A week of fraught planning follows. A week where Louis must be coaxed into the casket each dawn, pulled away from increasingly urgent preparations. The basement of this little cottage comes to house stolen tanks of gasoline. Chalk-scrawled diagrams, every piece of information Louis recalls about the workings of the theater, the sewers leading in and out of it, the strictly imposed curfew, the way it looked when the coven flouted it, bloom across the walls.
Armand speaks to him, intermittent appeals that Louis answers out loud. Spits his venom into the air.
They hunt. Together. They hunt gasoline and matches. They hunt the heavy knife Louis decides upon in the greying hours of the dawn.
They share a coffin.
Louis cultivates his rage, makes a carefully tended armor of it. Makes fuel of it, when it feels all the blood in the city won't slake his thirst. But his anger has demands too.
And so, with their cans of gasoline, they go. They douse the coffins, the floorboards, Louis' voice a low murmur as they work. The building is old, and it will be consumed from the ground up. The caskets go, flames consuming the wood. The screams start, but some are too slow, slept too deeply. Louis sees Lestat out of his periphery, meeting one of the doomed that managed to escape out of their coffin. Louis' blade finds little work here.
When the flames have taken hold, and all the vampires within the building are dead, they collect Claudia's diaries, her dress.
Louis counts four missing. Recounts their names to Lestat, the feverish pitch of his voice having cooled down to ice as they go. Two consumed by explosion, Lestat confirms. Santiago follows soon after, head easily parted his body.
Armand, gone. Sam, spared.
And dawn finds them sitting in the apartment Louis and Claudia shared, Louis splattered in blood and ash, slowly shedding his coat. They are quiet. The bag with Claudia's diaries, her dress, sits just inside the door. The bed springs creak as Louis sits.
It is near to the breaking of a fever. The rage goes, the hunger goes, and in its wake—
Nothing. Emptiness. Something like exhaustion, slowly catching up to him.
He lights a cigarette. Tips the pack towards Lestat, offering.
A week of fraught planning. Of witnessing Louis' spiral, the way it would curve between lunacy and competency. The scrawling of chalk and then the appearance of gasoline. Lestat cannot bring himself to contribute beyond moving in Louis' wake, snapping the neck of a police officer who catches them tampering with the motorcycles but saying nothing about the theatre layout, which he had come to know, or what to do about Armand's voice creeping into Louis' head.
A week and then it would be over. Louis, dead perhaps, or the Theatre burned to the ground and all the vampires within it. A week of this, in which Lestat feels like some kind of hallucination in Louis' world. Like he could vanish and nothing would change.
He takes his grief away like a wounded cat. He does eat, a little. Human beings, rats. They sleep in a shared coffin and Lestat feels reassurance that Louis will abide by it, makes it easier to be certain of his presence, and also says nothing. Doesn't trust himself to speak.
Reminded of those years during Claudia's departure, when Lestat felt like an irritating creaky pipe in the ceiling while Louis obsessed over her whereabouts. How appropriate, that that feeling should return now. Even as Louis involves him, hands him things to carry, trusts he will enact this plan he has made.
And then it is done.
Lestat finds a chair to sit in, likewise grey with soot. By the time Louis has offered him a cigarette, it might become clear that he has been weeping, somewhere between their departure from the wreckage and now. Tear tracks cut through the grime, only half-smeared away, and there is still a redness held between eyelashes as he glances towards the hand reaching out.
He reaches, takes a cigarette. Louis knows of the fire gift, so Lestat just uses his mind to will the end into burning, and takes a breath of smoke.
"Well," he says, "is it everything you hoped for?"
Sunlight glows outside the curtains. Louis' mind has quieted. A detached clarity has settled over him. Nothingness. He is alone in his body with the wound Claudia left in her wake, quieted down to a dull agony. The anger is near, waiting, whispering Armand's name. Work unfinished, but work Louis has no appetite for.
When he looks at Lestat now, it is almost as if his presence has finally registered. Louis observes the tears on his cheeks with a distant sort of envy. He can't remember if he's cried.
"Why did you come?" Louis asks. His voice is very level. Smoke curls around the words.
How long has Louis carried this question? Since they left the little cottage this morning? Since they began their preparations? Since they emerged from the sewer grate together? Since the coffin was cracked open and Louis pulled from his death?
Since Lestat's footsteps echoed up to him from within the theater?
How unlikely it is that he has finally received an opportunity to ask.
Smoke in his lungs is relaxing, has him slouch further in the chair. The interest he's taken in this apartment is—academic. In theory, he should want to turn over every item, hunger after the life Louis had made here.
But there are things of Claudia, and her things are mingled with Louis' things, and he would rather concentrate on the burning end of his cigarette.
And then up at Louis. The tone of his voice, catching him. Returns his regard, direct and steady, mouth pressing into the shape of a thin smile, no mirth to it.
He wants to maintain the emptiness in his body. He wants to smother the part of him that would cross the room, put his head into Lestat's lap.
The part of him that finds this presence a comfort, even on stage at the trial. Even now, at their lowest. That still feels some prickle of excitement, anxiety, eagerness, for Lestat occupying that chair in this space.
The challenge is withdrawn, easy, Lestat flicking his focus back down to his cigarette. Taking his time, a long breath in of smoke, held there, blown out again off to the side.
Some internal amount of bracing himself before he looks back at Louis' face. Admiring him, despite everything. The way soot and dust and ash has settled on his skin, the streaks of blood, the peculiar but not uncompelling edge in his manner, in spite of its wounding origins. He needs to hear Lestat say it, but Lestat has to marvel at how obvious it should all be.
"For you," he says. "I came for you. I came to save you," and there is a dismissive bite to that word, the opposite of a grand declaration. "And look, you live. I did it."
