomach clenching like when he forgets to pick up his toys like momma told him to, or when he has to speak in front of the whole church. 

“Why don’t your momma and daddy open the door?” he asks. 

“Because,” Lestat says, tilting his head like he does when he’s trying to say something in English but can’t quite find the words. “I was… comment dit-on? Bad. Trouble.” 

“What’d you do?” 

“Mmm,” Lestat shrugs, contemplating. “Je ne sais pas. I was bad.”

And then Louis decides that maybe momma was right about Lestat’s family being “ostentatious,” whatever it may mean, and that probably Louis doesn’t like them very much at all. 

He likes Lestat though. He likes him very much. So when he thinks of the plan the next day, he almost collides right into him on his way to tell him.

“Your fo-tess ?” Lestat asks, sounding the word out slowly. The r's still disappears somewhere on their way out of his mouth, but Louis has taught him how to say the word and what it means.

“Yes!” Louis exclaims, “I got that old mattress, and I can sneak in at night if I’m real quiet and open the window for you!” 

Lestat looks skeptical. “Your maman—”

“She won’t know. If you’re real quiet, she won’t.” 

Lestat chews his lip for a moment, looking a bit uneasy with the idea but then he lets out a breath, breaks out into a wide smile and says, “D’accord.” 

That night, Louis goes to bed and finds that, even though he’s just said goodbye to Lestat after a long day of play, he can’t sleep from the anticipation of his visit and the sneaking idea that maybe they can keep playing through the night. He worries for a moment that maybe tonight won’t be one of the nights that Lestat has ‘been bad’ and won’t need to come to the fortress at all, and then feels guilty for thinking it. 

He gives it a good ten minutes after he hears momma go upstairs before sneaking in through the fortress door and tiptoeing to the window. At first there’s only darkness, and Louis feels the first inklings of disappointment creeping in, but then a set of wide blue eyes pop up from the bottom of the window, and then little fingers against the glass. 

Through stifled laughs and hushed whispers, Lestat climbs up and into the fortress. A palpable sense of excitement fills the air between them, and Louis doesn’t know if it’s the prospect of being able to keep playing or the mere fun of sneaking around, breaking the rules, but it takes them some time and great effort to control their giggles and not get found out. 

They will have countless nights like this for years to come, but this one will remain the brightest in his memory, a flash and a click, permanent in his gray matter. And Louis feels it—not years later, not down the line, but then and there, so sudden and surprising, as though the fortress itself is telling him herself, and he wonders if Lestat feels it too—that this place is no longer his, but theirs.

Chapter Text

“Daddy says I probably won’t need this yet, but momma bought it anyway,” Louis says, placing the stapler on the floor. “Look,” he tells Lestat. He picks up the pack of fresh papers from the grocery bag, struggles for a moment to get the plastic wrapping off and carefully pulls out two pieces of paper. He places them between the stapler like daddy showed him, and then presses and hears the satisfying crunch. Lestat smiles wide, the small growing tooth poking out from where there used to be a gap. 

Louis has a similar one growing out on his upper row. One of the incisor ones, daddy had thought him. There's also canon, premolar, and molar . He’d felt fairly proud, later, teaching Lestat the terms. 

The tooth had fallen out—or popped out, really— one night while they’d been snacking on nougat bars in the fortress. It had been one of the locked door nights again and Louis had been showing Lestat one of the comic books he’d bought on his trip to West Monroe while they’d been visiting Grandma Grace, when Lestat’s stomach had suddenly grumbled. 

Louis had giggled so loud, he’d been scared momma and daddy would have heard him. Lestat had looked embarrassed at first but eventually he'd covered his mouth and laughed along with Louis. 

“Wait here,” Louis had said and then quietly—very quietly, because Louis was not allowed sweets in the evening, let alone so late at night, and super-let alone when he was hanging out in the fortress with Lestat instead of sleeping. He'd grabbed a few nougat and Hershey’s bars, some leftover popcorn from the last family movie night, and two packs of Chee-Wees’. 

Louis had barely taken a full bite when he'd felt the slight sting, gasping when he'd pulled the nougat away. And there it had been, wedged in with the pistachios—his fallen tooth! 

When he'd tasted the blood from the gap in his gums, the sudden urge to run up and tell momma and daddy had been immediate, but the moment he'd mentioned the mere idea, Lestat had gone so ashen and distressed, eyes gone so wide, that Louis hadn't been sure whether to worry or laugh.

“I go,” Lestat had said, “then tell your maman.” 

“She won’t notice you here.”

“I go,” Lestat had insisted.

Louis'd chewed his lip for a moment, wondering how to say what had been marinating in his brain for some time.

“Maybe you don’t have to."

“Your maman will see.” 

“I meant that...maybe it’s okay if she sees,” he'd gone on. “I just mean…maybe I can explain.” Louis would have been in a great load of trouble, but if he could have just talked to his parents, explained, made them see... “It’s just…I’ve been thinking,” Louis had tried again, trepidation filling his voice, “that…that maybe if my momma tells your momma that you’ve been good, she won’t lock the door no more.” 

Sure, Louis would have surely missed these secret late nights terribly—and maybe momma would still allow them if Louis could have just explained—but Louis had never kept a secret like this from his parents. The thought of them finding out about him sneaking around like this at nights had made his stomach hurt badly. It had felt even worse thinking of Lestat’s parents finding out. For some reason, thinking about them always made his stomach hurt. But Lestat was shaking his head before Louis could have even finished.

“No,” Lestat had said, “I go.”

“But Lestat—”

“No, you can’t tell your maman.” 

“She might find out anyway,” Louis had argued. 

Lestat had frowned. “D’accord,” he'd said, and stood, hands clenching at the hem of his shirt. “I don’t come to your fo-tess anymore.” 

“Wait,” Louis had said when Lestat had turned for the window. "It's cold out," he'd argued, desperation in his voice. Because it hadn't been true, really, the day had been warm and bright and in the height of summer. “Okay. Okay, I won’t," Louis had called,"I won’t tell her.

Lestat had stopped, looked down at him, eyes narrowing in suspicion the way that Paul’s would when he thought Louis was cheating at their board game, or when Louis would be dividing a pack of M&M's between the two of them and he’d check to see if Louis was keeping more for himself. 

“I won’t,” Louis had said, “cross my heart and hope to die.”

That had Lestat tilting his head and looking a little horrified, “Quoi?” 

“Just something people say,” Louis'd explained, “Like a promise.”

Lestat had just stood there for some time looking at his shoes, quietly considering. And then when he'd finally lifted his face and met Louis' gaze again, his eyes had been wide and wet and close to tear. 

“Come on," Louis had said, "let’s play some more and then we’ll sleep."

“I go,” Lestat had mumbled, quiet and uncertain and a question halfway out of his mouth. 

“No. No don’t go,” Louis'd reassured, gesturing to the food he’d sneaked in, “I can’t finish these alone, anyway.” 

“Ta dent saigne,” Lestat had said, one tear finally slipping out despite his efforts. 

“Nah, it’s fine now, see?” Louis'd assured, pointing at the gum, and it had been true. Once he’d lapped up the blood with his tongue, it hadn't even hurt. 

Lestat had sniffled loudly, kneeling down to take a closer look at Louis’ opened mouth. "Blood gone?"

“Yup!”

“Est-ce que ça fait mal?” 

“Nah,” Louis had said, dragging his tongue over the empty spot again, “Just feels tingly.”

Louis had picked up the comic again when he'd suddenly remembered his tooth. “Oh!” he'd exclaimed, “I have to put it under my pillow!”

“Why?” 

“For the tooth fairy, of course!”

He'd spent the rest of the night explaining who the tooth fairy was, and laughing at how disturbed Lestat had looked.

"He's not real," Louis'd explained, "not really, it's momma and daddy who put the money under my pillow, but daddy's still trying to convince me he's real."

"Oh," Lestat had said, looking slightly relieved. Louis had read them the comic book some more until they'd both gotten sleepy and Louis had gone back to his bed, while Lestat had slept on the mattress in the fortress.

Louis hasn’t brought up telling his parents about Lestat’s night visits to the fortress since, but given they haven’t had a locked door night in a very long time, Louis hasn’t been worrying over it as much. 

“And this one is for Paul,” Louis explains, placing down the last notebook. “He’s not starting school yet, but momma bought it for him anyway.”
Lestat nods, picking it up, inspecting it and then gingerly placing it back down on the ground. 

It’s Friday, and in only two days they will be starting school! When they’d found out they’d be going to the same school, they’d made such a raucous that momma had had to peek out through the window and give them a silent look to quiet them down. 

This morning, she’d taken Louis, Paul, and Gracie to the store so they could pick out their school supplies. Well, Louis’ school supplies, since he was the elder, and the only one starting school. But momma had brought Paul and Gracie along too because otherwise they will feel left out, Louis.

Louis has all the supplies he’d chosen laid out on the wooden floor of the fortress.

“That’s all, I think,” Louis says. “What about you? You get your school stuff yet?”

Lestat thinks for a moment, and then lights up and says, “maman bought for me…comment dit-on? Un cartable.”

“What about notebooks? And pens and papers and stuff.”

Lestat frowns. “We have. At home.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Lestat looks a little sad, so Louis asks, “do you want a highlighter? We got a whole bunch.”

“Highlighter?”

After Louis shows him his, Lestat shrugs, but doesn’t say no, so Louis grabs the grocery bag and sifts through the extras. 

“Aw man,” Louis sighs, “there’s only pink ones left” 

When he shows Lestat the contents, Lestat asks, “Et alors?” 

Louis giggles. “They’re pink,” he explains, “they’re for girls.” 

Even though Gracie is still in daycare, she’d gone and grabbed a bunch of pink markers and notebooks and highlighters and a whole bunch of other stuff she can't even use yet. 

“Why?” Lestat asks.

“Hm?”

“Why for girls?”

“Ummm.” Louis thinks for a moment. He’s grown accustomed to explaining things to Lestat that he has trouble understanding, but he usually just has to say them in French or explain in easier English words that Lestat will know. He can’t quite figure out how to explain this one, though. “Because they’re pink,” he says, shrugging, “they’re just for girls.” 

Lestat’s forehead creases for a moment and then he reaches out and grabs a pink highlighter out of the bag.

“I take this,” he says. 

“But it’s pink,” Louis argues. Lestat just shrugs, lays back down on the floor and starts flicking the clip on the side of the highlighter and then flipping it around, unbothered. 

Lestat is weird, Louis thinks, not for the first time. He’d realized this even before they’d become best friends, though that revelation itself had been very weird. 

One afternoon, while they’d been battling with Louis’ Rock’ Em Sock’ Em’ robots, Lestat had abruptly stopped the game, stood up and placed a hand on Louis’ shoulder.

“Louis, you are my best friend. Okay?” 

Louis had blinked, and then said, “Okay.” Lestat had smiled wide, his tooth had barely started growing then, and then he’d sat back down and gone back to the game like nothing had happened. 

And that’s how it had been decided, them being best friends and all.

On their first day of school, Louis is a bundle of nerves. 

“One more picture,” momma says. Louis sighs, rolling his eyes. 

“Louis de Pointe Du Lac,” momma reprimands, lowering the camera, “you do not roll your eyes at your mother.”

“Sorry, momma,” Louis says. 

“Now smile wide and hold your brother and sister’s hands.” 

“Momma, her hand’s all snotty,” Louis complains, but it just makes Gracie giggle and giggle. She twirls around in her puffy pink tutu, the matching pink beads in her braids clacking about, making her look like a tiny pink tornado as she twirls about on the porch. 

Louis has a feeling her good mood isn’t going to last because, while Louis is starting first grade, Gracie is going to daycare for the very first time. Daddy had spent all week telling her about daycare, how many things she’d learn there, and how much fun she’d have with all the other babies—though he’d quickly corrected himself when Gracie had taken offense at being called a baby—and that even though she’d be spending some of the day there, momma and daddy would pick her up before she knew it. Gracie is very excited now, but Louis has a feeling she’ll throw a tantrum once it’s time to actually stay at daycare. 

Paul, however, looks about as bored as Louis is feeling.

“Momma, no more,” he complains. 

Even though it’s only the first day for Louis and Gracie, Paul is also dressed in his Sunday best. He's been grumpy and prickly all week, refusing to play with Louis, or even talk to him much. Until last night, when he’d sneaked into Louis' room and confessed to him that he was sad that Louis was starting school and he was not.

“It’s just one year,” Louis had reassured. “And then you'll be there with me too too!”

Paul had cried a little, still, but when Louis had told him he could sleep in his room, he'd cheered up some.

"My Sweet Pea's all grown up!" daddy coos, tossing Gracie up and down in his arms, and making her giggle. While momma takes pictures of them, Louis glances to the neighboring house in search of any blond heads, but there’s only Mr. Jones, a mug in hand, yawning and walking to his car. He waves at daddy from afar, and then gets in his car to leave. Mr. and Mrs. Jones live in the same house as Lestat, but also not, because they live in the big part while Lestat’s family lives in the smaller ‘guest house.' Louis thinks this is strange given that they’re not really guests. He hopes it doesn’t mean that Lestat will eventually move. When he’d brought this up to Lestat—and explained what a guest meant— Lestat had looked worried and said, “J'espère que non. I don’t want to go.”

Louis suffers through five more pictures until he notices Lestat on the sidewalk. He skips down the stairs, and out the gates, ignoring momma's calls to stop. 

“Louis!” Lestat says when he sees him. Lestat's hair is combed more neatly today, and tied back in a low ponytail. He’s wearing the same blue collared shirt with their school emblem sewn on the front and khaki pants that Louis is wearing—their new school uniform. 

“Good Morning, Lestat,” Louis says. 

They stare at each other in their new uniforms and then, out of nowhere, a laughing fit takes the both of them, a mixture of excitement and anxiety at what’s to come. Lestat shows him the royal blue bag his momma bought for him.

“My maman will take me to school,” he tells Louis excitedly, and then, right on cue, Mrs. Lioncourt comes down the stairs of the guest house porch and joins them. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Lioncourt.” 

“Good morning, dear,” she says, smiling down at him.

Lestat takes her hand and says, “maman, Louis va à mon école.” 

Mrs. Lioncourt reaches down and tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear.

“Je sais, ma puce,” she says, and Lestat beams up at her, clutching her hand in an iron grip. Louis rarely sees Mrs. Lioncourt, but he thinks Lestat looks very much like her. 

After a moment, momma joins them on the sidewalk, gives Louis a halfheartedly stern look for not listening, and then turns to Mrs. Lioncourt.

“Good morning,” she says, extending her hand with a bright smile. “We haven’t gotten the chance to chat. Florence de Pointe Du Lac.” 

“Gabrielle,” Mrs. Lioncourt says, taking her hand. 

Louis has never seen her with her hair down before, the long blonde waves usually tied up into a tight bun on the top of her head. She smoothes them down now, constantly tucking a strand behind her ear like they’re getting in her way and she doesn’t know what to do with them. Her fingers tremble slightly the way Louis’ do when he eats too much sugar. 

“First day,” momma says, putting an arm around Louis. “Almost can’t believe it.” She pinching his cheek and laughs when Louis grimaces. “Must be a bit easier for you," she tells Mrs. Lioncourt, "since you’ve done it twice already.” 

“Yes,” Mrs. Lioncourt says, looking down at Lestat who still has her hand in a tight grip. “Yes, it’s…always hard with little children.” 

She looks a bit tired, Louis thinks. Mrs. Lioncourt often looks tired, and Lestat tells him so too. She likes to sit on their front porch sometimes, a mug in her hand, sometimes watching Louis and Lestat play, sometimes watching the birds or the street ahead. Or nothing at all. Sometimes when her head nods forward like she’s very sleepy, Lestat will go up to her, shake her a bit until she wakes.

“Maman, ça suffit,” Lestat will say, taking the mug from her hand. 

“Oui, ma puce,” she’ll mumble, “ça va, ça ira bien.” 

One time Louis had seen her come home from work, waver on the porch stairs and almost fall, and then Lestat had been grumpy all day after. When Louis had asked if she was okay, that’s what Lestat had said—“she is tired.”

“Pleasure meeting you, Florence,” Mrs. Lioncourt says, opening the passenger door for Lestat to get in. Louis never gets to sit in the passenger seat, and he almost considers asking momma if he can, but decides against it. 

“Likewise,” momma tells her. She eyes the car for a moment while it drives away and then says, “come on now, Louis.”

The drive to school is a whirlwind of emotions in more ways than one. While Daddy drives, and tells Louis about his first day of school— the same one, Louis, can you believe it? —he gets a little choked up at that, and then clears his throat and peeks at Gracie—who’s been singing “Jingle Bells" for the past ten minutes despite the fact that it’s the end of August—through the rearview mirror.

“Big day for my Sweet Pea too, ain't it?” he tells her, “I think Gracie should come to work with me instead, what do you think Florence, honey?”

“Daddy, noooo,” Gracie shrieks from the back.

“No? How come? I think she's ready for the family business.”

"No!" Gracie says, and giggles, “I’m only little, daddy!” 

Paul is quiet for the entire ride, until the very end when Louis turns to say goodbye to him and he suddenly undoes his seatbelt and lunges at Louis to pull him into a big hug. 

“Bye, Louis,” he mumbles, head buried in the crook of Louis’ neck, tears dampening his uniform. 

“One year,” Louis reminds him once he’s let go, “Okay?”

Paul nods, wipes his tears with the cuff of his shirt and gives a small smile.
Once he exits the car though, Louis feels the knots in his stomach tighten and thinks maybe he’ll miss going to daycare with Paul after all, and that maybe he wouldn’t have been too much of a baby if he’d given Paul another hug. Or daddy, or even Gracie. It’s a bit of a relief that momma will be staying with him today, but the thought that tomorrow, he will be alone has him close to tears himself. Momma takes his hand in hers and gives it a little squeeze.

“Let’s go, love,” she says.

When they walk down the hallway, Louis thinks he’s never seen so many kids in one place before, and then he almost jumps up and down when he finds the blond head among the crowd.

“Lestat!” Louis calls. When Lestat catches up to them, Mrs. Lioncourt is nowhere in sight.

“Is your mother joining us, Lestat?” momma asks him and Lestat shakes his head, no. 

“I see.” Momma hums, lips pursed like they get when she has to repeat herself twice for Louis to put away his gameboy and sleep. “Let’s make sure you’re in the right place then, hm?” she says and reads the class lists on the wall again. He is, and to their delight, Louis and Lestat share the same homeroom and Lestat gets to sit with him, while they fill out a whole bunch of worksheets with titles like “All About Me”, and “Things I Like,” while momma fills out the “Student Information Form” for the both of them. Louis is taking his time writing down his favorite foods when he notices that Lestat hasn’t written on his worksheet much at all. Momma must notice too, because she leans down, whispers something to him, and when Lestat shakes his head, she purses her lips and picks up the pen herself. She reads out the question one at a time, translates them to French when Lestat doesn’t understand, and then writes down the answers for him. At the end of the day, she spends some time speaking to their teacher—Mrs. Anderson, who is a very tall and thin lady with very large round-framed eyeglasses—introduces Louis and Lestat to her and then let’s her know that Lestat is new to the country and will need to be provided with assistance in English.  When it’s time to go home, Louis is hopeful that Lestat will join them, but then Pierre, the oldest of the Lioncourt brothers, drives up to the curb. 

“Dépêche-toi,” Pierre calls through the opened window, his familiar blue eyes filled with impatience. Louis doesn’t like seeing similarities between them, and there aren’t many—Pierre is sixteen, has darker and shorter hair than Lestat—but their eyes are undoubtedly the same. 

“Bye, Louis. Bye Madam Du Lac,” Lestat says, and then runs up to the car. 

School turns out to be more exciting than Louis had ever anticipated. He likes the students and the teachers and the lunch breaks and even most of the lessons, though some of them are boring. He also still gets to hang out with Lestat all day, though, to his disappointment, for most of the class, Lestat has to sit in the very back of the room with a tutor and another student who only speaks Spanish. 

“Miss Brooks knows both," Lestat tells him delightedly one day while they’re on their lunch break. “French and Spanish.” 

Louis is not at all impressed, and he tells him so. He thinks it’s altogether dumb that Lestat has to sit with the tutor just because he doesn’t speak English as well as the rest. Sure, sometimes Lestat will talk wrong or stop mid sentence and say “comment dit-on” until he finds the word or gets frustrated and moves on, and the rest of the students and their teacher aren't able to understand him all that much, but Louis understands him just fine. As far as he’s concerned, he can help Lestat better than the stupid tutor can. He’s been doing it all summer, after all. Louis used to hate the French Lessons his momma would sit him through, but now he’s secretly grateful for them. Sometimes there’re words Lestat doesn’t know, so Louis will translate them for him and even if Louis doesn’t know the French words, he still finds a way to explain. 

Sometimes, though, when Louis looks back, Lestat will be looking at him too, and he’ll giggle and make funny faces at Louis and make him laugh and laugh, until the stern tutor shushes him and makes him stop or Mrs. Anderson tells Louis to turn around and pay attention. So, in the end, Louis finds that he doesn’t mind if Lestat sits in the back of the class, as long as he’s still there. 

Chapter Text

Louis squints up at the sky, the sun beaming down harsh and hot against his skin. All night it had rained, battering loudly against his bedroom window, but when Louis had woken this morning the sky had been clear blue with not a cloud in sight and the sun high and bright, like it had never even happened. The only remnants of the rain now are a few patches of wet asphalt still darkened from the liquid, though even those will dry soon. 

“It’s very boring,” Louis says, training his eyes back before him when he feels himself wavering. He keeps his arms outstretched at his sides to keep his balance, puts one careful foot in front of the other and then continues airing his grievance. “I almost fell asleep before I could finish.”

Lestat wavers from his side of the raised curb, and jumps off the side before he can fall on his face. Louis laughs, momentarily pleased with his victory, but Lestat just climbs back on, unperturbed, and proceeds with his own walk towards him. 

“Miss Brookes has given me more vo-ca-bu-la-ry,” Lestat says, sounding out the word slowly. “This is very boring too.” 

Louis doubts it’s as boring as the poem he had to memorize all last evening, but he edges slowly closer and asks,“what words she give you?” 

“Boring words,” Lestat says, finally reaching him and smiling smugly when his foot ends up on top of Louis.’ “I win,” he declares. Lestat says his e' s real funny. Funnier than he says everything else. Louis doesn't really hear it much. In fact, he doesn’t notice Lestat's accent much at all anymore, really, but a few weeks ago, a third grader named Martin had laughed at him in the cafeteria line when Lestat had said milk, with that funny e. Louis had thought Lestat would have been upset, but he’d just stuck out his tongue at him and then said the word over and over again until Martin had called him weird and walked away. 

Having won, Lestat runs back to his side of the raised curb while Louis runs the opposite direction, and up they go again. 

Usually, before they start this game, they bet on something, or come up with some type of price for the winner—who gets to sit by the window in the bus, who gets to strike the tetherball first during recess, who can have the other’s muffin during snack break. This time they’d forgotten though, and so they’d come to a silent agreement that the game was mostly just to pass the time until the bus’ arrival.

This happens often with them, this silent conversation. Sometimes Louis doesn’t need to say anything, and Lestat will just understand him anyway. Sometimes he and Lestat will turn to each other during class and they’ll laugh about something without having to really say much at all. It’s a bit like when Louis looks at Paul when they’ve been playing a bit too loudly and they both know they’re about to get a good talking to without having to even say it. 

It’s an uncharacteristically warm day, given the season, and Louis feels his body heat up both from the sun and from his efforts to stay upright. He’s glad he’d worn his short sleeved uniform today, though he wishes terribly that he’d also gone for the shorts instead of the long pants.

“It’s so hot,” he complains once they’re close again. Lestat is wearing his long sleeve uniform like he tends to do most days. “Aren’t you hot?” 

Lestat, predictably, shakes his head, though Louis can see beads of sweat collecting on his forehead. He gets cold so easily, Louis thinks. He’s always wearing warm clothes, no matter the weather. Louis figures it must be hotter in France than it is here. Daddy says it matters where you’re from and what your body is accustomed to. 

“My daddy says it gets to minus 83.9 degrees in Siberia,” Louis tells Lestat, “did you know?” 

Lestat shakes his head. “That is cold?”

“Mhm. Really really really reaaaally cold. Daddy said so.” He’d also taught him the name of the coldest city of all, but he’s disappointed to find that he can’t remember it now. Unfortunate, since Louis loves telling people facts he’s recently learned— especially when that person is Lestat. “Think it started with a ‘Y’,” he says, putting a careful foot down, prepared for the win. “I think you’d like it there.” 

“Oui,” says Lestat. As expected, Louis’ foot ends up on top this time, and he takes a moment to send a smug smile Lestat’s way. Lestat rolls his eyes and down they go once more. 

Louis is sweating from the effort to stay upright, and this time around they’ve only managed a few steps forward before momma raises her eyes from her book and finally takes notice of them.

“Louis,” she calls. When he warily turns his head, Louis is met with a warning glare and a raised eyebrow. She’s sitting on the bench in front of the bus stop like she does most mornings, her large burgundy leather bag by her side that contains important work documents that Louis once got in trouble for touching. “I’m not going to say it again.” 

Louis sighs and jumps down. Lestat follows suit and they walk the short way back to the red zone where the school bus always stops. This part of the curb is not raised, and momma doesn’t mind as much when they play their game here, except it’s no fun at all that it’s not raised, so they stand around instead.

The bus stop is only a short walk from their homes, but momma never lets Louis walk or wait by himself. 

“But momma, Lestat’s momma always lets him, why can’t I?” Louis had tried arguing once. Momma had pursed her lips and said. “She shouldn’t. Now get your bag,” and that had been that. 

They sigh dramatically in unison once the boredom gets to the best of them, so they laugh and then start playing patty cakes to pass the time. Lestat’s shirt is wrinkled, and there’s a chocolate milk stain at the cuff of his sleeve that had ended up there yesterday on their snack break.  

“Bag-pack, tra-vel, li-bra-ry,” Lestat sing-songs as their palms meet—all the words Miss Brookes has assigned him. His English is getting better by the day, Louis thinks, but he stops him with a laugh when he gets to what Louis figures is supposed to be squirrel, and corrects. Lestat gives it a few more tries, but gets tongue ties every time. After the fourth attempt, he lets out an exasperated sigh and asks, “What is that?” 

“Like the animal,” Louis says. He looks around to see if he can spot any on the branches of the surrounding trees, but none stand out. 

“Momma?” Louis calls. Momma looks up from her book again. “What’s squirrel in French?” 

“Écureuil,” momma says. 

“That,” Louis tells him.

Lestat nods, but doesn’t keep listing the words. He gets a bit shy and quiet around momma, Louis has noticed, but once they’re in the bus he picks up right where he’d left off, “trans-por-ta-tion, u-ni-ver-ci-ty,” fairly loud and uncaring of the stares he gets from the other kids around him. 

School has lost some of its shiny excitement as the months have passed, and sometimes Louis feels like it isn’t fair at all that he has to sit still for so long and listen to the teachers. He doesn’t mind English class, though, mostly because Mr. Harris reads books aloud to them sometimes as they follow along, and he always makes sure to do voices for the various characters. Sometimes Mr. Harris calls on the students to read aloud, and he’d told Louis once that ‘he had a knack for literature.’ Louis isn’t too sure what he’d meant, but he’d felt proud anyway. 

Lestat, on the other hand, likes English class the least of all, always sitting in the back of the class with the tutor and Leo, the Spanish speaking student, looking bored and grumpy. Once the recess bell rings, he tells Louis how much he dislikes it and how he wishes he could sit with Louis, and that any day now he will “die of boredom.” 

Every time Lestat learns a new English phrase, he spends a whole week repeating it to Louis incessantly, and he takes such a strong liking to ‘dying of boredom,’ that it lasts for more than a week. Louis’ not sure where he’s even learned it—he doubts Miss Brookes would have included that in her lessons—but he laughs every time Lestat says it because he’s always a bit dramatic and weird, and on one notable recess, he puts the back of his palm to his forehead and then lays down right in the middle of the playground like he’s fainted, or like he’s finally ‘died of the boredom.’ 

“We’re gon’ be late for class if you stay dead,” Louis tells him, poking a finger on his stomach till Lestat breaks into giggles and finally stands back up.

Louis thinks it’s not just the boredom that Lestat dislikes about the class, though. He seems to have a harder time with English than he does with all the other subjects. Louis finds this unsurprising, given Lestat is still learning English, but once he overhears Miss. Brookes tell Mrs. Anderson that Lestat is “worryingly behind” and that she has to “refresh him on the alphabet” before he can move on to the worksheets she assigns. 

One afternoon, when they’re splayed out on opposite sides of the fortress mattress, stacks of worksheets before them, Lestat groans in frustration and pushes the papers aside.

“I don’t know this,” he says.

Louis peeks at the paper—a set of sentences with words missing here and there that have to be filled in. Lestat’s handwriting is as clumsy as he is, but Louis, not wanting to upset him further, doesn’t mention it.

“Maybe you can write in French for the ones you don’t know,” Louis says. “Didn’t Miss Brookes say you can do that?”

Lestat nods, but still doesn’t pick up his pen. 

“Then do that,” Louis tells him. Earlier, he had offered to help him with the answers, but Lestat had adamantly refused. 

“I don’t know in French,” he finally confesses. 

“Oh,” Louis hums. He takes a peek at the Lestat’s paper again, and finds that he can’t quite make out the blank spots he’s managed to fill out, letters clumsy and almost unintelligible. “But don’t they teach it in kindergarten in France?”

