singillatim | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who: Lestat de Lioncourt and open
What: Exploring town, exploring caves
When: December
Where: Milton, Misty Falls Cave

Content Warnings: Vampirism and associated blood thirst, animal hunting and consumption, claustrophobia, caving

misty falls cave

Unlike many of the explorers seeking the cave, Lestat did not receive directions from the old man of the forest. His guide to the falls came in the form of others’ boot prints trekking to and from the falls, a sight which couldn’t fail to incite his curiosity.

The trail brings him to the falls some hours after sunset. He had his trap-line to attend to first, where he took his small dinner from a gamey rabbit that now hangs dressed and butchered in his growing larder. Hunger blunted, if not sated, he can admire the tumult of icy water as it deserves to be admired.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” He calls over his shoulder as soon as he picks up the sound of newly approaching footsteps, perhaps sooner than whoever comes might expect. “A chandelier hung by winter itself.”

He turns gracefully even in his heavy winter layers, smiling at the newcomer as if they are already in accord. Warm acquaintances at the least, if not yet friends, on the cusp of embarking into a thrilling secret together.

“What do you think is inside?”

vampire about town

The evening Lestat walks into the grubby little town is unremarkable except for the fact of his arrival, a fact which perversely delights him. There have been no letters sent ahead, no lodgings arranged, no quantities of money moved by the firms of quiet professionals who attend to such things on his behalf. There’s only Lestat in secondhand winter layers, gliding between the huddled houses to the center of the community.

He’s always a little excited by novelty. It’s a quality one must cultivate to survive the interminable span of immortality, and it’s one of many such qualities he possesses in surplus of necessity.

So his anonymity has its charm, as fleeting as it will be. His mark will be made soon enough, beginning with crossing the threshold of the town’s gathering place.

Once inside, he takes in his surroundings with evident approval before he crosses to a table near the fireplace. He undoes the bundled canvas strapped to his back and lays it down, unfolding it to reveal the choicest cuts of venison he’d been able to harvest from last night’s hunt. Its blood is only a pleasant memory, but sufficient to keep him clear-headed and convivial.

He turns to the nearest party who happens to catch his attention with a modest smile, plucking his gloves from his hands a finger at a time.

“Good evening,” he says, warmly, “I thought this might make a decent supper. You wouldn’t happen to be a cook?”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Louis does note that Lestat doesn't comment on Louis's thoughts. He feels slightly less unnerved, more free to continue thinking what he will. Being able to touch, needle, prod, is more than enough allowance Lestat should have. Louis can already see this becoming a problem, however much Lestat claimed this power was mostly boring. Louis and Claudia already bothered each other enough, like having telephones attached to their heads. Lestat would indeed be impossible.

"You're bein' more impossible than usual." Sometimes it feels like it conveys meaning better to say it in French.

Louis keeps what graces he may, ever the gentleman. He remains where he is. He doesn't barge into Lestat's door. He must be invited in, and it has nothing to do with the superstition about vampires. Breaching that wall of respect and decency opens up terrible possibilities in their ongoing war of attrition, and Louis is more concerned about how Lestat seems determined to freeze his fingers off.

Yes, he is concerned, and he will indulge in this humanity that Lestat so derides.

"C'mon. Get yourself inside. This ain't porch sittin' weather."

He resists adding that Lestat looks like a grandma some fool forgot to help inside.

"And end our conversation so quickly?" Lestat needles. He can't help himself. He cocks his head, blinking long lashes, and feigns guilelessness. "Unless you'd care to join me in warming our hands by my crackling hearth?"

There is a thin trail of smoke rising from the chimney, barely visible in the night. It would be much more pleasant to be indoors, if not for their unseen third party clotting the air like a bad wind off the river.

He has noticed Louis is paying the ghost no mind. It seems fitting. Louis never much cared to acknowledge Lestat's ghosts. It reminded him too much of Lestat's age - and Lestat preferred it as well. Prefers it now, in fact. (The idea he looks at all grandmotherly would devastate him.)

"Think of all the snide comments you could make about my state of affairs," he cajoles, slightly more softly. "Aren't you curious to see what sort of den of sin the serpent inhabits?"