As he speaks, as he tells Louis this thing, Louis sees it laid out so clear. A way to hurt Lestat, a way to dig a wound into him and punish him for the miracle of Louis' survival.
How cruel it would be to ask him, Only me, and not her?
Louis struggles with the impulse. Puts it aside eventually, smoking down his cigarette in silence while he feels out the ragged edges of the damage in him. Drained of hunger and anger, Louis is better able to parse the far reaches of his grief.
Looks at Lestat, seeking that same pain in him. A nod, acknowledging the answer. It is no grand declaration. If it comes as a surprise, or as a confirmation, it is difficult to tell from the way Louis looks at him.
"What now?"
Relieves Louis of the burden of asking him to stay. Of making that decision himself.
Lestat opens his mouth, knowing the instinct to respond, to supply a sure answer. A demand, a suggestion, a declaration. Nothing leaves him, first.
Then, quietly, "I don't know, mon cher," his voice more hush than before, something pained in the half-smile delivered to him. The fresh spilling of tears that he dashes away with his palm. This oddest infusion of grief for the Théâtre des Vampires, warped and unrecognisable from what he had dreamed for it, the vanishing of a coven that he despised.
That, he keeps to himself. Something he will need to quietly assess, unpack, find room for.
Then, "I meant those things," and he hates how fucking weak that sounds, how pleading, but it feels necessary. "Those things I said to you. That I said, not him."
He's doing it again, comes Claudia's hiss. Hurting you, again.
Louis is quiet. Silent. He lifts the cigarette, end flaring bright as he takes a long drag of it. Of course he remembers the apology. Of course. Every word of it has wedged into his chest, made a home beneath his skin. How what little is left of his heart has softened. Those words live there, in what fragments and shards Louis has left. If he lets himself, he can feel the way they breathe together. The way the world closes in around them, and how right and good it is to feel that.
What does he do with this? With this feeling in the wreckage and absence of Claudia?
"Him," is where he settles. His anger, it is not unlike a dog flicking an eye open, scenting the air. Sensing something to be worked free, something that has passed by Louis without being perceived.
Safer, to step back. Observe it all from the safe vantage of his anger.
"Him?" repeated, a question. Santiago, whose head Louis had kicked down the alley. Sam, who vanished. And—
A little flicker of pettier annoyance despite the gravity of things, annoyance that his heartfelt reiteration is being so neatly swerved aside from, that he's summoned Armand's spectre only for it to linger. Then it goes, and Lestat studies Louis across the room, cigarette smoldering away and neglected between his fingers.
"His vision. His pretensions. I understand the writing of the thing was a collaborative process, but they didn't get any of that from me. Not from my mouth, anyway."
Armand is very adept at shuffling around in a vampire's mind, undetected. Lestat, significantly better at blocking him out, but not infallible. He is given to understand that Louis has never quite mastered it at all.
There is a logical answer, isn't there? Claudia's diaries, proudly displayed at the trial.
But as Lestat wonders, so does Louis. Armand commenting upon his open mind, the lessons that had never quite materialized. Things that could be gotten, no from Louis' mouth, but his unguarded thoughts. That night in the cafe alone—
Guilty claws dig in at his belly. Louis' jaw works, tensing as he suppresses the swell of his reaction. Compresses it. Stays quiet for a long moment, before speaking again.
He'd felt the desperate, scrabbling urge to make Louis understand all that happened on the stage, and over the week, when it was clear Louis would not hear of it, or anything, it had all winnowed down to the simple instinct to ensure that his apology didn't get burned away in the aftermath. To do that one thing, the one other thing he came here to do, before whatever happens next. How little the rest of it mattered, Claudia's ashes on the stage floor.
But now a return of it, an anxious clench beneath his ribs as he fixes a look across at Louis. Comprehends the depth of what he's saying. What is visible in his face.
His jaw works tight, so he just nods rather than trust his own voice.
Flicks ash away, onto the floor between his boots.
Here and now, Louis feels the way why works its way across his face. Since being excavated from that coffin, from his death, Louis has delayed grief. Real grief. But he feels it twisting in his chest now, looking at Lestat.
Here he is, alive.
And Claudia is dead.
"Was there another way?" is what he manages, slow and heavy.
They've shared a coffin for a week. The dawn is transitioning to morning. The numbness spreading through him is not enough. Not enough to save him.
Lestat's eyeline drops to his cigarette, wasting ash, and brings it to his lips to breathe from again. Did it ever enter his mind, to pour gasoline onto coffins, to sabotage the motorbikes, and wield a machete for the rest? Eight wolves, two flintlocks and two mastiffs, and a medieval flail. Maybe he should have.
"I couldn't see one," is the truth, anyway. "They would have their execution. They might have cut my ankles too. I was weak enough, at first."
Armand's blood. Uniquely and potently restorative.
"Death, death, banishment," he says, and the next smile is again something closer to a grimace. "All things in threes. So long as I could win them, I could do it once."
It helps that Louis is asking. It isn't just Lestat trying to flood him with conviction. These details are offered to what he feels like are snapping jaws, that may take his hand if they're not good enough.
Lestat is here, present in this room alongside Louis. It is testing his restraint (a famously imprecise thing, Louis' restraint) not to tear into him too.
Lestat is present. He has been present, remained even when perhaps it might have been simpler to step away. When it might have been simpler to leave Louis to his fate in the coffin.
Maybe Louis wants to punish him for that as much as he wants to punish him for the trial.