“Hm?”

“Kindergarten. It’s like school for…before school?”

“Oh,” Lestat says. “I didn’t go,” he whispers, voice low, like it’s a secret. 

That gives Louis a pause. He finds it strange, but daddy says that sometimes things are done differently in different countries. 

“Oh,” Louis says. They go back to their own works for a time. Louis is also doing a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ worksheet, but his also has a portion where he has to answer question and write his own sentences. He warily watches Lestat frown and grumble a few more times and then tentatively asks, “want me to help?” 

“I’m not stupid!” Lestat snaps at him out of nowhere, sitting up and swiping his worksheet off the mattress. 

Louis blinks. “I know that,” he says, and he means it too. Lestat is smart, he thinks. He’s taught Louis how to stack cards and build a castle out of them without them collapsing immediately, he’s shown Louis how to play a melody on Gracie’s little toy piano, and just a few days ago, he had helped Louis with some of his math homework.  You couldn’t be stupid and do that could you? And besides, momma says stupid is a bad word and that it is unbecoming to use such language. When Louis tells him all this, Lestat doesn’t respond, just frowns some more and worries his fingers at the edges of the comforter.

“You’re not stupid,” Louis says again, “you’re just learning, that’s all.”

Lestat bites his lip, and that seems to do it. His shoulders relax and he lays down on his stomach edging closer to Louis.

“Okay,” he says, the frustration and worry leaving his voice. It’s so easy to cheer up Lestat, at least most days. He gets grumpy and sad sometimes—like when he can’t get the teachers or other students to understand his English, or when Augustine calls him names and takes his toys, and especially on locked door nights—but most of the time, it doesn’t last long, and before Louis knows it Lestat is playing and laughing again and telling Louis the new phrase he’s learned that week. 

Some days, Louis thinks that Lestat must be the complete opposite of Paul, like if Paul is the sky, Lestat is the ground, or if one is up the other is down, because Paul is stubborn and when Paul gets grumpy or sad or doesn’t get his way in an argument, he keeps at it for a long, long while, and no matter how much momma always tells Louis that he is the elder and that he has to take care of Paul, and Gracie, sometimes nothing Louis does seems to work. 

It’s a half-day in mid-October and the classroom is filled with student-made halloween decorations—little ghosts made of wrapping paper hanging from the ceiling that float this way and that like real ghosts when the air conditioning hits them, long black witch hat cut-outs lining the sides of the chalkboard, and, Louis’ favorite, a giant pumpkin in the back of the class. Mrs. Anderson had limited the number of times they were allowed to touch it when kids started drawing on it with markers, and a week later completely disallowed it when Tommy carved a ‘T’ on the side with a paperclip. 

On days like these, when they have a long weekend ahead, and when classes end early in the afternoon, Mrs. Anderson doesn't seem too bothered when her students chat among themselves, or misbehave. She, herself, sits now in her office chair, and laughs freely at something Miss Brookes has said, leaving her students to their arts and crafts. There’s no need for a tutor, or any translations, and so Lestat and Leo sit among the rest. 

“Puis-je avoir le papier jaune,” Lily asks, reaching for a stack of construction papers on Lestat’s side of the table. Louis’ sat in between them, so he hands it to her and goes back to cutting his own project. They’ve been given a seemingly endless supply of colorful construction paper, scissors and glue sticks and asked to build whatever it is that they please. Louis has cut up red paper in the shape of Grandpa Arthur’s old car and is working on the window shapes that he plans to glue on the sides. Leo is building what looks like an airplane. It’s a complicated fold that doesn’t seem to need much glue and that he’d spent a few minutes trying to teach them how to make to no avail. Now he works with great concentration. Lily is making what looks like a bird, while Lestat is making something that Louis can’t make any sense of thus far. 

“Qu'est-ce que c'est?” Lestat asks Lily. 

“Un oiseau,” she says, “un oiseau jaune.”

“un canari. ça s'appelle canari,” Lestat declares, smiling wide. 

This happens often when they’re together, Lestat and Lily. Lestat seems relieved to be able to speak French for once, and Lily knows the language better than Louis does what with it being her first language and all, and off they’ll go, chatting all through the class. Louis’ following the conversation fairly well, for the most part, but then they start speaking so rapidly that at some point, Louis loses track of what they’re saying altogether. Leo, who doesn’t speak French at all, looks even more lost than him, though he’s so concentrated on his airplane that he doesn’t pay any mind to any of them at all. Louis cuts a circular shape from the black construction paper for the car wheel and tries to understand. Art is Lily’s favorite subject, and she’s shown Louis her endless stacks of sketchbooks many times.

“My momma is an artist,” she’d told Louis once, “that’s why I’m so very good.” She is, Louis thinks, even the little wings she’s attaching to the body of the bird look delicate and lifelike, like they weren’t pieces of construction paper a moment ago. After some time, Lestat’s work starts to take the vague shape of an animal and Louis pieces together from his rapid French that he’s making a dog. He’s in the middle of telling Lily something about its ears, he thinks, when Louis cuts in.

“It can’t be purple,” he says. 

Lestat glances at him, eyebrows furrowing. “Hm?”

“The dog,” Louis tells him, pointing at the pieces of mostly purple construction paper in his hands. The only things that aren't purple are what Louis figures are supposed to be the dog’s ears. Those are white. “There are no purple dogs.”

Lestat tilts his head, and then shrugs. “Je m'en fiche. This one is.”

“I like purple,” Lily states, “maybe this one is a magical dog!”

Lestat’s eyes brighten at that. “Oui!” he says, face splitting into a smile.  

Louis bites the inside of his cheek and goes back to his work. Why would a magical dog be purple? What’s so special about purple anyway? 

By the time the class is over, Louis decides that maybe he doesn’t like arts and crafts as much as he thought. He finishes his work quickly, writes his name in careful letters on the upper right corner of the paper, and then the date and goes to turn it in. Except Julie from the neighboring table bumps right into him as he turns, and his project goes flying all over the classroom floor. The car loses one of its wheels in the process. 

“Excuse me!” Julie says, cheeks turning bright red. 

Louis grimaces, hands clenching involuntarily at his sides. He wants to tell her it’s not okay, and that she’s ruined it all, but he sighs and tells her it’s okay anyway. He kneels down to pick it up, but Lestat beats him to it. He looks down at the content in his hands for a moment, and then declares, “I like it. Good job, Louis!” 

This weeks’ new phrase has been ‘good job!” and Lestat’s been using it for three days now: when Louis had aimed straight into the goal during recess, when Louis had thrown up a single cocoa puff into the air and managed to catch it in his mouth on his first try, when Leo had gotten an A on his vocabulary assignment, and once when Lestat himself had performed a fairly impressive flip on the monkey bars during recess. “Good job…Lestat!” he’d exclaimed, and they’d laughed until the bell had rung. 

“Thanks,” Louis tells him, feeling the weird pressure in his chest lighten a notch.

“Hmm…it lost une roue,” Lestat says, looking down at the sad thing. He places it back down in front of him on the table, picks up a glue stick and says, “I fix it.” He glides the glue stick carefully over the cut up wheel shape and then on the spot where it attaches to the car cutout for good measure. 

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Lily asks Lestat. She reaches out her hand towards him, where the sleeve of his shirt has risen up, and it’s only then that Louis notices the skin there that is slightly bruised, blue and yellowing on the edges. Lestat pulls his arm away before Lily can touch it, and then pulls down the sleeve. 

“Nothing,” he says, “I fell.” 

Louis sighs. “Again?” 

Lestat shrugs, and then picks up both of their projects from the desk. “I will turn in,” he says. 

Lestat falls often. One day he’s hurt his leg, another his hand, his elbow, his forehead. A month ago, his whole chin was scraped up because he’d fallen down the stairs. Daddy’s always telling Louis how clumsy Louis is and that he must be runnin’ around with your eyes closed with how often he falls, but Lestat’s even clumsier than him. One day they’d been tossing a ball around in the backyard while daddy had sat on a patio chair with a newspaper in hand and Lestat had been limping since his knee’d been all achy. Daddy had asked him how it is he’d hurt himself and Lestat had looked at his shoes, crimson taking his cheeks like it did when Louis’ parents were talking to him, and told him that he’d tripped on his way to his bedroom. 

“See daddy,” Louis had said. “Lestat is clumsy too.” 

“I see,” daddy had said. He’d expected him to tell Lestat too that he must be running around with his eyes closed and that he must be careful, but then he’d asked Louis to run on inside and bring him a glass of water. By the time Louis had come back, Lestat had been standing with the ball in hand, studying his shoes and daddy had been sitting and watching him quietly. After some time, daddy had stood and said, “that’s enough for today, boys. Why don’t y'all go play one of your board games, instead.”

Later, on their third round of Sorry! Lestat had fidgeted with his board piece and asked, “what is clumsy?” and Louis had been unsure of how to translate it, so he’d just grinned and said. “You!”

As the months go by, and the weather gets colder, school turns a bit tedious and boring at times, and sometimes Louis doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning with how cold it is, and get ready for school no matter how much momma pulls his comforters away.

“Five more minutes, momma, please,” he’ll whine some days, and momma will say, “Paul’s already in class, while his older brother lounges around in bed. Now get on up and get dressed.” And then Gracie'll run right through the door and into his room and then jump on him on the bed. So, while Louis loves school most days, by the time winter break creeps closer, he’s over the moon at its arrival. 

Lestat is not. 

“How long will you go?” Lestat asks for the third time this week. What he means to ask is “how long will you be gone?” but Louis doesn’t correct him. Lestat gets a bit annoyed, as of late, when Louis corrects him too often. 

“Three weeks,” Louis tells him. A messy and forgotten game of cards is scattered between them as they lay on their backs on the fortress floor. It’s a bit cold, but neither of them are bothering to move to the mattress. Louis tosses up the ball in his hands—tiny and soft and pink because it’s Gracies—and Lestat catches it on its way down. 

“Long time,” Lestat says. 

Louis is sad that he won’t get to see Lestat for that long too, but he can’t help the excitement that’s been building in his tummy since his parents had told him about the trip.

“I get to see my Grann!” he tells Lestat. “She’s really old, but nice and funny. And she cooks so, so, sooooo good and lets me and Paul do whatever we want. Maybe you’ll meet her one day, when she visits” he says, and then he thinks on it some more and adds with cheer, “or maybe you can come with us one day!”

“Really?” Lestat asks. 

“Yup.” and then the next thought has him sitting up. “Maybe you can come this time!” He says. He’s tempted to go up right now and ask his parents if it's okay, but Lestat is frowning and shaking his head. 

“Why not? It would be so fun,” Louis says, “There’ll be snow there!”

“My father will not let me,” Lestat says. 

“Oh,” Louis signs, and lays back down, deflated just as quickly as he’d gotten excited. “Maybe next time then?”

Lestat hums, doesn’t really answer, but Louis hears the ‘no’ anyways. Lestat’s father always looks really serious when Louis sees him, and when he does see him, he’s always either calling Lestat inside immediately or not letting him inside at all and once when Louis had said, “good morning Mr. Lioncourt,” like momma says is proper to do, he hadn’t answered him at all and Louis had practically heard his momma in his head say ‘how very rude and unbecoming.’ Louis finds that he agrees, and that he doesn't like Mr. Lioncourt much at all, especially when he yells at Lestat. 

Lestat throws the ball up, and Louis catches it. His family isn’t gonna be going on any trips for winter break, he’d told him sullenly and that he would die of boredom while Louis was gone. 

He’s pouting still, so Louis wiggles his body around on the hardwood until he’s closer to Lestat, then bumps him on the shoulder with his own. “It’ll go fast,” he tells him, “the time.” Lestat turns his head to him and the pout’s still firm on his lips so Louis crosses his eyes at him and sticks out his tongue until finally he breaks, and the silent fortress fills once again with their laughter. 

Louis’ favorite time to visit Grann Grace is in the winter because he and Paul get to sit in the back seat of the family car and watch through the window as the roads change from green and orange to murky gray and brown, and finally give way to bright white. Sometimes Louis wishes he could live there all the time so that he could see snow every year. 

They’ve barely made it through the door—and Louis and Paul brace themselves for the expected onslaught of hugs and kisses—before Louis can contain himself any longer and ask, “can we play in the snow Grann? Please, please, please?”

“Louis,” momma reprimands, “we’ve barely gotten in.”

“Of course you can,” Grandma interjects, expectantly and to Louis' great delight. And out they go, coats, hats, mittens and all. Louis can barely see Gracie’s face with how big the fluffy hat looks covering her tiny head, earmuffs, big and puffy, at the sides. With the way she’s bundled up head to toe, she doesn’t look unlike a snowball herself, as she wobbles around in the snow, falling and giggling as she stumbles. 

Louis can’t stop smiling and sees it mirrored on Paul's face, the sunshine glinting off the snow, and his eyes. They don’t waste any time starting on the snowman. Louis starts rolling on the biggest piece while Paul works on the middle. The third piece—the head—takes forever because Gracie keeps knocking it right back down. It makes daddy laugh, but starts to frustrate Louis and Paul after the third time. When she goes to knock over the stones, the eyes of the poor thing, Paul sighs and says, “quit it Gracie, that’s not nice,” but Gracie giggles and does it anyway. Louis shares a long suffering look with Paul as they watch the head wobble, fall and shatter once again. Finally, daddy picks Gracie up, lifts her up, up above his head and levitates her high like she’s a little airplane. He shifts her this way and that, making engine noises until the yard fills with her breathless shrieking and giggling. 

And finally, Paul and Louis are left to their snowman. Once the body is built, they stand and analyze their hard work. 

“It needs a nose,” Paul says. 

“Maybe we can use a rock, like the eyes.”

Pauls looks at him like he’s just said the stupidest thing in the world. “We can’t use a rock, Louis, it has to be a carrot.” 

So they go inside, begrudgingly suffer through the process of getting out of their layers and boots before they get scolded for leaving a sludgy trail behind, and rummage through Grann’s fridge. Momma reprimands them for not asking first, but Grann says “oh hush, Flo, let them be,” and then winks at the two of them. Momma purses her lips but, as always, lets it go. This is also one of Louis’ favorite things about visiting Grann Grace. They get to do whatever they want, and momma goes along with whatever Grann says. 

Christmas is always a big ordeal in Grann’s home, and when it arrives, the house is filled with noise and excitement and Louis can barely hear his own thoughts and he and Paul have to sneak to one of the bedrooms to play because of how often they're interrupted. Everyone is there—cousins and friends and relatives—some of whom even Louis is too little to remember—who’ll look down at him with bright eyes and say “my how you’ve grown!” pinch his cheeks until their eyes dim a bit and they sigh to themselves, “oh lord, I’m gettin’ old.” 

Aunt Janice plays a piano piece in the beginning of the evening, while Grann sits at the large armchair in the middle of the living room, right by the fire.

“Could be running the business better if he had more focus,” she’s telling momma. 

“Don’t start, momma,” momma says, and Grann hums and takes another sip form her mug. 

At the dinner table—vast and full, filled with so much food Louis doesn't know where to start— everyone compliments Grann on the food, most of which she has cooked from scratch by herself. But momma had packed a few plates of her own—they’d laid in an icebox by Louis’ feet in the back of the car on their way here and when Grann takes a bite, she says, “delicious, cher,” and momma smiles. “Just a lil burnt though,” she adds, and lays a hand on momma’s knee. “You’ll get it right next time,” and momma nods and says, “yes, momma.”  

By the end of the night, Louis doesn’t think he’s eaten so much in his whole life, and then tummies full, he and Paul sneak on out to the yard again again. Uncle Mike is off to the side on a smoke break that he's not supposed to be on and when he sees them he winks with a silent urge not to tell. 

“Like this,” Louis tells Paul, and then demonstrates by shifting his arms and legs wide at his sides until he feels the indentations left in the snow. He stands quickly and they both look down at the snow angel. Paul looks awed, and then lays down for himself right on the side to make his own. After some time—once they’re tired of the snow angels and a full stomach is making them sleepy and warm—they just lay on the snow side by side and look up at the sky. The snow looks a bit blue under the moonlight and for a moment it feels like they’re laying in the middle of the ocean, slowly sailing away. 

“Or like we’re in space,” Paul says, “in a spaceship.” 

They pretend for some time, like they really are in space, floating through the stars, comm-ing each other orders and messages. They argue for a bit about who gets to be the captain until they get bored of that game too. 

“I like it here,” Paul tells him, words leaving a cold foggy trail from his lips. “I like the sky. It’s beautiful.”  

“Yeah,” Louis says. The sky looks clearer out here than it does back at home, and they spend some time counting the stars, though Paul laughs and says that it’s impossible to count all of them, and that they’re endless. 

“They can’t be endless,” Louis tells him.

“Yes they can,” Paul says, “daddy told me so.”

Louis hums. There’s laughter coming from the house, daddy’s telling some story that has everyone talking excitedly, but it’s all a comforting muted hum from out here. 

“It’s beautiful and big,” Paul says of the sky again and Louis gets a familiar feeling in his stomach, like somehow he’s the younger brother and Paul the older one, and that maybe that’s how it should have been. They’re looking up at the same sky, the same stars and the same moon, but for some odd reason, Louis thinks that somehow Paul understands and sees the picture clearer than Louis can. Like there’s a beauty he sees that Louis will never have access to and maybe momma is right that Paul holds himself better. He watches Paul watch the sky, eyes bright, certain and sure, and wants to reach out and ask, “how do I do it? What is it that I have to do?” 

But as they lay there, side by side, Louis thinks that maybe it’s okay. That, at least, he gets to watch Paul watch the sky, and that maybe that’s what older brothers do. 

The noise from inside gets louder—laughter, old tunes playing from Grann's own daddy's old gramophone, the clinking of silverware, a heated debate from where Uncle Jason has joined uncle Mike on his smoke break. The aroma of the food is still in the air too, even out here, and it mixes with the smoking fireplace and the crisp smell of the winter around them. It's all visceral, solid and real—Louis feels the familiar snap in his mind, the polaroid in his brain clicks, and these are the cruelest of snapshots. On his worst days, it’s the sweetness of these memories that will taste the most bitter. 

But for now, they lay in innocence against the night sky, and the world outside of just the two of them can’t touch them yet.

Chapter Text

Louis swirls the ten remaining Cheeri-o’s floating on top of the milk in his bowl and tries to keep his knee from bouncing. 

The holidays are Louis’ favorite time of all, but they are also a strange and unpredictable time. Days and weeks, when time moves simultaneously slower and quicker, when everything around him seems to lose it’s uniform consistency, where rules lose their edge—momma doesn't reprimand him for playing too long, he doesn’t have to go to school, momma and daddy don’t work as much as they normally do, and when breakfast is either a hearty table full of festive dinner leftovers or, like today, hastily poured bowls of cereal through yawns and slowed paces. It always feels special to Louis, these limbo mornings, sitting at the kitchen island and eating a sugary breakfast, rather than sitting proper at the dining table.  

“All I meant was,” daddy is saying, placing the remainder of the bags on the floor, the last remnants of what they’d packed for their trip, “you don’t need to be going on any diets.”

Momma unloads the bag full of Tupperware that had contained all the food they’d taken with them to Grann’s on the counter, but doesn’t reply. 

Momma and daddy have been arguing for a while now, though neither of them like that word very much. Sometimes your momma and I get real excited while we’re talking, is all, daddy had once explained, don’t mean we’re mad, or fighting.  

And they’ve been real excited all morning. 

“Flo, baby,” daddy tries, but momma just turns away and starts placing the empty food containers back in their spots in the cabinets. 

It had all started when momma had poured them all the bowls of cereal and then only placed a mug of tea before her with a piece of lemon floating on top. 

Daddy had narrowed his eyes and asked, “not eating?” 

Momma had just swirled the lemon around with a spoon. “I will. Later.”

A few moments had passed, during which daddy’s fingers had drummed a consistent beat on the gray graphite of the kitchen island, and then combed at the edges of his beard. “Now you know these lil’ monsters here are gonna finish the whole box by the time you decide to eat. Ain’t that right Gracie?” 

“Daddy, I’m not little!” Gracie had protested and then laughed so hard at daddy’s monster noises that she’d spilled half her milk on the counter. And then momma had declared that she simply wasn’t hungry now and that lemon and water were appetite repellents and also very good for the immune system. 

And then…whatever that had meant, daddy had not liked. 

Louis is trying to keep his eyes down on his own bowl and from his periphery, he can see Paul trying to do the same. Momma says it’s not nice to eavesdrop, but then, is it really eavesdropping if they’re speaking so loudly right in front of them?

“I never said I needed to be on a diet,” momma finally says, “I said I wanted to. Nothin’ wrong with trying to be healthy.” 

“Funny how you seem to get these health urges every time we visit her, that’s all I’m sayin’”

The glass bowl that momma places in the cabinet next clanks louder than the previous ones, and then she finally turns to him, the blue fabric of her skirt flowing dramatically in the process. 

“This has nothing to do with her.” 

With that, she turns and walks out of the kitchen. She doesn’t get far though, with daddy in tow. They disappear, and then reappear through the kitchen and dining room passthrough. Daddy stops her determined march with a careful hand on her shoulder. Louis can still see them, but their words are now hushed and far away. The window behind them is wide, bright rays of the morning sun beaming through the curtains and enveloping them in its warmth. 

The passthrough allows only this view, this one moment and no more— two figures, enshrined in a golden, otherworldly glow that throws them into a sort of unreality so that, just for an instance, the moment becomes a living photograph in Louis’ eyes, a polaroid, and Louis finds that, for some odd reason, he can’t seem to avert his gaze. 

Daddy leans down, close to her ear, whispers words that only she can hear, their hair a joint halo against the brightness. And then something rare and magical happens—momma’s lips, so often pursed and tense, relax, let go of their struggle and lift in an earnest smile, the furrow of her brows disappears, and the sun hits the brown of her eyes just right, so that they glint as she gazes up at him, transfixed.

Louis will ponder on this often, this synergy between them that he doesn’t yet have a name for, and perhaps never will. The effortless power they hold that melts the lines off the other’s face. 

It’s a difficult thing, Louis has learned, making his mother smile. 

They seem to sway side to side, caught in the music of their moment, but the next second daddy leans down and kisses her and then Louis’ able to turn away just fine. He turns to Paul and sees the grimace mirrored on his face, nose wrinkling in disgust. 

“Blegh,” Louis says, sticking his tongue out. It makes Paul laugh, and that must break the trance, get the attention of their parents, because momma turns to them through the passthrough and calls, “Louis, Paul, finish up and clean up your rooms.” 

“But momma, we already did last night,” Paul complains. 

“I saw some of your clothes on the floor, go on now, Louis," and Louis doesn’t point out the fact that Paul was the one who’d complained. He rushes through the clean up, makes sure Paul’s room is also clean, in case momma has a reason to have him stick around for longer than he has to, and then grabs the box and finally sprints out the gates to the neighboring house. 

Louis had wanted to present his gift to Lestat the instant the family car had been parked in their garage the previous night, but momma had insisted that he wait until morning.

He’s a bit nervous when he knocks on the door. He doesn’t do this very often. Lestat is usually the one who comes to him. To Louis’ displeasure, it’s Agustine he’s faced with once the door opens. Augustine squints down at him, blond hair standing this way and that, and when he realizes it’s Louis, he scowls. 

“What do you want?”

Louis has the urge to roll his eyes and say, what do you think? but it would be rude, and Augustine scares him a bit, and also because he’s not allowed to interact with Lestat’s brothers very much.

“Is Lestat home?” 

“Non, he’s not home, s'en aller,” Augustine says with a dismissive wave of his hand. Louis frowns, but before Augustine can shut the door fully in his face, Lestat appears next to him. 

“I am home, arrête de mentir,” Lestat protests, shoving at Augustine when he doesn’t move away from the door. For all of Lestat’s great efforts, Augustine doesn’t so much as budge from his spot, which Augustine seems to find quite amusing with how he’s sneering down at Lestat. His mirth is short lived, however, because the next moment he’s shoving Lestat right back and Lestat surely budges, much smaller than him, and goes plopping down hard on the floor. 

“Morveux gâté,” Augustine spits out, and finally walks away.

“Are you okay?” Louis asks, reaching out a hand. 

“Louis!” Lestat beams up at him from the floor, “you are back.” 

By the time Louis is done talking, his voice is hoarse and the present he’s prepared is still sitting wrapped next to him. The plan had been to hand it to Lestat as soon as they'd entered the fortress, but then Lestat had asked questions about his trip and about the snow, and Louis had gotten so carried away that he’d momentarily forgotten all about it. 

“For me?” Lestat asks once Louis finally hands it to him.

“Mhm.” 

Lestat blinks, face blank.  

“I got it from a Christmas store,” Louis adds, and then regrets it because he thinks maybe he’s ruined the surprise a bit. Louis waits expectantly, but Lestat just stares down at the box and then back up at him.

“You bought me present?”

“Well duh,” Louis says. He thinks it’s pretty obvious, given Louis has wrapped it in gift wrapping paper—green and red, with tiny snowmen on it that they’d gotten from the same Christmas store as the gift itself— and even placed a little red bow on it. “Aren’t you gonna open it?” 

Lestat stares some more, and then finally places the box down on the floor and starts unwrapping it, careful and slow. When he sees what’s inside, he gasps, eyes going wide. “Wow,” he exhales. It must be a word he’s learned while Louis was away, because Louis has never heard him say it before. Louis is quite pleased. 

Lestat carefully lifts the snow globe from the box and holds it gently in his palms like it’s a living thing he might hurt, and then quietly looks at it for so long that Louis wonders if he maybe doesn’t know what it is.

“It’s a snow globe,” Louis clarifies. 

“Oui.” 

“You gotta shake it.”

Lestat blinks at him some more, and then gives the it a single, tentative shake. They watch as the little snowflakes sway in the glass and fall, ever so gently, over the ballerina at the center. She wears a puffy pink tutu that makes Louis think momentarily of Gracie, and a matching set of pink pointy shoes, which Lestat had called chaussons de pointe . 

On one exceptionally cold locked-door night, they’d made a blanket forth right on top of the mattress and huddled under it for warmth. They’d read, they’d played word games, they’d made shadow puppets with a flashlight against the wall, but mostly—they had talked. And Lestat, at one point, had spent a great long while recounting a trip he’d once taken to Paris with his grandmother, whose name he couldn’t remember, and which had been the best day of his whole entire life, Louis . 

“Le ballet,” Lestat had reminisced dreamily, pupils constricting against the flashlight placed between them, so that all Louis could see was blue in his eyes. 

A fully recounted performance, the plot of which he couldn’t remember much of, nor the name, or the place, the time. What Lestat could remember was that it had been the biggest building he’d ever been in, that his heart had raced with excitement the whole time that he had been there, and that it had been the very first and only time he’d ever seen his grand-mère cry. 

And then he’d talked, at great length, of just how much he’d liked the music, how vast the echoing theater had been, how beautiful, how every sound and note had felt bouncing off the golden crested walls, vibrating the very seat he had been in. Of the dancers in their pointy shoes and flowing, colorful fabrics, and, most importantly—just how terribly he’d wished to run right up there and join them. Wouldn’t Louis?

This had made Louis laugh, but then, imagining himself in that position, frown. The thought of standing in front of so many people, let alone dancing, had made his stomach clench and his heart race.

“That’d be scary,” Louis had admitted. “Everyone would be watching. What if I fell and they laughed.” 

Lestat had laid his chin on his hand, the flashlight making his eyelashes glow, and said, “but you wouldn’t be Louis when you’re on stage, you’d be someone else.” 

And Louis hadn’t exactly understood what he had meant, but he had felt, instinctively, even then, how easy and right it had been to picture Lestat up there. 

Lestat holds up the snow globe, studies it, his eyes wide and blue through the glass like they had been that night.

“C’est magnifique,” he says, awe in his voice that makes him sound older than he is. “I love her, Louis.” 

Louis’ stomach eases, let’s go of the knots he hadn’t realized had been there.

“Good,” he says.

Louis loves receiving gifts, and he also loves giving them, seeing people react to them. Late on Christmas eve, when everyone at gran’s had fallen asleep, Louis had secretly woken Paul up and had him open his own present early—a snow globe, much like Lestat’s, but with a blue bird at the center. And Louis had loved the brightness in Paul’s eyes too when he’d seen it, the dimples in his cheeks as he’d smiled at him. Louis had wanted to get one for Gracie too, but daddy had told him that she was too young, and she would break it, and so he’d gone for a small unicorn stuffy instead, which, to Louis’ disappointment, she had gotten bored of in a matter of minutes. 

Lestat smiles down at the ballerina and shakes the globe again and again. And then, when Louis winds up the key on the bottom, and the ballerina starts twirling to the slow tune, Lestat’s eyes turn into saucers and he sits back in awe to watch her dance. When the tune finally comes to an end, and the ballerina’s performance halts, Lestat chews his lip for a moment in silence, looks up at Louis and then throws his arms around him in such a sudden and tight hug that the force knocks Louis backwards. 

“Thank you, Louis,” Lestat says into his shoulder. 

Back in the colorful, crowded Christmas store, momma had blinked blankly at him when he’d shown her Lestat’s gift. 

“That’s not appropriate,” she’d said.

“But why?”

Momma had gazed down at him, mouth tight and eyes hard.

“Why don’t you get that for Lily, instead?” she’d suggested. “You can get the gingerbread one for Lestat.”