Louis actually feels the rise of heat in his face, the traitorous blood. Louis isn't in a hurry to sully another splintery floor, but there is attraction mixed with the annoyance and embarrassment. He's more keen on knowing why Lestat is like this--not his usual brand of honeyed fangs or burning quicksilver, but the circumstances surrounding it tonight.

Sitting like a monk in the cold does not fit Lestat. If he has the means to be comfortable and sated, he will pursue it. He had a hard life, didn't he, though he almost never talked of it. Making oneself uncomfortable in penance is more Louis's thing.

Lestat the vulnerable. The thought does not occur to Louis so much as it creeps up on him from behind. Lestat does a good job of throwing acid smoke into the air. Lestat the irritable. But Louis's body reacts instinctively to the one he shared decades of his life with. And Lestat dismisses his compassion so much...

So Louis's eyes are softer than they should be, and his voice almost lacks bite, like he never housed fangs in his mouth. He wrinkles his nose, a very human gesture, which only has the effect of woodcut lines on smooth vampire skin.

"Can't you just invite me in like a normal person, Lestat? I want to know why you sittin' out here like a little old gran'mamaw when you got heatin' inside."

Struck by an idea, he peers over his shoulder, wondering if Lestat is watching for something, or--oh no--waiting for someone. But if he were expecting guests--paramours? Is it cheating if they're no longer together? Louis's heart hurts--Lestat would be inside primping, wouldn't he?

Lestat draws himself up in instantaneous affront, the clutching of his quilt about his shoulders doing nothing to dispel the comparison Louis has so cruelly drawn. He realizes this a moment late, and unclenches his fists inside of his cocoon as he rearranges himself to disaffected indolence instead of stiff-backed dignity.

"I was taking in the air," he declares, archly, which also does little to help. He curses the maker of the quilt he's donned, and whatever wicked spirit possessed her to decorate the thing with gingham squares in cheerful blues. All of its warmth can't make up for such a display of poor taste.

"But if you insist - " He makes a show of standing up, the quilts slipping from him as he unfolds. He's wearing only light house-clothes, high-waisted dun trousers and a diaphanous white button-down tucked underneath a practically prosaic cardigan of soft blue. He thinks it rather makes him look like a college student, perhaps of the very sort their darling used to strew like broken dolls in institutes of higher learning across the continent.

He crosses to the door and pulls it open, ignoring the chill bite of the doorknob under his palm. Irritation, nothing more.

"Come inside, if it pleases you," he invites, sweeping his arm and dipping into a mannered half-bow like a theatre usher.

He blinks slowly. Lestat is trying his patience, but Louis won't give him the satisfaction of matching flounce for flounce. (His eyes briefly travel to the seat of Lestat's pants as he opens the door. Just noting the tailoring.)

He uncrosses his arms and enters in a timely manner, the need to protect warm interiors from open doors becoming a habit. (Memory harries him unbidden: Lestat playing doorman for Louis, Lestat standing while Louis sits in a business meeting, their little games of flaunting social etiquette where they could get away with it.)

"I prefer you actually speakin' to me, but if it becomes too difficult, you can use your mind gift while I'm in conversation with you." Unusual for Lestat to show anything but control over his powers. Unusual for Louis to gently pick at whatever might be the source of Lestat's annoyance like a tangled bit of hair instead of avoiding or throwing kerosene on the flame. Louis tries not to think of how many times he failed his family.

He shucks off his winter coat--his own, chestnut wool proving itself in the Northern Territories--but keeps his other layers on, Southern man that he is. A black fleece vest opens at the front over a dark storm blue braided sweater. These predominate over a flannel button-down checked with gray, white, and burgundy. He managed to find some wool blend trousers he didn't hate, and he tucked these into the deerskin boots. College professor on a camping trip.

He reluctantly removes a herringbone cap. He knew he would run out of pomade soon, and it doesn't trend among the men's hair products of Milton--no hold and unbearable scents. The search continues, but for now, he makes do with just taking proper care of it.