"For me," is not a question, only a hollow acknowledgement. Lestat could save only one, and he saved Louis. And their daughter—
And his fledgling—
Louis crushes the cigarette out in Claudia's little ceramic ash tray. Puts his face in his hands, body bowing over, elbows on his knees. When he closes his eyes, all of it unspools before him again: Lestat's face over him as Louis coughed out rocks, Claudia stood before him on a stage spitting venom at Louis carelessness and neglect, the audience leering, Armand's face miserable and intent all at once.
He had let Louis go. Offered his apology and accepted its decline.
And then dragged him out of his grave, letting him go. And brought him people to kill, and a place to sleep where they shared the same intimate space in the dark, and shadowed his path of vengeance to ensure he made it through to the other side, letting him go. He is here, in this apartment, explaining his role in the monstrous thing that consumed their family, letting him go.
Lestat sits for a moment, watching Louis wilt, miserable with a dozen different emotions and one of them being a kind of loathing for his own selfishness—but.
He moves. He also discards his cigarette into the little ceramic tray, and then kneels down before the other man. His hands, one on Louis' knee, another reaching up to his shoulder. "I love you," he says. Not wheedling, not trying to provoke something, but stated as fact. The sky is blue, the earth is round, Lestat de Lioncourt loves Louis du Lac. "I love you with everything I have in me. There is no part of me that isn't devoted to that task, Louis, loving you. That's your curse to bear."
This is not an appeal, not truly. It is only a recitation of fact, even as unbelievable as it feels.
"We killed you," is unsteady, disbelieving. His hands fall from his face slowly. It is as Louis suspected: painful, to observe the expression on Lestat's face, painful to see him at all. "I cut your throat, and I left you."
His sins, for which he was spared punishment.
Lestat has touched him since he was pulled from that coffin. This is not the first of anything, except it is the first time Lestat has touched him while Louis was present enough to give it due attention. They have spent every day laid together in a coffin, waking entangled, and Louis' attention had skipped over as a stone across a smooth lake. Self-preservation, maintaining focus on Claudia, on the coven, on his ambitions to punish them for her.
But all that has been done, and Lestat remains. There is no coven left to kill, unless he means to hunt Armand, hunt Sam.
And Lestat tells him this, a truth offered to Louis so gently that it feels like a kind of torture.
"And I am ashamed," Lestat says, his hands insistently solid on their points of contact, "of all that led you to do it."
And angry, it's true. He isn't a saint. Hurt beyond description. There had come a point when he had enough strength, finally, to exit the coffin in the heap, and he had remained that little bit longer, and he had cursed his own stupid will to live, to drink from the vermin around him, when it only promised a continuation of that awful void-like loneliness that Louis had finally consigned him to. He had imagined revenge. He had felt sorry for himself.
And there was shame. More articulate to him than the senseless version of it he'd been left it, in those quiet moments after Magnus burned himself alive. He'd been undeserving of that shame then, he can say that. But in the dark of the coffin he'd been abandoned to, there was only time to put it in its place.
The reality that he'd had everything he'd wanted. That he'd squandered it all.
Here, in Paris, he bites back on the tears he'd allowed himself to succumb to on the stage. "You saved me from the incinerator," and he is certain of that. He doesn't need Louis to say. Claudia is a killer. She of singular intellect and instinct. She would have finished the game, if she'd bee allowed it. "I saved you from the sun."
A shake of his head, a tension in his expression. "I'm not sorry. I can't be. I need you on this earth to make it worth walking."
You saved me from the incinerator twists like a knife in his gut.
If Claudia had her way—
No, there would still have been a trial, even if he'd helped Claudia hoist Lestat into the incinerator. The spectacle of their conviction would have been staged differently, perhaps, but the verdict would be unchanged. And there would have been no reprieve for Louis.
Lestat's voice is thick. Louis cannot recall if he ever saw this exact expression on his face before.
"I couldn't do it," falls out of him, a shattering of a confession. "I couldn't burn you. I couldn't let you go."
Even on that stage, even as Lestat made a spectacle of their life together, a degrading spectacle of everything precious between them, Louis had felt that same breathless relief at his presence. It had always been the way with them, love and hate and desire all muddled together.
A confession. Confessions are for sins, traditionally.
But not all of them. Confessions of love, of truths. It sounds like all of them, the way the words come out of Louis, stumbles out of him bleeding, and Lestat's hand slides off his shoulder to take his hand. Unmoving from his spot at his feet.
He smiles at him. A watery kind of smile, now, fleeting and disconnected. "So you understand," still strangled in his throat. "How I couldn't let them have you."
He isn't sorry. He might have asked if Louis is, but it seems like an absurdity tantamount to following him along at his brother's funeral march, asking why he hadn't come around in a while. So, he swallows instead. The taste of ash still thick in his lungs, the roof his mouth. The smell of burning flesh, that even the alien presence of gasoline couldn't hide.
"She held her love," instead. "Shielded her as best she could. And in the end, when the fledgling was gone, she looked to me."
The tears come, a wet sheen spilling over as Lestat speaks.
"I felt her go," he admits. "Madeleine."
His. His fledgling. His—
His mind skips over the word daughter.
"I could hear Claudia screaming," slowly, trying to piece together the memory. It's warped, distorted by fear, and panic, and pain. "Until they closed me in."
His fingers clench in Lestat's grip, while his opposite hand balls into a fist over his knee.
"Did she say anything?" Louis asks, the question cracking as he speaks it.
"She cried your name when you were taken," Lestat says, his voice brittle, a shake in its centre. Keeps a hold of Louis' hand, keeps his gaze fixed on the other man's face. "Over and over. She was frightened for you."
His other hand rises up from Louis' knee, touching his face, cradling his cheek in his palm and thumbing away tears.
"They whispered together, beneath everything. Their love for one another. No regret, no apologising."
