Archive of Our Own ^beta

The thing lay still

The plan didn’t work. Lestat didn’t drink the poison. Antoinette is a vampire.

Louis can’t think. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s trembling with rage, with despair, with fear. Lestat knocks him into a wall, he pushes him back. He goes after him, pushes him harder, tries to hurt him. He grabs his dagger, clenches his hand around it. All he hears is the pounding of his heart and the abundance of blood in his veins, his own heaving breath.

Then a sound cuts through. A gasp. His name.

Louis!

Claudia, blood on her neck. A knife at her throat.

She falls. She lies still.

Here, à la fin.

Lestat doesn’t see it happen. He’s watching Louis come towards him with his dagger drawn. Out of the corner of his eye he sees that the two women are tangled together, fighting, but he isn’t paying attention.

Then she drops to the ground, red blooms over her white dress, and by the time he turns to look, his daughter is dead on the ground.

Everything stills for a moment that feels like a lifetime. He stares at her. She called Louis’ name as it happened, choked on it. Antoinette must have overpowered her, got a grip on her, stabbed her in a swift movement, right through her throat.

It happened so quickly. Claudia is dead on the floor. He cannot think, a thick fog clouds his thoughts. Why is she dead?

Antoinette stands above her, the fire poker still in her hand, dripping blood in Claudia’s hair. She’s grinning, proud, looking up at Lestat.

Bile rises in his throat. He might throw up the entire bloody feast he indulged in tonight at the sight of Claudia’s dark eyes, staring unseeing at the ceiling, the unnatural stillness of her.

He can’t stop looking at her. He was fighting Louis, he vaguely remembers, though he isn’t sure why. He felt like he had to stop them - but not like this.

He did not want this. Did he? Did he want this? Surely he didn’t.

She looked so fierce tonight, his would-be murderer. The glee on her face as she slaughtered all those men, the delight in her laugh as she ripped them apart. Her pride when she thought she had surprised him. Oh, how she wanted him to die. He hadn’t expected to feel a sense of pride on the eve of her betrayal, but he did.

Along with the pride, the fog had formed in his brain, and the doubt had crept in. Now, there is nothing left of the certainty he felt only yesterday, when he told Antoinette to come here. Why? What for? Not for this.

Antoinette turns to look at him, that satisfied grin still on her face. In doing so she turns her back on Louis and doesn’t see, as Lestat does, how Louis moves towards her, slowly, like in a dream, his eyes wild and teeth bared in a silent snarl as he lunges at her and drives his dagger through her chest.

Her eyes widen as she mouths his name, Lestat?

She wants him to help her, he notes absently. Strange. Why would he do that?

Louis grabs her by the hair and Lestat has the fleeting thought that he could get to them in a fraction of a second. He doesn’t move a muscle.

He watches, silent, frozen, leaning against the wall Louis threw him into, as Louis stabs her, puts his knife to her throat and slices right through it, again and again, sawing through her neck. Belatedly, Lestat realizes Louis is making a noise as he does it, a wailing scream, wordless and full of pain and madness.

Antoinette drops to the floor, her head barely attached to her neck, blood all over her face and body.

Behind her, Louis drops to his knees next to Claudia. He lifts a hand to her hair, softly touches her curls. Lestat can see how he trembles from across the room.

His voice comes out hoarse and he has to try a few times before he manages to say, “Put her in her coffin, Louis.”

Louis freezes at the sound of his voice like he forgot anyone else was in the room. He turns his head to look at Lestat. His eyes are blank. Lestat isn’t sure he understood what he means, so he tries to explain, “She is not dead. Only…very injured. In her coffin, she will heal. A few weeks, months maybe. Feed her after a few days, she will heal.” He gestures at Antoinette on the floor. “You should burn us to make it permanent.”

Louis frowns at him. “What do you mean, us?”

Lestat stays silent, waiting for Louis to remember where he is. What he is doing, will do, in honor of his daughter. The thing they both wanted more than anything, the purpose of this night. He sees Louis’ eyes flit between Claudia’s body next to him, Antoinette’s bloody corpse on the ground and Lestat against the wall. The dagger is still in his hand.

Louis finally gets up and takes a step towards Lestat.

Another step, and another. His breath is heavy, his movements slow. Lestat would prefer him to be quick, he thinks, to use his vampire speed and ram the knife in his chest like he did with Antoinette, but maybe this is better after all. He gets more time to look at Louis’ beautiful face this way. He thinks he’s never been this exquisite; dark make up smudged around his eyes, the white shirt and pants cinched around his delicate waist, blood all over his mouth. Ethereal, monstrous, all the beautiful things.

Lestat’s knees buckle, and he lets himself fall to his knees.

He raises his head in acceptance, bares his throat, and says, “It’s okay. I see that now.”

Louis stands right in front of him but still doesn’t lunge at Lestat. He looks down at him and asks, “Why are you doing this? What game are you playing?”

Lestat looks past him, to the shape on the floor. Her face is blocked from sight by Louis’ legs. He only sees her hand, adorned with rings, just like his own always are.

“No game.” He looks up at Louis, tries to put a reassuring look in his eye, though he isn’t sure how effective it is. He feel a wildness cutting through the fog in his head, tears in his eyes, distant panic pressing on his lungs. Still, he insists, “It’s okay. Kill me.”

Louis hand grips the dagger harder, his fist trembling, and a look of anger crosses his face.

It feels right, Lestat thinks, to die by the same dagger that his love was wielding when he first saw him. When he knew instantly that a man willing to hold a knife to his brother’s throat in the street had a fire in him that might finally warm Lestat up.

Louis takes the last step, and then his legs, too, give out, and he falls to his knees next to Lestat.

He grabs Lestat’s hair and wrenches his head further back. He presses the dagger against Lestat’s jugular, but he doesn’t stab.

Instead, Louis leans forward, his chin bumping into Lestat’s collarbone on the opposite side from when the knife is, his face against his neck. Louis holds onto him, the hand that was in his hair lowering to his back, grabbing onto his shirt.

Lestat cannot hold back the tears anymore, and he feels a wetness forming on his neck that tells him Louis is crying too. He repeats, trying to sound reassuring through the lump in his throat, “It’s okay. C’est bien. Ne t’inquiete pas.”

Louis still doesn’t move, so Lestat puts his own hand over his on the dagger and puts pressure on it, until a bead of blood wells up where the point digs into his neck. He lets himself touch Louis, caresses his back. A calmness comes over him, then, an acceptance beyond even what he felt when Claudia fell.

He says, “I’m glad it’s you, here with me.”

He feels Louis sob, still hiding his face, before he takes a breath and raises his head. Of course Louis would sit up to do this. He would not do this cowering and hiding.

Louis doesn’t go far, just looks up enough to meet Lestat’s eyes. They stare at each other, Louis’ hand in his hair, not pulling now, almost cradling his head. He must understand now that Lestat will not try to fight him.

Their eyes meet in a last moment of connection, the cord that connects them singing once more. Lestat looks into his beautiful emerald eyes, the eyes that he gave him.

He whispers, soft as a last breath, “I have loved you, with all myself.”

Louis looks back at him, red tears brimming in his eyes. He opens his mouth, like he’s about to say something, but instead makes a noise halfway between a gasp and a sigh, leans forward, puts his forehead against Lestat’s, and lets the dagger fall to the floor.

time and time again

Louis carries Claudia to her coffin.

He puts her down softly in the pink satin, arranges her curls to lie around her head. He thinks he should clean her up, change her clothes, but he doesn’t have time and he doesn’t think she would want him to undress her. He feels numb. A familiar feeling. But today he can’t drift into endless days of sleep, moving dreamlike through the world, today he cannot stop and lock himself away. He has to keep moving. The city will not let them close the door on what happened on Rue Royale tonight. Even though Lestat is burning all the bodies in the incinerator and cleaning the blood off the floor, there will be no doubt as to what took place. They need to leave.

He takes the coffin down to the car waiting in the street. His own coffin is already there, along with a couple of trunks.

Lestat is in the courtyard, waiting. Antoinette’s body lies on the ground next to him. He had told Louis he would take care of incinerating the bodies, but Louis told him not to burn her yet. He wants to see it.

Lestat doesn’t look right. Small in a way Louis has never seen him. Like Louis, he’s cleaned his face, but Louis changed into a suit whereas Lestat is still wearing the same white bloodspattered shirt. He just stands there, looking blankly ahead, arms by his side.