Unstyled, his coils softly crown and spill away from his head, smelling predominantly of shea. Lestat will have seen it like this on the rare wash days when Louis didn't immediately set it with pomade after. What looks romantically tousled could invite disrespect from others when leaving the house. Ever the gentleman, Louis prefers to look neat.

Beautiful.

The thought slips Lestat's grasp from where he stands framed against the closed door, that detestable quilt gathered up in his arms. His blue eyes are lovesick, lovestricken, and he despises the way they feel in his face almost as much as he despises their mirror on the phantom that trailed into his house after Louis like the starving dog it is.

He shakes the quilt out and throws it aside, carelessly, onto a low cream couch that rests underneath the frosted windows of the living room. Much of the rest of the room is done in shades of the same, like whipped butter or the bellies of high summer clouds. The woman who owned this house was proud of it. She liked her neat little appointment of matching furniture upholstered in cloth, her collection of clear glass figures shaped after various animals peering off shelves mounted to the wall to display them, her tedious little prints of pastel flowers hung level with one another above the flattened television that carries no signal.

There is the promised fire penned in the grey stone hearth. The wood-burning stove that provides the true warmth permeating the rest of the house squats in the blue-tiled kitchen, which is visible down the hall from where they stand.

"I keep the bodies in the shed behind the house," he says, lightly, as if the stray thought was never introduced to tinge the air between them, "Stacked two by two. If you happened to be trying to ferret them out. May I take your coat?"

He goes still in the act of removing his vest, then continues as if he didn't hear anything in his head from the person behind him. He feels warmer than he anticipated--and then stupid Lestat breaks the spell. Lestat has a knack for dispelling actual meaningful moments with the most flippant comments. How is it that he could yearn for an intimate immortal companion yet run from true connection when it matters most?

Trying to feel anything other than the bitter twist in his heart, his eyes cast around the room for something to look at other than Lestat. After living in a rat-infested little house, this is almost a shock. (Lestat is not beating the grandmother allegations.)

Louis makes the mistake of feeling that his unhappiness and lack of industry makes him inferior to Lestat. Louis plugged the holes for warmth and got rid of any filth, but allowed the rats free reign so he could eat them during that uncertain time of starvation. He left most of the previous owners' possessions alone. (Sometimes he mournfully looks at the dusty family photos in their crisp modern colors.)

"Why would I look for your bodies, Lestat?" he asks with incredulous weariness as he hands him his things. Then, dreading it, "Human or animal?"

The TV is a dark mirror. They're not the rounded reflective tubes of glass in boxes he knows. He catches sight of his own blurred face in it and Lestat near him. If the phantom has a reflection, he does not see it.

"Human, of course." Lestat's tone is perfectly, dryly sincere. Only someone intimately familiar with his penchant for casually appalling lies could catch the deceit immediately; most people would reject it as an obvious joke. No one is so callous about killing, or so the social consensus goes.

Lestat knows it's all pretense. Most mortals couldn't give a damn about which of their ilk lives or dies, except for those most useful to them personally, and even then, they count the losses in terms of dreary materialism. But they all must feign horror for their fellow man, even if the true horror is nearly always out of sudden fright for themselves when confronted with the existence of someone who reveals the tenuousness of life without a care.

It's one of Louis' least charming foibles that he still attempts to cling to that vestige of so-called morality. Lestat wants to broach and clear the subject as swiftly as possible, rather than abide under the morose reproachfulness of Louis' surely present suspicions.

"I thought you might be curious about the welfare of our rustic townsfolk, considering your insistence on mingling with them," he continues, ever the hypocrite, as he hangs Louis' things with care at odds with his prickly attitude.

(He hardly knows why he's acting like this, Louis safely past his threshold and within his reach. He's being inordinately difficult, even by his standards. Oversensitive, undersoothed. He pushes to be pushed back.)

Says the guy who will shrivel up and die if he has no one interesting to talk to. Louis, who took the bait of this stupid game, already knows Lestat is in one of his impossible moods. Lestat is good at lying, using theatricality as a mask. Louis is good at lying when he also lies to himself. Lestat might be joking now, but will he be later? Louis has his own store of bodies, animals, the byproducts of his hunting. It's fairly easy to keep things frozen when the ambient temperature is cold as hell.