They should have told Claudia, all those years ago. They should have told her there would be someone who loves her the way they love each other, someone who would be devoted to her. But they couldn't conceive of it, could they? They couldn't begin to imagine what she would be. Stronger than either of them could have anticipated.
His hand lowers, rests on Louis' chest, a shift to sit a little on his haunches. "I never saw her perform," he says, his focus drawing a little more inward, enough that the corner of his mouth twists up, a glint of tooth. "But she played to the crowd in the end. Or against them. She told them, 'follow the bouncing ball' as the sun came down on them, and not a one of them smiled, or laughed. They looked sickened."
Back to Louis. "The sun came down," he echoes. "The fledgling went. And she—she cried. She screamed. Anger, and then it was just pain. And she said nothing but she looked at me—"
A break, finally, a shuddered gasp in as tears spill.
For days, Louis has had only the thing Lestat hurled at him in that dark little basement: Claudia, torn to shreds as the coven's nightly victims had been.
It had been such a painful thought. Louis hadn't been able to ask for fear of confirmation. For fear of something worse.
Now he has this. The truth. Lestat delivers it to him as gently as possible, with his hands anchoring Louis into the present moment. Lestat doesn't let him slip away.
Louis doesn't think to do it. It simply happens, his hand lifting to Lestat's cheek as his face crumples. Tenderness, reflexive even after all that's passed between them, and the need to touch him. Steady him, the way he has been steadying Louis.
"You were there," Louis tells him, choked. "You were there, so she wasn't alone."
It nearly collapses him, the simplicity of the touch, this offer of insight, the kindness of both of them. It partially does, but he has a hand pressed to Louis', keeping it there as he allows himself that moment of breaking, allowing in the possibility that perhaps he did something well for her, in the midst of the horror.
It allows for the next thing, which is, "I'm sorry," thick in his throat. "That I couldn't save her."
The world had shrunk to a pinhole in the moments after he'd manipulated the room. Standing for the denouement, swaying on his heels. Maybe if he had been a better maker, the father she had seen in him in those final moments, he wouldn't have cared. Would have moved from his spot, would have tried, however uselessly.
And she would be dead, still, and perhaps so would he, and Louis left starving in his box, but the neat circle of justification is scattered aside as he shakes his head. It had all struck him too late.
But this is not Lestat's doing. Lestat did not lure them into a trap, leave them alone within a bright little restaurant to be taken. He did not cut their ankles.
And even so, it has been very difficult to give Lestat the grace of acknowledging that he was a prop. He had been a tool the way the diaries were a tool, the voice to accompany the grotesque animation projected onto the screen behind them.
"Me too," is ground glass in Louis' mouth. No more than that, because he does understand the thing Lestat had described. The inability to let go, no matter the cost. "But she shouldn't have been on that stage."
Claudia should have been away with Madeline. Louis had been prepared for that, for whatever shape life would take without Claudia alongside him.
But he wasn't prepared for her death. He wasn't prepared to feel the full weight of it now either, with his hand soft at Lestat's cheek and tears streaking their faces.
Reflects on whether things would be simpler for Louis if he'd followed through on his intent to release him properly. To have hated him alongside all the rest. But what can he say? Love is a curse.
And he steals comfort from the hand in his face, leaning into it, turning his face to brush his lips against Louis' palm, and breathes through the last shudders that had gripped his lungs, his heart. "None of you should have been," murmured there. It's their turn to hurt, he'd said, a declaration flung out to the audience.
Inviting their complicity. Their abuse. Riling them.
"We need rest," he adds, a breath out that is close to a laugh, but never makes it. Again, coaxing Louis into coffin. But it's daylight outside, the sun pressing against the windows. Staying out in it will do them no good.
There's less excuse now, Louis knows. There are two coffins in this apartment. There are the sewers accessible to them.
Louis does not volunteer this.
Nothing is repaired. Everything is repaired. Both of these things are true.
Tears still run silently down his face as he nods, jaw set. His palm aches where Lestat kissed. He cannot imagine getting into a coffin by himself. Has that been taken from him? The ability to find rest on his own?
"Mine's beneath that bed," Louis tells him. "Her's is underneath here."
The heel of his boot scrapes backwards, thunks softly against concealed wood.
Lestat rises out of his kneeling pose, keeping Louis' hand in his. No, there will be no leaving him. Not through the sewers, not even through the separation of another coffin.
The answer as to sleeping arrangement seems obvious, until it isn't.
Then, he pulls at Louis' hand to urge him to stand. After, he will go and lift the bed that conceals their daughter's coffin. The handsome perfume she favoured, the scented oils she used in her hair, the cheap cigarettes she sometimes indulged in are released with that movement, a sensory sketch of a fully grown woman of good taste.
He looks to Louis, a clear question entwined with the plain desire to lay amongst it all, as the daylight takes them away.
Standing alongside her coffin, scenting all the familiar notes of her in the air among the traces and trappings of the little apartment they had made their home, Louis feels grief twisting through him so strongly, a force powerful enough to break his body apart.
Their daughter. Gone.
The last dregs of closeness to be gathered are within her coffin. Maybe he should bar Lestat from it, but it would be a cruelty.
And Louis balks at the thought of sleeping alone.
"Get in," is far more tender a thing than the invitation Louis had extended before, in the ramshackle basement they'd stowed away in. "Please."
Lestat allows the relief to pull through him, and he nods. Okay.
Takes off his shoes, first, and then his waistcoat, his shirt. It's a practical kind of stripping, none of the careful choreography with which he might have undressed himself in Louis' presence before. Sooty, bloody clothes are abandoned in a heap until he is down to what will have to pass as pyjamas, undershirt and drawers. There is still grime clinging to his skin, still the scent of massacre in his hair.