Louis is still apprehensive, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Lestat to grab him by the arm, drag him somewhere away from Claudia, or at least for Lestat to take charge, to lead them wherever he wants to go, finally explode into rage.

In the room, earlier, it was like a light suddenly went out in Lestat. Could it be that seeing Claudia dead on the floor had shaken him that much?

It can’t have been a game. One push of Louis’ hand, with the knife against his throat, and Lestat would be dead. He’s a good actor but not even he would take that risk. No, it was real; Lestat was willing to die in that moment.

Louis couldn’t do it in the end, of course. He wonders if he ever could. The thought of Lestat next to Claudia on the floor, both of them lying there like empty shells, had been unbearable. If Louis had ended up alone in that room with only the bodies of his family next to him - he would have joined them. It crossed his mind, of course; to kill Lestat and then himself. Burn his body, wait for dawn, step into the sunlight.

But then - what was it that stopped him? The hope of Claudia alive again, her needing him to save her, to put her in her coffin to heal?

No, it had been the look in Lestat’s eyes in those moments that could have been his last. It was love, not diminished in the slightest by their betrayal. Like a tidal wave, same as always. It had been their last dance, and how Louis had wanted to stay there in those strong arms forever. It had been his own love, still so wild and present even with his knife at his husband’s throat, their hearts still beating in sync. Looking into his eyes, he had drowned once more, and dropped the knife.

He will probably think it was a mistake soon. But not yet. Right now, he’s just glad he doesn’t have to be alone when he's loading his daughter’s body into a car and leaving the only home he’s ever known.

He walks up to Lestat, who shakes himself out of his stupor to look at him.

“Did you burn all of them?”.

“Yes.” Lestat’s voice is flat. “I would have burned her too. You told me to wait,” he says, like Louis doesn’t remember.

“I want to see it. Don’t trust you not to lie again.”

“Of course.” Lestat doesn’t seem to take any offence, just speaks with the same passive acceptance he’s been showing since falling to his knees. Like nothing matters anymore.

So they do it together, load her body into the incinerator and watch her skin turn to ash. It doesn’t feel like anything to Louis. There was a time when he hated this woman, for all she was that he was not - white, female, loud in her love for Lestat. But now she is just another entry in the long line of betrayals, of things that Lestat used to hurt him. There is another list, he knows, of things he has used to hurt Lestat - his silences, his contempt, his ‘thousand nights of sulking’. Lestat still winning, always more terrible- his violence more physical, more devastating, his betrayal more explicit. Now they might be even when it comes to betrayals, he thinks.

He glances at Lestat next to him to see how he’s taking the death of his fledgling, of the woman he spent so many years with, but he isn’t even looking at her. He's just staring into the distance.

Louis grabs him by the elbow, suddenly impatient, and drags him to the car.

“You have everything you need?” 

Lestat blinks at him like it’s a ridiculous question, but he’s only put the one trunk in the car. Louis would have thought he would take more; some of the art, more of his clothes. He wants to ask him, suddenly, strangely, if he’s made sure to pack that one red suit Louis likes, if he has his favorite tie, his sheet music, but he stays quiet.

The only way you know how to love

They drive for hours. Eventually they find a house, halfway to Austin, that seems to be uninhabited at the moment. Lestat knock on the neighbours’ door to ask them who lives there - an older couple who are visiting their daughter on the east coast, apparently, who will be gone for a few weeks. He erases the entire conversation from their minds and almost passes out doing it. Blood won't stop pouring out of his ear, but it's fine. All fine.

He walks back to the car parked down the street, and wonders again why he is still alive. Perhaps Louis will kill him tomorrow, he thinks. He is too distraught now because of Claudia, but the day will give him clarity, and he will wake up in the morning and take up his dagger once more.

That’s okay. He can help him tonight, to move their coffins inside and make sure they’re safe, and then Louis can take it from there, and Lestat will rest when he’s dead. Ha. He swallows back a hysterical giggle.

They find a windowless back room in the house to put their coffins - a travel trunk, in Lestat's case, because he and Louis had been sharing for a while now, and they had planned to travel by boat so he planned to buy a coffin in Buenos Aires. Except that had been no one's true plan, of course.

Louis is silent as he unloads the car. Lestat tells him he will keep watch for a while and Louis doesn't react beyond a nod. He crawls into Claudia's coffin with her and closes the top. Lestat stays awake, sitting on a faded brown couch in the living room, in a quiet corner the sun doesn't reach. He doesn't sleep. He thinks.

Earlier today, he stood on the balcony of the home they built together and lit Louis’ cigarette and looked at him and realized he loved him more than life itself. It had all started to crumble from there. He asked Louis for a dance, expecting to be turned down, denied as he so often was. But Louis surprised him, took his hand, and kissed him in front of the whole city. He had not thought he could love Louis more than he already did, but it happened in that moment. And he wanted, suddenly, for Louis to be happy, more than anything. For Louis to finally be all the beautiful things he was, without apology. Whatever the cost.

And then her. Claudia. He has hated her, resented her, feared her. But when he saw her feast on their guests, when he saw her revel in the culmination of her plan, delight in the massacre, he suddenly saw her as she was. His daughter, alike but so much better than him. She has his monstrousness, his flair for the dramatic, but she is even more vicious and much more beautiful.

The moment she fell to the floor, he suddenly realized something. He realized that he loved both of them too much to ruin them. They should be their beautiful selves, and by trying to hold onto them he would only stand in their way, and darken their spark.

So she was right, his child, evil of his evil. He should leave their lives forever.

what is worse than that?

Louis wakes up with the setting of the sun, cradling Claudia’s body in his arms. She’s cold and still, but if he listens closely he can hear, every ten seconds or so, the thump of her heart. She’ll be okay, he thinks. He remembers seeing her fall yesterday, feeling like a part of him fell along with her, leaving him an empty shell. But they will be okay. He just needs to be patient. Care for her, and then she will wake up, and heal, and they can leave.

Unless Lestat stops them.

He can feel Lestat in the house, close by but not in the room. Did he go to sleep at all?

Will he be back to his usual self today, Louis wonders, and if so, which version of himself? Angry, betrayed - locking them all in this house until they agree to stay with him, ready for a fight? Loud, exuberant, dancing around the room and ignoring the chill in the air, the despair wafting off Louis?

But Lestat is other things as well, he knows. He lets himself remember, now.

For so long, Louis hasn’t let himself think of him in a positive light. First because the darkness in his mind would not allow for any positive thought at all, about anything, and all he saw was Lestat being too much, too brash, too annoying. Then after the betrayal of Antoinette, after the way he treated Claudia, he let the anger take over. And then these last few months, he was so wary of Claudia, who was always in his head making sure he would follow through on the plan, making sure she could not catch any affection, or attraction, or god forbid, love there. But he failed, in the end. She told him to distract Lestat, so he allowed it all to seep back in. To fall into him again, his husband; to let himself smile at him and enjoy the lift of his lips when he smiled back, to touch him with softness, to kiss the scar on his lip like he always wants to, to wrap an arm around him in their coffin. He allowed himself to see him, more and more, as he had also always been; loving, gentle at times, shining with adoration when Louis gave him any sliver of affection. That’s a version of Lestat as well.

He makes his way out of the coffin and into the house, where he finds Lestat sitting in the same place he left him in last morning.

“Did you sit there all day?

His eyes still hold that same blankness when they turn to Louis. He looks tired, and…wrong. Louis has never seen him this still, this cold. It’s too much like Claudia, in her coffin, like maybe part of him died along with her yesterday.

“No,” Lestat says, “I went out briefly before dawn, to catch some dinner.” He nods to the corner of the room, where Louis spots a few rabbits sitting in a makeshift pen made of cushions and planks of wood. “You will be delighted to know that I stuck to your diet tonight as well. Best not to risk drawing any attention.”

Louis nods, slowly lowering onto the couch. He sits facing Lestat, on the other end, drawing himself away against the armrest to make sure there is as much space between them as possible.

Lestat stays still, doesn’t acknowledge his closeness beyond tilting his head to follow his movements, wary. “I went out again about an hour ago to check the area. I don’t believe we were followed.”

Louis hums. “Do you think anyone’s gonna come after us?”

“No,” Lestat says, “I expect our beloved New Orleans will count its blessings when they see that we have disappeared. They will be glad to be rid of us.”

Louis nods, looking at Lestat again. He still hasn’t changed out of his bloody shirt. His eyes keep darting around, unwilling to look at Louis too long, not meeting his eye, jumping back to the window like something might show up there at any moment to crash through, come for them, despite his assurances that he doesn’t expect it.