Once again, Louis finds himself standing between Lestat and something he wants to protect. It's an odd thing, because he doesn't even particularly like the people here. The positive feelings he has pale in comparison to the two great loves of his life, his maker-husband and his sister-daughter.

Louis rounds on him, building to desperation, thinking to head off something like their gory indulgence at Mardi Gras. He started hunting human again as a compromise, but he ended things just after stalking like a wolf through their house after those offensive screaming busybodies. Hypocrisy is a family affair.

"Lestat, you can't go killin' half the town! Not only will we starve, but there are people who already know what vampires are! What I am!"

His fingers gesture over the heart of his own sweater. May as well fess up now, as they're talking of bodies. "One flash of fangs and they have the whole measure of us!"

Lestat goes perfectly still. It's a more difficult trick than most people realize, bringing the whole of one's body to the rigid tensile inertness of a raised blade. Snakes can do it, and so can Lestat, as such is the nature of venomous things.

The skin of the college student is revealed for what it is. All the cloying neatness of this little toy house, this little toy performance, are shown to be artifice. What stands before Louis, framed by the fragile fiction of humanity, is nothing more or less than a predator incarnate.

"They know," he says, enunciation as clear and ringing and edged as cut-glass, "Not knew, Louis?"

He does nothing so vulgar as take a step forward. He means no harm to Louis, even in the same instant that he wants to rattle him until the fangs pop out of his cloud-stuffed head. He shifts his weight back, lightly, in the direction of the door.

"Perhaps I heard you incorrectly." He cocks his head, unhappy smile lifting his lips to let his teeth shine. "My ears are not what they were."

Edited 2024-02-03 01:06 (UTC)

When he was human, Louis wondered why animals went at each other when they had seemed to be so calm. Now he knows. They simply stared each other down before suddenly leaping into action over some slight.

Louis forgets all the human trappings he likes to cling to, breathing, shifting, leaning, all of it. The effect is of two statues staring intently at each other, but not so focused as to omit periphery observation. Louis watches Lestat's blond hair move with his head, notes it with detached fascination. Louis hears his own name like a hot brand.

Aw shit, here we go again...

It's absurd, how Louis circles around Lestat's reactive hot sun flares in his mind. Louis rattles the bars of his cage because he doesn't know what to do, and the air in it is a suffocating red fog. He's sick of Lestat's shit, sick of rolling over and trying to keep the peace (even if it was easier to just follow his teacher, maker, lover).

Finally he moves, if only to purse his lips as his nostrils flare--ironic that expressions meant to close himself off express so much.

"Both, if you're goin' be like that. Some places don't operate on the rules of your tiny little world. Does it surprise you that some people know what vampires are when you reveal yourself to humans?"

Only a few that he knows of. Himself, Claudia, Antoinette. That's not a lot, and they did not stay human.

"I guess I don't get the same privileges as you. I should have just laid down and died instead of askin' for a drink."

"I hardly meant that they'd see that appalling film," Lestat says, sarcasm acidic enough to strip the beige paint from the walls, "Of course they know what vampires are - or imagine they do, which is bad enough - but they know you?"

The first level of offence is the aesthetic. For Louis to behave as if knowing some peasant folklore and the fevered imaginings of repressed writers and sensationalist cinematographers is equivalent to understanding what a vampire truly is strikes Lestat as far from an amusing little foible.

The second, and far worse, is how far Louis has strayed from the simple principles of safety Lestat sought to instill in him. Louis has never faced the concerted wrath of a mob of mortals on the hunt for their hunters, only the tawdry annoyances of fitful persecution and shadowy whispers. His carelessness would be alarming enough if they were at their full strength, but as they are, in their diminished one?

A flicker of something worse than anger flashes in Lestat's blue eyes as he thins his lips, his smile twisting more terribly taut.

"You should have killed them," Lestat says, bitterly, "I trust I don't need to explain that to you? Or have you forgotten everything I tried to teach you out of spite? Did you think it would be amusing to entice me to clean up after you? Or simply more convenient for your conscience, to have however many loose tongues wagging freely about the ravenous Mr. Louis de Pointe du Lac? While oh, of course - the benighted Lestat must slaughter half a dozen, to your immense self-righteous disappointment?"