“But momma, Lestat likes ‘le ballet’ ,” Louis had insisted, “he said.” But that had made momma frown even more. 

“You’ll get that for Lilly. We’ll buy the other for him." It hadn’t really been a suggestion anymore. 

Later, when they’d gotten back home to Gran’s, Louis had sat in front of the TV, chest feeling strangely tight and heavy, unable to focus on the cartoons Paul had been watching. 

“How ‘bout we wrap them now, hm?” Daddy had suggested, and then, once they’d finished, red present bows pasted and all, he’d winked at Louis and quietly written Lestat’s name on the gift box holding the pink ballerina. 

After a long day of play making up for lost time, they lay outside in the grass between their homes and point out weird shaped clouds. Louis tells him more about Christmas at Grann’s and all the food he ate, and the piano piece his auntie Janice had taught him which Lestat finds very so cool , and Lestat shows him the blue scarf around his neck that his maman had gotten for him for Christmas. Louis’ in the middle of telling him about all the antics Gracie had pulled with the snowmen he’d tried to build with Paul, when Lestat abruptly sits up and looks down at him, a red tint spreading over his cheeks that matches the red hat on his head.

“What’s wrong?”

“Louis,” Lestat says, “I don’t have present for you.”

“S’okay,” Louis shrugs, “oh!” he exclaims, sitting up and almost bumping Lestat’s forehead with his own. Because, suddenly, he remembers the gifts he has received, and the fact that he hasn’t shown them to Lestat yet. So he bolts up himself, grabs Lestat by the hand and drags him up to his room. 

It’s a long and warm winter that year in New Orleans, or perhaps it’s that all things feel endless and warm in childhood, but the months pass by eventually, spring rolls in, and then summer, and the next thing they know they’re done with first grade. 

“Can you believe it?” Lestat asks. This is the week's newest phrase, and the accent is slowly ebbing away. 

Louis tosses his board game peg aside, the game of Chutes and Ladders forgotten between them, and shakes his head.

“Second grade,” Louis sighs dreamily. 

Paul, who’d not only refused to play catch with them, but also, uncharacteristically, any board games they'd suggested, is quiet as he sits by the window. 

“Is it long?” he asks, “the school day.”

“It’s fun,” Lestat says. “You will like it.”

Paul hums, but looks entirely unconvinced. 

For weeks now, he’s been a bundle of nerves, going back and forth between telling them just how excited he is to start school and then changing his mind and asking if he can just stay in kindergarten instead. 

“It’s not long,” Louis reassures. It’s not completely true, but Paul doesn’t need to hear that now. 

The first day of the school year goes well enough, since momma stays with Paul much like she had with Louis. Louis, for his part, feels a bit proud and grown up at his independence, especially when momma pulls him aside and tells him that it’s his job to watch out for Paul and how important that is, and how grown and responsible Louis is. On the second day, when momma is gone, Paul is tense, quiet and antsy, sticking by Louis the entire time, aside from when he has to forlornly go to his own classroom. At lunchtime, most of the students are divided between classes in the cafeteria, but Paul doesn’t talk or sit with the other first graders at all. Instead, he sits with them, and plays with his food. Louis takes a bite of his muffin, and nudges him again.

“You gotta eat, Paul. Else you’ll get hungry later.” 

“It’s really good,” Lestat reassures him from across the table, “try,” he says, and takes a bite of his own blueberry muffin. For all his talk, Lestat himself never finishes his food. He takes a few more bites of the muffin, eats most of his cereal but leaves the juice, apple and and the remainder of the muffin to take home. Louis knows he’ll do much the same with his lunch, so really, he’s not one to be telling Paul to eat. On the off chance that Paul will listen to him, Louis mentions none of this. 

“Don’t you like your English class, Paul?” Leo asks, an opened book placed before him too, “you’re reading all the time.” 

Paul frowns and shakes his head. 

The next few days are spent in similar fashion, with Paul quiet and sad and attached to Louis’ hip. When Louis asks if he’s made any friends he tells him that the rest of the students don’t like him. 

“How you know that?”

Paul shrugs. 

“You haven’t even talked to them, have you?” 

Paul shakes his head. “They won’t like me.”

“Of course they’ll like you, Paul,” Lily reassures, the long red bows tying her pigtails swinging about as she moves her head. She carefully places her sandwich down into her lunchbox—Lily’s parents don’t let her eat the cafeteria food at all because ‘none of it is organic and very disruptive to a growing child’s organism,’ or so Louis had heard her momma say once—and leans in. “You just have to be yourself, that’s the most important. My momma said so. And you won’t know if they like you if you don’t even talk to them, silly," and Paul’s eyebrows knit together for a moment like they tend to when he’s deep in thought. 

And then, to Louis and everyone else’ surprise, things take a sudden turn three weeks into the semester. They’re out in the playground, Louis, Lestat, Lily and Leo—Lestat often jokes that they are the four El’s’ — when Paul jogs up to them, smile wide on his face and a kick in his step.

“I love it here, Louis,” he declares. And then he talks and talks and talks about his class and the other kids there and how, once he’d talked to them, things truly had been just fine. “You were right, Lily,” he says and Lily, where she’s currently balancing on the metal bar, swings her legs back and forth, the colorful shoelaces on her shoes swaying about.

“I was right!” she sing-songs, and then she swings backwards and hangs upside down, beaming up at them with a proud smile, teeth glinting in the sunshine. It makes Paul laugh, and Louis relieved. 

By the end of the month, Paul can’t stop talking about anything else but how much he loves school and all the people he’s met and all the assignments he’s gonna be doing, and how many good grades he’s already received and momma beams at him proudly across the table every morning at the dinner table. 

When Spring rolls around, the fortress floor is covered in construction paper, markers, glues, glitter pens—courtesy of Gracie— and three giant trifold poster boards. 

Louis looks down at his halfway finished project and tilts his head. The photos are all pasted—his own photo at the very center, smiling wide, and looking quite sharp in his uniform, as daddy had said, and the few on the opening sides that represent his future goals. The bulletin facts list about himself are mostly written, though, glancing at Paul’s extensive list makes him momentarily consider if he should maybe think of more. He’s written the ‘To My Guardians’ portion already, and all that’s left to include is the list of his favorite academic facts that he’s learned through the first semester. This is the hardest and most boring part of the project, and he wishes he hadn’t left it for last. 

Paul, true to form, is almost done with his own board, and Lestat, true to his, is more busy drawing doodles at the edges of the poster than he is at actually finishing it. He’s quite good, to be fair—a sequence of guitars and lightning strikes of various colors and patterns from what Louis’ limited field of vision can tell him. 

“It’s due in two days, Les,” Louis points out. 

“I don’t care,” Lestat shrugs, “we’re not graded on it anyway.”

“But you still gotta make it nice,” Paul interjects, “it’s for Open House, your parents are gonna see it.” 

“My parents aren’t coming,” Lestat tells him, and goes back to his board. And…Louis can’t say he’s surprised. He’d expected that Lestat’s father wouldn’t be attending, but he’d hoped that Mrs. Lioncourt would. She had last year, albeit late, and Lestat had been quite proud and over the moon about it. 

Paul sits up, brows furrowing further, “they’re not?” 

Lestat shakes his head.

“But they gotta,” Paul insists, “they’re gonna be talking about your progress in class, your test scores, and the work ahead in the second semester.” It’s word by word what the letter regarding the Open House had explained. 

“So?” Lestat shrugs. “I don’t care.” 

The thing is, Louis knows him so very well by now, knows the tell tale signs—the tightening of his jaw, the way his lips purse and frown at the sides, the way his shoulders slump—that this conversation is upsetting him. He gets like this often when Louis asks too many questions, like the time he asked him why his momma doesn’t walk him to the bus stop and why she’s so tired all the time, or why his parents fight so often, and of course, why he won’t let Louis tell anyone about him being locked out some nights. And once he notices these signs, Louis will stop, he’ll let it be. 

But this is Paul, and Paul doesn’t let anything be, and his favorite thing in the whole wide world is questioning things, and learning. 

“But how will they know how you're doing in school if they don’t come?” he asks, voice laced with worry. “My teacher, Mrs. Hughes said that it’s the most important—”

“I don’t care what your stupid teacher told you!” Lestat snaps, sitting up from where he’d been lounging on his stomach, “stop asking!”

When Lestat abruptly leaves, Paul turns to him, eyebrows furrowed in confusion, “what’d I say?” 

True to their form, Lestat's parents don’t attend the open house, and neither does Lestat. Louis’ parents attend Paul’s classroom first, with the first graders getting an early start, and then it’s time for Louis’ homeroom—a whole class tour, a long speech by their teachers, and finally, a presentation of all project posters placed around the room. 

When they get around to Louis’ poster, daddy compliments his art, and momma tells him that his handwriting can use some improvement and corrects two spelling mistakes and then marvels disapprovingly at how the teachers hadn’t taken the time to check. 

The rest of the evening is spent with the teachers talking about their grades and what’s ahead in the new semester, while Louis spends some time with Lily, Leo, Paul, who’d joined them after his class, and the rest of the students. It’s strangely exciting, as it had been last year, to be here, out of their uniforms and with the sky darkening outside the windows. There’s almost an unreality to seeing the school in the evening, as though he’d expected it to stop existing altogether when they weren’t here to see it. They eat snacks and talk and play. And still...Louis feels a strange growing knot in the pit of his stomach as the evening progresses, and he can’t help his eyes roaming around and around and falling yet again on Lestat’s poster, displayed among the rest, but unseen by those who it’s meant for. 

They won’t attend the next year either. Or any of the years to come.

“Strange folk,” daddy comments quietly of the Lioncourts on their drive back home. Momma remains quiet by his side, as he takes her hand in his. Louis watches her through the side mirror from where he’s sat in the back seat, her eyes unblinking, gaze trained somewhere outside where Louis can’t see.  

A month after Gracie starts second grade, she walks up to Louis and Paul with a pout set firmly on her lips. “I’m telling momma.” 

“Gracie, you always get bored down there anyway,” Louis tries. But as always, Gracie wins this game. 

It’s a fairly warm Spring evening, and Gracie’s set, it would seem, on completely destroying Louis’ fortress. 

“This ain’t fair,” Louis mutters under his breath and crosses his arms. He shares a long suffering look with Paul, who sighs and goes back to building his card castle in defeat. She’ll get to that soon too, Louis is sure, and Paul won't be so accepting then. She’s going through their comic books now, declaring out loud which she finds cute, and which she finds boring.

“They’re not supposed to be cute,” Paul says to deaf ears. 

Earlier in the afternoon, when they’d barely gotten home from school and had lunch, Gracie had declared that she was a big girl now and that she wanted to play in the fortress with them. Louis, on account of the many previous times she’d wrecked havoc on his fortress, and on the bigger account of it being his fortress, had told her no. Which is when she’d stayed true to her threat and run right to momma. Gracie had cried, called them stupid-heads until momma had finally placed her work notebook and glasses down with impatience and told Louis and Paul that they were to let her in. 

The next step in Gracie’s evil agenda is going through every one of their toys, unearthing a long lost tennis ball from the back of a cabinet and then fussing with their action figures. When she glances towards the biggest cupboard, Louis and Paul share a nervous look. Louis’ hidden their treasured robot battle toys on top of said cupboard that Gracie can’t reach—and that he’d reached only through climbing on a chair—but thankfully she notices her old pink tent and spends some time fiddling with that. 

“Thank God,” Paul sighs. 

“You watch her well,” momma had warned Louis before they’d gone ahead, “so much clutter you got lyin’ around down there.” 

Well, Gracie sure is adding to the clutter now. Louis had considered, briefly, bringing this fact up during their conversation, except, Louis has grown accustomed to deciphering his mother’s moods, and this night had not been one where she would see reason. He sits back on the mattress and tries to focus on his homework through Gracie’s loud singing, until an especially loud voice from outside gets all of their attention. Louis cringes. 

“Man, they sound real mad, huh?” says Paul. 

The house next door is exceptionally loud tonight, and has been for close to an hour now. Lestat’s parents argue often. Very often. And they don’t just get real excited while they’re talking, or have a heated discussion like Louis’ parents do. Even then, at nine years old, Louis knows that their fights are different. He peeks his head out the window and watches the house. Many windows with their lights on, but the room that Lestat shares with Augustine’s is on the other side of the house, and far from Louis’ view. He wonders, sadly, what Lestat is doing now. He wonders how long it’ll last tonight, whether they’ll stop themselves, or whether Mr. Smith will walk angrily down from the main house, knock on their door and threaten to evict them if they don’t stop. 

While these fights aren’t uncommon, what’s new today is the fact that Louis can also hear Lestat’s brother in the mix of the angry voices—Pierre, whom Louis rarely ever sees, or hears from. 

The voices die down for a brief moment, and then raise back up. Louis can’t always figure out what it is that they’re yelling about in their rapid French, but what he knows is that every time they do, Lestat is down that day, quiet and sad and snappy. He doesn’t laugh at Louis’ jokes, doesn’t play board games in the fortress with him and Paul, doesn’t exaggerate his accent to make them laugh like he normally does. And so, in the end, it isn’t too much of a surprise when, eventually, Lestat’s head pops up from the other side of the window. Louis opens it, and lets him climb in. He’s solemn and frowning, just as Louis had expected. 

“Good evening, Lestat,” Gracie greets him, her hands behind her back like momma tends to hold them when she greets the neighbors in the morning. Lestat waves hello.  

“You wanna play comic books with me?”

Paul groans. “You don’t ‘play’ comic books Gracie, you read—”

“I wasn’t speaking to you,” Gracie cuts Paul off and turns her attention back to Lestat. 

“Not today, Gracie,” Lestat says, and plops down on the mattress next to Louis. 

“Aww, fine,” Gracie, says with a pout. Thankfully she doesn’t cry or go complaining to momma again. He wonders if it’s because Lestat looks so sad that she spares him. 

“Are your momma and daddy mad?” Paul asks him. 

Lestat nods.

“Why?”

Lestat shrugs.

“They mad at your brother? Did he do something?”

Louis sends Paul a warning stare. To no avail, and, as always, Paul asks too many questions, and after some time, Lestat stops answering altogether. When it gets real late, Louis sends Paul and Gracie to bed, pretends to go to bed himself, and then sneaks back inside to let Lestat back in. They lay on the mattress, the thick blanket Louis keeps there covering them from the growing chill, as Lestat stares at him in the dark, eyes unblinking. His cheek is smooshed over the pillow, making his lips more pouty, and normally, Louis would joke about this and they’d laugh and make faces. But the air in the fortress feels too sad today, and too cold and too scary. 

“Are you okay?” Louis asks. 

“Mhm.”

“Was your daddy mad?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” says Lestat.  

In the morning, the misery of the night follows them, but only briefly. The gift of a child’s forgetfulness and the natural need to be joyful still has a tender hold over them, and so, soon enough, the melancholy leaves them and they’re sweat drenched and breathlessly laughing in no time. With the weekend before them, and thoughts of homework set aside, the play takes their undivided attention for some time. Until Pierre emerges from the backdoor of the guesthouse and takes a seat on the stairs. While Louis sees and hears more of Augustine then he’d ever like, there are days where Louis forgets Pierre’s existence altogether. And maybe that’s why it takes Lestat off guard too, it would seem, as much as it does Louis, to see Pierre’s blue gaze and attention unblinkingly on them and their game.

He takes out a pack of cigarettes, takes one out between pale, thin fingers, lights it, and takes a slow, long drag. Every time momma has caught him smoking, she’s used it as an opportunity to turn to Louis and Paul and tell them that they should never start and what a disgusting habit it is. She’s sent Pierre many a firm stares for smoking so close to their house, but he hasn’t seemed to care much at all. Louis and Lestat continue their game, while Pierre silently watches them. 

Aside from the eyes—icy blue and sharp— that all the Lioncourt boys seem to have inherited from their father, Pierre doesn’t look like Lestat or Augstine much at all, with his now shoulder length dark hair, long face and sharp, arresting features. Pierre looks like Mr. Lioncourt in all things, so much so that, at times, it makes Louis uneasy to be around him. 

Lestat seems distracted with Pierre’s gaze trained so sharply on him, so that, at one point, he trips and falls, leaving his knees with a grass green stain. Pierre tsks impatiently and calls out, “Merde, be careful! Es-tu aveugle?”

Lestat rises, dusts off his knees and sends Pierre a confused look. They go back to their play for some time, but when Pierre takes out a second cigarette, Lestat gives up on the game entirely, tosses the ball to Louis and then goes to stand quietly before Pierre. He glances down at the stairs, and Louis notices, for the first time, the large black duffle bag sitting next to him. 

Lestat tilts his head. 

“What?” Pierre asks impatiently

“Are you going somewhere?” Lestat asks. 

“Yes,” says Pierre. 

“Where?”

“C'est pas tes oignons.”

Pierre takes another long drag from his cigarette and blows it out leisurely. Lestat drags his foot around on the ground by the stairs, muddy and wet from the sprinklers, and mucks up his already dirty shoes.

“Can I come with you?” he asks.

Pierre pushes back the raven strands away from his face with long, unsteady fingers and sighs. He takes another deep drag from his cigarette, and then turns his head and blows it out—slow, the puff of smoke like mist against the morning sun. 

And the thing is, Louis is standing much too far from him, and so it must be the trick of the light that, just then, his Lioncourt eyes seem to glisten with moisture.

“No, you can’t,” says Pierre. “I got no place for you.” 

He snuffs out the half smoked cigarette on the concrete of the stairs, rises, and then looks down at Lestat. 

“Don’t stay here too long,” he tells him, and Louis has a strange feeling he’s not talking about the backyard. He ruffles Lestat’s hair much too roughly, leaving it messy and wild in his wake, slings the strap of the duffle over his shoulder, and then walks down the pathway and out the small gate. 

As he disappears in the distance, somehow Louis knows that he won’t return. And Lestat must know it too because he watches after him for a long time, silent tears streaming down his face. 

Strange folk, daddy’s voice echoes in his brain, and it rings true, and truer yet each time. But he really feels it then. That, yes, they are strange, aren’t they? And that he’s known this from the start is undeniable. That the view is murky, and Louis might not have the eyes to see yet, but that the picture has been there from the first day. 

It's a month after his tenth birthday, and a week after Lestat’s, that the picture really takes full shape. 

It’s a foggy November day, when the garden still contains the remnants of a birthday party momma had thrown that had felt less like it had been for Louis, and more for her church friends, and relatives and neighbors, and folks whom Louis had never once met, when the trees are yellow and brown and momma’s Hydrangea still hold strong to their shades of purple and blue. They’re playing in the yard, an intricate game that they’ve come up with all by themselves that they can’t seem to properly explain to anyone, even Paul, with hurdles and trips and steps that make a battleground out of the yard. They’ve long outgrown the worms, the casual throw and catch. The priceless and causal interest in the mundane is on its unfortunate journey to fading. Their brains require much more now.

And perhaps that's why the picture becomes easier to see. The day is a normal one, and so is their play, the sky, the air, the smell of the flowers. An ordinary one, but an important one, because Louis falters, runs right into one of the cherub statues, and they watch it swivel about with bated breaths until it collapses and breaks. One of its wings lays on the side, completely detached. Louis rises, looks down at the poor thing with a growing pressure in his temples and sighs. 

“Oh, momma’s gon’ kill me,” he despairs aloud. 

He’s thinking of the explanation he’s gonna give, of how he can convince daddy to be on his side, of how he can present this as a learning experience, and that, now he’ll get the opportunity to fix the cherub, and don’t you always say learning is important, momma? 

“Tell her I did it,” Lestat says. 

Louis waves a dismissive hand. He crouches down, picks up the broken wing and watches the cracks. 

"Maybe I can glue it," Louis considers. When he rises and turns around, Lestat has gone strangely pale and statuesque. 

“Tell her I broke it," he says again.

“It’s fine, Lestat.” Louis picks up the body of the poor things and tries to piece the wing back on where it had detached. They'll need to attach the full structure itself back by the fountain too. 

"I'll tell her too," Lestat is saying, "she'll believe it, I'm clumsy."

"But I broke it," Louis argues. Lestat is shaking his head no and Louis can’t figure out why he’s so worked up and insistent on taking blame. His fists are clenched at his sides, and his breaths are coming in weird gusts all of a sudden. Lestat chews his nail beds for a moment, paces back and forth.

"Maybe I can hide it if she won't believe."

“Les, it’s okay, you don’t have to—” Louis starts, but then Lestat’s grabbing him by the forearm, fingers painfully clenching into his skin and eyes more intense and determined than Louis has ever seen them. 

“I won’t let her hurt you, Louis,” Lestat says. 

It takes a moment for Louis to understand what it is that Lestat is saying. What he’s really saying. The moment seems to be frozen between them, like the birds around have stopped chirping, or maybe that’s just the buzzing in Louis’ ears that cancels it all out. Or maybe it’s the sound of the last puzzle piece falling into place. 

“She’s not gonna hurt me, Lestat.”

Lestat’s eyebrows furrow. “But you said—” 

“Yeah but…” Louis starts, and then pauses because he’s not sure what he’s trying to say, either. “I didn’t actually mean it.”

Sure, momma might swat at him here and there, and she has hit him before when he’s been really reckless and one time when he’d spilled juice all over the kitchen floor and Gracie had slipped and bumped her forehead on the tiles, momma had grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him so hard that he’d felt dizzy and scared. When Louis had started crying, she’d stopped and looked down at him, hard frown and thunder in her eyes.

“You don’t even know how good you got it,” She’d said shaking her head. “You don’t know. I should whoop you like my —” and she’d balled her fists so hard Louis had thought she'd hit him. She'd just watched him cry for some time, instead, a look in her eyes that had made Louis colder than he’d ever been. 

And the way Lestat is looking at him now sends a similar shiver down Louis' spine. 

There’s that flash in his brain again, and the picture is ugly and makes his insides crawl, but it’s a bit like pushing the first domino and watching the rest fall over.

But it isn't, really. In truth, the domino had been pushed long ago, that very first day when he’d walked into the fortress and seen a pair of tearful eyes peek up at him, hidden behind a cupboard. It's only that the rest of the shape is coming into full view now, because it’s a normal day, but it’s the day he realizes that getting in trouble in Lestat’s home means something different than it does in his. It means being angry and quiet and jumpy. 

It means long sleeves, locked doors, and desperate fingers clasped around his forearm.

Chapter Text

“Maybe he’s sick,” Paul says, flipping through his book and only half listening. It’s a thick one and as always, far advanced for his age. Momma has consistently mentioned this fact every breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past month. 

“Maybe,” Louis says, but doesn’t mean. It’s week two of the Spring semester, and Lestat has been absent for the entirety of it. Louis is starting to worry that he’ll get expelled. Given he’s also barely spoken to Lestat for said two weeks, there are far more worrisome fears stewing around in his brain, ones he’s been too afraid to ponder for too long. 

When the bus comes, Louis looks back homeward one last time, but there’s still no sign of Lestat. 

A few days later, out of desperation, he knocks on the Lioncourt’s door to ask after him again. Mrs. Lioncourt has her hair down again, tangled and messy over her shoulders. Louis hasn’t seen her in ages. Lestat never properly explains, but Mrs. Lioncourt travels for work and disappears for weeks on end.
Her eyes are glassy and framed with dark circles and her speech is terribly slurred. Later, it would be so very easy to put the pieces together— the stench, the unstable wavering stance, the spaced out look, the apathy. But just then, Louis thinks, she must be tired, as Lestat says. Tired like momma is when she gets home from work, hands rubbing at sore shoulders. Tired like daddy looks when he gets back home from visiting Grandpa Arthur. 

When he asks to see Lestat, Mrs. Lioncourt informs him that he’s got the flu and that she wouldn’t want Louis to get infected as well. Louis purses his lips and frowns in a way that momma would certainly reprimand him for and stares blankly at her instead of replying to her dismissal. Still, momma is not here. Louis scowls and watches the door close. 

It isn’t that Louis hasn’t asked. 

Once when Lestat had again injured himself falling, or so he’d said, Louis had bit his lip and asked, “did you really fall?” 

Lestat had frozen in place, his eyes had gone a bit wide and he’d said, “I fell. I’m clumsy. You said.” 

When Louis had finally, tentatively, brought up his parents, Lestat hadn’t even let him finish his sentence. He’d stood up, told him that he was wrong and that if he ever said it again, he’d stop being Louis’ friend forever. 

Lestat is back the next day, chipper and happy, slinging an arm around Louis’ shoulder at the bus stop and asking Paul what dictionary he’s reading today. Things go back to normal for some time after that and, Louis thinks, I must have been wrong. I must have been crazy. 

Until one night, when he's startled out of his sleep by the sound of a crash coming from the fortress. When he gets there, he realizes the crates outside the window have toppled over while Lestat had been trying to climb them. Louis quickly opens the window, lets Lestat in, decides then and there that they’ll have to set up some sort of system for days when Louis can’t hear him coming. He can’t leave the window open, lest someone break in, not to mention that momma would never allow it, but he has to do something. 

When Louis turns on the little lamp he keeps by the mattress, Lestat is shaking head to toe, there’s a cut on his lip, and he’s holding his wrist with the opposite hand like he can’t hold it up by itself. 

“What happened?” Louis asks, heart beating out of his chest. 

And, Lestat doesn’t say, I fell, or make some joke out of it about him being clumsy. This time, he just plops down on the mattress and then promptly bursts into tears. And then, as though a dam has been broken, the tears turn into sobs that one moment have Louis worried he’ll wake the whole house up, and in the next, hopeful that they will. Once the cries subside, Lestat talks. He talks and talks for a long while, tells Louis of all his troubles, all the secrets. After he’s calmed down a bit and Louis has brought him some water, ice for his wrist, and a snickers bar for good measure, Louis says, “we have to tell someone.”

Predictably, Lestat shakes his head. 

“Les—”

“No, Louis.”

“Does your momma know?”

“No,” Lestat says quickly, shaking his head. “No. She's busy. She’s tired. She’s very tired.” 

And Louis knows it isn’t true. And he knows that Lestat knows that it isn’t true. Because the house is not big enough to hold that many secrets. 

“Lestat, it’s wrong. He shouldn’t.”

“I know that!”

“If I tell my parents—”

“No—”

“Or someone at school— 

“No, Louis.”

“My dad once told me to do that if anyone ever hurts me like that—”

Lestat rises from his place, fire in his eyes. “I said no!” He breathes, his hand clenched tight at his side, and desperation in his voice. “You can’t tell your parents, Louis. If anyone finds out, they’ll go to jail and—”

“Maybe they should.” Louis says it before he can help it, and can’t find it in himself to take it back. Lestat looks like he’s just been slapped, then turns his back to him and sits down on the mattress again, fidgets with the ice pack, drags his nails roughly over the condensing surface.

“Sorry,” Louis says. Lestat shrugs. Louis takes a seat next to him. “We have to tell an adult, Les.”

Lestat doesn't meet his eyes. “They’re my parents,” he says, voice quiet. 

“I know, but…” 

But what? Louis doesn’t know what to say. He tries to imagine himself in the same situation, as he does often when faced with something he doesn’t understand, and comes to a blank on what he would do. He can’t imagine ever getting his daddy in trouble, but then… he can’t imagine him ever hurting Louis either. 

“I told someone once,” Lestat tells him, voice barely a whisper, “when I was little. Back in Auvergne.” Lestat finally turns to him, eyes impossibly wide and lip still stained red. “I didn’t mean to,” he quickly adds, “I didn’t know they’d be in trouble, but….a neighbor asked, and I told her and then…then they sent me away for some time, and it was worse there. And it was worse, still, when I got back home. And, Louis, I always end up back home. Always.” 

Louis stares back at him, lost for words. Lestat tells him about when he and his brothers stayed with his grand-mere for a short time, and how nice that had been even though he’d missed his parents, but that, then, one day she’d just died. He tells him about the time he had snuck into the back of a theater troupe bus that had visited his small town, but been found out and sent back. And then once again, when he’d just walked and walked and kept walking. 

“Maybe it’ll be different this time,” Louis says helplessly. When Lestat stays silent, Louis’ thoughts race. “Maybe,” he starts, and then suddenly, the solution is so very obvious. “Lestat,” he says, hand clasping at his shoulder, “maybe you can stay here . See, if you let me talk to my parents, I could ask them if you could stay. I can convince them!”  

There’s a light in Lestat’s eyes at that, that’s there one instance, bright and intense, and then gone the next, like he snuffs it out before it can take true form. “No, Louis,” he says, shaking his head, “that won’t happen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“He’ll never let me go, he– no, I mean–” he stops for a moment, chews his lip and shakes his head as though to say, those aren’t the right words, and I can’t quite find the right ones to make you understand . “He gets mad sometimes, my dad,” he says, “but… he doesn’t want me to go away, Louis. I’m his son, and he loves me. He told me once.” 

Louis blinks at him and finds himself lost for words too. This happens often, as of late, this feeling, this knowing in his chest that he can’t put into words. Because it's too big, all of this, it’s much too soon to have this thrust upon them before the right words, the right emotions have even formed. They sit around for some time, the only sound in the fortress Lestat munching on the snickers bar. And then he puts it down, and says, “But, you’re right, Louis. It is different this time.” He lays his good hand over Louis’. “This time, I don’t wanna run away. I wanna stay.” 

Louis stews in his conflict for a long time, lays back on the mattress and looks around at the walls of their vast fortress, like maybe she, who sees all their secrets, will give him the answers. 

“You don’t want me to go away, do you, Louis?” Lestat asks out of nowhere. Louis sits up and looks at him. 