He doesn’t know what to do. Where to go from here. Yesterday, he was ready to leave the country. Today, it feels like too much effort to leave this house. It was all Claudia, their whole plan; her desire to see the world, to find others like them, to murder their maker. Louis has no plan, no desires.

“Thank you for the rabbits,” he says. “I’m gonna take a walk. Alone.” He needs to think, away from Lestat. Away, away.

Lestat nods, still looking anywhere but at him.

Louis hesitates before leaving the room.

“You should change your clothes. I’m sure there are some shirts in the trunk, or steal something from whoever lives here.”

Lestat looks down at himself, shakes his head. “If my throat will be cut once you return from your walk, it seems pointless.”

Louis is so tired. He just looks back at Lestat for a moment, whose eyes are just as blank as when he offered the same last night. He turns to leave.

Before the closes the door, he murmurs, knowing he’ll be heard, “Change your shirt, Lestat.”

he was a broken thing

Lestat changes his shirt. It seems easiest to just do what Louis asks of him.

He looks through trunk he packed, things he was ready to take with them to Buenos Aires. Once again he questions himself - he would have dragged Louis and Claudia with him to another continent, shackled them, imprisoned them until…what? They grew to love him, after all? Did he truly believe that given enough time, enough misery, he could destroy their spirit enough that they would stay?

Seeing the dress shirts he and Louis bought together once upon a time in happier days disgusts him, so he goes through the closet of the man who lives here - an older man, clearly, old fashioned, a workman perhaps. His shirts are old and worn and not Lestat’s style at all. He hardly looks at them before grabbing a dark green one and shrugging it on, going back to the couch to wait for Louis to return.

It’s quiet here, out of the city, in the middle of the night. But every time he hears a sound - the wind in a nearby tree, a cat walking on the roof, he jumps.

He wishes Louis had just done it yesterday. Not dragged it out like this. He doesn’t think he wants to die, not really. He just knows it is the only solution. He wants it to be over. These last few months, fearing the townsfolk coming for them with their pitchforks, knowing he was not safe even in his own home, his own coffin, sitting at a dinner table as his family talked to each other about how they would poison him, lying in his coffin with man whose thoughts he could not see but which surely ran only to revenge and murder. He has not slept soundly for so long.

Sleep, yes, that is what he needs. Louis told him to put on another shirt, indicating he will not kill him today either. He does not seem to be planning to kill him at all, anymore. So sleep, perhaps, is the answer.

like a chord you cannot see

As he walks through the streets of this nothing town, Louis thinks about his wedding day.

When they were dancing, what feels like a million years ago but was only last night, he had this utterly crazy thought. He had thought, for a second, that it was a shame they never danced like this at their wedding.

Because of course he thinks of Lestat as his husband. Never told him that, of course. Because if they are husbands, then that day in the church was not just, as Louis has yelled at him more than once, the day Lestat took his life from him. It was also the day they married each other. And maybe that’s equally important.

On the dancefloor, in front of every sad little human that thought they were better than Louis, he suddenly stopped caring what they thought, stopped caring who they saw him as, and just did what he wanted. And what he wanted was to kiss his husband.

If Claudia had not been there, he knows, he would have abandoned the plan right then and there. Knowing now that Lestat had known what they were planning - he knew the whole time they were on that balcony, on that dancefloor - makes Louis want to hunch over and cry. Lestat is a terrible liar. He’s good at hiding things, at not telling anyone anything, but his actions are always loud, and his emotions all over his face. He was genuine that night. He showed how he loved Louis, loves him still.

Does it matter? That they love each other? That Louis could not, can not, kill him?

He thinks of their vows, in the church, on the altar. The promise that Lestat made - that Louis could live without apology. Be himself. His true nature. But he hadn't, had he? Lestat had certainly tried. He tried to make him abandon the family who never accepted him, abandon the white men who would always see him as lesser. Lestat tried to make him rise above it all, be the monster, the powerful one, revel in it. But with all that came the murder, the blood, even more to set him apart from the world that he always wanted to belong to. If he became the monster Lestat wanted, he could never be human again, he thought.

But what is humanity about if not love? Those people who disdained them for their private love, were they more human because they do not kill? And if they are, does he really want to hold onto humanity?

He was never more monstrous than yesterday and still, love was there. All tied together, the love that choked him as Claudia died, turned to the rage that made him behead Antoinette. The love that Lestat showed him, that stopped him from committing the one murder that would have truly felt like one.

It could be a revelation, perhaps, if he lets it. The moment on the dancefloor. The moments after. Because he felt so pure in his monstrousness yesterday. So pure in himself. In his love, his desire, his thirst. Can that be his future? Not Lestat’s theatricality in it, not Claudia’s delight, but a quieter rage that can be let out sometimes.

Yes, he thinks, as he feels himself smile. He wants that. Kill the men who would think him lesser for the color of his skin, the things he does in the bedroom. Show them who has the real power.

What else does he want? He thinks about it as he walks further along the street, which eventually becomes a field, and as he keeps going through the tall grass, in the moonlight. He wants Claudia to be okay. He wants her to wake up. He wants her to be happy, to find what she is looking for. To be in her life. He wants to live more honestly. To accept his vampiric nature. Not to lose touch with all the beautiful things humanity offers - art, and light, and sex and love and society - but to rise above the pettiness of humans. To find power. To be independent.

He lets himself imagine it - travelling with Claudia to Europe, to South America, to wherever. Discover the world. Let her spread her wings, find the companionship she craves. Find a new version of himself - find new people, new music, new art. See the seasons change until he loses track of the years.

He sees this future version of himself, and lets himself want it. To stand up straight and proud, to laugh in the face of whoever tries to judge him. Hunt the lowlifes, the racist assholes, the rapists, drag them around a corner and feast on them.

He sees himself on these imagined streets, sometimes with Claudia, sometimes with other companions, perhaps even other vampires. And he knows, suddenly, without any doubt, that wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always feel like he does right now - like half his heart is missing, like an endless string is tugging him back, back to the small house he just left. Like a limb is lost, waiting to be reattached so he can feel whole.

He walks and walks for hours, then makes his way back to the house.

When he gets back Lestat is on the couch, exactly as he was when Louis left, wearing a shirt several sizes too big for him and dark shapeless pants.

Louis ignores him, goes to eat a few rabbits, checks up on Claudia, gathers his thoughts.

Then he comes back and looks around the room. It’s small but cozy. A fireplace, a couch and an armchair, a record player and a radio. Nothing like the opulence of Rue Royale. He lets himself miss it for a moment.

He looks at Lestat, his hunched figure staring into the air. Shoulders tense, like he still expects Louis to approach him from behind and slit his throat.

He feels sad for him, for them. It would be so much easier to hate him if he could only think of the pain, of Lestat dropping him from the sky and walking out the door to fuck other people. That’s what he’s been making himself think of constantly these last few weeks. But it was always useless.

He closes his eyes and remembers their home. Lestat at the piano, playing some soft, soulful music. Louis on the couch, reading a book, hiding his smile when Lestat curses as he tries to compose.

He shakes himself, sighs, and goes to sit on the couch. He tells Lestat, “It’s almost dawn. You should go to sleep.”

Lestat looks at him. He clears his throat, puts his hands on his knees primly. “I have been thinking, while you were out. I believe perhaps, if you do not kill me after all, that I should go to sleep for a longer while.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s something we can do. Something I have done before, after…after Paris. After Nicki. I buried myself and slept, for a long time.”

Another thing he never told Louis, of course. He skimmed over so much of his history. Louis still barely knows who Lestat is, he thinks. He wants to ask more questions, but this is not the time.

Lestat continues, “I would find somewhere remote. Somewhere dark. Dig a hole. You would not need to worry about me, and perhaps afterwards - well. Perhaps we bump into each other, and you will have - had time. You might want to say hello. Perhaps.” He looks almost longingly at Louis, like he looks forward to it. To being a long-lost friend to him, to be an acquaintance.

It doesn’t feel right. Not what Louis wants, but the offer of it is appreciated, and he thinks it may be what they need, right? Louis cannot kill him, Claudia does not want him anywhere near.

“All I ask,” Lestat pleads, “is that you do not go to Paris. I know that I have no right to ask anything of you but please. Louis. The vampires there are -” a dark look crosses his face. “They are vicious, and old fashioned, and will not welcome the both of you.”

It feels easy enough, in the face of the whole world, to promise this, so he does. “Okay. I don’t know what we’ll do, but no Paris.”