It'll do. He steps into the coffin and kneels down into it. The dimensions aren't too out of proportion, not a child's coffin anymore, but it would be uncomfortable for they were more concerned about intimacy, if the deep sleep awaiting them wouldn't rob them of the senses to be uncomfortable.
Still pink satin, he observes, but with a grey sheen. Less frills, less frippery. His heart hurts. He reaches a hand to Louis to help him in.
A bloodier, stripped-down mirror, Louis takes the hand offered.
That has been the way of it, since Lestat excavated Louis from beneath the stones. Lestat extends a hand, and Louis takes it. This is the first moment where it feels like a fully conscious decision, rather than reflex.
Louis recalls the day they chose their coffins, the project of procuring and transporting them sight unseen into this room. He cannot think on it too long. It is too painful.
He lowers himself down alongside Lestat. Recalls still how they fit together, how to tangle their legs, to lay himself across Lestat's chest. Hip to hip, heart to heart. Louis' fingers hook in the collar of his undershirt.
"You meant those things."
A whisper in the dark, as the lid closes overhead.
It is easy, conforming his body to Louis', to make space for them both. They fit together perfectly, like they were made for each other. These are the kinds of things Lestat is still capable of thinking, even now, as he winds an arm around the other arm, lets out a long stream of breath at the innate comfort it gives him to do so.
And he will wait until Louis feels relaxed against him before he gives into the urge to enter that sleep state, knowing he will eventually have little choice in doing so anyway.
His hand goes up, cradling Louis' face, and he lifts his chin so that he can press a kiss to his brow as they are bathed in reparative shadow. "Every word," innately refers to the ones that were his own.
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no subject
Armand speaks to him, intermittent appeals that Louis answers out loud. Spits his venom into the air.
They hunt. Together. They hunt gasoline and matches. They hunt the heavy knife Louis decides upon in the greying hours of the dawn.
They share a coffin.
Louis cultivates his rage, makes a carefully tended armor of it. Makes fuel of it, when it feels all the blood in the city won't slake his thirst. But his anger has demands too.
And so, with their cans of gasoline, they go. They douse the coffins, the floorboards, Louis' voice a low murmur as they work. The building is old, and it will be consumed from the ground up. The caskets go, flames consuming the wood. The screams start, but some are too slow, slept too deeply. Louis sees Lestat out of his periphery, meeting one of the doomed that managed to escape out of their coffin. Louis' blade finds little work here.
When the flames have taken hold, and all the vampires within the building are dead, they collect Claudia's diaries, her dress.
Louis counts four missing. Recounts their names to Lestat, the feverish pitch of his voice having cooled down to ice as they go. Two consumed by explosion, Lestat confirms. Santiago follows soon after, head easily parted his body.
Armand, gone. Sam, spared.
And dawn finds them sitting in the apartment Louis and Claudia shared, Louis splattered in blood and ash, slowly shedding his coat. They are quiet. The bag with Claudia's diaries, her dress, sits just inside the door. The bed springs creak as Louis sits.
It is near to the breaking of a fever. The rage goes, the hunger goes, and in its wake—
Nothing. Emptiness. Something like exhaustion, slowly catching up to him.
He lights a cigarette. Tips the pack towards Lestat, offering.
no subject
A week of fraught planning. Of witnessing Louis' spiral, the way it would curve between lunacy and competency. The scrawling of chalk and then the appearance of gasoline. Lestat cannot bring himself to contribute beyond moving in Louis' wake, snapping the neck of a police officer who catches them tampering with the motorcycles but saying nothing about the theatre layout, which he had come to know, or what to do about Armand's voice creeping into Louis' head.
A week and then it would be over. Louis, dead perhaps, or the Theatre burned to the ground and all the vampires within it. A week of this, in which Lestat feels like some kind of hallucination in Louis' world. Like he could vanish and nothing would change.
He takes his grief away like a wounded cat. He does eat, a little. Human beings, rats. They sleep in a shared coffin and Lestat feels reassurance that Louis will abide by it, makes it easier to be certain of his presence, and also says nothing. Doesn't trust himself to speak.
Reminded of those years during Claudia's departure, when Lestat felt like an irritating creaky pipe in the ceiling while Louis obsessed over her whereabouts. How appropriate, that that feeling should return now. Even as Louis involves him, hands him things to carry, trusts he will enact this plan he has made.
And then it is done.
Lestat finds a chair to sit in, likewise grey with soot. By the time Louis has offered him a cigarette, it might become clear that he has been weeping, somewhere between their departure from the wreckage and now. Tear tracks cut through the grime, only half-smeared away, and there is still a redness held between eyelashes as he glances towards the hand reaching out.
He reaches, takes a cigarette. Louis knows of the fire gift, so Lestat just uses his mind to will the end into burning, and takes a breath of smoke.
"Well," he says, "is it everything you hoped for?"
no subject
When he looks at Lestat now, it is almost as if his presence has finally registered. Louis observes the tears on his cheeks with a distant sort of envy. He can't remember if he's cried.
"Why did you come?" Louis asks. His voice is very level. Smoke curls around the words.
How long has Louis carried this question? Since they left the little cottage this morning? Since they began their preparations? Since they emerged from the sewer grate together? Since the coffin was cracked open and Louis pulled from his death?
Since Lestat's footsteps echoed up to him from within the theater?
How unlikely it is that he has finally received an opportunity to ask.
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But there are things of Claudia, and her things are mingled with Louis' things, and he would rather concentrate on the burning end of his cigarette.
And then up at Louis. The tone of his voice, catching him. Returns his regard, direct and steady, mouth pressing into the shape of a thin smile, no mirth to it.
"Do you really not know why?"
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He wants to maintain the emptiness in his body. He wants to smother the part of him that would cross the room, put his head into Lestat's lap.