“Of course not, you’re my best friend.”

“Then you have to promise me you won’t tell. You have to keep my secret, like best friends do.”

There’s an upside to growing up much too fast, or rather, being forced to. It's good practice, being ahead in the game of life and its trials. It’s something Louis will realize later, refuse to examine the negative consequences of and instead, cultivate it like a dark gift. It’ll bring him great fortune in life, even as it silently eats away at his spirit. 

But these are problems much too vast and complicated for a ten year old, even an unusual one like Louis. And so, faced with this dilemma, and the desperate plea of an even more unusual boy, and his truest friend, Louis nods and says, “okay, I promise.”  

Later in spring, on a gray, early April morning, Louis wakes to a sound he’s never heard before. Or, it’s more accurate to say, that he’s already awake—feet bare pattering down the hall towards the kitchen for a cold glass of water—but hearing his father cry for the first time wakes a part of him that hadn’t yet existed. 

He went easy, father Matthias says later, gentle hand on daddy’s shoulder, he’s with the Lord now. Louis doesn’t know what going easy means, though he isn't so young to not understand that Grandpa Arthur is dead.

He hangs on that for a moment, going easy, and then wonders what the opposite would be. He doesn’t like the feeling that rises in his chest at the thought, so he pushes it aside. 

Daddy sits on the couch quietly, doesn’t cry anymore, but doesn’t speak. It’s a strange sight. Louis is unused to his father’s silence. The funeral scares him, but he’s too busy holding Paul’s hand to think of his own fear. The kids don’t need to come, Flo, Louis had heard daddy argue, a hushed conversation in the middle of the kitchen that Louis wasn’t meant to have heard. But momma had told him, gentle but firm, that death was a part of life and that they’d be better off learning first hand.

After the funeral, when Grandpa Arthur truly is gone, Louis tries to figure out what it is he’s learned, and comes up blank. 

Gracie’s eyes are wide and wet during the wake—daddy had put his foot down on her not attending—and she stays close to Louis the entire time and stays uncharacteristically quiet. Louis wonders if she understands that they won’t be seeing their grandaddy anymore. Louis isn’t sure he understands himself. 

Is that what he was supposed to have learned at the funeral? 

There’s a lot of food at the wake, but Louis finds that it’s hard to swallow. He sits on the couch by the coffee table that has turned into the kids table as the day has progressed, and tries to keep his eyes from moving through the room and falling on daddy’s face. Looking into his eyes unnerves him, and so does his silence. 

“Has she eaten?”

Louis raises his head and meets momma’s gaze. She’s waiting expectantly, and impatiently. 

“What?”

“Has Gracie eaten?” 

Louis looks at Gracie’s plate and can’t quite remember what he’d put there, if he’d put anything there or if she’d already eaten it. Earlier she’d asked for desert, but Louis hadn’t been able to walk past the long crowd to get to the table with the pastries. It had looked daunting for some odd reason, and his heart had started feeling tight at the site.

Momma’s patience wavers, until she sighs, picks up Gracie’s plate herself before Louis can remember. 

Late that night, Louis lies awake and stares at the ceiling above his bed. Paul’s already cried himself to sleep next to him, and even though momma doesn’t like it when they don’t sleep in their own rooms, Louis doesn’t wake him. Louis’ eyes remain dry and unfocused. When sleep eludes him, he slowly pushes away the comforter, careful not to wake Paul. 

In the dimly lit living room, he finds daddy not sitting in his usual spot on the armchair, but the couch facing the the large windows. With the lamp behind him, and the only source of light, it looks for a moment to Louis’ eyes, like he’s glowing in the darkness himself, a single point of brightness in an otherwise dark room. Daddy watches the window for some time, eyes rarely blinking. 

For the first time in his life, Louis feels nervous to approach him. He stands by the doorway, feeling knots in his stomach and unsure of what to do, until daddy takes note of him himself. It’s a bit like Louis has woken him up from sleep, though his eyes had never shut. He smiles at Louis. He looks very tired, Louis thinks. There is something different in his eyes, and just then, when Louis looks at him, he thinks of Gabrielle, of her eyes, and hers alone that she has passed down to none of her children. 

“Can’t sleep?” daddy asks. 

Louis shakes his head. 

“Me neither,” he says. Louis sits next to him by the couch, but stays a distance away. 

“Was hard today, hm?” daddy asks. 

Louis shrugs. He fidgets with the raised velvet texture of the couch, his fingers leaving dark shapes, and then clears them away with the swipe of a hand. 

“Are you sad, daddy?” he asks. 

Daddy’s quiet for a moment and then he says, “yes, Louis, I’m sad.” Louis can’t seem to meet his gaze, but he notices him wipe his eye in his periphery.

“Louis,” daddy says, and Louis finally looks up. “You don’t ever gotta worry about me, okay?”

“Okay,” Louis says. 

“And it’s okay, you know? If you’re sad. That’s okay. You do know, don’t you, son?”

Louis nods his head, but daddy watches him quietly like he’s not sure what to make of him and then says, “come here.” Louis scoots closer and let's daddy put an arm around his shoulder. 

“See that tree out there?” he says, pointing out the window. 

“Ahuh.” 

“My grandaddy planted that tree. It’s old. Real old, just like this house.” Daddy watches the tree for some time, eyes going somewhere Louis can’t follow, and then roaming around at the living room, at the intricately decorated ceiling tiles, at the equally delicately carved fireplace, at the photos adorning it, at the giant painting mounted on top of it of old time-y people Louis doesn’t know. “Yeah,” daddy whispers, more to himself, “yeah. Real old, this place.” And Louis wonders then, if maybe there are polaroids in his brain too. 

Wherever he’s gone, daddy must return, because he turns to Louis and says, “we oughta’ put a swing on that tree, don’t you think? Whattaya say Lou-lou? We’ll do it, me an’ you, hm?” 

“Okay, daddy,” Louis says, and then bursts into tears. Daddy pulls him into his side and lets him sob into his shoulder, the white cotton of his dress shirt darkening with his tears. Louis doesn’t know when he falls asleep, but when he wakes in the morning there’s a soft pillow under his head, a warm blanket over his body, and an ease in his chest that, in all his years, Louis will never find a replacement for. 

The sun is shining brightly through the window, and when he looks out, daddy waves from his granddaddy's front-yard tree and beckons him out. 

What starts off as a simple plan to attach a swing to the old tree turns into a month-long project, partly because daddy keeps getting new ideas on what to build, and partly because he lets the children ‘help.’ In truth, they don’t do much but hand him things and listen to him talk and joke around, but daddy lets them go at their pace, and at the end of the day, wipes his sweaty forehead and pretends they’re all equally exhausted. 

Lestat joins them most days, and no matter how many times Louis tells him, yes, daddy said you can come, he still hesitates. He’s quiet and still uncharacteristically shy every time he’s around Louis’ parents, standing around for most of it, doing what he’s told when the need arises, nodding along to daddy’s stories, and only speaking when he’s spoken to directly. 

And then one day, daddy, a hammer in one hand and a wet cloth in the other, turns to him and says, “hand me that piece there, won’t you, son?” and Lestat’s eyes get so comically wide that Louis almost laughs. Lestat freezes for just a second, and then shakes himself and hands him the plywood. After that, something shifts.

What most people don’t realize about Lestat is that he loves to talk even more than Louis does. And once he starts to talk, he doesn’t stop. He tells daddy about the swing his old neighbors in Auvergne had, about how it had broken off one day while the boy next door had been on it, and would this one break off Mr. Du Lac? The boy had been jumping on it, maybe that’s why. What is this wood called? My brother, Pierre, once built a birdhouse with a similar looking wood.  

A whole month passes in this manner, with warm afternoons spent outdoors, at the end of which, they—or rather his father—have built not only a double swing, but also a slide, a hammock, and a small tree house which Gracie declares her very own fortress. Louis’ all but happy with that idea, given it’ll decrease the chances of Gracie messing up his own fortress and filling it with glitter and pink tents. 

When the treehouse is almost finished, daddy cleans his hands with a towel, and asks, “right then, what color we choosing?” 

Gracie, predictably, proposes they go with pink. Both Louis and Paul groan, but Lestat tilts his head and says, “I like pink,” which makes Gracie so delighted she starts jumping up and down with excitement. Louis looks at his father, a strange tension in the pit of his stomach, but daddy doesn’t comment on it, or say pink is for girls . He just says they’ll have to vote on it. Which is a problem, given that they’re two against two—daddy declares that it would be unethical of him to take sides and would her majesty, Mrs. De Pointe Du Lac share her wisdom with us common folk?  Momma just shakes her head from the back entrance, unable to temper the smile from her lips, and tells him he does too much and to not get her involved in his little projects.  Momma’s not been a big fan of said new multiple projects that make a mess out of the yard , but she does often bring them cold glasses of lemonade and loads of food and snacks even while she complains. In the end, they settle on doing a mix of both- pink, the main body of the structure, with green and blue frames. The door is painted bright white, and Gracie cannot stop admiring it, a toothy smile plastered on her face. 

“Thought tree houses were supposed to be in trees, Mr. Du Lac,” momma says, an eyebrow raising. 

Daddy looks back at the small house, nestled on the ground between two trees, rather than on top, like Louis often sees in movies. He looks back at momma, lays a hand at his heart, affronted. 

“This is a safety concert, Mrs. Du Lac, not a skill issue.”

“Mhm, I’m sure it ain’t,” momma says, which has daddy throwing back his head and laughing in a way he hasn’t in months. They bicker for some time, with momma arguing that he shouldn’t have started something he wasn’t sure how to build, and daddy telling her that if his great grandfathers could build this house, he can build a damn tree house. 

“Fortress!” Gracie exclaims, head popping out of the little door. 

“Fortress,” daddy corrects. 

When daddy offers momma a swing on the hammock, she laughs along, and then swats at him with a kitchen towel when he leans in close and whispers something in her ear.

On the last day, when everything is done and finished to a tee, Louis feels a mix of happiness and a sense of loss and sees it mirrored in Lestat’s face. Lestat rolls his head to the side to face him, eyes squinting against the brightness, sun kissed and lazy. “This is a good day, Louis,” he tells him, hair splayed over the grass where he lays by Louis’ side. 

Always the seer, the flash in Louis’ brain goes off—the bright rays of the sun warming his skin, the soft ticking of a sprinkler somewhere to his right, his parents, their soft whispers and laughs, the smell of the wine in their glasses, Paul and Gracie, careless and bickering by the freshly pink fortress. 

Lestat, ever present, by his side. 

This one is a salve for the dark days. 

When May arrives, Lestat disappears again, this time for much longer. With his departure, so too return the knots in Louis’ gut, the ever present fear. It’s a feeling he’ll get repeatedly acquainted with—life proving his worst fears correct. This time when Louis knocks on their door, Augustine opens it and tells him to go away or he’ll send him away. In the third week of his absence, a sense of frustration overpowers the fear, and fills Louis with a sense of determination and a newfound rebellion that has him doing something momma would ground him till the end of his life for. 

And maybe that’s part of it. It has its strange appeal these days, pushing against her, making her see him. 

Louis finds Mr. Lioncourt's car absent from its spot, and turns the door without knocking to find it open, and it's only dumb luck that he doesn't run into Augustine.

Louis has known Lestat for just over four years now, but he can count the number of times he’s been in his home. He can’t help but look around for a moment, marvel at how strange it is to know Lestat so well, and know nothing about his home. Well…almost nothing. 

To his surprise, he finds Mrs. Lioncourt laying on the couch. It’s a strange view, her in a long violet robe, half undone, her hair half splayed over a cushion, some stray strands in her face, one arm hanging off the side—dead to the world. Louis accidentally runs into a vase, watches it swivel and fall with bated breath, and thankfully not break. Mrs. Lioncourt doesn’t even stir. There's a bottle next to her, and this time, even at ten years old, Louis can put the pieces together just fine.  

He sneaks upstairs and to Lestat’s room. He considers barging in like he had the front door, but momma’s voice is still alive and present in his head, making a ruckus. There’s a limit, after all, to how deep against the grain he can go in a single day. So he knocks and waits. When he doesn’t hear anything on the other side, he whispers, “Lestat? It’s me.”

There’s the sound of some shuffling inside and then the door creaks slightly ajar. Lestat’s one eye goes wide through the crack.

“Louis?” he says, “what are you doing here?"

“Can I come in?”

Lestat hesitates for a moment, then opens the door fully and lets him in. And sure enough, Louis’ fears are proven correct. There’s a dark bruise on Lestat’s cheekbone, his neck, and his left arm is in a sling. This is the worst of what Louis has seen, and suddenly, he thinks— this is crazy. This is wrong. 

“What are you doing here?” Lestat asks, eyes looking anywhere but at Louis.

“Came to see you,”  Louis says, “you’ve been gone a while.”

When Lestat finally meets his eyes, Louis can’t help but think, there’s a bit of awe mixed in with the shame. 

“You came to check on me?” Lestat asks. 

“Les…” Louis starts and then, suddenly he finds that he is, in fact, very angry. He stands taller and says, “let’s go.”

"What?" 

Louis doesn’t have an answer. All he knows is that he wants to leave this place, and he needs Lestat to leave this place too. The walls feel like they’re closing in on him. Do they feel that way to Lestat?

“Let’s go," he says again. 

“Where?”

Louis paces. “I don’t know, come on.”

“I can’t Louis. You have to go.”

“No—”

“He’s gonna be back soon,” Lestat says, “please go, I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not!” Louis says, “your arm’s freakin’ broken.”

“It’s not, it’s…” Lestat gives his fingers a wiggle, “it’s just sprained.” He sits down on his bed. “I tripped on the stares.”

“Oh, come—”

“Louis, you have to leave,” Lestat says, this time with a bigger sense of urgency.

“I know you didn’t fall, Lestat—”

“He’ll be back soon,” Lestat says, “Please go. You’ll make it worse for me.”

And that…that’s what gives Louis pause. 

“I’m okay,” Lestat says again, “I promise, just go. Please. I’ll see you soon.” 

And Louis leaves. 

He lasts only a day. And then it happens at the dinner table, of all places. Gracie’s in the middle of trying to convince momma and daddy to let her sleep in her tree house, or so Louis thinks, half listening and half out of his mind. Louis just drops his fork and blurts it out. No warning, no preamble, it all comes pouring out of him like a flood, and he may as well have dropped a bomb at the table with how quiet the room gets as they all stare at Louis. 

It doesn’t take very long at all, and when the police and the social workers arrive, Louis can’t help but feel like he’s betrayed Lestat. Gone back on his word. 

Momma doesn’t let him leave his room, let alone go outside anywhere near the police or the social workers. Louis sits on his bed and feels the walls of his chest constrict, the air feeling lacking. Momma stands by his door, a distant look in her eyes that echoes back to when Louis was seven and she and daddy had sat him and Paul down and gave them a long, long talk about the police. And no matter how gentle daddy’s voice had sounded, it had left Louis terribly fatigued and much too small for the world. He feels too small for the world now too, microscopic.  

He expects there to be a big commotion, but the world outside his window sounds much the same. 

It all comes to nothing but heartbreak in the end, anyway.

He doesn’t see Lestat for the next six weeks. Every morning, on his walk to the bus stop, Louis stops by the Lioncourt house in hopes of catching some news, getting a hint, but there’s nothing, they’re just gone. What if he never sees him again? He wishes he’d planned for this. Some way to reach him. 

Then one day, Louis comes home from school to find Mrs. Lioncourt sitting in her usual spot on the porch. Louis freezes, locks eyes with her. He needs to ask her what’s happened, where Lestat is, but he finds that he can’t move. Louis looks and looks, but he finds no anger in her eyes. There’s only a hint of sadness that’s replaced the apathy, the usual emptiness. She snuffs out her cigarette in her ashtray, rises from her seat as though it’s a herculean task, and goes inside with no words between them. A week later, Louis comes home to find Lestat sitting on the backyard stairs, the bruise on his cheekbone gone, his hand in a brace, and his father’s car parked in its usual spot. 

It would take much more than this moment for Louis to learn, to truly understand, how the world really operated. That simply asking for help wasn’t enough in life. That the world was a battle to be won, a price to be conquered, and that saviors only existed in Paul’s storybooks. 

Louis drops his bag and runs to him, heart beating out of his chest. Lestat looks up at him, his Lioncourt blues glinting in the sunlight, and for a moment, all Louis can see is Pierre, sitting in his place, a cigarette hanging between slim fingers and a duffle bag by his side. 

“Lestat,” Louis says, out of breath, and he knows he’s upset with him before Lestat even speaks. 

“Was it you?” Lestat asks, “did you tell?” 

Louis looks down at his shoes and avoids his gaze. 

“I had to, Les.”

Lestat frowns, fidgets with the brace on his hand for a moment. “You promised me,” he says, “you promised you wouldn’t.” 

“Lestat, they were hurting you.”

“Best friends keep each other’s secrets.”

“I had to,” Louis says again. 

Lestat doesn't respond, so Louis takes a seat next to him. 

“What happened?” Louis asks. “Is it better now? Will he stop?”

Lestat just looks at him, doesn’t speak, just looks and looks, and no matter how hard he tries, Louis can’t figure out what he’s thinking. It’s a strange feeling, and so very rare, to look at him, and not be of the same mind with no words needed. 

“You really don’t understand, Louis,” Lestat says. He digs his good fingers into the ground, disturbed the dirt there, and muddies his fingernails in the process. 

“Lestat,” Louis says again, like somehow he can clear away this fog between them if he says it enough. This place isn’t a good one, where Louis can’t see him well. 

“I told you, I always end up back home.”

“But…” Louis starts, and then stops. Lestat is right, he doesn’t understand. How can it be that everything’s back to the same place it was before? When Louis has done the right thing, tried to help. “I wanted to help…” he says, voice feeling, and sounding small. 

“I know,” says Lestat, and lays his head in his arms. 

“It isn’t right,” Louis says again, feeling an anger grow in his chest that, as of late, has started to make a home there.

“I could have never seen my maman again because of you,” Lestat tells him, voice breaking. “She coulda been in trouble. She coulda gone away forever.”

Louis thinks back on her, lying prone on the couch, half dead to the world, and then he thinks of Lestat in his bedroom, bruised, arm in a sling and fear in his eyes, and frowns. But she always goes away, Louis wants to say. 

“But it’s wrong, Lestat,” he says instead, “she…she’s your momma, she should take care of you. I think she….she should walk you to the bus. And buy you a birthday present, and come to Open House, and open the door for you. She—”

“Shut up!” Lestat snaps, head popping up. He dries away the tears with the back of his good hand, but they’re just replaced by more. “You don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not her fault.” 

“But Lestat—” 

“You wanted them to take me away, is that it?” 

“What? of course not—”

“Then I wouldn't have to come to your stupid fortress or ever bother you again like I do—”

“You don't bother me, Lestat—”

“Yes I do! I always do!” Lestat says, voice breaking again. 

“That’s not true,” Louis says, his own throat feeling sore. Louis doesn’t have the words to explain the war in his mind, how to voice the indignation, the injustice he's feeling. He wants to shove his hand into his chest and bring them out, hold them in front of Lestat so he can see. “I just,” he says, standing and pacing in front of him, like maybe the words will come easier that way. He feels that anger again, and he can’t understand why Lestat won’t get it . “They shouldn’t hurt you, Lestat. It’s not right. It’s not right, they’re bad!” But that just makes Lestat cry even harder, shoulders shaking where he's crouched over. “My dad says you can’t hurt family, not if you love them—” 

And then, Louis may as well have flipped a switch, or physically hit him himself, because suddenly Lestat’s head pops up again, and the sadness in his eyes morphs and shifts, his jaw clenching, until there’s nothing left on his face but fury. 

“That’s stupid!” he screams, “you’re stupid!” Lestat stands, hands clenched into fists at his sides. “My mom loves me! She loves me, she loves me very much, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” 

“I didn’t mean—” Louis tries, but Lestat doesn’t hear him, doesn’t seem to hear anything at all anymore. He just keeps saying it over and over again, the tears endlessly streaming down his face, and he doesn't wipe them away anymore, like he’s not even aware of them. 

“You’re a bad friend, Louis! I wish I’d never met you! I hate you! I hate you!” Lestat screams and screams. Louis has never seen him like this before, this upset, this angry. 

And never at Louis . 

It feels as though Lestat is there one moment, and gone the next, because, suddenly, the boy in front of him doesn’t look like his best friend anymore, eyes gone all but dark. For a brief, gut-shattering moment, Louis thinks, he almost sounds like his father on those late nights he hears through his window.

“Lestat, I didn’t mean—” Louis tries again, but the words don’t reach him. Nothing reaches him. 

“I don’t ever wanna see you again, Louis!” Lestat tells him, “not ever!” 

“Well fine then!” Louis tells him right back. “If that’s what you want, we don’t have to be best friends anymore.” 

Lestat stares back at him, breaths coming in shallow. 

“Is that what you want?” Louis asks. 

Lestat sniffles and blinks at him, face wet and red, but doesn’t answer. 

“Is it?!” 

“Yes!” Lestat says, “that’s what I want.” 

“Fine, then.” Louis tells him, a strange mix of betrayal and resolve battling in his chest. 

This time, Louis keeps his word. 

Life falls into a sort of limbo for a while after that. Or, it’s more accurate to say, that it shifts drastically, as though Louis has moved somewhere else— a different house, a different street, a different bus stop, a different school. 

“You did the right thing,” daddy tells him, arm slung around his shoulder, seeing, as he always does, the thoughts and worries spinning in Louis’ head. “You tried to help your friend.” 

Louis doesn’t feel like he’s done the right thing at all. Nothing he does, nothing he is, feels right these days. It’s as though God has made him all wrong. When he says this to him, daddy frowns and tells him it isn’t true, that God loves him, has made him just right, and that, as long as he stays good at heart and works hard, he’ll be alright. 

This, deep into the throws of late, dark nights and empty bottles, is one of the things Louis will resent him for one day—his naivety, his optimism, his righteousness, his willingness to believe in right and wrong, in good and evil, and above all, for letting Louis believe it too, time and time again. Louis will spend endless nights thinking of legacy, of his father’s soft eyes, of his moral choices against an immoral world that would see him first before it knew him, and give back none of the good he gave. 

But not Louis. 

Louis will take his father’s lessons, his soft words and blessings, and hone them into jagged, sharp edges to wield against the world. Because there is only so far that virtue and even wealth can take you when you don’t have the right color of skin, the right amount of ruthlessness in your heart, and the stomach to take what’s yours.

The morning after their fight, Lestat meekly walks to the bus stop, hesitates for a moment, studies his shoes and then takes a seat next to Louis like he does every morning. He takes a deep breath and says, “Louis,” like he normally does, and waits, as always, for Louis to say, “good morning, Lestat.” 

And that’s the thing about him that Louis hasn’t yet learned—Lestat doesn’t know how to hold a grudge, or stay angry for too long. 

Not yet, at least.

And so, a day after professing his hate for him and swearing to never want to see Louis again, he goes out of his way to see him, to talk to him, and to look at him like a remorseful kicked puppy. 

But in the process of learning this fact about Lestat, Louis also learns one about himself. Namely, that he himself is quite proficient at keeping a grudge. That anger doesn’t feel all that unwelcome in his chest. That, in fact, sometimes holding on to it makes the moments hurt less. 

He gets a bad grade in class, and the anger eases the disappointment. Father Matthias says something in church that draws a fear from his heart, and the anger soothes it. Momma tells him she doesn’t like the way he walks, and Louis undoes the knots in his chest, the hurt, the confusion and replaces it with this new salve.

And so, when Lestat says, “Louis,” Louis says nothing. 

For the remainder of fifth grade, school becomes a chore that Louis embraces. He wakes, goes to the bus stop where he sits on one side of the bench, while Lestat sits on the other, says “Louis,” to deaf ears, and sends him tentative glances until the bus arrives, while Gracie and Paul stare back and forth between the two of them. Louis goes to class, does his schoolwork, goes home, does his homework, and then goes to bed. One morning, at the breakfast table, momma praises him for a job well done, and Louis doesn’t feel any of the warmth that he’s always expected to. There’s a different thing feeding him now. And so, every time Lestat tries to talk to him, Louis feeds his anger a little more, and after, it’s not at all difficult to ignore him, no matter how upset he looks.

At school, their little group is awkwardly split between them. Paul stays by Louis’ side while Leo stays by Lestat’s, though they both seem torn and unhappy with the turn of events. For the first few weeks, Lily looks like she’s debating splitting herself in two between them, until one day she gets so fed up that she lets them both know that they are immature children and not behaving like proper adults and that she will be spending her breaks with her new friend, Bri Williams instead, who is very mature. Louis wants to point out the fact that they are, in fact, not adults, and that he’d seen Bri giggling in science class when Miss Laurence had thought them about Ittibittium snails just two days ago. He thinks better of it, however, because Lily never listens once she’s made up her mind, and because Louis had also giggled at the name. 

For the first month, Lestat tries to make amends, to talk to him and every time Louis says, “no, thank you,” and turns his back. He’s only doing what Lestat has wished for, after all, he tells himself. And even if Lestat looks sad afterwards, Louis thinks, so what? What’s the use in doing the right thing anyway? This time, Louis will keep his word. 

“You just never gonna talk to him?” Paul asks one day at lunch after Lestat once again comes up to them and casually asks if they’d like to play dodgeball with them on the field. “No, thank you,” Louis replies, and so Paul frowns and says, “guess not”

“He doesn’t wanna be my friend,” Louis tells him, “he told me himself.”

“Don’t seem like it to me,” says Paul. Louis ignores him and eats his chocolate muffin. 

But even as the days pass by through gritted determination and a false stoicism that Louis will perfect in adulthood, nights are a different beast. 

Late at nights, Louis lays in his bed and wonders what Lestat is doing, if he ever managed to watch that scary movie Louis had recommended that was rated R, and that they never did finish that game of Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders, did they? Who would have won? Did Lestat get a good grade on that boring science project?  Louis had gotten a B. Lestat’s foam cell model had looked a bit messy during his presentation, but Louis had thought the mitochondria had looked cool because he’d used a little spring from inside a pen to make it. 

And, tensely and with great dread—he wonders if Lestat’s had any locked door nights. 

Some nights, Louis stares intently at the small door by his bookcase, at the little red and green jingle bells hanging off of the doorknob that remains in place at all times, regardless of season or holiday. His parents don't know this, but the bells have a string attached to them, a long one that goes on and on and on, into Louis’ fortress, and out the tiny slit of his closed window, to be pulled at need. 

But the bells never ring, rustle, or move, his room remains silent, and Lestat never shows. 

As the days pass, the finals are taken, and the school year comes closer to an end, the anger slowly tapers off, and the longer the bells remain unrung, the fortress seems to lose some of its magic. 

The thing is, Louis can’t stand the thought of starting middle school without Lestat by his side. The picture looks unnatural in his mind—school without Lestat, long summer afternoons and evenings without Lestat, the fortress without Lestat. His life without Lestat. 

But the last school day comes and goes, and nothing changes.

Lestat seems to receive his message, loud and clear, finally, because that morning, at the bus stop, he stands very far away from them. Doesn’t sit next to them on the bench, doesn’t say “Louis,” doesn’t try to joke with Gracie or Paul, just leans against the raised curb that’s been their morning playground for almost five years, and looks at his shoes. 

And Louis almost does it, almost walks right up to him and says, weren’t the finals hard? Wasn’t the thunder a little scary last month? Didn’t Mrs. Anderson look so very silly in that pink hat yesterday? Daddy bought me three new games, remember that one I wanted that I told you about, GeoSafari? I think Paul likes it more than I do though, and my gameboy suddenly stopped working last week and I think Gracie’s broken it, though she won't admit it and does your arm still hurt very much? You’d told me I was your best friend that day in the fortress, and don’t best friends sometimes fight? 

All the things that have piled and overfilled his mind in the last few months—thoughts, and ideas, and worries, and questions, the random trivia, the fun facts, the unimportant, and the important, all the things he’d usually pour out to Lestat, but that have gone unsaid and stuck inside him with nowhere to go. 

They lock eyes for just a moment, and Louis thinks, isn’t this silly? He takes a step, but then the bus arrives and the moment is gone. And the last school day, usually one filled with excitement and fun, more-so because it’s their last in elementary school—the yearbook messages, the pictures, the games—Louis spends sad and lonely. 

A few days later, Louis lays on the floorboards of the fortress and stares at the boards above. He turns his head and looks at the initials they’d carved, his and Paul’s and—after a very heated and tearful debate a year ago— Gracie’s. And then he turns his head to the other side, at the messy gashes left on the floorboard, there behind the cupboard, and sighs. And then, as though the fortress calls him, Louis hears the familiar sound of someone stepping over the crates outside, a sound he hasn’t heard in a long time, and then Lestat’s head pops up through the open window. 

“Louis,” he says.

Louis sits up. “Hello, Lestat.” 

“Hi,” Lestat says. 

They stare at one another for an awkwardly silent moment, blinking and not speaking, and then Lestat clears his throat. “Are you busy?”

“Kinda, yeah,” Louis lies, and then picks up the pen he’d dropped. Middle school is an important period of one’s life, and Louis must be prepared even before he attends, or so momma had told him and then assigned him a book to read and then report on. Louis’ been mostly doodling, in truth, so he turns the page upside down so Lestat can’t peek. 

“Oh,” says Lestat. He opens his mouth again like he’ll say something else, but then thinks better of it. “Okay, sorry,” he finally says, and turns to leave. 