"No, not the damn pictures, Lestat, the real thing! They know about us back wherever they come from, from experience, I don't know how. They ain't like the humans at home."

Lestat the vulnerable, becomes Lestat the irritable, becomes Lestat the controlling, Claudia said. Louis wants to walk right out the door, risking passing Lestat. He wants to plead with his teacher in all things vampire not to kill the witnesses. He wants to provoke him into the cheap satisfaction of a fight. He does none of these things, though the last is sorely tempting. Even when Claudia was around, it was hard for Louis to stand his ground.

"I'm tellin' you, because, I don't know, I thought you should know! But you go and act like this! You think I don't know what it's like to wonder if my neighbor's goin' turn me in? You think I was runnin' around tellin' the whole town, just to get a rise outta you?"

His hand gestures futilely at Lestat before leveling a finger at him. "You're not layin' a damn finger on anyone. I wanted to save a life, not take it. For once in my goddamn life I wanted to do right by someone. If we kill them, we starve."

Lestat knows he's being patently unfair. The truth is that he's certain Louis didn't give the slightest thought to what Lestat would make of any of this until it threatened his precious mortal herd. He doubts Louis thinks of him at all except when he's reminded by some unpleasant association that his inconvenience of a maker lingers at the periphery of his new little rudiment of a life.

His phantom looks on, a mute idiot. Lestat envies his oblivious emptiness.

"I could have provided for you!" Lestat bursts out, sweeping his arm through the arm in front of him like the brandishing of a blade. "If you had only deigned to ask! But you prefer to put yourself in the hands of strangers, of over-educated humans, than bend even the smallest filament of your obstinacy!"

Anger animates him now, roiling under his skin. He wants to pace, to wrench something from the wall and throw it, to slam his hands on solid wood until it shatters underneath them. He has trained himself to curb such impulses, to the gratitude of no one, the only things that ever seem to matter being his slips of temper - but for now, he confines himself to stand where he is, his shoulders braced against his own wrath.

"Save a life," he laughs, unkindly, "Oh, Louis. How many times must we play this game of yours? How many heads must roll down the steps of your temple to satisfy your mercy?"

"No one takes him from me," his thoughts writhe like alligators in a swamp at a shot, thrashing up murky waters of near-panic, seething over into protective wrath, "For him, all of them - for him, anyone - my one life -"

Words are beyond Louis. Lestat the patriarch, the hysteric, threatens everyone in town and also himself. He becomes controlling when he has the least control. It's pathetic. Louis knows this logically, but logic doesn't figure into this.

It becomes so unbearable Louis hardly knows what his feet are doing, and he is crossing the room without so much as a warning to himself, past Lestat, his cold icy eyes on him be damned, and he is wrenching the front door open with a bang.

If no one can take Louis away, Louis can take Louis away.

He doesn't lose his stride. He knows his mistake immediately of course, the snow burning wet through his socks, but it feels like something, anything, reminds him there is ground beneath his feet and movement in his legs. He stalks down to the vague snow-covered end of the front yard, such as it is, stops, and wraps his arms around himself.

He gasps, and the cold air hurts his chest. The seconds tick by. So goddamn good to have a moment. This is already so much better, and he shouldn't have judged Lestat for wanting out of a stifling room. It's fucking freezing. His feet are on fire. He feels nothing. He is nothing.

Lestat lets Louis approach him, his chin raised in readiness for whatever might come of it. He, somehow, does not expect Louis to walk past him. To put his hand on the door and swing it open, to step out into the cold, to leave.

"Louis," Lestat says, in warning of some as yet undecided consequence. He turns to observe Louis' progress onto the porch, out into the broken snow, with growing impatience. Louis does not even have on his damnable boots. He's not suited to the cold. He'll look a fool when he has to turn back, shouting at Lestat from the yard, and Lestat will have to bundle him back inside with conciliation and assurances, and all will be as it always is.

He finds himself pulling on his own boots once more with a mild, distracted surprise. He has no idea what urgency spurs his abruptly clumsy fingers as he stoops, his eyes fixed on Louis' back, waiting for the inevitable.