The part of him that finds this presence a comfort, even on stage at the trial. Even now, at their lowest. That still feels some prickle of excitement, anxiety, eagerness, for Lestat occupying that chair in this space.
"I need to hear you say it."
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Some internal amount of bracing himself before he looks back at Louis' face. Admiring him, despite everything. The way soot and dust and ash has settled on his skin, the streaks of blood, the peculiar but not uncompelling edge in his manner, in spite of its wounding origins. He needs to hear Lestat say it, but Lestat has to marvel at how obvious it should all be.
"For you," he says. "I came for you. I came to save you," and there is a dismissive bite to that word, the opposite of a grand declaration. "And look, you live. I did it."
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How cruel it would be to ask him, Only me, and not her?
Louis struggles with the impulse. Puts it aside eventually, smoking down his cigarette in silence while he feels out the ragged edges of the damage in him. Drained of hunger and anger, Louis is better able to parse the far reaches of his grief.
Looks at Lestat, seeking that same pain in him. A nod, acknowledging the answer. It is no grand declaration. If it comes as a surprise, or as a confirmation, it is difficult to tell from the way Louis looks at him.
"What now?"
Relieves Louis of the burden of asking him to stay. Of making that decision himself.
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Then, quietly, "I don't know, mon cher," his voice more hush than before, something pained in the half-smile delivered to him. The fresh spilling of tears that he dashes away with his palm. This oddest infusion of grief for the Théâtre des Vampires, warped and unrecognisable from what he had dreamed for it, the vanishing of a coven that he despised.
That, he keeps to himself. Something he will need to quietly assess, unpack, find room for.
Then, "I meant those things," and he hates how fucking weak that sounds, how pleading, but it feels necessary. "Those things I said to you. That I said, not him."
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Louis is quiet. Silent. He lifts the cigarette, end flaring bright as he takes a long drag of it. Of course he remembers the apology. Of course. Every word of it has wedged into his chest, made a home beneath his skin. How what little is left of his heart has softened. Those words live there, in what fragments and shards Louis has left. If he lets himself, he can feel the way they breathe together. The way the world closes in around them, and how right and good it is to feel that.
What does he do with this? With this feeling in the wreckage and absence of Claudia?
"Him," is where he settles. His anger, it is not unlike a dog flicking an eye open, scenting the air. Sensing something to be worked free, something that has passed by Louis without being perceived.
Safer, to step back. Observe it all from the safe vantage of his anger.
"Him?" repeated, a question. Santiago, whose head Louis had kicked down the alley. Sam, who vanished. And—
Armand. Armand, who Louis warned away.
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A little flicker of pettier annoyance despite the gravity of things, annoyance that his heartfelt reiteration is being so neatly swerved aside from, that he's summoned Armand's spectre only for it to linger. Then it goes, and Lestat studies Louis across the room, cigarette smoldering away and neglected between his fingers.
"His vision. His pretensions. I understand the writing of the thing was a collaborative process, but they didn't get any of that from me. Not from my mouth, anyway."
Armand is very adept at shuffling around in a vampire's mind, undetected. Lestat, significantly better at blocking him out, but not infallible. He is given to understand that Louis has never quite mastered it at all.
Hard to teach, on this end of things.
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But as Lestat wonders, so does Louis. Armand commenting upon his open mind, the lessons that had never quite materialized. Things that could be gotten, no from Louis' mouth, but his unguarded thoughts. That night in the cafe alone—
Guilty claws dig in at his belly. Louis' jaw works, tensing as he suppresses the swell of his reaction. Compresses it. Stays quiet for a long moment, before speaking again.
"You just said the words. Like they wanted."
Anger. Agony.
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But now a return of it, an anxious clench beneath his ribs as he fixes a look across at Louis. Comprehends the depth of what he's saying. What is visible in his face.
His jaw works tight, so he just nods rather than trust his own voice.
Flicks ash away, onto the floor between his boots.
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Here and now, Louis feels the way why works its way across his face. Since being excavated from that coffin, from his death, Louis has delayed grief. Real grief. But he feels it twisting in his chest now, looking at Lestat.
Here he is, alive.
And Claudia is dead.
"Was there another way?" is what he manages, slow and heavy.
They've shared a coffin for a week. The dawn is transitioning to morning. The numbness spreading through him is not enough. Not enough to save him.
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Lestat's eyeline drops to his cigarette, wasting ash, and brings it to his lips to breathe from again. Did it ever enter his mind, to pour gasoline onto coffins, to sabotage the motorbikes, and wield a machete for the rest? Eight wolves, two flintlocks and two mastiffs, and a medieval flail. Maybe he should have.
"I couldn't see one," is the truth, anyway. "They would have their execution. They might have cut my ankles too. I was weak enough, at first."
Armand's blood. Uniquely and potently restorative.
"Death, death, banishment," he says, and the next smile is again something closer to a grimace. "All things in threes. So long as I could win them, I could do it once."
It helps that Louis is asking. It isn't just Lestat trying to flood him with conviction. These details are offered to what he feels like are snapping jaws, that may take his hand if they're not good enough.
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Lestat is present. He has been present, remained even when perhaps it might have been simpler to step away. When it might have been simpler to leave Louis to his fate in the coffin.
Maybe Louis wants to punish him for that as much as he wants to punish him for the trial.
"For me," is not a question, only a hollow acknowledgement. Lestat could save only one, and he saved Louis. And their daughter—
And his fledgling—
Louis crushes the cigarette out in Claudia's little ceramic ash tray. Puts his face in his hands, body bowing over, elbows on his knees. When he closes his eyes, all of it unspools before him again: Lestat's face over him as Louis coughed out rocks, Claudia stood before him on a stage spitting venom at Louis carelessness and neglect, the audience leering, Armand's face miserable and intent all at once.