“Lestat,” Louis calls, voice a little too desperate to his ears, but Lestat turns back in record time and waits expectantly. 

Louis clears his own throat. “Are you okay?” he asks. 

Lestat’s eyes are a bit wide as he nods. “Mhm, yes. You?”

“Yup.” 

“Good,” Lestat says, he drags his fingers over the bottom of the windowsill for a moment, watches the dust collect on his fingertips. “What are you writing?”

“Oh, it's um,” Louis gestures vaguely with his pen, “book report.”

Lestat's eyebrows furrow. “But we’re done with school.”

Louis sighs. “Momma told me to write one.”

“Oh.” 

There’s some awkward silence again, and when Louis opens his mouth to ask if maybe he’d like to come inside, whatever it is that’s clearly trying to burst out of Lestat finally makes it out. He’s never good with holding on to what’s inside him, Lestat. Louis often wonders what that’s like, how it is he does it, when Louis can’t seem to know how to let most things out.  

“Louis,” Lestat says, and then bites his lip again like he does when he’s nervous, or when he has something that he needs to tell Louis and can no longer contain himself. 

Louis has missed him very much. 

“I have a surprise,” Lestat announces. And it’s so far from what Louis had expected that it gives him pause. 

“Surprise?” 

“Hold on.”

And then Lestat climbs down and disappears. Louis blinks, the confusion momentarily overtaking his pride, and any other thought. And then, instead of Lestat, there is a set of ears popping up from the bottom of the window, floppy and brown, and then two beady wide eyes that look like little marbles, and a tiny face with so many folds on it's forehead that it looks to Louis a little bit like an old man. 

Louis’ mouth falls open. “Lestat!” he exclaims, standing, all else forgotten, because Lestat has in his hands a dog. Lestat’s head pops up next to it, a wide, toothy smile on his face. 

“Whose is that?”

“Mine!” Lestat exclaims.

“Liar.”

“I’m not lying, I swear. My mom got her for me!”

The dog sneezes her assent. 

They spend the rest of the day playing with her. She's a whiny little thing, but doesn’t bark very often and walks very awkwardly on her little legs. Her eyes are so dark that they look like charcoal, and she bumps into every single thing in the fortress. 

“What’s her name?” Louis asks. 

“Doesn’t have one.”

“What? Lestat, she needs a name.”

They debate on that for some time, but both come up blank. Eventually, Louis tentatively brings up his confusion at how Lestat’s father has allowed this and Lestat informs him that his dad’s "been nicer"  as of late, and that his momma had insisted. 

“All it cost was a sprained arm, and two foster homes,” Lestat jokes and laughs, though Louis doesn’t find it very funny. “It’s thanks to you,” Lestat says quietly, “if you hadn’t…”

Louis pets the dog’s head, her floppy ears and little furry folds, and avoids Lestat’s gaze. 

“I’m sorry Louis,” Lestat tells him. “I said- I was horrible to you. If you don’t wanna be best friends anymore, I’ll understand,” he says, and then looks down at the dog to hide the tears already welling in his eyes. 

“I mean…” Louis says, “I can’t play with the dog if we’re not best friends anymore, so…”

Lestat looks taken a back one moment, like it’s not at all the response he’d been expecting, and then throws back his head and laughs. 

Louis smiles. “And I’m sorry too,” he says, “for what I said. About um…your momma and…I'm sorry.” not knowing what else to say, Louis just trails off. 

They’re quiet for some time after, and yet, Louis finds that the fortress no longer seems silent. 

“Oh, and I’m sorry I called you stupid,” Lestat adds out of nowhere, “you’re not stupid, Louis, you’re very smart.” And, for some odd reason, that’s what does it for Louis, because, Lestat really is so ridiculous sometimes, isn't he? Louis doesn't understand how it's possible for him to know Lestat so well, and yet be surprsied by him so often. The laughter that bursts out of him is sudden and so hysterical that Lestat looks a little bewildered by it. He blinks at him with a blank expression, which just makes Louis laugh even harder. But, always in sync, Lestat eventually can’t help but join in, and the fortress is once again filled with their laughter. 

Louis has missed this feeling so very much, being here in this space with him and hearing their voices echo through the fortress walls like they’re meant to. It had felt so empty and lifeless in the months he hadn’t been here, and now, as though she’s aware that a wrong has been righted, she feels, once more, a bit otherworldly.  

It won’t be the last time CPS knocks on their door. A teacher will notice a bruise here, the school nurse will get suspicious there, another neighbor will hear the fighting and send for a wellness check. None of it will ever come to anything. And as sickening as it may be, it’ll become the norm for Louis as it has clearly, for a long time now, been for Lestat. 

I always end up back home , Lestat had told him, and Louis will learn, as the years pass and the world becomes clearer, just how much truth and power those words really held, just how terribly he had underestimated Mr. Lioncourt—the friends he held in all the right places, his cunning nature, his downright charm and charisma when the occasion called for it and benefited him personally. 

Louis will witness it on more occasion than one, how easily he’ll switch outside those doors, how he’ll smile and shake someone’s hand, and they—who don’t hear his true self through the walls, who’ll see the charming smile, the every-man calloused hands, and just the right skin color—will smile and think, what a well educated, hard-working, family man. Shame his son gives him so much grief. 

They spend most of the summer arguing about what to name the dog. Louis feels he’s taking it a lot more seriously than Lestat is, given the ridiculous slew of names he keeps coming up with, each of which Louis rejects, leaving the poor thing nameless. At some point, Lestat starts calling her ‘Dog’ and even suggests that they name her that. 

“Absolutely not”, Louis tells him. 

“Why not? It’s funny!”

Louis expects that, any day now, Lestat will stop and remind him that it’s, in fact, his dog and he should be the sole decider of her name, but he never does, he just rolls his eyes at Louis’ rebuttals, laughs at some of his chastising, and then says, “fine, fine, we’ll keep working on it.” 

And they do keep working on it, to no avail. Louis, appallingly, finds himself inadvertently calling her ‘Dog’ too and then feels guilty about it. 

Lestat just laughs.

“It’s not funny!” Louis tells him. “Imagine if someone just called you ‘Human.’ Would you like that?”

“I’d love that!” Lestat says, because he’s Lestat. “You know, there’s plenty of people named ‘Guy?” he declares and folds his arms like he's proven some point. 

“That’s ‘cus it’s originally German and means wood.”

Lestat lifts an eyebrow. “How on earth do you know that?” 

But before Louis can even say it, they both answer at once— “Paul.” 

Dog doesn’t receive a name until one late July afternoon when the sun is still beating down hard, and they’re on their third hour of trying to teach her basic commands. 

“Catch, Dog!” Louis tells her, and throws the toy. Dog blinks up at him, lets out a little huff, and doesn’t move from her spot. 

“Maybe I should teach her French,” Lestat suggests. 

Louis hums, pets her over the folds on her head and tries again. To no avail. Another half hour passes, and it feels more like Dog is training them than they are training her. “Dog is free and will take no commands!” Lestat proudly tells Louis as they dutifully cross the street to grab the toy themselves. 

It happens so fast that neither of them notice it, it seems. All Louis hears is Dog’s loud bark and then they both look up and see the car coming. It’s a close call, but they move away just in time, and watch the car drive off, soaring down the street at high speed. After they catch their breath, the adrenaline ebbing away, Louis leans over with his hands on his knees and looks down at Dog, at her marbly black eyes blinking up at him and her drooping, floppy jowls. “You know, I think you got some mojo, Dog,” Louis tells her. 

And then, it’s symbiotic, the way their heads turn to each other at once — “Mojo!” 

Chapter Text

“We should just skip,” Lestat proposes, balancing on the raised curb upon one leg. One of his shoelaces is untied, Louis tentatively watches it swing about with every step he takes, but Lestat seems to give it no mind.  

“It’s the last week, Lestat,” Louis reminds him again.

Lestat throws up his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Precisely why we should skip!” He teeters momentarily to the side, and then steadies himself with raised arms and goes on. “It’s just gonna be some boring lecture about how much more serious we have to get in high school and how we can’t mess around anymore, and bla and bla, and some more bla!”

Paul raises his head from its usual crane over his book and turns to Lestat. 

“I mean, they’re right, you know?” he says, “high school is important. It’s preparing you for college. You shouldn’t be messin’ around anymore.”

“Oh, Paul,” Lestat says, hand at his heart, skipping once on his trail, “that’s just something the teachers say to make you listen and behave.” 

It leaves Paul unconvinced, as always. 

When another five minutes passes with no sign of the bus, Louis starts considering it himself. Maybe they can skip the first two periods all together, go down to Josie’s diner for a bit and not have to listen to Miss Parham’s long speech about how important these last few assignments are, and that just because the school-year is ending doesn’t mean we get to be irresponsible and other such reprimands that go through the students’ one ear and out the other. 

It’s as though Lestat can see the wheels turning in his head because he stops by where Louis is leaning against the curb, nudges him on the shoulder with his knee and raises a questioning eyebrow, the side of his lip lifting in mischief. 

This look has gotten Louis into a lot of trouble over the years. And it isn’t that Louis is averse to some good trouble from time to time, but the last time they’d done this, momma had grounded him and locked the fortress, and that hadn’t been good for either Louis or Lestat. 

Louis doesn't bring this up. He just lets Lestat nudge his shoulder—again and again and again, because he’s annoying like that—and then half-heartedly swats him away and says, “let’s just wait a lil’ more.”

Lestat groans dramatically, head raising to the sky. “Boring!” he exclaims, “boring, boring, boring, boring–”  When Louis flips him off, the bastard just leans down and bites his fucking finger. He tries to skip away, almost trips over his untied shoelace, giving Louis just enough time to pinch him on the calf and make him squeal. Lestat gets one last boring! in but otherwise starts behaving.

It’s such a nice day too, Louis thinks, breathing in the fresh morning air. The hot humid summer has not taken New Orleans just yet. Louis closes his eyes, lifts his face towards the sky and lets the slight breeze caress his face, breathes in the familiarity of it. 

It’s home, every part of it: this air, this sky, this bus stop with its rusting bench, the spicy scent of the cornflowers that like to grow in the bushes lining the sidewalk, the rough and rugged surface of the raised curb against his back, the click-clacking of the charms on Gracie’s backpack as she fidgets around with a child’s restlessness, Paul’s sage voice as he reminds Lestat again of the importance of academia and Lestat’ part amused, part teasing one reminding him of the importance of having fun from time to time. 

Louis glances up at him, eyes roaming up his light denim-clad long legs, the white t-shirt, the sleeves of which he has slightly folded up, as he tends to these days, emulating the rockstars he’s become so obsessed with. 

Lestat has a way of getting into his head, introducing these wayward thoughts, letting them take root, so that now all Louis can think is that yes, it would be nice to skip class today wouldn’t it? Yes , Stroll down to Josie’s instead, get a nice, big breakfast, maybe some waffles—Louis had barely eaten at home in his haste to not miss the bus, in vain—and a free iced coffee if he can sweet talk Jane at the register. And it is the last week of middle school and maybe Paul is right that they’ll have to get more serious once they’re freshmen. 

Lestat must sense Louis’s eyes on him because he looks down, meets his gaze, that mischievous smile dancing at his lips again, and then crosses his eyes at him. Louis bites his lip to keep from laughing because that’ll just spur him on more. 

“We could go down to Josie’s,” Lestat whispers, conspiratorial, and there he goes, with his telepathy, sneaking into Louis’ brain again. That twists a few knots in Louis’ stomach, Lestat hearing his thoughts, makes him feel far too exposed, so he shakes his head and turns away.  

Still, he can’t help thinking, Paul will refuse to come, as always. Louis is certain. He’ll stop long enough to look at them with that disapproving frown that at times reminds Louis of momma, but the fact is, he’ll be able to make sure Gracie gets to her class just fine. And Louis’ daydreaming must take him too deep because all of a sudden the click-clacking of Gracie’ charms is coming from behind him and not from the bench. Louis turns back, feels a pressure in his temples build as he watches her balance on the curb a few steps away from Lestat. 

“Gracie, get down from there.” 

Gracie does that new thing where she pretends she doesn’t hear you and then has the audacity to turn around and start stepping towards the opposite direction. “Gracie ,” Louis repeats, “I know you hearin’ me.” 

Gracie finally turns around, arms raising with indignation in a manner that, Louis’ afraid to note, is starting to mimic Lestat’s tantrums a little bit. 

“Lestat’s doing it!” she protests. 

“Well, Lestat’s an idiot. Now get down.” 

And Louis might as well have paid him some sweet compliment with the way Lestat beams down at him, chin raised in pride and teeth glinting in the morning light. Has he always had dimples, Louis wonders, or is the sun hitting his face at just the right angle?

“I’mma tell momma you’re using foul hand gestures,” Gracie tells him, hands at her hips. 

“Well I’ll tell her you’re trying to get a concussion. Now get down.” 

“Louis, don’t be such a grouch,” Lestat says, “let Gracie and I enjoy— Oh!” he gasps, suddenly, looking down at his feet. “Oh. Oh no. Oh no, Gracie!” He puts his arms out and starts flailing about like, any minute now, the ground will give way under him or he’ll topple over, which alarms Gracie just enough to jump down and run up to him. 

“What!? What's wrong?” 

“Gracie, he was right, we should have listened to Louis! Oh I feel faint!” The theatrics continue for some time more, until finally he jumps down and falls dramatically, right there, on the concrete sidewalk. 

Gracie rolls her eyes. 

“You so did that on purpose.”

“Gracie, you have to carry me.” 

“Uh-uh,” Gracie shakes her head. 

Lestat groans mournfully, and then starts playing dead in earnest, tongue lolling out like a dead animal and all. That is, until the bus driver, having arrived mid performance, honks the horn so loudly that it has all of them jumping. 

“You think I got all day?” Mrs. Berry calls from the driver's seat, long accustomed to their antics. 

“Come on,” Paul says, and leads Gracie laughing and skipping towards the bus. 

Lestat just stays splayed out where he is. 

“Carry me, Louis,” he says, eyes squinting up against the sun, “I’ve died.” 

“I ain’t carryin’ you,” Louis tells him, trying and failing to suppress a laugh. “Come on, they’ll leave without us, don’t think she won’t do it.” 

Louis’ fairly certain that Mrs. Berry has a vendetta against the two of them ever since they jumped out of the moving bus that one time in seventh grade. In their defense, the bus had been in the process of stopping, barely in motion, really, and they had been testing out an important theory the details of which Louis can no longer recall. Predictably, Mrs. Berry had found their explanation entirely unamusing, unconvincing, downright irresponsible and maybe a little bit insane . 

Louis wishes he could say it had been Lestat’s idea but...he cannot. 

“Come on,” Louis says again. Lestat’s bright white T-shirt is all but surely ruined by now. Louis cringes, imagining the talking-to he’d receive from his momma if he ever did this, but Lestat doesn’t have an ounce of care for that in the world. Louis has never met someone who simultaneously loves dressing up, and whose level of care for his own belongings is in the negatives. 

You’ll have to clean it yourself! Louis wants to remind him, but Lestat will likely just wave it off and say something like, you have to live in the moment, Louis!  

“Lestat, I can’t carry you!” Louis picks up his hands, starts to pull him upward by the arms, but Lestat just keeps being dead weight, letting his head loll back like a puppet. “Jesus, quit—” and then suddenly, he comes alive just fine, bolts up, grabs his bag and then sprints towards the bus leaving Louis in the dust. Louis blinks and watches him take the seat by the window. When he meekly jumps on after him, Mrs. Berry narrows her eyes at him. 

“Next time, I’m driving away, young man,” she tells him, thick glasses low against her nose, “don’t think I won’t. I don’t have time for tomfoolery.” 

“Yes ma’am,” Louis says, and listens as the three traitors, who used to be his full-blooded siblings and best friend, snicker from their seats. Mrs. Berry doesn’t let it go on for too long, however, lifting her glasses against her nose and narrowing her eyes at Lestat. 

“I’m talking to you too, young man,” she tells him, voice stern. “You did good to sprint right by me like that, and that I got places to be today. Next time I’m leaving you on the sidewalk, understand?”

“Yes ma’am!” Lestat says, and then does a little salute that makes Mrs. Berry let out a weathered sigh. 

“Christ,” she mutters with a shake of her head. “Take a seat, Mr. Du Lac. Before your friend pulls something else.” 

Lestat is the face of innocence when Louis reaches his seat, terribly serious and straight-backed, hands resting mannerly in his lap, but the more Louis stares him down, the more the sides of his lips battle to stay still. When Louis socks him on the arm, the battle is lost. 

“Asshole.”

“Enough with the foul language and tomfoolery, young man,” Lestat mimics. 

“Next time you’re dead on the ground, I’m leavin’,” Louis informs him. 

“You’d never leave me behind, Louis” Lestat says, all easy and certain, and then nudges him with his shoulder so many times that Louis can’t help but drop the grimace. 

It’s the first day of June, and with the clear sky outside the windows of the bus, the just-perfect heat of the day, the excited chatter among the students dulls the part of Louis’ brain equipped for his responsibilities, for schoolwork, for seriousness…for pretending not to like Lestat’s silly pranks. 

That part usually carries momma’s voice, and it whispers even now—that there are assignments yet to be done, lessons still to pay attention to, younger siblings to watch after—but it is awfully quiet and weak. Louis’ chest feels tranquil and light, only stirred with the excitement of the last week of middle school—the anticipation of carefree summer days spent by cool waters, sleepless nights in the fortress with the breeze coming through the window, afternoons chasing after Mojo in the backyard, despite the ever present mixed soup of excitement-elation-anxiety that comes with the thought of starting high school. 

Louis lets the thought float through momentarily again, that, in less than a few months, his and Lestat’s trip will extend a block away from the middle school they’ve attended for three years, and they’ll step out as actual freshmen. 

High schoolers.

Paul’s been perfecting a nonchalant pretense about this fact, but in a moment of honesty a week ago, he’d complained that Louis and Lestat were 'leaving him behind'. 

“Least you’ll have Gracie with you now,” Louis had tried to reassure, but Paul had rolled his eyes and complained about babysitting duties extending to school now. 

To which Gracie had shrugged and said, “yeah, cus I’ll be babysitting you !” 

Louis leans his head back against the seat and lets the vibrations soothe him further. Anxiety over starting high school will surely find him soon enough, but the mood present in the bus now, an exhilarating and special aura that Louis has only ever found in the tail end of the school year, leaves no space for worries. 

Even Mrs. Berry’s foul mood does not last, as it never really does, and amidst the hubbub of the loud bus, Louis can hear her humming to herself. 

She’s a strict woman, Mrs. Berry. In those first years, she had made Louis slightly nervous, with her short temper and sharp words. But as the years had progressed, Louis had come to learn that the cold left no frost and that no matter how many times she threatened to complain to their parents if Louis and Lestat misbehaved again, she never kept to her word. 

One morning she had witnessed Lestat’s father snap at him irritably on his way to work and had gotten such a sour look on her face Louis had thought she’d have run him over. From time to time she’ll stop them, or some other student, lower her glasses to the tip of her nose and give them a look over, decide that they clearly haven’t eaten enough, take out a granola bar or an apple or a bag of M&M’s from her snack stash, toss it at them and dismiss them to their seat with an impatient wave. 

She’s always in a rush, Mrs. Berry, like she has somewhere real important to be at all times and she always has a bag full of snacks hidden in the storage compartment. 

Louis wonders if she feels it now too, this elation that’s infected the students, simmering in the air now. 

Even Lestat, for whom summer breaks don’t carry the same reprieve they do for others, shackle him more than they liberate him, seems to be afflicted with this elation, chattering away cheerfully by his side. 

“One more year and I can get a job,” he’s telling Louis. He’s been talking about this for a month now, this sudden desire for employment. “I can start saving up,” he says, “and maybe my mom and I can move. Not far,” he adds with a nudge. Louis nods, listens and does not bring up the fact that Gabrielle hasn’t been home in a month. Louis never brings up Gabrielle. 

“Look,” Lestat tells him, poking him on the side and nodding towards the back of the bus. 

Louis turns…and sighs. 

Paul has his neck craned down, head in his book again, which wouldn’t be an anomaly, or a problem if it weren’t for the fact that Louis knows he isn’t actually reading. Hands clasped at the edges of the book like his life depends on it, Paul’s eyes remain unblinking from the page before him. 

“He hasn’t turned the page since we’ve sat down,” Lestat whispers, and Louis doesn’t need the confirmation. Of course Paul isn’t reading. He’s too busy trying to avoid Lily’s gaze, who sits on the opposite side, as always, chattering away with Bri. Now and then, for as much as his head remains statuesque, Louis can see his eyelids flutter to the left in a desperate attempt to sneak glances at her. When it happens again, Louis can’t help but huff out a laugh, Lestat fully turning around to keep a firm hold onto his own. Louis shakes his head, feels his chest warm up a bit, at the way Paul bites his lip, bounces his knee in that rhythm Louis knows better than his own heartbeat. 

The thing is, Louis knows Paul, knows him completely, utterly, knows him in that way that only older brothers can know their little brothers. There must be a special word for that, Louis thinks, something that can only be achieved by watching someone grow up right before you, and growing alongside them. 

Sometimes, Louis thinks he knows Paul better than Paul knows himself. Louis has known him longer, after all, than Paul has known himself. Louis has seen him take his first steps, seen how his fear of spiders developed, caught the light in his eyes when he’d taken his first clumsy, messy bite of a persimmon and discovered a lifelong love for it, witnessed how he got that slight scar at the very edge of his chin that no one else seems to notice. And so, no matter how much Paul may deny it, Louis knows what the look in his eyes means when he catches Lily’s eyes, can hear the thoughts bouncing around in his head. 

It has become quite obvious, in all fairness, this frankly adorable crush that Paul’s developed in the last few months. Lestat’s been trying to pry it out of him for just as long, been offering his services in helping woo her, but Paul has been adamantly denying all of it. 

“Should we help?” Lestat asks yet again, “I feel like we should help.” 

“Don’t get involved,” Louis warns, “you know he won’t like that.”

“Mmm,” Lestat hums. “It won’t work anyway, she’s more interested in someone else,” he says, nudging him with an elbow. 

Louis rolls his eyes. Not this again. 

“Stop,” Louis tells him, irritation growing. “She does not like me.”

“Does too.”

“Lestat .”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Well, don’t.” 

Lestat mimics zipping up his lips with his fingers, which has never once actually led to him shutting up in the eight years he’s known him. 

Louis sighs. Two months ago, Lestat had come to the grand conclusion that Lily had 'a giant crush' on Louis, and that Louis was blind for not seeing it. Louis has dismissed it for just as long, but Lestat has refused to let it go. 

But then, as of late, it seems to Louis, that not a day goes by that Lestat isn’t telling him about a girl he’s fallen in love with. 

First there’s Anna from English class, with whom Lestat gets assigned to write a book report with, and then spends a week gushing to Louis about. About her eyes and her legs and all the other parts that Louis catches him staring at. Even about her long, waist length hair that she keeps in two pony-tails at all times, despite how absolutely childish and downright ridiculous they make her look. 

Then there’s Jasmine from PE, with her long eyelashes that she spends almost a month batting at Lestat, a finger twirling in her hair, giggles echoing through the gymnasium as Lestat tells her joke after joke in between sit ups. 

Then there’s Annete, and Jane, and Isaura, and for a full month, Bri, whose rejection Lestat takes terribly hard. 

But then, there are the questions that follow: who does Louis like? Lily? She definitely has a crush on you, Louis. Do you want me to ask her? Irene from Geometry was looking at you with hearts in her eyes all last week, I'm telling you. Should I ask Isaura about her friend Doris? Or Isaura herself?! Don’t worry, Louis, I’ve fallen out of love with her completely. 

Louis looks back at Lily and takes her in. She has her hair in a high, tight ponytail today, which she has braided and falling over one shoulder. She’s very pretty, Lily, her lips are pretty, her eyelashes are long and dark, and Louis always likes how she smiles. What is it that Lestat always says when he talks about his crushes? That they make his heart beat faster and that he gets nervous and flustered around them? 

Louis looks at Lily and tries to figure out if he’s ever felt that way around her. He must just not have a crush on her, or maybe it’s that he’s known her all his life and doesn’t know how to see her like a girl. She’s like family, Lily, and girls in your family aren’t really girls in the same way others are. 

He looks at Bri, sitting in front of her—pretty eyes, pretty nose, pretty lips and hair. Louis’ heart doesn’t flutter for her either. He looks back at Lily, her finger twirling the tip of her long braid, and when she catches his eyes, she smiles and waves. 

“Hey Louis!” she calls, eyes bright and sun glinting against the crystal pendant around her neck. Louis smiles and returns her wave, and Lily’s smile widens.

“Told you,” Lestat says, breath hot against his ear, making him jump. Louis turns back to him, rolls his eyes at the shit-eating grin on his face. When Lestat doesn’t quit, Louis raises his own fingers to Lestat’s lips and mimics the same zipping motion he’d done earlier. It doesn't achieve the right effect, because Lestat just licks his fingers and then cackles when Louis wipes his hand on his white t-shirt. 

“Gross,” Louis tells him, and Lestat smiles wider, those dimples forming on his cheeks again. 

The sun is beaming bright through the window at Lestat’s side, casting one side of his profile in brightness and leaving his hair a glistening gold. It’s longer than it's ever been, and Lestat has made it known that he has no intentions of ever cutting it. His father finds it unsuitable for a man and absolutely loathes it, and Louis thinks that’s part of the appeal. A big part, if not the main reason. There’s not much Lestat seems to enjoy these days more than pissing his father off. To a worrying degree. Though, lately, it seems to Louis, that there isn’t much that Lestat doesn’t enjoy and that the smile is rarely ever absent from his face. 

It’s a part of Lestat’s nature that’ll never come easily to Louis. So foreign, so ill-fitting, this optimism. 

Often, in these soft days, and in the hard ones, Lestat will stop, turn to him and say, Louis, this is a good day! and Louis will wonder how it is that he knows. Louis can’t ever seem to recognize a good day until it’s long passed, a flimsy, yellowing polaroid in his mind. 

If only life came with warnings— brace yourself firm, the brink approaches! Or, let the knots in your stomach loosen, feel the soft breeze against your skin before it’s gone! 

He laughs so easily, Lestat, and cries easily too, and doesn’t seem to feel an ounce of self consciousness about doing either. A month ago, he’d noticed a bird's nest outside the window of his math class, and come close to tears telling Louis about it later at lunchtime. Louis can’t think of anyone who would do that and not be embarrassed by it.

And that’s another marvel, how easily the emotions leave him and how natural it is for them to do so. It’s as though there isn’t enough space inside him to bear them all, hold them all in, and so naturally, they must come out. Like the rocks that seem to be lodged in Louis’ throat, the cage he’s built in his diaphragm, are all but absent from him. 

It’s why it’ll be so easy for Louis to miss—the tell-tale signs, those life altering changes—when Lestat learns, finally, to keep his eyes dry, his words unsaid and his insides locked away in their own cage, fortified and foreign.

He’s telling Louis something about that rock band that he’s become obsessed with—Louis has forgotten the name again and doesn't have the heart to ask—and about how he wants to learn the guitar and if maybe there’s a way he can borrow one from the school if he takes it as an elective. He keeps biting his bottom lip, leaving it chapped and red—not in the way he does when he’s nervous, but rather when he’s so excited about something that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. 

“Louis?”

“Hm? What’d you say?”

“I asked if I could practice in the fortress?”

“Oh, yeah sure.” 

Lestat grins dreamily, leans his head back against the seat, “that’s if I can find a guitar, that is. I hope they’ll provide one.” He taps his fingers over his knee, a habit he’s picked up as of late. “They will, won’t they? I feel like they will.”

Louis has no idea, but he says, “probably, yeah,” and watches his smile widen. Lestat taps a drum with his fingers against the backrest of the front seat like they’re drums, ever restless and ready to soar off, and then seems to think of something and turns back to him. 

“Louis,” he says. 

“What?” 

Lestat bites his lip, and there’s that look again that gets Louis in trouble. He leans in and whispers, “or , maybe I can snag one from the auditorium. With your help, of course.”

“Definitely not with my help,” Louis tells him. 

Lestat’s mouth drops open, affront painted over his face. “Louis, you’d let me go down alone?”

“Oh, I’d push you down if you got me in trouble the first week of high school.” 

That makes Lestat throw back his head and laugh, full bellied and loud, one hand clutched at his chest and the other Louis’ shoulder and… Louis is faced with it again. These strange episodes he’s been having as of late, that he can neither name nor make sense of. 

He looks at Lestat, at his eyes squinting with laughter, cheeks red from it, and it floods him again, this notion that he’s seeing Lestat for the very first time. 

It happened first two months ago, on an unremarkable spring afternoon lazing around in the fortress. Paul perched by the window doing his homework, Louis cross legged on the mattress pretending to be doing his and Lestat splayed out on the floor trying dutifully to distract them. 

He’d started finger drumming again, first half heartedly against his thigh and then more confidently against the floorboards, this time not some song he’d taken a fancy to, but a tune he’d come up with himself. Louis knew this because Lestat wouldn’t stop narrating that he was doing just that no matter how many times Paul reminded him that his notebook lay blank and forgotten at his side, and the due date was looming. 

It had been monotonous, all of it, regular, familiar, until Gracie had unceremoniously barged in, stood before them with her hands at her hips, her eyebrows raised. They’d all perked up then, even Lestat sitting up from his sprawl and Paul putting his notebook aside. When Gracie had just stared expectantly—irritation clear on her face— they’d exchanged confused glances. 