Lestat sighs, tears welling up. “Thank you.” He nods, wipes his face. “I- if it is alright, I think perhaps I could find a place to dig tomorrow?” He looks out the window. “Only, the sun is almost up, and-”

“Of course,” Louis interrupts. “Yeah, I don’t even- we’ll talk more tomorrow, okay? Sleep in your trunk tonight, it’s fine.”

“Oh,” Lestat says, suddenly rigid again, “No, I will stay here again.”

Louis stares at him. He’s never known Lestat to skip a day’s sleep, and now he wants to skip two? He looks haggard, slumped like he might keel over. “You need to sleep, Lestat. Are you…” He swallows, thinks of the way his eyes keep darting around. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes,” Lestat answers with a short, hysterical laugh, “I cannot- I-” He closes his eyes in despair. “Louis. You are right, I am exhausted. Can you-” another bark of unwelcome laughter. “More promises I want from you. I never could stop.”

“It’s okay. What do you need?”

“If you are going to kill me,” Lestat whispers, “please do it when I am awake. Do not take me from my bed, as he did.”

Louis freezes. Lestat had never mentioned anything again after he told them, briefly, how he was made, and Louis had almost forgotten about it. He realizes in a moment of clarity, now, just how much pain and trauma Lestat is hiding in his past. Before he can think about it, he slides across the couch up to Lestat and cups his cheek.

He looks into his eyes and says, “I am not going to kill you. Okay? I promise. Not in your…bed, not anywhere. “ He swallows, doesn’t want to make promises he can’t keep, think of the dagger clenched in his fist, tip drawing a bead of blood. “Not tonight. You can sleep. I promise.”

For the first time since they left Rue Royale, Lestat’s eyes aren’t blank. They shine with surprise and something else, something familiar and warm, as he leans just slightly into Louis’ hand and says, “Okay.”

He gets up, and Louis lets him go, hand falling to his side. Something aches - his heart, the part of it that hasn’t been his own in a long time. He watches Lestat disappear into the back room, listens to him take of his shirt and crawl into the travel trunk.

He thinks of Lestat disappearing into a hole in the earth for - how long? Years? Decades? It’s a perfect solution, he thinks. It will even placate Claudia, once she wakes and realizes Louis could not go through with their plan. Finally, freedom from Lestat, freedom to leave and pursue their own desires.

But the problem, Louis thinks, was never that Lestat prevented him from having what he desired. Even now, if he were to follow his desire, it would only lead him to squeeze next to him in that trunk.

you are its keeper

Lestat wakes up unharmed, because Louis never says things he does not mean. He does not say a lot of things, likes to keep his thoughts to himself, but Lestat thinks that wat he does say, he means. Like you took my my life. Like you’re always gonna be alone. Like you’ll never be my family.

He sighs and makes his way out of the trunk. Louis isn’t up yet. He goes back to the couch.

A forest, perhaps. Somewhere deep in a forest would be nice. He thinks of his mother, suddenly, which he hasn’t done in a long time. She likes forests. A hole in the dark, wet earth, and a long rest. Yes.

He’s glad he thought of the option of sleep. Since Louis does not seem inclined to kill him, for whatever reason - could he ask him, Lestat briefly wonders, why he won’t? - and walking into the sun does not appeal - the vast chasm of difference between dying at your lover’s hand and being alone in the light as you turn to ash is insurmountable. And staying alive, but letting them go? An impossibility. He cannot. He will not. He does not want to, really, is the whole of it. A life alone, to walk the streets alone, attend the opera or the theatre without someone to sit next to, endless nights with this ache in his chest, this void where his heart should be as it instead travels the world without him? Or god forbid, trying to find another companion, another shining soul in the darkness, when he has already found the brightest light in the world in Louis’ smile, rare as it is? No. A century or two in the forest is the only answer.

 crushing what you cannot own?

The next night, Louis makes Lestat go out with him to hunt.

“There are a lot of rabbits in the field over here,” Lestat says, trying to lead Louis over.

Louis shakes his head. “I went down to the river yesterday. It’s bit of a walk, but there are people living on houseboats there that won’t be missed. We can just drop them in the river. We’ll be gone by the time they’re found.”

It takes him a few steps to realize Lestat isn’t walking next to him anymore. He looks back to where he stopped, in the middle of the path. The moon is full tonight, and they’re far enough from the town now that the stars are out. The moonlight reflects silver on Lestat’s hair, making him look ethereal as he stands there frowning at Louis in his oversized clothes.

“You want to hunt humans?”

Louis sighs. “Lestat, we ate a dozen people two days ago. I ripped a man’s jaw off.” He hesitates, unsure if he wants to share what he’s been thinking about, but also wanting to be honest for once. “And anyway, I think I’m gonna try and…be more accepting of my nature. From now on.”

“Oh,” Lestat says faintly. “That’s good, Louis.”

He starts walking again. Louis can see that his eyes are shining wet in the starlight as they quietly make their way to the river.

They find two fisherman, kill them, dump them in the river, and walk the hour back to the house. They still don’t talk.

Louis makes himself think of all the reasons he had for wanting Lestat to die. The terrible things he said to Claudia. How he choked her, grabbed her, hurt her, dragged her back when she tried to escape. All the endless things he did to Louis, all the things Claudia would repeat again and again whenever she felt him waver: He lied to you, he hides his past, you don’t even really know him. He almost killed you. He did kill you. He bled you, dragged you, took you to the sky and dropped you. It took you weeks to heal. He cheated, again and again, made you feel like you could never be enough, and lied when you asked him to end it. He is callous, selfish, rude, he wants things you cannot give. You deserve to be happy and you deserve to be free.

It’s that last one that always fell especially flat when Claudia insisted on it. Happiness is hard, Louis thinks, and it has never come easy to him. He lived for 33 years before meeting Lestat and can only remember some brief moments of happiness from that time - dancing with Paul, sitting in the garden in spring with his sister, that first time with Jonah. In his childhood, his early twenties, there were these moments of joy here and there, but they grew rare as he got older, as he became a disappointment to his family and felt more and more on the outside of everything.

He remembers those six years without Lestat, when he and Claudia were alone together. He was not happy then, though again, sometimes he came close - watching her twirl in a new dress or hum along to a song on the radio. The love he has for her has come easy, like the love between him and his siblings as children, and the happiness that came from it was at times easy as well.

But her insistence that there was none of it to be found with Lestat was so blatantly false that even when he hated him the most, he could never make it ring true. There had been laughter, warmth, and a kind of belonging that he never felt before in those first years with Lestat, and again in their first years with Claudia. He lets himself have the thought that he always dismissed before Claudia could hear it: Other than when he was a little kid, the happiest moments of his life happened because of Lestat.

But does it matter? Two days of this quiet, contemplative version of Lestat is not enough to change anything. Whatever is happening, whatever Claudia’s temporary death did to him, Louis knows that it won’t last. He also knows that there is nothing in the world that will convince Claudia, when she wakes up, to do anything but depart to the other side of the earth from wherever Lestat is. Unless she kills him after all.

Eventually, they get back to the house. Lestat goes and makes his way once more to the couch, but Louis catches him by the elbow. “Let’s sit outside and talk. It’s such a beautiful night.”

Lestat quietly follows him into the backyard, where they find two lawnchairs in the grass, old and wobbly, half turned towards each other. The couple that lives here must sit here often, Louis thinks, just talking, drinking coffee, watching the birds and each other. A small life, but a nice one.

Louis looks at him as they sit. Perhaps it’s the stage that has been set, the chairs posed for an intimate conversation between lovers, but he feels soft towards him like this.

He notices Lestat took his shoes off. The pants he wears are a little too long, covering his feet, his toes poking out, buried in the grass. Along with the too-big shirt and the uncharacteristic slouch of his shoulders, it makes him look small.

Louis pictures him on his knees, digging a grave. Crawling into it and closing his eyes. All alone.

“So,” he asks, “going to sleep. How does that work, exactly?”

Lestat’s toes curl in the grass. He says, “It is like what Claudia is doing now, in a way. We can do it when we need to heal, to let the world pass us by for a while. Everything shuts down. And then when the time is right. When the…pain is not as acute anymore. Or when the outside world is loud enough…we wake.” A small smile appears on his lips. “Last time, it was like I could feel how the world was changing - the new world, with all its light and sound. It felt like it was worth awakening for. And all the pain, the…loss - it was less present. Not gone. But less."