What now? What can come after all of this?
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And then dragged him out of his grave, letting him go. And brought him people to kill, and a place to sleep where they shared the same intimate space in the dark, and shadowed his path of vengeance to ensure he made it through to the other side, letting him go. He is here, in this apartment, explaining his role in the monstrous thing that consumed their family, letting him go.
Lestat sits for a moment, watching Louis wilt, miserable with a dozen different emotions and one of them being a kind of loathing for his own selfishness—but.
He moves. He also discards his cigarette into the little ceramic tray, and then kneels down before the other man. His hands, one on Louis' knee, another reaching up to his shoulder. "I love you," he says. Not wheedling, not trying to provoke something, but stated as fact. The sky is blue, the earth is round, Lestat de Lioncourt loves Louis du Lac. "I love you with everything I have in me. There is no part of me that isn't devoted to that task, Louis, loving you. That's your curse to bear."
His hands tighten. "Look at me, please."
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This is not an appeal, not truly. It is only a recitation of fact, even as unbelievable as it feels.
"We killed you," is unsteady, disbelieving. His hands fall from his face slowly. It is as Louis suspected: painful, to observe the expression on Lestat's face, painful to see him at all. "I cut your throat, and I left you."
His sins, for which he was spared punishment.
Lestat has touched him since he was pulled from that coffin. This is not the first of anything, except it is the first time Lestat has touched him while Louis was present enough to give it due attention. They have spent every day laid together in a coffin, waking entangled, and Louis' attention had skipped over as a stone across a smooth lake. Self-preservation, maintaining focus on Claudia, on the coven, on his ambitions to punish them for her.
But all that has been done, and Lestat remains. There is no coven left to kill, unless he means to hunt Armand, hunt Sam.
And Lestat tells him this, a truth offered to Louis so gently that it feels like a kind of torture.
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And angry, it's true. He isn't a saint. Hurt beyond description. There had come a point when he had enough strength, finally, to exit the coffin in the heap, and he had remained that little bit longer, and he had cursed his own stupid will to live, to drink from the vermin around him, when it only promised a continuation of that awful void-like loneliness that Louis had finally consigned him to. He had imagined revenge. He had felt sorry for himself.
And there was shame. More articulate to him than the senseless version of it he'd been left it, in those quiet moments after Magnus burned himself alive. He'd been undeserving of that shame then, he can say that. But in the dark of the coffin he'd been abandoned to, there was only time to put it in its place.
The reality that he'd had everything he'd wanted. That he'd squandered it all.
Here, in Paris, he bites back on the tears he'd allowed himself to succumb to on the stage. "You saved me from the incinerator," and he is certain of that. He doesn't need Louis to say. Claudia is a killer. She of singular intellect and instinct. She would have finished the game, if she'd bee allowed it. "I saved you from the sun."
A shake of his head, a tension in his expression. "I'm not sorry. I can't be. I need you on this earth to make it worth walking."
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If Claudia had her way—
No, there would still have been a trial, even if he'd helped Claudia hoist Lestat into the incinerator. The spectacle of their conviction would have been staged differently, perhaps, but the verdict would be unchanged. And there would have been no reprieve for Louis.
Lestat's voice is thick. Louis cannot recall if he ever saw this exact expression on his face before.
"I couldn't do it," falls out of him, a shattering of a confession. "I couldn't burn you. I couldn't let you go."
Even on that stage, even as Lestat made a spectacle of their life together, a degrading spectacle of everything precious between them, Louis had felt that same breathless relief at his presence. It had always been the way with them, love and hate and desire all muddled together.
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But not all of them. Confessions of love, of truths. It sounds like all of them, the way the words come out of Louis, stumbles out of him bleeding, and Lestat's hand slides off his shoulder to take his hand. Unmoving from his spot at his feet.
He smiles at him. A watery kind of smile, now, fleeting and disconnected. "So you understand," still strangled in his throat. "How I couldn't let them have you."
He isn't sorry. He might have asked if Louis is, but it seems like an absurdity tantamount to following him along at his brother's funeral march, asking why he hadn't come around in a while. So, he swallows instead. The taste of ash still thick in his lungs, the roof his mouth. The smell of burning flesh, that even the alien presence of gasoline couldn't hide.
"She held her love," instead. "Shielded her as best she could. And in the end, when the fledgling was gone, she looked to me."
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"I felt her go," he admits. "Madeleine."
His. His fledgling. His—
His mind skips over the word daughter.
"I could hear Claudia screaming," slowly, trying to piece together the memory. It's warped, distorted by fear, and panic, and pain. "Until they closed me in."
His fingers clench in Lestat's grip, while his opposite hand balls into a fist over his knee.
"Did she say anything?" Louis asks, the question cracking as he speaks it.
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His other hand rises up from Louis' knee, touching his face, cradling his cheek in his palm and thumbing away tears.
"They whispered together, beneath everything. Their love for one another. No regret, no apologising."
They should have told Claudia, all those years ago. They should have told her there would be someone who loves her the way they love each other, someone who would be devoted to her. But they couldn't conceive of it, could they? They couldn't begin to imagine what she would be. Stronger than either of them could have anticipated.
His hand lowers, rests on Louis' chest, a shift to sit a little on his haunches. "I never saw her perform," he says, his focus drawing a little more inward, enough that the corner of his mouth twists up, a glint of tooth. "But she played to the crowd in the end. Or against them. She told them, 'follow the bouncing ball' as the sun came down on them, and not a one of them smiled, or laughed. They looked sickened."
Back to Louis. "The sun came down," he echoes. "The fledgling went. And she—she cried. She screamed. Anger, and then it was just pain. And she said nothing but she looked at me—"
A break, finally, a shuddered gasp in as tears spill.