"Louis!" Lestat calls, in rebuke. He stands at his own threshold, leaning slightly into the frigid air, hanging by some invisible thread.

Louis does not turn around.

The snow whispers and creaks under his footsteps as he crosses the yard in long, hurried strides, fetching up to a stop within arm's reach of Louis' shoulder. He cannot see his face. Only the huddled refusal of his hunched back and folded arms.

"Louis," Lestat says, suddenly cajoling, suddenly soft, "What will the neighbours think?"

Anything Lestat could level at him--turning his name into a warning, a curse, a caress--surely cannot be worse than entering once again. Louis shivers in his private prison. The wetness of snow creeps up his pants. Lestat doesn't get to explode one minute and be praised for picking up the pieces the next.

"I d-don't give a damn." Why is it so hard to speak? Even if he weren't freezing, his words are like cotton in his mouth.

His face contorts and smooths and twists again as he stares at the houses across the street without really looking at them. Louis, who fastidiously keeps up appearances, can't bring himself to care in this state if any neighbors are peeking from behind silly patterned curtains at them. What do they even look like, some comedic farce? A caretaker ushering someone inside after an episode? Louis can't bring himself to imagine. It only matters what Lestat thinks, and it shouldn't.

"I don't--expect you to understand, but I keep doin' it. I keep expectin' you to be reasonable--like a damn fool. You love the music they make--like an angel listenin' to the spheres."

Louis attempts to stitch the tears in himself and it comes out in patchwork sentences. He expects Lestat will want to march him back inside with all the authority of practicality, bemoaning how he always makes things so difficult. Louis feels he will explode if he touches him.

Lestat does not touch him.

Louis wants him to touch him, carry him like a bride in his arms as if he never hurt him and never would hurt him. Delusion. Better he consider the snow, which has already decided to hurt him to numbness, rather than Lestat, who hasn't even touched him.

"Lestat the provider," and here his lips curl bitterly, but he is as quiet as ever, a strange longing in his voice. "Lestat the father, the mother, the unholy monster. That all you want to be? I hoped we might confide just a little in each other. How can I be yours--how can you be mine--when you can't even do that?"

And here Louis betrays himself when his voice breaks, and there is no acid, only a broken heart.

Lestat's silence are rare. The one in the house scant moments ago was typical of what they presage, the calm before his terrible storms. He called Louis an anchor when they last spoke. He didn't speak of why he so longs for one. They know these things about one another.

Lestat knows he can be childish. Like a child, he wants everything to return to a state it was never in, the best of all his memories cut apart and sewn together with the lies of nostalgia. He wants a Louis who can be all of the things he most loved in him at every turn of their long dance at once, sieved out of time and misery until only gold remains.

Every horrendous thing he ever did was in search of that imagining, his hands tightening on the throat of the sweetness they once had (and they did have it, they did; he knows this, he must know this) to try to pin it in the faded ruins of their crumbling home. He never understood what Louis wanted of him, why his words so often did not stitch to his acts as Lestat thought they should.

They still do not. He understands Louis less now than perhaps he ever did. How can Louis think he wants to be so little to him, when Lestat so badly desires to be the whole of his world?

"Well," he says, the lilt in his voice shivering with, surely, only the cold, "I give a damn if those lovely feet of yours end up blackened stumps."

He lifts his hand as he takes a cautious step forward, as if Louis is a wild creature he doesn't want to startle, which is more and less than the truth of it. He grazes Louis' sleeve and lingers there, just below the crook of his elbow.

"Come back inside to tell me how appalling I am," he coaxes. "At least for your boots. I would hate to have to lose them while you leave them unattended."

"Please," his thoughts curl, fingers hooking into the pant legs of a lover departing.

He makes a choked sort of whimper when he feels the brush of Lestat against his sleeve. Lestat's one thought reaches out to him across a vast dark ocean when his words won't, and it pierces him. Get it together, at least enough to move, he tries to tell himself. Louis does not have it together in the slightest. But his shoulders uncoil, and his legs no longer feel like they might carry him off like a gunshot.