Sometimes, Louis knows, Lestat will still get a melancholy look on his face when he hears a violin, or when they pass people on the street speaking a particular French dialect. He cannot imagine what the pain must have been like before he went to sleep, if it still lingers all these decades later.

“How long would it be? If you went to sleep now?”

“Well,” Lestat considers, “It took a century last time.” He looks at Louis then, taking him in with a sad smile on his lips. “Longer this time, I expect.”

“Longer than a century?” That’s impossible, Louis thinks, mouth hanging open. That’s not an option. That’s- “No,” he hears himself say.

“No?” Lestat frowns.

“No, Lestat, you can’t-” You can’t leave me for over a century, he almost says. Don’t leave me, you’re a part of me. I can’t breathe without you.

Fuck. Back in the well with no bottom.

He closes his eyes, takes a breath. “Can’t you do it for like. A year or two? Maybe Claudia will…maybe we will have -” He doesn’t even know what to say. Will have what? What can he offer?

“Mon cher,” Lestat says, not considering the way those words make Louis’ chest hurt, “do you really think I’ll be able to let you go after only two years?”

Louis rubs his face, trying to hold himself together. “You have to let me go now.” He blinks back tears, voice choked as he continues, “It’s about when I can come back to you.”

He dares to look at him, and oh, Lestat’s face. It’s no emotionless blank anymore. His eyes are wide, red tears dripping down his cheeks as he stares in awe. His hand trembles as he reaches out towards Louis, too far away to touch but it hangs there, reaching, in the air.

“You want to come back?”

He thinks of all the things he could reply. Of course. You have my heart. I need you to be happy. I love you. But he just says, “Yes.”

“After-” Lestat swallows, unsure, “a year or two?”

“I don’t know. Maybe longer, maybe ten or twenty but - yeah.”

“You don’t want to kill me?”

“No,” Louis stresses. “I never did. I only wanted you to let us go. I want Claudia to leave, and she won’t go without me, and you wouldn’t let me go. That’s all.”

“You don’t want me to sleep for-”

“Not for a century, no, christ, Lestat. What would I do without you for a century?”

And oh, it’s like the embers of a fire start smoldering again in Lestat’s eyes. He drops to his knees in the damp grass and crawls over to Louis, grabbing his legs, a roaring fire in his gaze now.

“You’ll come back to me.”

Louis nods, his lips pressed tightly together so he doesn’t say too much.

Lestat rises up, touches Louis’ face, a featherlight caress over his cheek, the cleft of his chin. Louis reaches back to cup his face. A mirror of the church, Lestat on his knees, a question in the air. This time, it’s Louis who asks it.

“Can you wait? Can you let us go, and wait until I’m ready to come back? Leave us alone, don’t follow us, don’t look for us.” His hand trembles as he lets himself touch the moonlight in Lestat’s hair. “Trust me to come to you.”

He thinks, just nod your beautiful head, and as though for a moment they are truly back there in the moment before it all changed and Lestat can still read his mind, he does.

it will spiral beyond your reach

Lestat leaves the next night. He wakes up before Louis does as usual, gets out of the trunk, gets dressed in his own clothes. He stands next to Louis’ coffin for half an hour. He thinks about opening it to take one last look at him. Then his mind spirals into crawling in there with him, pinning him down, begging him to let him stay, threatening and cajoling until he gives in.

Walking out this door may be the hardest thing he’s ever done.

In the end, it’s the thought of Claudia that lets him do it. In the weeks before Mardi Gras, he sometimes thought she would be an acceptable loss. She was the driving force, after all, the angel of death. If she had to die so that Louis would stay, that cost would be worth it, he thought. He was nothing to her, after all. Not even an uncle anymore, or a brother, just a jailor, a monster. He never even wanted her. He only made her so Louis would stay.

Then he saw her fall, her eyes wide. Saw her on the floor, hair loose, staring at the ceiling, and she looked so young again, like she did when she first joined them. When she would smile at Lestat, that big, innocent smile. We’re a family? , she had asked him then, and they had been. She was not just a pest trying to steal Louis. She was his daughter, and he could no more kill her than he could kill himself.

She will wake up, and if Lestat is in the house when she does, she will find the first sharp thing in her reach and jab it through his chest, and Louis may not be inclined to kill Lestat himself, but he won’t step between them either. Louis made his choice. It will always be her.

A year or two, or ten, or twenty, he said. And then, no promises were made. Not really. Louis made him promise not to track them, not to follow them. They agreed that when Louis was ready (In twenty years? How will Lestat endure?) he will send a message through Roget. And then they had just said goodnight, and went to coffin. Perhaps Louis expected a goodbye this evening, but Lestat knew he had to leave like this.

He walks away, nothing on him, and doesn’t look back.

you and me

They stay in the house for a week, and then move on, Claudia still motionless in her coffin. Another empty house, another few weeks. Louis eats rabbits and cats not to raise suspicion, but also takes a human in every stop along the way, and tries to enjoy it. He starts putting rats and pigeons in Claudia’s coffin every night, and takes out the corpses the next morning. Her wounds close, her heartbeat speeds up.

In the fourth house, after two months, she wakes up.

She’s weak, and starving, and refuses to talk about the emotional toll, but she is alive and fully herself. It’s another two weeks until she can walk around and while she’s not back to her full strength yet, she looks fine.

She doesn’t ask, and Louis knows she assumes he killed Lestat. Wherever he went, by the time she woke up Lestat was far enough away that Louis could not feel his presence anymore - a fact that led to several long nights shaking in his coffin, feeling the loss of him in his bones.

It’s the fourth week after she wakes up, when she’s talking more and more about getting on a boat, sailing to Europe, picking up her old plans, when he tells her.

She yells, she throws furniture around, she leaves the house for an hour to go kill some people about it. When she comes back, she yells some more - she tells Louis that he is an idiot, that Lestat must be close by keeping an eye on them, ready to strike, ready to imprison them again or even kill them. She doesn’t let him get a word in before going to her coffin and throwing the lid down hard.

The next night, she finds him smoking on the front porch of this week’s house and sits next to him.

They sit there for ten minutes before she sighs and asks, “Why?”

“Because I-” Louis chokes on the simple truth of it. Thinks of Paul, walking off the roof. He looks at the glowing ember of his cigarette, remembers how Lestat would come up to him to light it with his own. The casual romance of it, all those little intimacies they had.

He says, “Because he’s my husband. He’s your father. He’s a terrible person, maybe even a monster, but I-” He growls, “Goddamnit.” Still can’t say it, never can say it. “Because I never wanted him dead, not really. You did. And you weren’t there, and I didn’t want to be alone. Okay?”

She’s quiet. She looks at him with something like pity in her eyes, but also some understanding. Louis thought she might get angry over him calling Lestat her father, but she doesn’t react to it.

“You did want to, though. We agreed that he had to die.”

“Yeah, well, I held my knife against his throat and then I didn’t want it anymore.”

She frowns at him. “You were fighting with him?”

“No, Claudia. When you - when you fell, he just…stopped. He fucking knelt on the ground and bared his throat at me and told me to kill him. Seeing you die messed with his head. I know you don’t want to hear it but I think he loves you. Even if he’s shit at showing it.”

She chews her lip for a moment and shrugs. “I don’t care.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t.”

“Yeah. I believe you. Just thought you should know.”

She nods. They sit there for a long while. Smoking, looking into the night. They’ll be okay, he thinks. All of them.

one more round

Lestat endures.

He goes to Buenos Aires, the place that he had planned to go after Mardi Gras. He settles there. He buys furniture, new clothes, a piano.

Every night for a year, he cries himself to sleep, the loneliness unbearable.

He phones Roget once a month at first, even though he is assured every time that they will contact him as soon as they receive any message. Nothing, nothing.

Meanwhile a war rages in Europe, and he realizes that he has no way of knowing if Louis and Claudia are all right. They could die halfway across the world, and he would just never know. He wishes he had asked Louis to send him a message, to check in every now and then. He cries about this new fear for another month.

The second year, he meets a young woman named Lucía, who is a nice diversion for a while. She’s a dancer and she takes him to all the clubs in the city, teaches him to move his hips properly, lets him fuck her in the alley behind the bar she works at. It’s nice. It’s fun. He doesn’t cry when he’s with her. The thought of turning her never crosses his mind, and after six months they seem to mutually decide they’re bored of each other and stop seeing each other.

