"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."