In the end his feet hurt too much to think of anything else, even whether or not he is prepared to turn around. He sways a little as he turns, and he hates the way he can't meet Lestat's eyes, so like the ice-blue shadows in the snow.

Louis wobbles like a newborn deer. His feet hurt too much to take more than a few steps before he gives in and moves naturally as a vampire does, and quite suddenly he is on the porch with snow dusting his feet and widely spaced tracks behind him.

With a little muffled sound he collapses to his knees just inside the door, the pain just as bad as it ever was--worse as the numbness wears off. He rips his freezing socks off and winces. But what a relief too.

It is combined with an immediate dizzying hunger. He's still learning to hunt with the new power, as it takes its toll. It promises to make whatever rebuttals Lestat might choose to throw at him all the more taxing. His breaths shudder and his heart pounds urgently as he tries to regain an equilibrium with less blood to spare.

Edited (i pasted it wrong and went to sleep rip) 2024-02-09 21:30 (UTC)

"Oh, for the love of - "

Lestat would be the first to say he's not a saint. His exasperated outburst as he traces Louis across the yard is not precisely laced with patient, loving kindness. He pursues with lesser quickness, mounting the low porch steps in a single lope, and shuts the front door firmly behind him.

Of course he forgot to shut it when he left. Of course the front hall is now bitterly cold, clotted with an even unhappier Louis, and that much more difficult to move about in. He shucks off his boots with fingers he's deeply displeased to find numb, then crouches next to the most impossible stubborn, self-destructive individual he thinks he knows. With his own ghost staring on mournfully, Lestat thinks that really does say quite a bit about Louis.

(He almost wonders whose love he might have spoken of, before he cut the common exclamation short. An affectation, surely. Nothing more.)

"Well," he says, after a moment, with a dryness wholly unsuited to the situation at hand, "Of course you can outrun me."

He offers Louis his shoulder, pivoting to slide his arm around his back before Louis can make the decision to reject him. Let him shove him off, if he likes.

"Come to the couch," Lestat tells him, starting to bring them both up, and damn Louis' frozen feet - it does them no good to lie there still, "It seems I'll be playing the doctor again. What a marvellous new education you are cultivating for me, Louis."

He doesn't know why he walked out the door, only that he had to. He didn't think. Now he thinks about it, but all his wrung-out frozen thoughts can come up with is that it was something that came over him, not something he chose.

He grunts with protest as Lestat picks him up. His feet are in agony as they are made to stumble over the floor again. With a vampire's perverse attention to blood, Louis knows it's rushing there and compounding the pinpricks.

"Shut up, they're just cold," he mumbles, but he refrains from shoving at Lestat until he's collapsed on the couch. It's very soft; it nearly consumes him and hampers any true effort at movement.

"Can't run long anyway. I get to bein' ravenous like it's been days. This ain't our old power."

And then he lies full length on the couch, curled up like a sick child, because he hates the way he feels (emotionally) and wishes it would stop. He came here to be stalwart and, if need be, disdainful of Lestat's theatrics. He shivers from something other than the cold.

"We've had this conversation before, why bother tryin' to explain it to you? I put their blood in my mouth and I taste the whole of a person, their life, their dreams, and I don't want that to go away... I thought at least you would respect me. And somethin's eatin' you, somethin's wrong, like a... off note."

So sensitive he is to Lestat's moods (and one wonders why he attuned himself so well), Louis withers like an indicator species when the water is but lightly poisoned. He puts his face in his arms.

Once again, Lestat has a number of scathing comments on Louis just cold, beginning with the fundamental fact that just cold should touch neither of them at all. He might add a pointed addendum about the consumptive nature of Louis' 'new' gift, the paltry substitute for the unnatural birthrights they ought to be entitled to by virtue of their unhallowed existence.

But as ever, Louis can only think of others. The meaningless herd, of course, and then -

He softens where he's standing, his arms folded since Louis pushed away dropping slightly even if they don't yet uncross. He purses his lips less direly and cocks his head, then sighs, making a show of it. He can never make a concession without one.