He kept the hope of Louis’ initial timeline - that wasn’t a promise - of one or two years in his heart. But then the third year starts, and he realizes that of course it is not enough time. Louis wanted to see the world, to be himself, to be free. For an immortal being, what is two years? What is twenty? Louis balked at the thought of a century, but maybe he will realize, now, how short a century could truly be.

The fourth year, he seriously considers going to sleep after all. He has convinced himself that Louis will not return. He may be dead. He may be living it up somewhere who-knows-where ; New York, or Morocco, or China. He may have forgotten all about Lestat by now, found someone he could truly love, someone who would never grab his daughter by the throat. Someone who is perfect. Not too much.

He spends most of the fifth year inside his house. He leaves sometimes for a hunt, but his heart isn’t in it and more often than not, he sticks to rats and stray dogs. He plays his piano and tries to read books and spends whole nights in his coffin going over the past thirty years of his life, detailing all his mistakes. He realizes how much he truly hurt Louis. How he tried to punish him for not being able to love him. Tried to break him. How he broke the promises he made him. How he treated Claudia, pushed his fears of her turning out as Nicki did onto her without ever explaining himself. For the first time, he truly considers walking into the sun. But he has a promise to keep, even if Louis will never forgive him, might even punish him the way he deserves by making him wait forever and never returning at all.

The sixth year starts out much the same, but one night he decides to go out because the taste of wet dog is starting to make him retch. He wanders through the city and ends up at the Teatro Colón. An opera is playing, and he mindcontrols his way into the balcony without a ticket to watch. It’s wonderful. He goes again the next night, and the next. He goes there so often that the employees start to recognize him, and before he knows it he’s ingratiated himself with the stage crew, been invited to cast parties, and become friendly with the company (and more than friendly with two or three of them in the theatre dressing rooms.)

He drowns himself in decadence for a while, to the extend that year seven is largely a blur of alcohol and sex and opera. He still cries himself to sleep, often, still feels the gaping chasm in his chest where his heart is missing. He meets many beautiful humans, even a few beautiful young vampires who approach him in the night. He beds many of them, sometimes more than once, but he never takes any of them to his coffin, and it’s Louis he thinks of every night as he lies there, arms wrapped around himself, dreaming of the days when he held his companion heart close to his chest. He wonders if he’ll ever feel warm again.

He thinks he finds his new normal in the eight year. He is no longer living as a hermit in his new house that has never felt like a home, every room too empty, not enough books, no matching ties in the closet. He is no longer drowning in hedonism. Instead, he is somewhere in between; he goes to the theatre, the opera, to piano bars and dance halls, kisses strangers and drains tourists and drags himself through the endless, endless lonely days without breaking down too often.

And then, in the ninth year after that fateful Mardi Gras, he gets a phone call.

“Monsieur Lioncourt?” Roget says as Lestat clutches the horn so tightly he feels it start to crack, hoping against hope. “We have received a personal message for you.”

He has to clear his throat twice before he manages to speak. “What does it say?”

“ ‘I’ll be at the church on our anniversary.’”

He waits for the rest of the message, but Roget stays silent. “Is that all?”

“Yes. That is the whole message. Would you like me to repeat it?”

“No, I heard.” His heart is beating in his throat. He had hoped for a long, romantic missive, perhaps. In his wildest dreams, drunk and lovesick, he had imagined passionate declarations of love, Louis finally realizing his devotion. More often, early in the morning in his coffin that always felt too big, he imagined a message from Claudia telling him Louis had been killed, or a message from Louis telling him to stop waiting, he had found a new companion, would never come back.

This is short, but it is promising, surely. The anniversary of the day he turned Louis is two months from now.

He tries not to hope. It will be a goodbye, perhaps. But whatever happens, he can go back home, once more. To where it all started. New Orleans, one last time.

He arrives two days early, just to be sure.

The moment he sets foot in the city, something starts to tug in his chest. The invisible cord grows taut. He isn’t sure if that means Louis is here or it is just the ghost of him. He sees him everywhere. They walked every inch of New Orleans together, sat on every bench, smiled at each other on every corner in those early days.

He keeps his head down, his hair tucked into his collar. He doesn’t want to be recognized by anyone who might remember him from ten years ago, who knows what went on that last night on Rue Royale.

And then, after two nights of wandering the city, he wakes up the moment the sun goes down on the day when, 38 years earlier, he turned Louis.

He goes to the church. St Augustine. It looks exactly the same as it did then. He gets there in only a few minutes, and realizes the message specified no time. A long night could be ahead, he thinks, if Louis even shows up. Perhaps this was all a last way to torture him. To make him suffer for nine long years, drown in his loneliness and then give him this sprinkling of desperate hope, only to dash it by never showing up at all. Perhaps Louis is somewhere halfway across the world, laughing with Claudia about how they tricked their horrible maker one last time. Perhaps this is calibrated to finally drive him into the sun.

These thoughts only get louder as Lestat sees no one waiting at the church, no one inside, no one in the confessional or in any of the pews. Or lying naked on the altar, as he imagined in one or two dreams lately.

He walks to the front of the church. His heart is pounding. He stands there for a while, looking at the altar.

He wondered, often, as he lay alone in his coffin in the early Argentinian mornings, if he really gave Louis a choice. If he should have waited to offer him the gift until he was less distraught. But he could never regret it, or see their moments here as anything other than a kind of wedding. Louis called today their anniversary. Not ‘the day you killed me’ or ‘my death day’. Our anniversary, the message said. Can he draw meaning from that?

He sighs and sits down on a pew to wait.

He stays there, mindless and patient, for two hours. The the door opens.

As soon as he steps inside, Lestat knows this is not a ghost or wishful thinking. He might faint from the feeling. It’s like the very air changes with his presence, like the whole world holds its breath.

He doesn’t look back.

His steps echo in the church as he comes closer. He can feel his eyes on him. He slides into the pew next to him.

“Hello Lestat.”

He closes his eyes. His voice is the same.

“Hello Louis.”

I didn’t know it was a gift

Lestat isn’t looking at him. Louis has no such problem - his eyes feel starved of the sight of him, so he stares. He knows vampires don’t change, but Lestat still looks different. Is his hair slightly longer? Was his skin always so pale?

When Lestat finally turns to look back at him he has to hold back a gasp. God, his eyes. Were they always so blue?

Once he looks at Louis, it’s like Lestat can’t stop either. His eyes dart over his face, his body, his hair - less gelled back than it was nine years ago, more natural. His clothes are different too, slightly, and he made sure to wear his best shirt, his tightest pants.

“You look well,” Lestat says. “I’m glad.”

Louis can’t help but smile at him. “You look good too.”

And he does, of course. His hair in soft waves that fall to his shoulders, his broad shoulders and thin waist. He’s wearing a suit that Louis doesn’t recognize but that looks similar to the kind of things they picked out together ten years ago.

Mostly, he looks just as beautiful as Louis remembers, which surprises him. He had convinced himself that his memory must be embellishing Lestat. Why else did no one he meet live up to him at all? Every tall blond man he picked up in bars all over the world was too thin, or too broad, their hair too dull, their eyes too pale. He even moved on to other types, dark skin and black hair, men with stubble and muscle, then freckled waifish boys. No one shone as brightly as the Lestat of his memory, not even the other vampires they eventually met, with gemstone eyes and similar smirks. He thought his memory was playing tricks, but no. He’s here, and he’s brighter than anyone in the world.

“How have you been?” he asks hesitantly.

“Oh,” Lestat scoffs, “you know. Perfectly fine. Enduring. I am in Buenos Aires now. They have some lovely shows there at the teatro, and the people are…ah, Louis, you would love it. Exquisite creatures. Vibrant, like you.”

Louis blinks at him.

“You think I’m vibrant?” Not a word he would use to describe himself, prone as he is to dark spells and melancholy.

“Of course,” Lestat says easily. “When I first saw you, it was like I saw the sun for the first time in more than a century. Le soleil levant.”

He’s always been a romantic, Louis remembers. He lets it gut him in a way he hasn’t in a long time, long before the last time they saw each other.

“I was worried you might have gone to sleep after all. I know I said a year or two. It took longer.” He won’t say he’s sorry for it. He knows he owes Lestat nothing. But the fear had been there, that he had taken too long, that Lestat would have dug that hole in the forest after all. It had been a relief to walk into the church and see him sitting there already.

He looks at Louis like he’s talking in tongues. “I told you I would wait. I would have waited a century, if that is what you wanted.”

“You never tried to find us - me?” He winces, regretting the reference to Claudia, her absence suddenly made real.