Met with more silence, Louis had finally asked, “what?” 

“Where is it?” Gracie had demanded, finger pointing at each of them in pursuit of some culprit. 

“Where’s what?”

“My Barbie microphone, that’s what!”

“How the hell should we know?” Paul had asked.

“Language!” Gracie had told him, scarily close to the tone momma would have used. “I can’t find it. I looked everywhere.”

“Well, we didn’t take it.”

“Liar.”

“Gracie, none of us want your stupid Barbie—”

“You have a microphone?!” Lestat had cut in, sitting up fully now, a glint in his eyes that dimmed a little when Gracie’s accusatory stare turned to him. 

“I didn’t take it!” he’d amended. “But,” he’d said, standing, “I would love to help you find it. And use it, if you let me.”

And then it had been Gracie’s turn to be confused. Growing up with two older brothers had meant being shown no interest or care for her games, her toys, some in truth, some, Louis would later admit to himself, pretense on his part. And here Lestat was, wanting to play with her pink Barbie microphone. 

Anger and accusations forgotten, they’d made haste in trying to find the thing, mostly because Lestat wouldn't let them be, physically pulling Louis off the mattress and tossing his notebook aside and blabbering about the songs they could try out. 

They’d ended up finding it in a hidden nook of Gracie’s tree house that had made her bite her lip in embarrassment, which had also quickly passed once Lestat had turned the thing on and started belting out some Nirvana song at the top of his lungs. 

Right there, in their backyard. 

She and Gracie had gone back and forth on their opinions of the songs that were already on the microphone cartridge, and Lestat had gone on an inspirational spiel about how they didn’t have to stick to the songs on it and that they could choose their own.  

“Your turn!” Lestat had said at one point and then shoved the microphone into Louis’ hands, sitting down in the grass cross-legged and looking up at him expectantly. 

And it was an infectious thing even then, Lestat’s excitement, a freeing thing that made Louis’ limbs looser than anything else in the world. Louis had looked at him and hadn’t been quick enough to stop the thoughts in his head from forming, the options floating through, the possible songs to choose from, and he’d thought, so what if people might hear? So what if this thing is for girls, it could be fun! 

But just as he’d lifted the meshed head to his mouth, his eyes had caught it, the soft purple and pink of the hydrangeas in their large white vase that momma had placed right there by the windowsill, delicate and bright in the sunshine beaming through the opened window. And then he’d passed the microphone off into Paul’s hands like a hot potato. 

“Boo!” Lestat had called. “Paul, show him how it’s done.”

Paul had sighed. He’d simply lifted an eyebrow, looked around at all of them, and then declared, “I don’t want to sing.”

But the thing is…

The thing is, he hadn’t flung the microphone like a hot potato the way Louis had. He’d simply placed it down in the grass, gentle and secure, as he always was, and Louis had looked at it, this pink thing against the green of the grass, eyes glazing over. 

And then, Gracie had turned to Paul casually and said, “well, that’s good, cus you sound like shit.” 

And that’s when it had happened. 

Lestat had gasped, mouth falling open, aghast like some cartoon character, and then he’d thrown back his head and laughed, and laughed and laughed. 

He’d laughed so hard that he’d gone plopping backward, hair spreading over the grass, eyes squinting, hand at his chest, and time had paused a bit, or maybe it was Louis who had paused, or his eyes had glazed over like they had on the pink microphone and he’d felt suddenly out of sorts, off balance. Because he’d looked at Lestat, his best friend of nearly eight long years, and felt, suddenly, as though he was looking at a stranger. 

And Louis had really looked. At this strange boy, at his long legs in familiar worn out light denim with a bleach mark on the right hem, the gray of the Nirvana T-shirt he wore so often, at his oddly long fingers clutching at his chest, the gold of his hair against grass-green, a patch of which on the left there Louis knew, for some odd reason, frizzed more than the rest. And he’d thought, maybe that’s what happens when you’ve known someone so well and for so long, that there’s no way forward but back to the very start, seeing them anew, in a different light. 

Like a home appliance, or a grandfather clock that’s laid in the living room for so long, chimed into the ears of so many generations that it’s blurred into the background, melded with the very walls of the place, until one day some young thing stops, looks up and thinks, it’s not quite burgundy, and the numbers are golden-crested rather than copper, and it has scratches here and there, and just now its ticks are more piercing, louder than a canary. Has it always been so?

And so when Lestat’s laugh melds with the racket in the crowded bus, Louis thinks, this isn’t new . Lestat laughs as he always has, is the same as he’s always been, and yet, he seems wholly new to Louis—his laugh, the way he talks, the way he sits, or rather can’t sit still, how he always gesticulates with his hands when he’s really excited, or tilts his head all Mojo-like from side to side when he’s thinking something through or confused. How he puts his hand on Louis’ shoulder now and shakes him in the throws of his own laughter. And Louis thinks again— has he always done that?  

“Maybe I’ll save up for it,” Lestat says once he’s calmed down.

“Hm?” 

“For a guitar,” he says, digging around in his bag. “You even listening?” 

“Yeah,” Louis says, “guitar.” 

Lestat sighs. “One more year, and I can get a job,” he says again. 

He takes out his water bottle, twists off the cap, the rays of the sun meeting the contents and painting a rainbow against his skin. He takes a long sip, gulps down half of its contents, his Adam's apple bobbing with every swallow and when he lowers it, he leaves a droplet on his bottom lip that glistens when the sun hits it. 

“How much you think they cost?” he asks, licking it away.

“Hm?”

“Guitars,” Lestat repeats, “how much do you think they cost?”

“I don’t know,” Louis says, rubbing his palms against his jeans. “Where do you wanna work?” 

Lestat chuckles. “Shit, wherever’ll take me.”

Louis pushes at the handle underneath the patio table and propels his chair back, feels the heat of the sun against his face, and then lets the chair fall forward again. It makes him think of one of those rocking chairs Grandpa Arthur used to have that had made daddy too sad to keep around. He’d joked that he was no old man and didn’t need a thing like it, but lately Louis had been pondering that, on what adults said and what they actually meant. 

He sighs, peeks at his book for a few more minutes and then pushes it aside when he reads the same sentence three times in a row. Momma’s gone back inside anyway. He pushes his chair back again and squints up into the sun, squeezes his eyes closed and watches the stars flash and dance behind his eyelids.

Summer’s coming to an end, and the heat is reaching its peak. Any minute now, Louis knows, momma will insist they go inside, or open the patio umbrella to hide them under its shade, so Louis savors it, the rays beating against his skin. When he feels Mojo’s soft fur against his hand, he peeks down, lets her lay her snout against his thigh and glance up at him with pleading eyes. Louis pets the soft fur on her head. 

“You’ve already had three, Mojo,” he tells her. When she lets out a sorrowful whine, Louis sighs, and as always, yields. He likes to make fun of Lestat for being a pushover, for being wrapped around Mojo’s little paws, but Louis’ not immune either. He ignores Lestat’s pointedly raised eyebrow. 

“One more and that’s it,” he tells Mojo, her tail already wagging. Louis throws a slice of cheese from the snack bowl and watches Mojo vacuum it up instantly. 

“And I’m the pushover,” Lestat mutters, but before Louis can defend himself, Paul places his book down and says, “You both are.” 

And ain’t that just rich? Paul’s just as guilty, if not more. 

“Like you got any place to talk,” Louis tells him. 

Before Paul can dignify that with a response, the sliding doors open, and out comes momma, a large tray of sliced persimmons in hand. Louis feels it before he sees it, the absence of weight and soft fur in his lap. A blur of motion, as Mojo zooms towards momma, tail wagging excitedly. Momma raises the tray away from her excited sniffs, but doesn’t move fast enough to avoid the soft licks on her ankle and the paws against her skirt. Lestat is up next, as fast as Mojo. 

“Mojo, down!” he calls. Mojo turns her wet marble eyes at him and whines sadly. 

“Mojo,” Lestat warns again. 

Mojo lets out an almost-there, soft, but indignant bark, then complies and sadly trots back away from momma, tail between her legs. Momma takes a breath, and brushes her skirt with one hand where Mojo has left her paw prints. 

“I’m sorry Mrs. Du Lac,” Lestat says, and looks it, “I can take her back if you—” 

“It’s fine,” momma says, setting down the tray on the table. “Long as she stays outside,” she adds, sending Lestat a pointed look before heading back, Mojo’s head following her movement, jowls swaying sadly.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Lestat calls, and then looks down at Mojo. “We talked about this, Mojo,” he tells her, to which Mojo replies with a much bolder bark. Lestat gasps, aghast at her newfound attitude and starts explaining to her the errors of her ways. Lestat does this a lot, talks to Mojo like she speaks fluent English and then switches to French when he really wants to reprimand her. 

Every time Louis makes fun of him for it, Lestat brings up the times Louis has done the same, so Louis keeps quiet now. 

The backyard is still a mess from Gracie’s birthday party two days ago. Louis can’t stop finding confetti everywhere—the kitchen, the living room, his bedroom, on himself, and even the fortress. There’s still a giant helium balloon attached to Gracie’s treehouse with a purple mermaid on it and a bunch of confetti inside, but it’s levitating in a sorry height now and starting to wrinkle.  

“Maybe I should take her home,” Lestat says again. 

“I told you, it’s fine,” Louis reassures. “She doesn’t actually mind.” 

Momma has never been a fan of pets, had made that fact very clear when Louis had been five and begging for a dog. And so, Louis wasn’t surprised when momma had set up strict rules the moment Lestat had been gifted Mojo. Namely that Mojo was not allowed anywhere near the house or her. 

That rule had slowly changed to— Mojo is allowed in the front yard to, Mojo is allowed in the backyard also to,

Mojo can come inside for a few minutes if Lestat cleans off her paws very, very well , to, I’ll just go ahead and get Mojo a little bowl to eat while we’re eating outdoors, it’s only fair. 

Momma won’t admit it, but Louis can see right through her. She likes Mojo. Which makes sense, because Mojo is a very good girl and impossible not to like. 

“Saw her petting her just the other day,” Louis whispers.

“No way.”

“I’m telling you.”

“It’s true,” Paul reassurances from across the table. 

Lestat looks slightly relieved, but not completely. 

“Stay good,” he tells Mojo and leads her to sit underneath the patio table. Mojo lets out a big sigh that’s very un-dog-like but very Mojo-like, lays her head on her paws and does as she’s told. Lestat gives her one last rewarding boop on the head, then dutifully sits back down in Gracie’s tiny pink chair. Gracie rubs her hands together like a tiny evil scientist and gets back to work. 

The work of making Lestat look absolutely fucking ridiculous, and not only because of the tiny chair that even Gracie has outgrown. 

Two months ago, Gracie had visited a friend whose momma had happened to be a hairdresser. Ever since that day, she’s been talking their ears off—and threatening their hair—about wanting to be a hairdresser too, and that she must start practicing now if she is to be successful, isn’t that what you always say, momma?  

It hadn’t helped the matter at all when daddy had gifted her with a whole set of tools for her birthday—various brushes and clips and products—even if they were mostly toys.

Her latest victim is Lestat, who had made the very, very naive mistake of answering “of course!” when Gracie had asked if he’d like her to do his hair.

“I’m almost done,” Gracie informs him. 

She informed him once again twenty minutes later. 

“You going to let that boy be already?” momma asks from the sliding doors when she hears Lestat wince for the third time. 

“Momma, he doesn’t mind. Do you Lestat?” 

“No, Gracie,” Lestat says, and then winces again when Gracie places a pin tight against his scalp. Momma sighs, then goes back to sorting through her endless stack of work papers. 

“I’m almost done,” Gracie says again. 

“You been done for an hour now,” Paul reminds her. Gracie pauses long enough to send him a narrow-eyed death glare and then gets back to work. 

Louis’ not sure what exactly it is she’s attempting, let alone almost being done with, but Lestat’s hair is completely flat at the top from how much she's brushed it, and standing up on ends at the sides. It’s starting to look more and more like an easter basket. When Louis tells him so, Gracie looks like she’ll throw the brush at his head, and Lestat has to purse his lips tight to keep them still. Louis knows he’s close to cracking. When Paul tells him that he looks like Arnold from Hey Arnold! and better yet, more like Helga from Hey Arnold! the battle is lost. 

“Shut up, Paul. It isn’t done yet!” 

“I’m sure it looks fine, Gracie, don’t listen to them,” Lestat tells her, barely getting back his composure.  

“I’m almost done,” she tells him again. 

When she, at last, is done, Lestat looks into the mirror and blinks. “It’s very nice,” he says, “thank you.”

Paul almost spits out his water with how hard he laughs. Louis rises from his seat hurriedly. 

“Hold on, do not move.”

“Louis, no,” Lestat warns, predicting, as always, where Louis’ mind has taken him. 

Louis hurries in through the sliding doors, waves off momma’s warnings not to run indoors and sprints to his bedroom. He opens his desk drawer with clumsy, excited hands, rummages through until he finds it. 

Grandpa Arthur's belongings had sat around in their boxes in the garage for two whole years before daddy had so much as glanced their way, but when the time had finally come, he hadn’t even hesitated. An heir apparent, he had joked, as he’d handed Louis the camera. He’d made it seem so simple, grandpa Arthur, yet Louis’ only just starting to get the hang of the thing. 

Lestat, despite his initial hesitation and always delighted at the opportunity, strikes a pose when Louis lifts the camera to his eye. Louis takes out the polaroid from the slit, shakes it, and carefully places it on the table. Lestat flips his hair, at least the part that Gracie has left falling over one shoulder, and asks, “need more? I can try a different pose.”   

Louis rolls his eyes and sits back to really admire Gracie’s creation. Lestat looks absolutely ridiculous, and also terribly happy about it. 

“Do you really like it?” Gracie asks Lestat. 

“Gracie, this is the best I’ve ever looked.” 

“Won’t argue with that,” Louis says, and Lestat has to just sit there and take it. 

When the back door slides open again and daddy steps out, a series of expressions cross his face. Louis sees the progression in real time, how his eyes roam around, take them in and then do a double take on Lestat. 

“Oh my,” daddy blurts out.

“Is it bad, daddy?” Gracie asks, lips pouting already. 

Daddy succeeds in reigning in his own reaction very quickly. 

“Bad? Now who told you it’s bad? Tell me and I’ll deal with them.” 

Gracie turns accusatory eyes at her brothers. 

“That true?” daddy asks them. “You messin’ with my baby girl?” 

Lestat narrows his eyes at them too and then tells Gracie that it is, in fact, impossible to make Lestat look bad, so Gracie doesn’t have to worry at all.

Gracie folds her arms in front of her, then goes to stand in front of Lestat like she’s in a museum admiring a statue. She lays a finger on her chin, takes a moment to really look at Lestat, analyze her work. And then she bites her lip, her eyes filling with tears, her face falling. She takes a mournful breath. 

“No it’s not impossible,” she says miserably, “you look horrible Lestat!” she wails, and then she turns back to them, “it’s cus ya’ll kept distracting me!” 

Which is what pushes Paul over the edge, the laughter bursting out of him, and… Louis doesn’t do well when Paul laughs, not at all, so he can’t help but follow suit, because really, he can’t look at Lestat for more than a moment and keep a straight face. 

The laughter is loud and short-lived, however, because Gracie pinches him so hard on the shoulder that his own eyes burn with tears. She scowls at them, and then storms off to her treehouse. 

“Gracie, come back, I’m sorry!” Louis calls, trying to catch his breath.

Daddy gives them the we’re gonna talk about this later look, then follows Gracie, crouching down, hand at his ever increasingly aching back and fits himself into her Castle. 

It takes some time, but they make their amends—mostly daddy convinces her to come out and gives a long speech about mistakes being part of the journey to success, or something to that effect, and reprimands the two of them for not being supportive brothers. When momma joins them, she takes a moment to also give them a talking to about being better older brothers and tells Gracie they’ll get her a hairdressing mannequin head to practice on instead of bothering everyone. 

They laze away the afternoon that way, much like they will the rest of this sweet summer. When the sun begins to set, the sky takes on a pink hue and makes the moment a bit dream-like. But this one won’t remain just a snapshot in Louis’ mind. Grandpa Arthur’s polaroid sees more use this one day, Louis thinks, than in all its days in Louis’ possession. 

These moments through rose tinted glasses in every sense of the word; Lestat with his ridiculous hair, Paul munching away at his persimmons, no worried furrow etching his forehead, nothing but the present in his eyes, Gracie sat in front of a small mirror, meddling with her own hair now, his parents immersed in the peace they find in each other, Mojo trying to sneak a piece of persimmon out of Paul’s plate. 

Louis has the sudden Lestat-like urge to turn to them all and say, this is a good day! 

Because it is. The best of days. 

But Louis must have been born with it, this dread, this deep knowing in his gut, that soft things are impermanent, fragile. That if he allows it, happiness can make a home in his chest so grand, so vast that it leaves a canyon in its inevitable departure. 

So Louis doesn’t turn to them, he doesn’t say it, he doesn’t think it. 

And, perhaps, that’s a blessing of its own kind.

Louis balances his backpack on an awkwardly raised knee and opens the zipper. 

“Shit,” he mutters, “got a little wet.” 

He takes out the biology book, assesses the damage, thankfully minimal. 

“Louis,” Lestat complains mournfully, “the books are the least of our worries. My new jacket is completely ruined.” To which all Louis can do is roll his eyes. In fairness, Lestat’s jacket is soaking wet, along with the rest of him. He took way more damage on their sprint towards the bleachers. Louis had been smart enough to wear a hat, but the rain has left Lestat’s hair plastered on his scalp. He looks a little like a sad, wet rat. Louis tells him so, and yelps when Lestat pinches him on the shoulder for it. Louis pinches him right back, and then Lestat punches his arm and then they scuffle for a bit until Lestat fucking licks his elbow. 

“Disgusting,” Louis tells him with a shove, to which Lestat grins like a maniac. The smile dims a little when he remembers his soaked jean jacket.
“Brand new,” Lestat says, and bemoans his bad luck. 

“Lestat, it’s gonna dry.” 

“Not by the time we get back to class. Jenny is in my class, Louis” he reminds, again, as though Louis would have forgotten from twenty minutes ago when Lestat had said it, or from this morning or from any point in the past three weeks. 

Jenny is the newest crush—a very hot senior with big breasts, and a bigger boyfriend. 

“First impressions are important.”

“It’s the third week, Lestat. She’s seen you fifteen times already.”

“Fourteen,” Lestat corrects, “she was absent last Tuesday.”

“Of course, sorry I don’t remember her every–”

“And first impressions take time. It’s not just one–”

“–single thing about her.”

“–time.”

Lestat narrows his eyes at him, so Louis narrows his right back. 

“This rain keeps ruining everything,” Lestat says, looking up at the sky in disgust. 

He’s not exactly wrong, Louis can admit. High school had started out less with a bang and more with a whine.  It had rained so hard on the first day that everyone’s clothes were completely ruined, a crushing blow to a school full of teenagers who had placed hours of preparation on their first outfits, their first impressions the night before. It hasn’t been much better since. 

They take refuge under the bleachers for some time more, not yet quite acquainted with the inner workings of this school. There’s a giant quad with outdoor lunch tables scattered nearby, but they’ve barely gotten the chance to see it because of the rain, let alone figure out where they can sit, what places might already be taken, where they’ll be welcome. Louis sighs. 

Lestat spends another five minutes complaining, but then halfway through their lunch break comes to the conclusion that the jacket, in fact, looks far better wet anyway, that the rain has deepened the color nicely, and puts his gloom completely aside. Louis thinks, if given enough time, Lestat can convince himself that a bowl of mud tastes just as good as chicken soup if you think about it.

“She’s gonna hate my hair,” he says next. 

Louis groans. “I told you to wear a hat, you knew it was gonna rain.”

“But then she can’t see my hair, Louis.” He messes with it a bit, makes the sides frizzier in his efforts and keeps missing the one strand that’s standing up out of place. It always does that, that strand. Louis watches his efforts for a full minute and then groans. 

“Would you stop? You’re—here, wait,” he swats Lestat’s antsy hands away and then combs his own fingers through the damp, tangled strands until they sit moderately in uniform. He tilts his head a bit, decides that the left side looked better a little bit disheveled after all, so he tucks half of it behind his ear and leaves the rest loose. 

“There,” Louis says, satisfied. 

Lestat just stares for a moment, eyes unblinking and mouth slightly parted. He blinks once, twice, his cheeks taking on a red hue and Louis thinks maybe he’s upset him, maybe ruined whatever hairstyle he’d prepared for his Jenny. But then Lestat clears his throat and says, “thank you.” He tucks the other side of his hair behind his ear, and then, as thought remembering, sets it loose again the way Louis had left it. 

They wait around for a bit longer, share a bag of chips they’d picked up from a vending machine earlier and decide it’s too late to stand in line for a proper lunch. Louis had been the one wanting to check out the fields himself, so he can’t exactly blame Lestat. It’s not exactly a sight to behold, really. The grass is patchy, here and there, and the bleachers they’re standing under are fairly worn out too. 

“You look fine, Lily,” comes a voice from somewhere above and gets their attention. They both look up in unison and find Leo, Bri and Lily sprinting down the bleachers in the rain. 

“I wouldn’t expect you to—” Lily is saying. 

“Hey!” Louis calls. 

Lily’s head peeks through the gap between the seats, her lips relaxing into a smile when she notices Louis. 

“Louis!” she calls. 

There’s the sound of their shoes clattering against the bleachers above, and then they join them under its cover. 

“What are you guys doing here?’ Leo asks. 

“Oh, this is horrible,” Lily says miserably, in place of a greeting, her pleated skirt and yellow striped shirt soaked through. “My hair is ruined, my outfit is ruined. My momma ironed this all night.” 

Lestat declares that the rain is good luck despite the fact that he’d been talking Louis’ ear off himself not ten minutes ago, and that her outfit looks way better now than it did in the morning when it was dry, and Lily argues that he hadn’t even seen how it looked in the morning given she hadn’t taken the bus, and Lestat tells her that he’s clairvoyant and knows all, and then Louis tunes them out.  

The previous night, Louis had stared at the mirror, found a zit on his chin, despaired about it for a minute and then decided that he didn’t, in fact, care. He’d looked through his closet, rummaged through the entirety of his wardrobe— the t-shirts, the sweaters, the jeans, the shoes, the jackets. He’d eyed a sage green V-neck that would have gone perfectly with his dark jeans, had gone as far as taking it out, laying it over his bed. He’d chosen shoes that matched his backpack, organized them all on his desk chair, but, come morning, he’d tossed them all aside and put on a plain gray sweater and black jeans instead. 

“I hope it stops soon,” Lily says. 

“I hope it doesn’t,” Leo declares and then fake whispers to Louis and Lestat about how good the wet clothes look on all the girls, making Lily and Bri roll their eyes. 

The rest of the week goes much better, the weather improves and the teenagers manage to wear their new outfits, and make their proper impressions. 

Lestat wears his jean jacket again, and tells Louis that yes, it was indeed better wet and then jokes that he should run down to the science lab and take a quick one under the safely showers. 

“There’s literally showers in the PE locker rooms, you know,” Louis informs him.

Lestat dismisses him. “Where’s the fun in that,” he says. "Besides, Jenny’s in chemistry class right now, and it might be my only chance. She’ll see me in a wet t-shirt and fall in love.”

“Jenny’s not gonna go out with a freshman—” 

“So little faith in me—” 

“And Jenny has a boyfriend,” Louis reminds him. Again. 

Lestat lays a hand on his shoulder, face serious. 

“Juliet also had a boyfriend,” he tells him, and then sprints to his next class. 

“Fiance!” Louis calls after him. “And they both died!”

Monotony finds them sooner than Louis expects. High school turns out to not be so different from middle school after all, aside from the fact that they’ve gone from being the oldest in the school to being the youngest. And the youngest isn’t exactly the best thing to be in school. 

Louis shoves his giant bio book into his locker, eyes himself in the mirror he’s placed there on the door, grimaces at the pimple that just won’t go away, wonders if he’s gained weight, wider there around his cheeks for sure, he thinks, or maybe it’s the mirror, its position accentuating his features, the slightly puffy under eyes. And then he considers if he should remove the thing altogether. Every single girl he’s met seems to have a mirror in her locker, but Louis hasn’t noticed mirrors in any other guys’ lockers. Aside from Lestat’s, that is, but then, he’s Lestat.
A hand at his shoulder pulls him out of his thoughts. Louis turns, feels the breath against his cheek before Lestat even speaks. He’s panting so hard, he looks like he’s just ran a mile, and he’s grinning from ear to ear. 

“Louis,” he says, in between gasps. 

“What?” 

“Looouis,” he says again, placing his other hand on Louis’ shoulder and shaking him in that way he does, as though Louis hadn’t heard him the first time.

“Lestaaat,” Louis mimics, “what?” 

Lestat looks so excited, it seems for a moment like he’s gonna start floating in place in the middle of the hallway like a Looney Toons character. Louis barely manages to get his lock closed. 

“I’m getting a guitar!” Lestat says, “tomorrow. Holy shit, I can’t believe it.” 

Afternoon the very next day, Lestat asks him if he can practice in the fortress. Louis agrees, and doesn’t have the heart to point out the fact that he hasn’t, in fact, even had a single lesson yet.

To his surprise, Lestat seems to be able to play a few things that somewhat resemble a tune, at least. 

“Leo,” he gives as explanation, “his older brother taught him some things, and he taught me. He only knows chords though.” 

Louis spends some time skimming through his copy of Lord of the Flies while Lestat plays. Paul has, unsurprisingly, already read it, and keeps only throwing vague plot points his way. 

“Can’t you just tell me the whole story so I can finish this thing?” Louis asks. The book report is due in two days, and Louis has barely started. 

“It’s a good book!” Paul argues again. 

Louis rolls his eyes. It is good, to be fair, but it makes him anxious. Paul says that’s the point, and that books are supposed to make you feel all sorts of things. He’s also spent the last three weeks asking them endless questions about high school and doesn’t seem quite satisfied with it’s okay, I guess.

“You’re gonna find out in less than a year,” Lestat offers, to which Paul lets out a deep sigh. 

Eventually, the day outside the fortress window looks so nice, so bright, that they move into the back yard, sit around the patio table until the day starts to dim and Louis’ parents join them. Which is when Louis learns something new about his father. 

“Since when?” Paul asks. 

“Since before you were born, boy,” daddy tells him, and places Lestat’s guitar in his lap. 

Louis’ been pondering on this as of late, this realization that he doesn’t quite know much about his own parents. That they’ve had a life before he even existed, a life that didn’t involve him. That they’re… people like everyone else, and it’s strange that Louis had never realized that before. 

As it were, not only does daddy know how to play the guitar, he’s quite proficient at it. 

“How you think I won your momma’s heart?” he asks Louis with a wink. 

“Definitely not with the guitar,” momma says, taking a sip of her mango iced tea concoction. 

“Don’t listen to her,” daddy tells them, then turns back to her. “Had you swoonin’ by that fire, and you know it.” They go back and forth again, like they do, and then get all lovey-dovey like they do, so Paul groans and tells them to get a room, and then momma tells him to stop being crass. 

“Were you in a band?” Lestat asks. His eyes had turned into saucers when daddy had seen the guitar and casually informed him that he knew how to play. 

He teaches Lestat a few simple tunes that very evening. Lestat sits straight-backed, wiping nervous palms against his jeans, his eyebrows furrowing like he needs to absorb everything he hears word for word. Once he starts to play, Lestat picks up the tunes fairly quickly. He looks strangely anxious, more serious than he tends to be these days, and practices with great concentration, cringing and biting his lips through every mistake, until he gets it just the way daddy teaches him. 

“See, there you go,” daddy tells him with a pat on the shoulder, “you’re a natural,” he says, and Lestat all but blushes at the praise. 

When the sun fully sets, and night falls around them, Louis turns to Lestat and asks, “fortress?” 

Because… Lestat’s been strange about this as of late, hesitant about asking to stay the night even when the need is clearly there. Louis’ made it a habit to casually ask, throw out the lifeboat and give him the option to take it. 

Tonight he does. 

Sleep evades them even late into the night. 

Louis tosses up a tennis ball and catches it with his other hand. The night has cooled, and the wind feels soothing through the open window, and the notes Lestat plucks away at on his guitar, though clumsy and repetitive, are soothing too. Louis had given the book a few more pages and tossed it aside. He’ll have to cram for the report later, but he can’t find it in himself to care now. 

“Did you decide?” Lestat asks as he plays. He makes another mistake, swears under his breath, and then starts from the top. 

“What?”

“An elective, Louis,” he says, “you gotta choose soon, man, else they’ll just shove you somewhere boring like…I don’t know, culinary or pottery or some shit.” 

“Maybe that’s what I want,” Louis tells him. 

“Louis, I can’t let you go down that way,” Lestat says with a shake of his head, “unless you’re gonna learn how to cook really good food for me, in which case go on ahead and be lame.” 

“I don’t know,” Louis says. He doesn’t like this topic, has been avoiding it for some time now, hence why he’s been sitting in indecision for days. 

“Yes, you do,” Lestat says.

“What?”

Lestat arches an eyebrow so Louis arches one back.

“Oh, come on,” Lestat says, setting aside the guitar, “it’s obvious which you should choose, I don't get why you haven’t already.”

“Which is?”

“Photography! Duh.”

