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

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?"

Even without the dull isolation that's settled over him of late, Lestat would be jolted by the warm, liquid rush that comes at Louis saying that others might think he has a lover. Of course, they must imagine a different sort of lover than Lestat, one of fairer sex and gentler disposition. A gorgeous yet practically minded woman, no doubt, some angel of the household sponging the dust from Louis' wide and worried brow.

The idea of 'beef' is easily dismissed. Even in New Orleans, many were well-aware of the often contentious relations between the two of them.

But to know Louis has spoken of him even in allusions as his undoes a thin, binding strand around his heart. His fretful melancholic anger is diluted with affection, a gleam of pride.

"Then they will know you have an accomplice who's an excellent shot," Lestat says, and dares to bring his hand from the rise of the couch to the arch of one of Louis' bare feet. He waits to see if it will be tolerated, the iciness of Louis' flesh shocking even to his cool fingers.

"I've never minded being associated with you," he adds, with a different touch of lightness. The devil-may-care Lestat, flouter of convention, mastered only by his own whims. "It's the small-minded fools of the world who misapprehend the worth of your company."

Gentle disposition. Ha. If Louis was asked about it, he mournfully said things didn't go well and he had to end it. These were the bare facts, after Louis stripped half the truth from them. Lestat cultivates delusions about the rest.

Louis's skin is tender to the touch, mottled, and unevenly flushing, especially apparent on his soles. "Feels weird," he mumbles his eventual assessment. He gently punts Lestat's hand, then immediately regrets it as his foot sings with pinpricks. Guess they're workin' well enough.

He tentatively tries sandwiching his feet between the brick-warmed bundle and Lestat's thigh instead, searching out warmth and stillness. If Lestat can feel the cold through his pants, he can just deal with it. This is his fault for being loutish.

"You could always get away with a lot more than I could." I miss steppin' out with you, he can't say.

He sits up, suddenly struck with an idea from something Lestat said about shooting, and all thought of what he should or shouldn't encourage in Lestat flies from his head. (He's careful to keep his feet still, twisting only his shoulders to face Lestat.)

"Teach me to hunt," he says with false calm, eyes fixed intently on him. He refuses to simply depend on Lestat providing for him. The possibility that Lestat might say no has not occurred to him yet. "You've done it before."

Lestat produces a moue of displeasure at being so rudely kicked, but he accepts the (unintended) mollification of Louis' feet insinuating themselves against his thigh. He even quite bravely overlooks the chill for the sake of chivalry - and for relaxing the long muscles of his leg to better imprint Louis through the thin fabric of his trousers.

Louis might find it 'weird', but Lestat thinks he might enjoy it. He doesn't get the opportunity to linger on what it is about the mingling of heat and cold that appeals before Louis is shooting upright, possessed with a new flurry of an idea.

He should be pleased Louis has moved on from the safety of mortals, but of course, Louis can never move on to anything easier as a subject of conversation. No: the only departures from one arduous topic to another are at best leaping between parallel tracks. So perhaps he should rather be pleased that it isn't anything even less welcome.

In the meanwhile, he notices that his hand went out to touch Louis' shin, and rests there now with his palm open and fingers only slightly curled. More supportive than clinging; the hand of a nursemaid easing a charge down from a fright.

"It hardly sounds like you need a refresher course," Lestat starts, more taken aback by some combination of these events than he expects. Feigning ignorance of what Louis means is often enough to bait him out into starting an argument, and an argument always means a delayed resolution.

But he thinks of Louis darting out into the cold, again. Thinks back only a moment further, to a miserable little shack in the dark woods. A moment before that, a cold and lonely street.

"But if you mean in the forest," he amends, "May I ask what brings on this mania for hart and hind? You've been," apparently, "Managing."

Intent on this idea, Louis spares little thought for the steady and halfway pleasing warmth of quilt, brick, hand, and leg. Not that he's in any state to go cavorting in the forest tonight, but he must lay out his proposition.

Louis is impatient with Lestat's stalling, but it only lasts a moment. Claudia calls Lestat stupid, but it's just that he directs his wit and cleverness only to things he cares about. There is a practicality underneath Lestat's extravagance. Lestat can be very efficient when he is trying to make more time for entertainment. Even after indulging too much, he is fastidious about corpse disposal.

"Managin' ain't the same as livin'. Tired of chasin' deer all night and not findin' them half the time. I don't like teasin' the sunrise. I don't like staggerin' home so hungry I might eat someone. Then what do I do with the body in a hurry, and people askin' questions..."

Louis gestures with his open palms left and right, underscoring the drudgery of the chore--as if murder weren't a heinous mortal sin--trying to appeal to Lestat's practicality. "No one asks questions if I drag a deer into town, except what I'd like to trade for it."

Yes, Louis is still trying to preserve the safety of mortals. It is, in the end, about the same topic. But in Louis's mind, one cannot deny the value of surplus goods and not being completely dependent on a too-small population of mortals. But with Lestat's lack of immediate agreement, Louis begins to doubt himself, and he frowns at nothing in particular.

"But if you won't teach me, I'll find someone else."

Absolutely not.

Lestat doesn't intend to think that so loudly, but even without the certainty that comes with the true mastery of the mind-gift, he's sure that he's been overheard. A rare pang of embarrassment touches a deep-buried chord in him, and he briefly averts his eyes in the direction of one of the arrays of charmless ceramic beasts.

"They're all incompetents," he lies, "I've seen the mess they make of it. You'd only learn things I'd have to unteach you."