“No. It was…hard. Not knowing if you were alive. But I knew I was not welcome, so I kept away.” He looks tired, suddenly. Weary. There is a question in his eyes, but he doesn’t ask it, and Louis isn’t sure yet if he has the answer.

He wanted to see him. That’s simple. He walked the earth for nine years, and never stopped thinking about Lestat, never stopped seeing him around every corner, but he kept it up. He tried to be his own man, tried to find out who he is as a vampire outside of Lestat, and he thinks he found him. He wanted to see how this new version fits around Lestat, if there is anything still to even fit together. But now that he’s here, he wonders how different he is, after all, because now that he is in this church again, looking into these eyes again, he knows that if Lestat were to kneel before him now, he would give the same answer as he did forty years ago.

Would it work? Could they do it all again with any different results? How to test it? How to see?

Lestat interrupts his pondering in a hesitant voice to ask, “How is Claudia?””

Louis feels himself smile. “She’s great. She found a companion, actually. A girl. They’re travelling together now, in Europe. Last I saw them, they were thinking of settling down for a while.”

“Another vampire?”

“Well, now she is, yeah. I made her one.”

“You have a fledgling?” Lestat’s voice is small, a smile on his face.

“Yeah. It’s not-. She really wanted it, and obviously Claudia couldn’t do it, so. But it still felt weird. They left together like a day after it happened, and it felt-” He remembers sitting in his room, afterwards, bleeding himself, trying to feel her, trying to feel anything at all. “It felt horrible, honestly.”

“Well,” Lestat sniffs. “Fledglings tend to do that. Leave. Mine always have.”

Louis frowns at him. “How many do you have, anyway?”

“Well, you two. Who tried to kill me and then crossed the globe. Nicki. Who went mad, resented me, and threw himself into the fire - with some help, admittedly. My mother, who also left to -”

“Hold on, your mother?”

“Yes. She -”

“Your mother is a vampire? Is she still alive?”

“I expect so. I have not heard from her in a long time. I believe she might be in the Amazon somewhere.”

Louis rubs both hands over his face and takes a deep breath. It doesn’t really help. “And you wonder why people leave you? You never thought to tell me that your fucking mother could show up on our doorstep at any time?”

“I did not consider it important information,” Lestat sniffs.

“You never told me shit, jesus christ. You let me walk into the sun without telling me it could kill me! You have all this shit in your past ready to trigger any number of hissy fits.”

“I do not throw hissy fits,” Lestat scoffs.

“Oh, please. You’re the king of hissy fits.”

“I do not see how it matters what I did a century before we met, Louis.”

“You knew everything about me!” he says, teeth clenched. “You met my family. You could read my thoughts for months. You knew everything!” His voice echoes around the church. He resits the urge to grab Lestat by the collar and punch him in the face - another thing he forgot, how easy it is to feel enraged by him. “You knew all the darkest parts of me, all my shame and insecurity and -”

“And all I wanted was for you to let them go!” Lestat hisses back. He seems to be trying to keep himself controlled, not raising his voice, but his face is twisted in something between rage and agony. “I do not see why any of my past, the mistakes I made, the hurt I felt - I left it all behind. I wanted the same for you.”

“But I wanted to know you,” Louis insists. “And you never let me really see you.”

“I showed you who I was. Right here, in this church.” He motions to the side, towards the altar.

Loius sighs. They both look forward for a moment. He knows they both see the shadows of their former selves kneeling there. “You did. And I said yes to you. So why did you keep hiding?”

“You hid just as much. You withheld your thoughts, your feelings. It was like living with a stone statue sometimes, Louis, one full of regret and hatred. Why should I share more of my shame with that? You hated me so much already. Why should I give you more reasons to?”

“I didn’t hate you for that,” Louis says. He wants to be able to say he didn’t hate him at all, but sometimes he did, and they both know it. “It was never about your past, or the things you did. You were insufferable at times, and cruel, and selfish, and-”

“Is this why you came?” Lestat asks. It’s a shock to hear how his voice cracks with hurt. “To list all the reasons why you hate me? I know. I know it is impossible to love me, Louis, I know that I am a monster.”

Louis sighs, feels the anger drain away as he looks at him. “You’re not impossible to love. You are impossible to be with, because you lie, and you withhold, and you tried to hurt me all the time. You don’t listen and your rage is terrifying. But it was always possible to love you.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

And oh, Louis thinks, he looks broken. He realizes now, that Lestat maybe hasn’t been okay all these years. He remembers how he had talked about going to sleep, nine years ago, how he seemed to almost look forward to it. Instead, Louis asked him to wait, and he did. Enduring, he said earlier. He has been enduring for nine years. He looks tired. He thinks everyone leaves him. He thinks he is unlovable. He thinks Louis is the vibrant one.

“Can I hug you?” Louis blurts. He just - needs to touch him suddenly. To make sure he’s real. To make sure he knows Louis is real, that they’re both here. Both alive, despite it all.

Lestat’s eyes grow wide as he nod frantically.

So Louis scoots the final inches closer on the pew and puts his arms around him. It’s been nine years since they have been in the same country, and the last time they saw each other Louis almost killed him. But there is nothing tentative about this hug. The moment he touches Lestat he feels desperate. He hauls him close, one arm low around his waist, the other around his shoulder. He buries his face in Lestat’s neck, breathing him in. Their thighs are pressed together and Louis has the insane urge to climb on his lap to get as close as possible because god, the smell of him, the warmth of him, Lestat Lestat Lestat.

It takes Lestat a beat to gather himself in the face of the onslaught of Louis, but then he holds him closer still, presses his arms around Louis and touches their faces together.

They stay there, so close, and Louis hears Lestat start to sob. Warm tears soak into his shirt.

He’s murmuring something in Louis neck, quietly, over and over. Louis strains to hear it and eventually makes out a litany of “Je suis désolé, Louis, Louis, je t’aime, je suis désolé.”

It drains away the last bits of fury, calcified and old, and just leaves the tender, aching open wound that is his yearning heart.

Eventually, Lestat stops crying. They don’t move. They stay there for minutes, breathing together. Louis doesn’t want to ruin it with words. He doesn’t know what he would even say. He had a plan - he wanted to talk, to figure out if Lestat had changed at all, or moved on, if there was any chance to slowly get to know each other again. He almost scoffs at the thought of ‘slowly’. They never did anything slowly. They got married seconds after Lestat proposed. Lestat decided they were destined for each other after seeing him once. Slowly, he thinks, what a joke.

It’s all or nothing between them. He tried nothing. It didn’t make him very happy. He tried all the beautiful things life has to offer - music and art and sex and drugs - and none of it came close to the feeling of having Lestat back in his arms.

He thinks of Claudia, the last time he saw her. He visited just a few weeks ago, to tell her that he was going back to New Orleans, that he had called Roget. He asked her if she wanted to pass along a message. They had talked about it before, and he still expected her to try and stop him, but she hadn’t. He had asked her why, as they were saying goodbye on the balcony of the apartment in Italy she was staying in.

She had looked over her shoulder, at the red-haired figure sitting at the kitchen table, and sighed.

“I understand it more now, I guess,” she admitted. “Love. How it makes you hopeless and full of hope at the same time.” She had hugged him then, kissed his cheek. “You two were always hopeless about each other. I’ve given up trying to make you see sense. Maybe love ain’t about sense.”

Then she had punched him in the arm and said fiercely, “If he tries to hurt you, you let me know and I will finish what I started. Make sure to tell him that.”

He smiles into Lestat’s neck now, remembering that conversation. He thinks he’ll like to hear it, how their daughter is still full of fire and bloodlust. How she thinks there is hope for them after all. Hope in their hopelessness.

He remembers what Lestat said before they collapsed into each other’s arms, and suddenly he wants to give him a gift. Maybe he hasn’t earned it yet, but maybe it’s not about what they earn. Maybe, if he wants Lestat to be less withholding, he should offer the same.

He leans back just enough to look at Lestat. His eyes blink open, wet tears glistening on his eyelashes, bloody trails down his cheeks.

Louis cups his face and softly strokes a thumb over his lip. He can feel his, their, heartbeat pick up. He has to swallow - it’s still hard to show himself like this. But he has to.

He says, “It’s not impossible to love you. I did.” He leans a little closer still. “I do.”

It’s not quite the words he knows Lestat has always wanted to hear, but he can tell it’s close enough, and it’s like another vow, isn’t it. In the church, again. Hope sparks a light in those blue eyes and an old familiar smile, almost a grin, crosses Lestat’s lips.