"What could be wrong, Louis? I am stranded in a hideous town, stripped of all but my name and myself, starved of anything more interesting than the habits of deer, and most recently informed that soon I ought to expect the villagers to take up torches and besiege my flimsy door." He shrugs, then turns on his heels, vanishing to another room. The sound of drawers being opened and objects being moved travels from one place to another, out of sight.

"But have it as you like," he calls, crossing into the kitchen, "I'll await their arrival with gracious patience. Perhaps having my own head cleaved from my shoulders will at least be a diverting experience. I have only died the once. The second time might be more amusing."

He wilts more, if that is even possible.

"Don't. Don't talk about you dyin'," he murmurs into his arms, and their positions are reversed with Lestat being the morbid one tonight. Knife at Lestat's throat, rug stained with all the blood he feasted on--

Louis sinks his nails into the pastel pillow he clutches.

"I'm not sayin' there ain't a rat bastard among them," he says laboriously to the floor. "I did not fall into the neck of the first human who said a kind word. So difficult to make friends when I... I was apart for so long. Still am. I never mentioned you by name. I was always... afraid they'd get us for somethin'. Small towns are less kind. If it isn't one thing, it's another. I mean, look at me."

He refers to the color of his skin, his choice in liaisons, and his drinking problem. It occurs to him he did not adequately finish explaining the situation. He was explosively sidetracked. He petulantly wishes Lestat would finish whatever it is he's doing. He childishly wishes, with all of a child's yearning for impossible things, to really be able to talk with him.

"I was not... willin' to become the monster I would be painted as. No one here has made threats of death against me despite knowin' what I am, no one... attacked me or ran from me with that fear that promises they'll be back in force."

Lestat is, in spite of the loneliness still gnawing at him, glad of the temporary separation. It gives him latitude to make all the faces he'd like at Louis' explanation, both derisive and half-heartedly regretful.

It's almost difficult to understand how someone as careful as Louis, as preoccupied with the opinions of others, can be so cavalier about things that strike Lestat as pertinent threats. If he wasn't familiar with Louis' even more pronounced streak of defiance, he'd be left lost.

Louis is afraid he will be 'got for something'. He also believes that it is a fundamental unfairness of the world that is the case, and he can't stand for unfairness. A perpetual and unresolvable tension.

"I am aware of the close-mindedness of small towns," Lestat says, emerging from the kitchen with a wrapped, quilted parcel in hand. "And how they gossip, and collude, and otherwise become intolerable."

He sets the oven-warmed brick, one of several that normally resides beneath the stove, at Louis' feet. Not quite touching, but close enough to touch whenever Louis can tolerate it. Otherwise, it radiates heat through its buffering cloth sleeve. He sits on the opposite side of it, his arm slung over the back of the couch, and crosses his leg over his knee at the ankle.

"But the cat is out of the bag, as they say." He brushes by his own insistence earlier, and the topic of death, as lightly as if he never spoke of either. "You don't mention me?"

An even lighter question, like a passing whim.

Yes of course--Lestat had grown up in a small-minded family that, according to him, thought nothing of dragging Lestat out of school. Stands to reason that the environs were small-minded as well.

Louis isn't foolish enough to think Lestat is suddenly not at all angry. He guesses that Lestat is affecting casualness for the sake of actual conversation. That Lestat might feel compassion in this moment doesn't cross Louis's mind, though perhaps it should. Louis yearns for it, underneath his prickliness. They share so much with each other that no other has shared.

He slowly inches his feet towards the warm thing, finding it to be brick-shaped, and makes a note to hunt for some himself instead of using hot pans. The wetness at the hem of his pants goes from cold to bearable.

"Not by name or description. Bet most people think I had a lover back home. Others might think I got beef with a particular person here. Aren't you glad to not immediately be marked by association? Isn't that one of your rules, not to tell the names and resting places of other immortals? I think you prefer to make your own introductions. I don't have your flair."

Louis sounds tired. Hiding in a small place like this is tiring.

"They will eventually find out we know each other. What then?"

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cw: threats of violence

cw: self-harm

cw: self-harm

cw: self-harm divorce 2 for 1 special

cw: self-harm divorce

Re: cw: self-harm divorce

cw: self-harm divorce

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