Louis swallows. “I don’t know,” he says. It’s the truth, of course. Of course it is. At times, it’s a little eerie, how well they know each other. 

“You haven’t stopped yapping about lighting and compact points and SLLs—”

“SLR’s,” Louis corrects, “Single Lens Reflex.” 

“See? You’re a big fuckin' nerd about this shit.”

Louis kicks him on the shin from his spot on the mattress. “I’m not a nerd.”

“Mhm,” Lestat hums. “Next time you go on one of your long sermons about Gordon Parks I’ll remind you how much of a nerd you are.” 

“Yeah, well the next time you’re writing poetry about Kurt Cobain’s eyes, I’ll remind you how much of a nerd you are.”

“Oh, Louis,” Lestat says, glancing down at him from where he’s leaned up against the wall, “you can’t be a nerd with a guitar, those two things are mutually exclusive. Everyone knows that.” 

“They aren’t when the player is a big. Fuckin.’ Nerd.”

“Hm.” Lestat bats his pale eyelashes at him, tilts his head in that Mojo way. “You die for this,” he says, and then picks up the pillow next to him, puts it over Louis’s head and lays his own on top. 

“Lestat,” Louis grunts, voice muffled under the pillow. He pushes at Lestat's big head, almost gets him off but nearly gets his long hair in his mouth in the process. When that doesn’t work, he pinches him hard on the sides and shoves him aside. Lestat plops down next to his head, breathlessly laughing. His hair smells like the citrusy shampoo he loves so much. When Louis had told him it was probably for girls, Lestat had just tossed his hair back and said, “probably why I’m so pretty.”

“Stupid,” Louis says, and socks him on the shoulder.

Lestat picks up the discarded tennis ball and throws it up. Louis catches it on its way down, arm brushing against his. The only sounds in the room are Mojo’s quiet snores as she sleeps on her mat and the creaking of the ceiling fan— one of daddy’s numerous projects that hadn’t gone quite the way he had planned. There’s not much need for it now, but they’re both too lazy to get up and turn it off. They’ve gotten so used to the sound by now, anyway, that they rarely notice it. Unless it’s as quiet as it is now. Lestat’s the one to break the silence.

“Is it ‘cus of your momma?” he asks. 

“No,” Louis lies, catching the ball. “Just…I don’t know.”

They’d only been into the second week of summer break when momma had opened up this conversation. In the car, of all places, as she drove him to a doctor’s appointment, where, with the absence of his father, all Louis could do was listen and nod. 

Things will be harder now, and you’ll need to focus more. 

Yes, momma.

We’ll aim for AP classes.

Okay, momma.

It’s a decisive time, high school, it’ll affect the rest of your academic career. 

Momma had been saying that one since preschool, but still, Louis had nodded and said, yes, momma.

Louis isn’t sure when it was that it had dawned on him, but conversations with his mother came in various forms. This particular brand, he’d learned, was more of a monologue than it was a conversation. The responses didn’t matter much at all, only that Louis acknowledged having heard her. If he didn’t, momma would turn to him and ask if he'd outgrown speaking to his mother already. 

So Louis had let her talk and plan and think aloud, and responded accordingly. 

But then she’d said, “there’s a business course you should choose as an elective. Foreign language is important too, of course, but you can always start next year, that’ll –”

“I wanna try photography,” Louis had cut in. Momma had kept talking for a moment, and then, as though realizing that Louis had given something other than his assent, had paused and glanced his way. 

“Photography?”

“Yeah,” Louis had said, “you know, I’ve been practicing with Grandad’s polaroid and I can–”

“What use would that be?”

Louis had dug through his brain for a moment, trying to ascertain how to frame this as practical and useful. That was the key when it came to his mother, he’d learned. Anything her children did had to contribute to their future.

“I’ve just been thinking,” Louis had said. He’d cleared his throat, feeling suddenly parched. “I’ve been researching photography. As a career, I mean. I know it’s not exactly an easy route but–”

“Oh, it’s an easy route, alright,” momma had said. “Taking pictures. It’s a hobby, Louis.”

“It’s not that simple,” Louis had argued. “It’s–” he’d taken a breath, feeling the anxiety in his chest turn into irritation. “It’s not simple. It takes skill. It takes practice, and you have to have an eye for–”

“It’s impractical, Louis. School isn’t for your hobbies. You’re messin’ with that thing all day anyway, why waste your school hours on it?”

“There’s things I can’t learn on my own, momma–” 

“You are not going to be a photographer Louis, so what is it you need to learn about it that you can’t on your own?”

And that had been… Louis had a fault in that, to be fair. He’d let himself get too carried away with it, that polaroid, had let his mind wonder beyond, towards a future he wasn’t going to have. Unserious, all of it. 

“How much do photographers make?” momma had asked. 

Louis had watched the cars zoom by in the next lane, avoided the side view mirror, the glassiness of his eyes reflected in it. Momma wasn’t a fan of tears. 

Not when it came to her eldest, at least. And Louis was being ridiculous. It was just a stupid hobby. 

“How much do they make, Louis?” she’d asked again. 

“I don’t know, momma.”

It had been silent for some time after, aside from the sound of light rain that had started pattering against the windshield and momma’s fingers tapping over the steering wheel. She’d reached out a hand towards the radio, hesitated over the dials, and then had snatched it back just as quickly, gripped tight the steering wheel instead. It had stayed quiet for so long, in fact, that it had jolted Louis when she’d spoken again. 

“It’s dangerous,” she’d said, softer now, almost a whisper. “Living life with your heart.”

Louis had looked at her, at her furrowed eyebrows, at her lips tugging into a frown, but momma’s eyes hadn’t moved from the road ahead of her. Not for an instance. “You have too much of that, Louis,” she’d whispered. “It scares me.” 

It had been brief, ephemeral, that moment, and yet all at once, it had stretched out like the road ahead. And as he’d looked at his mother, Louis had thought again of that grandfather clock, of how things could be so clear, so familiar, and suddenly obscured, muddled in fog, foreign. 

She’d looked too young, momma, and she’d looked too old, and she’d looked a stranger. 

“Momma,” Louis had said, and he’d felt like reaching out and clasping this new thing. This real thing, at last. But then the fog had cleared, or maybe it had returned to its place, and Louis' hand had grasped at nothing. 

“You can’t base your future on chance. That’s how you fail. And you are not going to fail, Louis.” 

“Yes, momma,” Louis had said. 

“Business,” Louis says to Lestat now, tossing the ball a bit harder than he means to. 

Lestat catches it and turns to him. 

“Business?” Lestat says it like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. 

“Mhm.”

“That’s an elective?”

“Mhm. Business Fundamentals. It’s practical.”

“Practical,” Lestat says, “hm,” he fidgets with the ball for a bit, instead of tossing it up. “And since when are you into that?”

“I don’t know. Since now, I guess.”

Lestat just keeps staring at him instead of throwing the ball, so Louis sighs and turns to face him. Lestat’s eyes are piercing when he gets in this mood, when he won’t let something go. 

“What, Lestat?” 

“You should choose photography,” he repeats. “You’re good at it. Plus you get all dopey when you’re doing it.” 

Louis scoffs. “All dopey ?”

“Yeah,” Lestat says, “you, uh…” Louis feels the air against his face when Lestat huffs out a laugh. “You get this really serious look on your face, like…your forehead gets all wrinkly and your mouth hangs open a little bit when you’re trying to focus," he laughs again, “you know, like when girls are putting on mascara, and they make this funny o-face, you ever seen that?” Lestat demonstrates it for him, and Louis rolls his eyes. “And you barely hear me when I talk to you. I might as well be talking to a wall when you’re like that.” 

Louis shakes his head at him. Lestat has this freckle on the side of his nose that keeps coming back every single summer, and fading away in the winter. 

“Maybe what you’re saying is just not interesting,” Louis tells him. 

“Well that’s just ridiculous. I’m the most interesting person in the world.”

Louis sighs. He watches the fan turn for a moment, lets his eyes zone out. 

“I won’t hear the end of it,” Louis says, “she’s…” and he’s suddenly tired of this conversation. “She’s right, anyway.” 

“You should do what you want,” Lestat tells him. He pushes up on an elbow, ball forgotten, leans his head in his palm and looks down at him. “If you want, you can tell her I convinced you. Led you astray,” he whispers conspiratorially. 

Louis snorts. “Yeah, okay.”

Louis signs up for Business Fundamentals. 

It’s a new one, this elective. And Louis finds it's not as bad as he’d expected. In fact, Louis excels in it, and momma is pleased. 

Grandpa Arthur’s polaroid doesn’t collect dust, however. Not that year, at least. His time outside of his studies is spent taking photos, thinking about taking photos, thinking about his favorite photographers and their photos, what cameras he can get next, if he can maybe ask his dad for a new model, and generally vomiting all of those thoughts to his friends on their lunch breaks. They’ve finally found a spot, a little nook in the quad, a few stone benches that sit right underneath a bridge connecting the two sides of the school and casting the perfect shade against the sun.  

Lestat takes a big bite of an apple and leans back against the bench, one hand behind his head. 

“Is it broken?" he asks. 

Louis frowns at him. “Don’t say that!” 

Lestat lifts his free hand up innocently, “I’m just asking.” 

It’s just been lagging, the camera. Louis will fix it. He always does. 

He’s probably taken a photo of every corner of the school by now. A week ago, some sophomore by the name of James Hawker paused in front of him and asked, “why the fuck are you taking a photo of bird?”

“Why the fuck not?” Louis had opened his mouth to say, but Lestat had beat him to it.

“Well, he can’t take one of you, you’re too fuckin’ ugly, Jimmy.”

And James Hawker hadn’t liked that very much. Not at all, in fact. His face had gotten so red, Louis had thought his head would have shot up and exploded like firework. It had come close to a fight, really, but Lestat had laughed so much and Leo had joined in, and then Lily and then everyone else nearby, that James had just stormed away. 

It’s the rollers, Louis figures out eventually. The camera is old, and so are the rollers, so they collect all sorts of residue on them from time to time, what with the chemical already in there and the added dust. It causes the film to get jammed. He explains this thoroughly and out loud to the group and is met with blank stares. He waves them off. It’s not his fault they don’t get it. He tries to wipe away some of it with a finger. 

“I like it,” Lily says. “Photography. It’s interesting, Louis.”

“Bet you do,” says Bri, and that makes Leo snort out some of his orange juice. 

He needs a cloth, Louis decides. Maybe paper towels. He looks back at the cafeteria, considers grabbing some tissues from there and trying that out. 

“Do you need help, Louis?” Lily asks. 

“Hm?” Louis finally raises his head. Lily blinks at him, her hands in her lap, dimples in her cheeks as she smiles up at him. 

“You need help fixing it?”

“Um, I think I need like…a cloth or something. I’m thinkin’ tissues might just make it worse, might leave behind –” 

“I have one!” Lily says, “a handkerchief!” and then she springs up from her seat to rummage through her lilac-colored backpack. A moment later, she produces a small, yellow handkerchief with intricate needlework on the edges. 

“Here you go,” she says, handing it over. 

Louis’ more and more convinced every day that Lily’s got everything you can possibly need in that backpack of hers. He thinks she’d maybe survive on a deserted island with it. He takes the handkerchief, but then hesitates.

“It’s gon’ get dirty though,” he warns. 

“Oh, that’s fine,” Lily tells him. 

“Thanks,” says Louis, he gives it a go. “Alcohol would probably do a better job,” he mutters and wishes he had one of those alcohol wipes Gran Grace uses for her insulin shots.

“We should absolutely find some alcohol,” says Lestat. And then Leo nudges him and suggests they sneak into coach Stanley’s office and go through his desk drawers, and Lestat gets that dangerous spark in his eyes again that never leads to anything good, so Louis is relieved when the jam finally clears. 

Lily claps her hands in a little celebration. Louis smiles lifts the camera up to his eyes and kneels in front of her. 

“Oh,” she says, surprised, “wait, let me…” and Louis gives her a moment to adjust her skirt, her posture, sweep her long braids over to one shoulder and then smile wide, bringing out the dimples on her cheeks once more. Louis clicks. Lily changes her pose. Louis clicks again. She makes a funny face at him and Louis laughs and clicks again. He goes to take another, but then Lestat says, “careful it doesn’t jam again.” 

Louis turns to him. He’s practically sunbathing, the way he’s laid out lazily over the stone bench, one sneakered foot over his knee, a hand behind his head. “You need it to work for the photoshoot, remember.” 

“Photoshoot?” Lily asks. 

Louis chuckles. “Yeah, we thought we’d take some funny pictures of Mojo later today, is all.”

“Oh!” Lily exclaims, delight painting her face. “That sounds so fun!”

“You can come, if you want,” Louis suggests, and Lily’s smile widens. 

“I’d love– ” 

“She might get spooked though,” Lestat cuts in, “Mojo, I mean. She doesn’t like when there’s too many people around.” And then he turns those piercing Lioncourt eyes his way. “Does she, Louis?” 

“Um…well, sometimes she gets spooked, yeah,” he says, looking from Lily and back to Lestat. “But I’m sure we can–” Louis starts, but then the bell rings before he can finish. 

Lestat springs up from the bench before the bell’s even stopped, faster than he’s ever bothered to before, and sets a quick pace for his class. Louis blinks at his retreating form, and then looks back at Lily. 

“You can–” he starts, but Lily just bites her lip, looks down at her shoes and then waves him off. 

“Oh, it’s okay, Louis. I have that project I have to finish anyway. You know, that self-portrait for Art 101.”

“Yeah…” Louis says. 

“Another time,” Lily says with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. 

Louis turns, eyes roaming over the crowd of students until he finds the blond head and jogs up to him. 

“Jesus, slow down,” Louis says, catching up. “You’re practically running.”

“I just don’t wanna be late,” says Lestat. 

“Since when?”

“Since now.” 

Louis goes through the rest of the school day relatively confused. After school, however, Lestat waits by his classroom door as he always does, smiles a big smile and asks, “ready?”

Later, once they notice the sun starting to set, the sky filling with that blue-pink that Louis has been waiting for, Louis pets Mojo on her head and says, “good girl, Mojo.” 

He backs up again, holds up the camera to his eye and gives Lestat the signal. They’ve tried this about five times now. Lestat throws the piece of kibble, Louis braces, finger at the ready. Mojo jumps on her large hind legs, mouth gaping open, and Louis’ finger presses over the button. 

“Yes!” he exclaims, “I think I got it.” 

They watch the polaroid develop with bated breaths, until the image appears—Mojo, mid air, her canine's out and eyes bulging at the tasty kibble. It’s just what Louis had pictured. It’s magnificent. 

“You’re a supermodel, Mojo,” Lestat tells her. Mojo blinks up at them, confused by their excitement but always ready to join in, jumping up with them and barking.  

“You’re a star!” Lestat says, and she jumps so abruptly on top of him that he goes plopping back down on the grass, laughter bubbling out of him as she licks his face. 

Louis lifts up the camera and clicks again. 

Chapter Text

Louis’ halfway asleep when he hears the soft chimes of the jingle bells hung against his fortress door. All these years he’s had to adapt, and the moment still carries great weight, still fills his chest with instant dread. He wonders if the sound will carry Christmas cheer for him ever again. Maybe one day, he thinks, one bright snowy day, in another place, when they’re both freed from this horrid ritual. 

He’s been expecting this. The neighboring house had not known a moment of silence all through the day and late into the night. If he focuses now, Louis can hear the never ending arguments, still.  

When Lestat sees him enter the fortress from behind the window, he presses his palms and face against the glass, cheek and nose mushed against it, and Louis feels some of that fear leave him. 

Perhaps not the worst of nights, then.

“Were you sleeping?” Lestat asks. He lets Mojo jump up ahead of him, run straight for her mat, and plop down with a deep huff. 

“Was ‘bout to.” 

“Louis, it’s barely ten, have some shame.”

“Whatever,” Louis mutters. He snatches the bag of chips that Lestat’s holding in his hands and chucks a few into his mouth. Lestat lets him easily, then splays out on the mattress and stretches his arms over his head, all in similarly dramatic fashion as Mojo. Lestat is living proof that dogs and their owners truly are alike, though who has assumed whose mannerisms through osmosis more, Louis is not sure. 

Lestat leaves barely any room for Louis to sit, so Louis nudges his long legs with a foot until he scooches. Lestat’s grown taller than him over the summer, only just so, but he brings this fact up smugly to Louis irritatingly often and makes sure to exaggerate it greatly. 

“We’ll see in a year who’s taller,” Louis always throws back his way, but Lestat just gets that shit eating grin that says, sure, we will.

When an especially loud bout of angry hurled French reaches them through the window, Lestat groans, and rolls his eyes towards the ceiling. 

“God, how’s his throat not fuckin’ sore?”

“Why’s he so upset?” Louis asks. 

Louis’ heard Augustine yell at Lestat plenty over the years—insult him, belittle him, make fun of him, even hit him, though Lestat’s been bragging a bit, as of late, about giving back just as much as he gets now that he’s taller and stronger. Louis once caught them going at it in the back yard with rough shoves and fists and tackles. Lestat hadn’t exactly won—as much as he’s grown taller and stronger, Augustine is older and even stronger—but, by some silently agreed upon endpoint, they’d both let out a maniacal laugh and then, with one last shove and a spitted insult, had gone about their day like they’d just played a round of catch and not beat each other bloody. Momma had not been happy about that little scene she’d caught a glimpse of through the window, though Mr. Lioncourt had seemed to be as pleased as he could get, watching over them here and there from the porch like he was watching a boxing match on the TV and not his children throwing punches at each other. 

So, yes, Louis has heard Augustine’s angry voice through these walls more than he’d ever like to, but not once has he heard that anger be directed at his father. In fact, it’s fairly clear that Augustine is the favorite of the Lioncourt brothers, and with Pierre long gone, the only one that the senior Lioncourt seems to stand the sight of. 

“Fuck knows,” Lestat says. “Haven’t heard him bitching like this in a while. It’s kinda entertaining.”

Louis doesn’t find it entertaining one bit, but he keeps that opinion to himself. There are hard lines that they’ve drawn over the years when it comes to Lestat’s family. To what can be discussed before Lestat either waves it off with a laugh, or gets defensive and leaves. He usually laughs. Lestat laughs off most things that Louis finds the opposite of humorous. He bursts out into that hysterical laughter now when their yelling gets even louder, eyes crinkling, breathless, clutching at his stomach like he’s at some comedy show. 

Louis thinks they must be mirror images of each other, he and Lestat, always parallel, on the same wavelength. But on this one thing, this one vital point—how they endure—they’ll always be polar opposites.

Lestat endures by grasping at any sliver of light he can find and holding on tight. 

But slivers of light are dangerous, Louis will learn. They’re immaterial, deceitful things that tremble and vanish at a shadow’s whim. No. Better to cast a big shadow than be at the whim of one. 

“Did you finish that stupid essay?” Lestat asks him some time later, voice muffled against the pillow and sounding half asleep already. He means their World History assignment on the French Revolution. Louis gets the urge to jab at him, tease him and say something like, “you’re just pissed cus your rich ancestors lost their heads!” But he finds the mines before he says it, the sore spots in that line of conversation. 

One being the Lioncourt legacy—one of his father’s favorite topics, and Lestat’s least. Of the lands they used to own, of the wealth and titles, of the weight that their name used to hold, back in the days of their aristocratic standing. Of this, his father likes to go on long and mind-numbing rants about to Lestat, of how his own father had lost any remnants of the wealth that had remained and how it was up to the sons to reach those heights again. 

“Isn’t he a fuckin’ son?” Lestat had once vented his frustration to Louis, “don’t see him reaching any heights.” 

The second mine, of course, lies in the sore topic of Lestat’s literary skills. His feelings on the English subject haven’t changed much over the years, and there isn’t much he despises more than writing essays. Not that he’ll ever admit to it, of course—of having trouble with it, of even disliking it—and if Louis were to even so much as offer a helping hand, or even suggest the existence of an issue, Lestat would get his hackles up. The furthest he’s ever come to admitting any difficulty to Louis has been a frustrated and desperate confession in the midst of writing a book report—the letters keep getting jumbled in my brain before I can make any fuckin’ sense of them!

“Half of it,” Louis says instead. “I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. Did you?”

Lestat laughs, turns again to look at him through half lidded eyes. “My dog ate it.”

As though hearing him, Mojo lets out an affronted bark.

“Don’t be a snitch, Mojo,” Lestat grumbles with a sleepy tsk. Mojo whines and barks yet again. 

“Maybe she’s hungry,” Louis suggests. 

He rummages through the cabinets for the bag of kibbles he keeps around and pours some into her bowl. 

“I fed her already, you know,” Lestat says quickly, raising up onto his elbows, irritation evident both in his voice and in his downturned lips. 

“I know,” Louis says, and means it. Lestat would sooner go hungry himself than leave Mojo unfed. 

But he gets like this as of late, Lestat, defensive about everything. About Mojo’s care, about staying in the fortress, eating anything Louis offers him, accepting even a hint of a helping hand with his essays. About anything and everything.  

When the frown lingers, Louis quickly adds. “Maybe she just wants a late night snack, is all. I always do.” 

Lestat doesn’t respond, but lays back down on his stomach and rests his face back down into the pillow with a huff. 

Louis sighs, lets Mojo gently lick his hand after she’s done eating. She has a little pink bow tied to her collar today, likely a gift from Ms. Denisse, who watches her more and more often the longer Gabrielle is away. Lestat doesn’t like leaving Mojo with his father if he can help it, rarely does, and, Louis suspects, Mr. Lioncourt doesn’t give him much of a choice either. It had been a thing of luck that old Ms. Denisse next door had decided to retire when she did, and that she loves dogs more than her own children.  

She needs her nails clipped, Mojo, and a bigger mat too, very soon with how much she’s grown. Louis goes to say as much, but when he turns to Lestat, he finds him laying still, fast asleep. His face, where it rests against the pillow, is lax and tranquil, his lips parted slightly, and his hair is spread out wildly over the white cotton of the pillowcase. He’s taken up most of the mattress again. He always falls asleep like this, Lestat, limbs splayed out wide in an extravagant sprawl, but come morning, Louis always finds him curled in on himself in one corner and barely taking up much space at all. 

Louis walks over, carefully picks up his copy of Lord of the Flies where it’s caught between Lestat’s arm and the mattress. His hand hangs loose off the side, his nails painted red today, already chipping off at the edges. A few weeks ago, he’d come to school with them painted charcoal black and laughed for a good five minutes describing his father’s expression at seeing them in the morning. He’s made it a habit ever since, changing the colors more frequently than his clothes. He has a few strands of hair falling over his face, so that every time he exhales in sleep, they sway with his breath. Louis watches him for a moment, that small freckle next to his nose, the slight furrow of his brows, and then has the strange urge to reach out and brush the strands away from his face. 

He goes to his room instead. 

Augustine takes off the following night. Lestat tells him casually over lunch break the following day, like he’s talking about the weather. 

“Don’t think he’s comin’ back,” Lestat says. “Packed a bag and everything.” 

He sighs dreamily and jokes that it’s the Lioncourt Special and that he can’t wait until it’s his turn to take off. “Soon as I’m seventeen,” he says. Lestat’s been saying that since he turned twelve and realized that there was a life outside the doors of his house. Louis nods and agrees, on this green notion they still hold tight to— that it’s the walls that trap them, that they’ll walk out of their respective thresholds unscathed, unchanged.

“We should go down to Josie’s in the morning,” Louis suggests one sunny afternoon while they pretend to read around the patio table—Louis, Paul and Lestat. 

Well, Paul isn’t exactly pretending, he never is when it comes to his books, but Louis can tell, even his heart isn’t in it. The day, the clear, blue sky and just the right amount of warmth demands leisure from all things, no matter what momma says. 

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Paul reminds him, eyes briefly rising from the page.

Louis groans. “I forgot.” He rubs a hand over his face. “Maybe I’ll pretend to be sick,” he thinks aloud, and then narrows his eyes at Paul, “if you don’t go snitchin’ again, of course.”

Paul rolls his eyes, and pops a few pieces of popcorn into his mouth. “That was one time and I was seven,” he retorts. “And you shouldn’t be pretending anyway, just say you don’t wanna go if you hate it so damn much.”

“Yes, Paul, I’ll just tell momma I don’t feel like attending Mass, I’m sure she’ll take it real well.”

“Don’t get why you don’t wanna go anyway, it’s nice,” Paul mutters.

“Boring, you mean.” 

“Can’t be that bad,” says Lestat. 

“Oh, it is.”

“No it is not,” Paul argues, this time putting his book down in truth. If there’s one thing that’ll make him put down a book… “You just don’t actually listen to father Matthias.” 

“Whatever,” Louis mutters, grabs a handful of popcorn himself, then holds it out for Mojo to munch on. 

“The music sounds nice,” Lestat notes, “I hear it sometimes when I pass by Saint Augustine.” 

“Wait,” Paul says, “you’ve never been inside?”

Lestat shakes his head. 

“You never been to church?”

Lestat shakes his head again. “Well, I have, technically,” he amends. “My grandmother took me a few times when I was very young. Back in France. I don’t really remember much, though.” 

“So why don’t you come with?” Paul suggests, “tomorrow, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Louis says, “come fall asleep next to me.”

Lestat shrugs, the picture of nonchalance, but Louis doesn’t miss that light of curiosity in his eyes, that tell-tale lift of his eyebrows. He wants to come, clearly, but doesn’t wanna impose, or whatever notion it is that keeps him feeling like he’s gonna get kicked out any minute if he steps wrong. 

“I’m sure they won’t mind,” Louis reassures, nodding towards the house. 

Lestat hums, tapping his fingers on the table, the black of his nail polish reflecting on the glass of the popcorn bowl. “Long as they don’t mind, I guess I’ll come check it out.”

“Maybe get rid of those,” Louis suggests, gesturing to his manicure. Momma has not hidden her distaste of Lestat’s recent eccentricities, as she’d put it. It’s inappropriate, she says. 

The next morning, Lestat dresses formally—or as formal as Lestat gets, a white polo shirt, black jeans and the black wiped from his nails—and waits dutifully to leave with them.

“Your…parents won’t mind, Lestat?” momma asks with the usual curl of her lip at the topic of the Lioncourts. Even Mrs. Lioncourt, whom she had initially merely deemed full of herself, has now reached the ranks of deserving complete disdain and nothing more. Louis will never voice it to Lestat, but for once, he finds himself completely at one with his mother’s feelings. A rarity these days, that.

“No, ma’am,” Lestat assures, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind his ear with nervous fingers. Louis can’t remember the last time Lestat had his hair tied back and out of his face. 

“Very well, then,” says momma. 

Louis doubts Lestat’s even asked his parents. He doubts they’d care either way. Louis hasn’t seen Gabrielle in weeks, and anything Lestat would ask of his father would more than surely be denied. Not to mention, that his disapproval would motivate Lestat even more. 

Lestat is quiet on their morning walk to church, hesitant, but clearly, to Louis at least, brimming with some new excitement. 

Mass feels much the same to Louis. He sits through it as he always does, partly restless, and partly uneasy at some of the wisdom father Matthias bestows. 

Lestat, however. Well…

Lestat, by his side, in a very literal sense, has a religious experience within the first ten minutes. 

He seems to hang on to every word of the sermon, inching closer and closer to the edge of the wooden pews as Mass progresses. And then the music begins…and something seems to take him, a sort of trance. His eyes wide, mouth a bit agape, he seems in total awe of it all, and as the congregation joins in in song, his head swivels about the room as though he can’t quite believe what he’s witnessing. Now and then, he glances back at Louis with glistening eyes as though to ask “you seeing this, you hearing this?!”

Afterwards, he goes on and on and on, about the sermon, the hymns, the sound of the organ, how breathtaking it had been, how the notes sounded reverberating and echoing through the church, how the voices of the choir harmonized, how the candles smelled, how the sun beamed brightly through the colorful stained glass windows. Wasn’t the choir amazing Louis? How does one end up in the choir, do they audition?  Would he be able to join if he tried? The art on the walls was amazing, did you see the sun illuminate the altar at one point? It felt divine. Did you feel it Louis, the light? Is it always like this?

“I guess,” Louis tells him, a bit taken aback. Lestat is overly energetic on most days, but when he’s particularly excited about something, fixated on the shiny thing he’s newly discovered, it feels not unlike an onslaught.

For all of Louis’ lack of enthusiasm, however, Paul is there to listen to him, nod, and say, yes, I did feel it. It’s amazing, isn't it? It is always this way, you should come again next Sunday. 

And Lestat beams at the very idea. By the time they reach their homes, he builds up the courage to stand before Louis’ parents and ask, “Mr. and Mrs. Du Lac, may I join you again next Sunday?”

There are many constants in Louis’ life. The De Pointe Du Lacs are a family of habit, of routine, of ritual. At the very top of these rituals are their early Sunday morning walks to Saint Augustine that have been a fixture in Louis’ life since he can remember himself. After that day, Lestat becomes part of that time-honored De Pointe Du Lac routine, this sacred trek to church, bright and early every Sunday morning, well dressed, well behaved, and eyes shining with new excitement. Soon enough, momma make a habit of pointing out quite frequently to her church friends how they’ve taken Lestat under their wing, and no, his family isn’t very religious at all, but we do what we can. 

On the Sundays when his father remembers his existence and forbids Lestat from joining them, Lestat is endlessly sad. 