Lestat makes an aborted move, like a muscle spasm, like he wants to lean in but there is still enough doubt to make him hesitate. So Louis is once again the one who decides, who throws himself in the deep end.

He crosses those final inches and kisses Lestat. He tries to kiss him like he did the last time they were here: softly, like a promise. His thumb strokes across his cheek. He tries to savor it, to take in all the little things he missed: the softness of his lips, how he grabs onto Louis. All the things he tried to hold onto but found himself forgetting : the taste of his mouth, the exact sound he makes when their tongues touch.

He keeps it soft, tries to, and when Lestat growls and moves his hands to Louis’ ass, he pulls back and slides off the bench in a smooth movement to stop himself from going too fast.

He moves away, out onto the aisle, and walks towards the front of the church. He doesn’t look back. He needs a moment.

He takes a cigarette out of his pocket and lights it, takes a drag.

He knows Lestat is moving behind him, can hear the soft steps of his feet on the marble floor, but tries no to pay attention to him.

It was Claudia, surprisingly, who first broached the topic of this reunion almost a year ago now.

When she asked him to make a fledgling for her, at first he had refused. He had tried to find someone else. He couldn’t. So they made arrangements - a nice soft bed, pretty clothes, washed hair and a lover’s hand to hold. And Claudia had said, almost casually, that she wanted it to be different from what he did to them. How he had decided to take their lives. And suddenly Louis had found it unbearable, the way she saw Lestat, that she could only think of him in the darkest of terms, and he had told her how her turning had really happened. Not all of it; he hadn’t talked about how he had dragged her across the floor like she was nothing, not even a person, or how deeply selfish he had truly been. But he told her that Lestat had refused, at first, kept refusing until Louis begged him on his knees, and used his worst fears against him, manipulated him into it, making promises he didn’t end up keeping.

She had been angry, but still wanted him to do it. So he did, and then they both left, and he thought about bleeding until there was no more blood in his body, and he thought about the promise he broke, and he thought about Lestat in all the ways he usually tried not to think of him.

He spent two month wandering around Madrid, then Barcelona, then Seville, looking at art, buying a few new interesting paintings and storing them in the apartment he bought in Seville, killing a boy every night and trying to pretend he enjoyed it.

Then a letter arrived, an invitation to the Portuguese village where Claudia was staying for a few weeks, and he had gotten on the first train.

There, they had a long conversation, moving around her hurt and his regret slowly, knowing they didn’t want to lose each other but once again recalibrating their relationship. After daddy and daughter, after sister and brother, now an added layer of murderer and victim that used to only be Lestat’s burden. She skirted around Lestat in the conversation so obviously that it was almost like he was there, lurking around her shoulder where she was sitting on the sand on the beach she had taken him to.

It wasn’t until an few hours later, when they had both cried a little and hugged and agreed to keep in touch no matter what, when they were silently walking back, that she brought him up. And it wasn’t until then, her asking Louis why he hadn’t gone back to see him yet, that he understood what he had done by telling her the truth of her turning; he had let her take some of the hatred and transferred it from Lestat to Louis, and taken some of the forgiveness, some of the understanding, only a sliver, and transferred it from Louis to Lestat. Not enough to want to give him a message, or think of ever seeing him again, but enough to give this gift to both of them; the assurance that Louis did not need to choose. That he could have her, still, even if he went back.

It was immediately clear just how much he had been holding back on his want because of Claudia because after that, he thought of going back every day. It took him a few months, but in the end, it was inevitable. Anyway, he missed New Orleans.

And now here he is, back home. In more ways than one.

He takes a drag from his cigarette, flicks the ashes to the ground. It might have horrified him, once, to be so callous in the house of the lord. Another thing he let go of finally, the guilt of the cross.

He’s been so lost in thought that he hasn’t kept track of Lestat’s movements behind him. It surprises him to feel a soft touch on his back. He stays still, frozen, looking towards the altar, as what feels like a single finger touches him low in the dip of his spine and trails up slowly along his vertebrae, all the way up to the back of his neck. It feels like Lestat’s hand is on fire, the way it burns through the layers of clothing. He shivers. He feels suddenly aware of his body. He feels naked.

He’s grateful that he’s grown to find it so easy, now, to know what he wants and to move towards it.

“I figure it's my turn this time ," he says, turning to give Lestat a shaky smile.

“Louis?” He looks hesitant, but that endless hope is there as well, making its way across his face.

He grabs Lestat's left hand, rubs his empty ring finger with a frown.

“Maybe we can get rings this time.”

He mostly says it to make abundantly clear what is happening, but as he does he realizes how much he would like it if Lestat wore his ring, if he could be sure that everyone who looked at him knew he would never belong to anyone but Louis.

Lestat starts to nod, but Louis squeezes his hand, tells him to wait. He has things to say.

“It can't be the same again, alright?”

Lestat nods again, silent and determined.

“You have to tell me things. About your mother, for example, and your family, and whatever happened in Paris. You have to be honest. You can never lie to me like you did about Antoinette. And you have to listen to me, and have patience sometimes. And-”

“I know,” Lestat interrupts frantically. “I have thought about this a lot, in my coffin, at night, when I longed for you. I know how wrong I was, Louis. I wanted to hurt you, I wanted to break you so you would love me.” He grabs onto Louis’ hands, squeezing them and holding them to his heart. “I am not worthy of the forgiveness you are showing me.”

Louis can't look away from him, how beautiful he is in his desperation, his eyes red with tears.

“It's not just you,” Louis says softly. “I tried to hurt you too. I wanted to make you miserable because I was. But it wasn't because of you. I could only see my life as a curse. I never knew how to be honest, with myself or anyone else.”

He stands up straight, proud, determined, and says, “I promise to withhold less. To be more honest. Maybe I'll hurt you, I don't know, but I won't try to.”

“Louis, is this real? Have you come back to me?”

Louis smiles. His heart feels whole for the first time in nine years. “If you'll have me.”

Lestat starts to roll his eyes in incredulous joy and Louis just grins, and moves up to kiss him. “That a yes then?”

“Oui. Yes. Always, Louis.”

the nights in front of me

Later that night, they are lying in the coffin Louis just purchased, in the small apartment he can apparently afford just by buying and selling art, lid not yet closed as they bask in the afterglow, and Lestat finally dares to ask another question.

“Do you think she will ever want to see me again?”

His Claudia. Perhaps his most perfect fledgling. The one most like him. It surprised him how much he missed her, all these years.

He can tell Louis does him the courtesy of really considering his answer, as he takes his time to reply. His thumb strokes softly over Lestat’s arm, resting over his chest where they are shirtless, half on top of each other, still some sweat drying on their skin.

“I think so. Eventually."

“In a century or so?”

He can hear a smile in Louis voice as he replies, “Yeah. Maybe two.”

He strokes Louis chest, twirling a finger through his chest hair. He still isn’t sure how they got here, if he can trust it. It’s the last lingering doubt that makes him ask, “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if your plan had worked?”

“Sure, I’ve wondered.”

He has to swallow, twice, and hopes his voice is even when he says, “Do you wish it had?”

“You think I’d be here if I did?” Louis softly touches his chin, tilts his head up to meet his eye. “If I wanted that life I just would have stayed away, pretended you were dead.”

Lestat moves to straddle him, putting both his hands on Louis chest and sliding them up. He grins at him. “Hmm, c’est vrai. Where would you be if you had thrown me in the fire, mon coeur? In some stranger’s bed, wishing he was me? Forever unsatisfied, taking lovers who cannot give you what you want?”

Louis rolls his eyes, but Lestat can see the fond grin he tries to fight as he grabs onto Lestat’s hips.

Louis quickly sobers up, though, and says seriously, “I never would have burned you. I don’t know what would have happened, what Claudia would have done, but there is no world where I could have thrown you in our incinerator and walked away. So yeah, maybe we’d have killed you. But then we’d have let you heal. And maybe we just… go to Europe while you recover. And we walk from country to country. And she finds a companion, and I turn her. And yeah, I meet new people, and fuck them and I think of you, and I drain them and I think of you, and I try different cities and different men and I look at art and I listen to music and I think of you. And maybe after about ten years, we find each other again.”

Lestat is frozen on top of him, in awe. Cannot look away.

Louis softly touches his face, rubs a fond thumb over the corner of his mouth.

“And we end up right here anyway, in the end.”

Lestat isn’t sure if that is the truth, but as he looks into his companion’s eyes, he chooses to believe it, as he leans down for a kiss, both of them smiling.