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It had been such a painful thought. Louis hadn't been able to ask for fear of confirmation. For fear of something worse.
Now he has this. The truth. Lestat delivers it to him as gently as possible, with his hands anchoring Louis into the present moment. Lestat doesn't let him slip away.
Louis doesn't think to do it. It simply happens, his hand lifting to Lestat's cheek as his face crumples. Tenderness, reflexive even after all that's passed between them, and the need to touch him. Steady him, the way he has been steadying Louis.
"You were there," Louis tells him, choked. "You were there, so she wasn't alone."
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It allows for the next thing, which is, "I'm sorry," thick in his throat. "That I couldn't save her."
The world had shrunk to a pinhole in the moments after he'd manipulated the room. Standing for the denouement, swaying on his heels. Maybe if he had been a better maker, the father she had seen in him in those final moments, he wouldn't have cared. Would have moved from his spot, would have tried, however uselessly.
And she would be dead, still, and perhaps so would he, and Louis left starving in his box, but the neat circle of justification is scattered aside as he shakes his head. It had all struck him too late.
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But this is not Lestat's doing. Lestat did not lure them into a trap, leave them alone within a bright little restaurant to be taken. He did not cut their ankles.
And even so, it has been very difficult to give Lestat the grace of acknowledging that he was a prop. He had been a tool the way the diaries were a tool, the voice to accompany the grotesque animation projected onto the screen behind them.
"Me too," is ground glass in Louis' mouth. No more than that, because he does understand the thing Lestat had described. The inability to let go, no matter the cost. "But she shouldn't have been on that stage."
Claudia should have been away with Madeline. Louis had been prepared for that, for whatever shape life would take without Claudia alongside him.
But he wasn't prepared for her death. He wasn't prepared to feel the full weight of it now either, with his hand soft at Lestat's cheek and tears streaking their faces.
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Reflects on whether things would be simpler for Louis if he'd followed through on his intent to release him properly. To have hated him alongside all the rest. But what can he say? Love is a curse.
And he steals comfort from the hand in his face, leaning into it, turning his face to brush his lips against Louis' palm, and breathes through the last shudders that had gripped his lungs, his heart. "None of you should have been," murmured there. It's their turn to hurt, he'd said, a declaration flung out to the audience.
Inviting their complicity. Their abuse. Riling them.
"We need rest," he adds, a breath out that is close to a laugh, but never makes it. Again, coaxing Louis into coffin. But it's daylight outside, the sun pressing against the windows. Staying out in it will do them no good.
hoists bow
Louis does not volunteer this.
Nothing is repaired. Everything is repaired. Both of these things are true.
Tears still run silently down his face as he nods, jaw set. His palm aches where Lestat kissed. He cannot imagine getting into a coffin by himself. Has that been taken from him? The ability to find rest on his own?
"Mine's beneath that bed," Louis tells him. "Her's is underneath here."
The heel of his boot scrapes backwards, thunks softly against concealed wood.
and they were roommates
The answer as to sleeping arrangement seems obvious, until it isn't.
Then, he pulls at Louis' hand to urge him to stand. After, he will go and lift the bed that conceals their daughter's coffin. The handsome perfume she favoured, the scented oils she used in her hair, the cheap cigarettes she sometimes indulged in are released with that movement, a sensory sketch of a fully grown woman of good taste.
He looks to Louis, a clear question entwined with the plain desire to lay amongst it all, as the daylight takes them away.
and they WERE roommats
Claudia is dead.
Standing alongside her coffin, scenting all the familiar notes of her in the air among the traces and trappings of the little apartment they had made their home, Louis feels grief twisting through him so strongly, a force powerful enough to break his body apart.
Their daughter. Gone.
The last dregs of closeness to be gathered are within her coffin. Maybe he should bar Lestat from it, but it would be a cruelty.
And Louis balks at the thought of sleeping alone.
"Get in," is far more tender a thing than the invitation Louis had extended before, in the ramshackle basement they'd stowed away in. "Please."
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Takes off his shoes, first, and then his waistcoat, his shirt. It's a practical kind of stripping, none of the careful choreography with which he might have undressed himself in Louis' presence before. Sooty, bloody clothes are abandoned in a heap until he is down to what will have to pass as pyjamas, undershirt and drawers. There is still grime clinging to his skin, still the scent of massacre in his hair.
It'll do. He steps into the coffin and kneels down into it. The dimensions aren't too out of proportion, not a child's coffin anymore, but it would be uncomfortable for they were more concerned about intimacy, if the deep sleep awaiting them wouldn't rob them of the senses to be uncomfortable.
Still pink satin, he observes, but with a grey sheen. Less frills, less frippery. His heart hurts. He reaches a hand to Louis to help him in.
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That has been the way of it, since Lestat excavated Louis from beneath the stones. Lestat extends a hand, and Louis takes it. This is the first moment where it feels like a fully conscious decision, rather than reflex.
Louis recalls the day they chose their coffins, the project of procuring and transporting them sight unseen into this room. He cannot think on it too long. It is too painful.
He lowers himself down alongside Lestat. Recalls still how they fit together, how to tangle their legs, to lay himself across Lestat's chest. Hip to hip, heart to heart. Louis' fingers hook in the collar of his undershirt.
"You meant those things."
A whisper in the dark, as the lid closes overhead.
🎀 found it
And he will wait until Louis feels relaxed against him before he gives into the urge to enter that sleep state, knowing he will eventually have little choice in doing so anyway.
His hand goes up, cradling Louis' face, and he lifts his chin so that he can press a kiss to his brow as they are bathed in reparative shadow. "Every word," innately refers to the ones that were his own.