On the days that he is allowed to join, however, the familiar Sunday ritual of Louis’ childhood slowly but surely takes on a new form. Namely, the normally silent walks to church see Paul and Lestat thrown into intricate, existential discussions—on the way there, on the way back, whispered between them right before and after Mass, right there at the pews. And soon, Louis finds himself, more and more often, lagging behind them, as they go at their back and forth. About father Matthias’ words, the daily passages he preaches, the songs the choir sings, the power in their lyrics. And on and on and on. 

But above all, they speak of the light that they find within the walls of Saint Augustine. This elusive light, this thing that Louis can’t seem to find no matter how hard he tries. 

Some mornings, their excitement seems to brush up against him, right there at the edge of his mind, close enough that Louis can feel the hint of its warmth, that ease, but it fades just as quickly, right out of his grasp. 

It becomes even more frustrating when their discussions extend beyond their Sunday morning walks and beyond the walls of Saint Augustine. 

“What do you think it means?” Lestat asks, sitting cross legged on the fortress floor. 

“Depends on how you look at it, I guess,” Paul says, a finger at his chin as he ponders God’s word. 

Sat atop the mattress like he would stand before a pulpit, Louis can’t help but think, and Lestat, his faithful parishioner—though worshiper comes easier to the mind—head raised from the pews, hanging on to every word. They’ve been talking about some bible passage that father Matthias preached this morning. It’s late afternoon, and they haven’t stopped talking about it. 

Paul starts to explain, how he sees the words, what they could mean, what he’s read about what the words mean, what the popular consensus is among religious scholars and theologians, and the disagreements between them. Lestat hangs on to every word, occasionally agreeing, hmm-ing and hum-ing and generally looking at Paul like he’s hung the very moon—which is how he’s been looking at him for weeks now.

“What do you mean you’re sick?” momma asks him one Sunday morning when Louis informs her that he’s staying in. 

“Means I’m sick, momma. I had a fever last night,” Louis lies. Momma doesn’t believe him. He can tell by the way she narrows her eyes at him and rests her hands at her hips. 

He’ll pay for it later, probably for many days. Hear muttered comments here and there about the importance of faith within a family unit, the role it plays in one’s upbringing, about how much Paul enjoyed Mass, and even Lestat. 

Still, Louis doesn’t budge. He spends his Sunday lounging around in the fortress with Mojo instead. She must sense his foul mood, because she keeps pawing at his lap, laying soft licks on his hands, on his cheeks. Louis does some homework, reads, watches TV, lays around staring at the fan on the ceiling. It’s a dangerous thing to lay around in front of Mojo, who is blissfully unaware of her weight and her size, and whose favorite thing in the world is laying right on top of the nearest human she can find. Louis lets her anyway, scratches right behind her ears, where she likes. When they both get bored again, Louis takes out Grandpa Arthur’s camera—he can’t seem to think of it as his own, no matter how much time passes and how hard he tries. Every inch of it reminds Louis of him, of his trembling, wrinkled, and patient hands showing him what buttons to press. He changes the cartridge, and starts taking photos of Mojo.

Mojo, for a creature who doesn’t know what a camera is, is incredibly photogenic. Louis once made fun of Lestat for saying it, but it’s the honest truth. He takes a few with her slobbering tongue hanging out, and a few in between little barks, and they all come out perfect. 

“You are a star, Mojo,” Louis coos at her, “we gotta get you in one of those magazines, you know–” 

A soft chuckle has Louis whirling around so abruptly that he almost falls off the mattress in the process. 

“What is it you always tell me?” Lestat asks, lips twitching, “you sound nuts talking to Mojo like that, Lestat!” he mimics, elbows resting on the windowsill. 

Louis blinks, “I never said nuts,” he defends, as Mojo zooms towards the window.

“Mmm, pretty sure you did,” Lestat says, letting Mojo rest her paws against the windowsill and lick his face. “But it’s okay, I forgive you, Louis. Especially on a Sunday.”

Louis rolls his eyes as Lestat climbs in, Mojo following behind, her tail a blur. 

“What are you doing here?” Louis asks, glancing up at the clock , “it’s early, Mass hasn’t ended.”

Lestat sits down on the edge of the mattress and pets Mojo instead of answering. 

“Why didn’t you go?”

Lestat shrugs. “I don’t know. Just didn’t. Are you sick?”

“A little,” says Louis. 

“Hm.” Lestat lays down on the floor and lets Mojo plop right down and heavy over his chest. 

“Paul’s gonna be lonely,” Louis says looking down at him, “what with you not there.”

Lestat doesn’t respond, chews his bottom lip red and hugs Mojo to his chest instead. The neat ponytail he likes to keep his hair in for Sunday church has all but come undone, golden strands coming loose and free of the hair tie that held them, as though in a rush to get back to their natural disarray. 

It chafes, Louis has the sudden realization, to see Lestat in muted colors, clean-cut, and proper. Louis prefers his hair undone. Louis prefers his nails coated in bright chipped polish. 

When Mojo frees him from her weight to chew on her toy instead, Lestat tilts his head on the hardwood floor, messes up his hair even more, and looks up at Louis. 

“I’ll go next Sunday,” he says, “we both will. You’ll be better by then, Louis.”

He reaches out a hand to Louis’ foot and walks his index and middle fingers on a trek over his shoe, over his crew-cut cotton sock, and up to the exposed skin of his ankle where the hem of his pants has risen up. He taps his fingers there like he does over the fretboard of his guitar, and asks, “won’t you?” 

“I…yeah,” says Louis. “Yeah.” 

Lestat smiles, his fingertips stepping their way backwards to Louis’ shoe. He undoes his shoelaces when he reaches them, only to tie them again himself.  

Louis tinkers with the camera. His ankle tingles strangely. It got jammed again earlier, the camera, and he’s not sure if it’s been cleaned well enough, and it needs to be cleaned often. He needs to remember to clean it. The camera. Louis clenches and unclenches his toes in his shoes. 

“Why don’t you like it?” Lestat asks, finally pulling back his hands. 

“Hm?” 

“Church.”

“I never said I don’t like it.”

“But you don’t,” says Lestat. Louis purses his lips. It’s an inconvenience at times, how well Lestat knows him. How clearly he sees him. It’s suffocating. 

Louis shrugs. “I just get bored, that’s all.”

Lestat hums again, in that smartass, knowing way he does, and that irritates Louis even more. 

“You should have just gone,” he tells him. 

“Well, I did,” says Lestat, pushing himself up and leaning back on his palms. “Sort of. I stayed for a bit and then left halfway.”

Louis stares at him, mouth all but falling open. 

“You did what?” 

Lestat chews his bottom lips again and sits up fully, shoulder sagging. 

“You left Mass half way through?”

“Yeah…” Lestat says, voice hushed. “I don’t think your momma was very happy,” he confesses with a cringe, “or like…the rest of the congregation.”

“Yeah, no shit, Les!” 

“Yeah,” says Lestat. And it’s something about that. That dejected and meek little yeah, that innocent slump of his shoulders and the ridiculous pout of his lips that has Louis bursting out in such sudden laughter that it surprises the both of them. 

“Jesus Christ, Lestat,” he says. 

“I did try to do it quietly!” Lestat defends quickly, “but…it gets so fuckin’ quiet and echoey in there. Soon as I took a step, everyone turned to look. You should have seen Father Matthias’ face, Louis. It was horrible.”

That sets off Louis even more, picturing him like some cartoon character. His cheeks must have gotten as red as they’re getting now, the longer Louis laughs. 

“It was horrible, they’ll never let me back.” 

Louis nudges his shoulder with a knee. “Course they will, don’t be dramatic.”

“You think?”

“Yes,” Louis reassures. “But why on earth would you do that?” 

Lestat shrugs. “You weren’t there,” he says, “thought I’d come to check on you.” 

Louis feels a little breathless all of a sudden, and knows it’s not from the laughter.

“I’m not really sick,” Louis confesses. 

“I know,” says Lestat.

One particularly cold Spring evening throws them into a strange reversal of things. 

It’s a Friday evening and one of those rare occasions when momma has permitted dinner to consist of greasy pizza and wings and even some pop on the side. She’d drawn the line, however, at having the pizza in the living room by the television like they’d wanted. 

They've barely begun to eat when dinner is cut short by an unexpected phone call. News of the passing of a distant cousin on his mother’s side, whom Louis had met only once at the age of five. After momma shares the unfortunate news, daddy takes a moment to say a quick prayer for her, after which the table gets eerily quiet. Louis pushes the pizza around on his plate, at a loss for what to do. There’s no sadness in him at the news, he doesn’t remember Mrs. Donna, but is it appropriate to go back to eating after such news as though nothing has happened? By the looks of everyone else around the table, they feel the same. Gracie looks the most out of place, looking around at everyone to understand what she needs to do. It’s likely she’s never even heard of Mrs. Donna, let alone met her. Lestat, whom Louis had convinced to join them for dinner, looks more uncomfortable than Louis has ever seen him, eyes trained on his plate alone. Only Paul looks solemn, fingers laced over the table, looking much older than he is, and Louis has the sudden feeling that Paul knows exactly what to do, how to feel, and how to behave at any given time. Like it’s a skill that’s skipped right over Louis and passed on to him. He holds himself better than you, momma had told him once, and she must have known even then. 

It’s daddy that breaks the silence once again. 

“Does Eva know?” he asked.

Momma doesn’t immediately respond to that. She takes a long sip of her sparkling first and lays it gingerly back down on the table.

“I’m sure someone will call her," she finally says.

“Who will?” 

Momma glances his way, then takes a measured breath and, instead of answering him, turns to the rest of the table and says, “let’s finish our food, now. Disrespectful to be wastin’ food. God bless her soul.” 

They tentatively go back to dinner, then. Occasionally momma shares a memory of Mrs. Donna from her younger days, asks Louis if he remembers her babysitting him, which Louis doesn’t, but nods anyway. 

“A Godly woman,” says momma with finality. 

Some more silence follows that’s only upset by daddy’s thoughtful finger taps against the table. He does that when he’s preparing to say something, Louis knows, and he eventually does. 

“You should call her, Flo.”

“Hm?” 

Daddy takes his own calming breath and clarifies. “Eva, Flo,” he says. “You should call Eva, and let her know what’s happened.” 

“And why does it have to be me?” momma says.

And that's the catalyst. 

It doesn’t take long for them to excuse themselves to the kitchen to have their fight in private, and Louis knows it’s not gonna be a pretty one when momma tells them to go on ahead and finish the food in the living room. 

“She’s her cousin too,” Louis hears daddy say, voice booming through the house in a way Louis has rarely witnessed. “She’s always been very kind to us. To the kids. To everyone in your family, in fact. She deserves better. Just because–”

“My family,” momma throws back. “Mine, being the distinction. Never seen you or your family take my opinion into account, I’d appreciate the same.”

Daddy audibly scoffs. “You know damn well that ain’t true.”

“They always do this when Auntie Eva comes up,” Louis tells Lestat later that evening when they retire to the fortress. 

“Why?” 

“Well…” Louis starts. He settles down on the mattress, lets Mojo nuzzle into his lap, and then throws her favorite toy to fetch, if only to give himself time to think. He realizes that, up until this very moment, he’s never actually spoken about it, nor heard anyone in his family speak about it out loud. Someone must have uttered the words at some point if Louis has knowledge of it, right? Except he can’t, for the life of him, recall. 

It’s one of those ghosts that floats at the top of the ceiling at every family gathering—every Christmas, every Easter, every Thanksgiving dinner—nestled right there by the chandelier, its presence always felt, but never acknowledged. In between quiet glances, Gran Grace’s dissatisfied sighs, awkward silences, abrupt changes of conversation, in every word unsaid, only to float up there and join the rest. It’s levitated there since Louis can remember himself, the same place in the air where questions about his maternal grandfather have gone, drifted right up there to stew and float, unanswered.

“My auntie Eva,” Louis says, “she’s…well they say she’s with a woman, like…romantically, so…my family doesn’t really talk to her.” Or about her, Louis thinks. Only in the abstract.

“Oh,” Lestat says. “Oh,” he says again, licking his lips and then settling down on the floor by the mattress. “I see.” 

Louis fidgets with Mojo’s collar, unties Ms. Denisse’s new yellow bow, and neatly ties it back again. It’s a long time after, once Louis’ made Lestat test him on his upcoming math test and the flashcards have been set aside and forgotten, that Lestat speaks again. 

“I had an uncle like that, you know?” he says, looking up at him upside down, his long legs raised and leaning against the wall. He nudges forward on his elbows and palms until his back has reached the wall and then rises briefly in a handstand, his skinny arms shaking. “My momma’s cousin,” he says, voice strained from the effort. The hem of his t-shirt falls, revealing a pale stomach, a glimpse to a dusting of golden hair, and then he lowers himself and sits back down, cross legged.

“His parents didn’t like him either, I think. My dad really hated him,” he says. He picks up Louis’ flashcards again, flips through them without really looking. “Stupid,” he mutters low under his breath.

“What?”

“It’s stupid,” Lestat says, “so what if my uncle’s with a guy and your auntie’s with a woman. Who cares?”

“Well,” Louis says, “it’s…wrong.” 

“Why?” 

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why’s it wrong?”

Louis blinks at him, “It just is.”

Lestat frowns, tosses the cards aside and picks up his own discarded Algebra book instead. 

“I don’t think so,” he says with a shrug. “I mean…who cares, anyway?” He leans back against the wall again and flips through the pages, and then lets out a deep sigh. “Mr. Bright is such a fuckin’ prick,” he says, suddenly, of his math teacher, “you know he gave me a C for disagreeing with him in class? I know that’s why he did it. My answers were correct.”

Louis doesn’t comment on Mr. Bright being a prick or not. Air’s not reaching his lungs properly for some odd reason, and he can’t stop staring at Lestat, at the comfortable ease of his shoulders, at the way his lips move in silence as he mouths the words on the page before him.

At the casualness of him. 

“But it’s a sin,” Louis says.

Lestat looks up, forehead creased, “hm?”

“It’s a sin,” Louis says again, voice firmer, “being…gay.”

That makes Lestat sit up straighter. “No it’s not, what are you talking about?”

“Yes it is,” Louis argues, “it’s in the bible.”

Lestat scoffs. “No, it’s not.”

“It’s in the bible,” Louis argues again, his chest feeling tight. “You readin’ it all the damn time, you didn’t get to that part?”

Lestat looks at him for a moment, eyebrows furrowing, and then he simply rolls his eyes and says, “I don’t think it’s a sin, and God doesn’t either.” 

And the thing is, he says it so confidently, so easily. 

“And how do you know that?”

Lestat shrugs. “I just do,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with loving someone, long as you’re not hurting anyone,” and then he jokingly lifts his Algebra book and adds, “long as you’re not an asshole of a math teacher.”

Strange, Louis’ breaths are coming in faster, and yet the air doesn’t seem to be reaching his brain properly. He feels sweat bead on the back of his neck. 

“It’s God’s word, you—” Louis takes another shallow breath, his hands clammy and clenching in his lap. “You can’t just pick and choose. One day you’re devout, the next day you’re not? It’s in the bible.”

Lestat raises exasperated hands into the air and finally puts his book aside.

“So what if it’s in the bible, you keep sayin’ that.”

Said casual, light as a feather. 

“So what–”

“So they got it wrong then! Humans are flawed. Even the priests get things wrong. Remember when Paul was reading—”

“Yeah I heard what he read, it’s hard not to, it's all ya’ll talk about.” 

Lestat looks at him for a moment like he’s trying to find the right words to argue with, but failing. It reminds Louis of the early days when he couldn’t find the english words for his mother french, except Louis thinks, with some twisted pleasure, that just right now, he probably couldn’t explain himself in french either. 

“Whatever,” Lestat mutters with a dismissive flip of his hand, frown set deep in his lips, and some of that causal ease now gone from his posture, and it makes something dark in Louis’ gut twist, feel a sense of satisfaction at seeing it replaced with tension.

“How you know that’s the part they got wrong?”

Lestat shrugs, “I just do,” he says. 

Easy. Simple. Feather-light.

For just a brief moment Louis hates him. Feels that dark thing in his gut raise its head again, this boiling, tarry thing flowing through his veins. Louis wants to scream at him, at his constant nonchalance, at his easy smiles, at his bouts of inopportune laughter in the face of the world, at the lightness with which Lestat holds himself, at the ease with which he says these back-breaking, heavy things. Easy, while Louis’ insides burn. Louis wants to shake him. Louis wants to reach out his hands, clasp him by the shoulders and spread that fire until it burns them both to a crisp.

 “It is a sin,” Louis says, “It’s wrong.”

“Fine, then guess you gotta stop being friends with me, too, then!” Lestat snaps, suddenly, “since I’m such a sinner.”

“...what?”

“You heard me.”

All Louis can do, then, is breath, or try to, and the incongruence of Lestat’s words momentarily quiets the whirlwind in his brain. 

“You’re not gay,” Louis says, tongue tingling at the word, “you’ve been talking my ear off about Jenny, and Isaura before that and Bri and—”

“So?” Lestat shoots back, “I like guys too,” he tells him and although crimson immediately flushes his cheeks, he doesn’t lower his chin, but raises it and crosses his arms to hide his trembling hands.

“What?” 

Lestat stands then, looks down at him with those piercing Lioncourt eyes like he wants to make sure Louis knows he means it. 

“I kissed one too,” Lestat says, “and I’ll leave now, lest I spread my sin your way.”

That night, Louis dreams that he is on fire, right at the pews of Saint Augustine. Can feel and see as the flames rise from the white marble floors and catch on the hem of his pants and slither up and up in a raging blaze and take his hands, his arms, his chest, the white cotton of his shirt until it’s charred and black. 

“Flee from sin as from the face of a serpent,” Father Mathias’ voice thunders through the echoey nave, “for if thou comest too near it, it will bite thee: the teeth thereof are as the teeth of a lion, slaying the souls of men.

Terror takes him, an unyielding noose around his chest, and he screams with no voice. In the front pew, sit his closest, his dearest—his parents, his siblings, Lestat. The rest of the congregation is there too, Louis knows, but their faces are unclear, a blur of skin with no mouth, no nose, only eyes with which to glare his way. His loved ones smile, speak among themselves and laugh, and no matter how much Louis screams, how much he begs them, they do not turn his way. 

“Do you feel it?” Lestat whispers in Paul’s ear, stars in his eyes, voice echoing through the church and reaching Louis’ ears. “The light?”

And Paul smiles wide at him and says, “Yes, I feel it.”

Tears drench his face, but they’re not enough to put the fire out. 

“Paul!” Louis calls, and then, though no sound is uttered from his trembling lips, Paul hears him, still and always, and turns his way. There is hope yet, Louis thinks. What a mercy, my brother by my side! 

But when Paul’s brown eyes meet his, there is only sadness there, and no love. 

“Aren’t you your brother’s keeper?!” Louis screams with no voice and no words as Paul turns away. 

Louis stares at his back, hopeless and Godless, and as the fire takes him, body and soul, Louis sees a glimmer of it then, a light—bright, luminous—hallo-ing out around Paul’s head, so blinding and warm that it reaches out just far enough to bathe Lestat in its ethereal glow. 

Louis wakes in a silent scream and a cold sweat that washes over his body as fiercely as the flames in his dream. He wants, with a sudden, and child-like desperation, to run to Paul’s room, crawl into his bed and beg him to not turn away. He spends the night awake, staring blankly at the unmoving jingle bells hung on the cracked handle of the fortress door instead. 

Lestat ignores him in the morning, sits silently on the bus stop bench and doesn’t quite meet his eyes. Louis’ still too shell-shocked—from Lestat’s confession, from his dream, from himself— to try to speak to him, but the following day, Louis knocks on the Lioncourt door, and holds his breath. It’s a Saturday and to his great disappointment, Lestat’s father answers the door, and smiles down at him, that false smile that he’s quite perfected over the years.

“Louis,” he greets him like a long lost son, “come on in, he’s in his room.” 

As though Louis doesn’t see him. Through his own eyes and Lestat’s. 

“Thanks,” Louis says, and thinks for the hundredth time—you shouldn’t have those eyes. 

He sprints up to Lestat’s room and can hear the soft sound of a guitar before he even reaches the door. Plucked away at quite carelessly, which means Lestat’s just entertaining himself rather than practicing. 

Usually, on the rare occasions that Louis visits him, he’ll barge in, give him a scare, or do some dumb voice behind the door until Lestat cracks up and opens it. 

This time, Louis just knocks and waits. The music halts abruptly, no sound on the other end, and it takes a moment for Louis to realize that, likely, Lestat is confused. With Gabrielle away, there is no one who’d be bothering to knock on his door, let alone giving him the time to open it.

“Les,” Louis says, “it’s me.” 

Briefly, Louis considers the chance that Lestat will ignore him again, but after a moment, the door falls open and Lestat steps aside to let him in. 

“Hi,” Louis says, standing awkwardly by the doorway and then electing to close the door immediately, as though a line of separation will make Lestat’s father stop existing. 

“Hey,” says Lestat. He settles back down on his bed and picks up his guitar again. 

Louis takes a seat in his computer chair, rubs his palms over his jeans and wonders where to start. The silence is awkward, save for Lestat’s playing, and it feels wrong for it to be awkward between them.

“That’s new,” Louis says. 

Lestat plays it again, makes a mistake, and starts over. “Came up with it myself.” 

“Really? It’s good,” Louis says. Normally, Lestat would bask under that praise, offer to play it again, try a different variation, tell him how he came up with it, but now he only says, “thanks.”

Lestat’s taken to the guitar quite readily and rapidly. Louis’ not sure how he’s able to come up with his own tunes already, but he’s been trying since the start, unhappy and unsatisfied with whatever they teach in class. 

Louis looks around at the bedroom he so rarely gets to see. Lestat used to share it with Pierre, Louis knows, this room, but there’s not a trace of him left now, if there ever had been one to begin with. The only evidence of his existence is a framed photograph of a young Pierre with a near silver-haired baby Lestat on his lap that always sits on Lestat’s desk. Louis has always had the urge to ask about it, but has never quite found the right words that wouldn’t get Lestat prickly, nor the right time to ask—and it surely isn’t the right time today. 

It’s a bit claustrophobic, this room. There’s something everywhere the eye can reach; the walls adorned with posters of his favorite bands, musicians, movies; his desk, his cabinets, his windowsill covered in various trinkets that have, at some point, taken Lestat’s fancy and been given a permanent home here. 

The three desk drawers are full too, in a disorganized organization that only Lestat seems to make sense of. The lowest of them, Louis knows, contains snacks—half eaten chocolate bars, bags of chips, and marshmallows and gummy worms and whatever else Lestat can afford to keep around without drawing his father’s ire about hoarding food. 

Louis swivels around in the chair and tries to find some normalcy before he can get to the point. 

“Your room’s a fuckin’ mess, you know?”

“It’s not a mess, it’s how I like it,” Lestat grumbles, and goes back to his playing. 

Right, okay. That was dumb. The usual banter won’t do today. Louis bites his lip and swivels nervously around once more. 

The snow globe Louis gifted him years ago, Louis knows, is tucked away somewhere deep in his closet. Because, Lestat’s father isn’t a big fan of his son liking pink ballerina’s either, and Lestat’s been afraid he’ll toss it out. Has threatened to, he’d told Louis once. 

Once the thought comes, however, Louis can’t help the creeping feeling in his stomach it induces, and he can’t keep his eyes from tracking desperately across the room in search of a glossy shimmer of a globe, for a hint of pink peeking through. 

Because….what if Lestat himself has tossed it out? Has deemed it worthless now, and useless. 

And that…that fills him with a sort of panic that has him uncharacteristically stumbling over his words. 

“Les, I’m sorry,” Louis says, “I shouldn’t have said that stuff, I didn’t really mean it. It just came out all wrong. It always just comes out all wrong and–” Louis takes a halting breath, and presses his fingernails into his thighs. 

Lestat stops playing, clearly surprised at Louis’ sudden outburst, but trying to hide it. He opens his mouth to say something, then forces it closed, swallows, strums a few more chords, and shrugs. 

“I’m sorry,” Louis says again. 

“Well, you were being a good Christian,” Lestat mutters finally, “unlike the rest of us.”

Louis frowns. Digs his nails in deeper.

“I didn’t mean it like that, I just…” he takes a deep breath and fully turns the chair around to face him. “Les, I don’t care if you’re…however you are. I don’t care. I’d never stop being friends with you cus of that. Ever.” 

Lestat eyes him. “Even if it’s a sin in the Bible”

“I don’t care what the Bible says.”

Lestat bites his lip. “Are you lying?”

“No.”

“You really mean it?” 

“Course I do.” 

Lestat swallows, plucks away some more, some haphazard, toneless thing. He's clearly trying to force himself to hold on to his grudge a little longer. But it’s a skill Lestat hasn’t learned yet and, in truth, never will, so lets out a dramatically loud sigh and puts his guitar aside. 

“Fine, fine,” he says, “guess I’ll take you back.” 

Louis let’s go of the breath he’d been holding. They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, trying for seriousness, until Lestat’s lips slightly tremble and they both burst out into some inexplicable kind of laughter that takes a moment to recover from. 

“So…you like girls and guys?” Louis asks tentatively after some time has passed and the air around them feels almost back to normal, reaching his lungs and feeling like home again. 

“Mmm…” Lestat hums, “I guess? To be honest…” he says, “I haven't really thought about it much.” 

“Does anyone know? Well I mean…besides…” Louis swallows, taps his fingers on the chair’s armrest, “the boy you um...” 

“Well,” Lestat says, “I did tell my dad.” 

Whatever air had reached his lungs soon leaves them again. Louis leans forward, mouth all but falling open, and in the brief pause before either of them speaks, his mind provides him with some of the most unimaginable horrors and worst scenarios it can come up with.

And then Lestat’s lips quivers again and he finally snorts.

Louis groans, rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair in relief. 

“Ah,” Lestat breathes out, palm over his stomach, “you shoulda’ seen your fuckin’ face.” 

“Stupid,” Louis mutters and kicks him in the shin. 

“Louis,” Lestat asks once he’s calmed down.

“Hm?”

“You uh…you won’t tell anymore will you?”

“Course not–” 

“I don’t care even if you did!” Lestat adds quickly. “I’m not ashamed of it,” he says, though he flushes deeply as he says it. 

“Okay,” says Louis. 

“I just…” Lestat chews on his bottom lip again, and then shakes his head. “Just…don’t tell, is all.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

Lestat nods, and then, in a quieter tone, like it’s a secret, “I’ll tell my mom, I think. Maybe. When she’s back.”

And, Louis thinks, this house too has its ghosts, does it not? Floating up there on the ceiling to remain unacknowledged, merely whispered of— when will she be back? Will she be back? 

Gabrielle is always coming and she is always leaving.

“Louis?” Lestat asks, voice uneasy again. 

“What?” 

Lestat leans his head against the wall and looks at him for some time instead of speaking.

“What is it?” Louis asks. 

Lestat bites that bottom lip again, chafing now from the abuse. 

“You think Paul would think that too?” he finally asks, voice a whisper. 

“Think what?”

“I mean, what you said about the bible and…if he found out about…how I am. You think he’d think it’s a sin too? Like…” he swallows, and goes on, “he’d look at me different?” 

Louis blinks at him, not finding his voice. Lestat looks like he’s bracing himself for a blow, so Louis says simply, “Nah. Nah don’t worry about it.”

“Really?”

“Course.” 

Lestat takes a deep breath, and exhales, looking convinced, leaning his head back against the wall in relief. 

The truth is, Louis doesn’t know. No one has ever talked about being gay in the De Pointe Du Lac household. But…Paul is wiser than all of them, is he not? He’d understand, would he not? Paul always finds the correct answers, the correct ways to see the world. Lestat doesn’t suddenly become someone else because of who he likes. He’s still Lestat. And Paul likes lestat. 

God wouldn't’ get this wrong, Lestat had said, and Louis thinks, Paul wouldn’t either, would he? 

The dream comes to him again, suddenly, of burning alive at the pews of Saint Augustine, of Paul’s loveless eyes, of a God who doesn’t hear him, but then just as suddenly, he thinks then that maybe he feels it after all, that elusive light they keep talking about, buried deep in his gut, that luminous thing. 

Except that, Louis doesn’t find it at the altar, he doesn’t find it in the rays of the sun beaming through the stained glass windows of Saint Augustine, nor Father Mathias’ holy sermons. 

They’re in Paul’s eyes, in Louis' mind, that light, when they look at Louis, and see all of him in truth, and love him still. Love him always. Love him despite.

“Louis?”

And what a dangerous thing it is, that light. How fickle. How horrifying, the hope it feeds in his chest. 

“Louis. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Louis says, “yeah, sorry.”

The rest of the afternoon is split between trying to teach Mojo to sit and roll (unsuccessfully), Lestat talking Louis’ ear off about his new composition after all, playing it for him multiple times until his dad tells him to stop, and switching to a boring computer game after. The bliss of normalcy leaves Louis so relieved that he doesn’t think of the dream anymore, nor the light, nor the hope, and the calm finally leaves space for his mind to think, to go back to Lesat’s words and process them properly. When it finally hits, Louis gasps, clutches Lestat by the arm so abruptly that it startles him almost out of his seat. 

“Lestat!” Louis says, shaking him.

“Jesus, what? You made you lose,” Lestat grumbles.

“Who was it?”

“Huh?”

“The guy! The guy you…kissed,” Louis whispers. 

“Oh,” Lestat says, “Leo, of course.”

“You kissed Leo?!” Louis exclaims, muffled halfway into the hand Lestat clasps against his mouth. 

“Shhh! Jesus, quiet down.”

“Holy shit.”