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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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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.