Louis will know the signs of Lestat taking the circuitous route towards convincing himself that a change of opinion is solely his idea. It's often best to let it run its course. He sighs as he tucks an imaginary strand of his hair behind his ear (as if he would allow such a flaw to linger if it was anything but flattering), then serves a pointed look at an apparently empty corner of the room.

"If I agreed," he says, after that moment of consideration, "Would you listen to me, for once? I don't know if you've listened to our nightly chorus, but there are harsher teachers than I out in those woods, and as much as I've enjoyed you as the invalid," a squeeze to Louis' shin, "There are limits to my patience."

His eyes snap back to him, hard evidence Lestat's thoughts surfaced like a beacon. So Louis has a full view of Lestat embarrassing, faltering, and trying to cover it up with what he is almost sure is a lie. Plenty of Interlopers have proven themselves competent.

Louis's self-doubt is real, but his impatience with Lestat's ridiculousness has the half-intended side effect of ferreting out Lestat's help. Louis hates that Lestat has to allow himself to allow Louis something. Insufferable, as if Lestat is the only one capable of having good ideas in his areas of expertise. Louis refuses to beg, even if Lestat is in some sort of mood tonight.

Oh you enjoyed me alright. Louis closes his eyes slowly over pursed lips, the telltale sign of him biting back a reflexive retort. He thinks of Lestat shepherding him, freezing, into his hunting shack. He is infinitely glad Lestat can't hear his thoughts.

"You need to listen to me, for once. I'll go with you, long as you don't get a swelled up head about it. You do, I leave. And don't hold anythin' back. Not like before. I'm done with waitin' around for you to finally divulge your secrets. Teach me to hunt properly or not at all."

The illusion of Lestat as this grand ancient vampire has long been shattered over the years. Now Louis sees him as miserly with his knowledge, carping, and childish. The advantage of seeking his knowledge at all has to do with familiarity; does Louis really trust any of the other Interlopers at his back with a gun?

Lestat knows the look of Louis summoning images of passion. It's almost always tinged with some degree of remorse, as if he cannot reconcile the man he is with the man he becomes when he allows himself pleasure. At times, it was once endearing. Despite Lestat's current frustration, he can't deny that there is still a certain charm to it. It's pleasing to be reminded of the effect he can still have on him.

It's less pleasing to be scolded, Louis once more playing the part of the harrying housewife, Lestat the rooster-pecked husband. The imperiousness of Louis shaking out his coxcomb and rendering absurd accusations is another of those qualities whose charm depends entirely on Lestat's mood.

"Do you think I'm concealing some ancient secret of summoning animals from between the trees?" He asks, faintly incredulous. "I hunt with snares and rifle, not," he raises a hand and flicks out his fingers, "Bundled fetishes and incantations."

"But yes," he adds, exasperation mostly outweighed by a genuine attempt at mollification, "I will share with you all of my considerable expertise. Which you will no doubt assume is intended as an insult, as you seem to take all of my remarks."

He sighs again, more heavily, for the sake of the effect. This is tempered by rubbing his palm over Louis' pant leg, an abbreviated path that rises no higher than he's already been allowed to wander.

"You, a man of the woods," he muses, "How pastoral. It's a shame we can't have a portrait done."

He raises his eyebrows a little and says with a dry humor, "Yeah, of us suckin' a deer dry, blood all over our faces... Charmin'."

He leans back on one arm, listing towards the back of the couch, a sign he's more relaxed about all this. (Even Lestat's hand helps the circulation in his leg.) He got what he wanted, didn't he? But Louis is, as ever, unsatisfied with simply that. To simply be a hole--or a vampire--consuming the world is a sort of emptiness to him. It is his nature to seek, and with passion.

So his eyes linger on him in a searching look, trying to see something past the affectations. One might think he doesn't believe him, but it is Louis switching tack to what really brought him inside the door. He considers being subtle, coaxing it out of Lestat who hates talking of such things, then throws that out the window.

"I ask you to be honest with me because many times you're not." His own words surprise him, because so often he had to wheedle and keep the peace under their roof. This feels, strangely, like being forward, if it is even possible to be forward with someone who shared so many intimacies.

"You'd like me to think you're doin' very well for yourself and never have dark days. You really didn't arrive here with anythin' but yourself?"

There's a challenge barely implicit in the question, coming so close after Louis' observation of Lestat's honesty. He doesn't think it's an entirely fair one. He's honest with Louis about the only things which truly matter - the contents of his heart, which are truer than any of the little material quibbles that might temporarily obstruct their expression.

But it represents an opportunity to prove himself, absent the needling criticism of their eternal third. If Claudia were here, she would already be well into the process of undermining him.

A foolish thought. If Claudia were here, she would be convincing Louis that the pair of them should arrange a hunting accident, with her all too happy to be the instrument of slaughter. If she had only the capacity to act alone to begin with, his darling dulcet demon would have dispatched him with all the moral disquiet of scuffing muck from the toe of one tiny shoe.

"Myself," he says, with a languid recline back against the couch (and when he sit so upright?), "A few small things. One of my rings. A music box. A picture. Hardly a sultan's treasure - but hardly a trove of diabolical mechanisms."

The ring was the one he'd traded for Miss Lily's company, that long ago night of their first conversation. The music box is Nicki's. The picture is of the three of them, from better days, before Claudia curdled against him. All sentimental, impractical, and utterly priceless.

"And I did receive a bottle of my favourite scent from a particularly large pig in the woods," he says, as if this, too, is unremarkable. "Which brings us to the sum total of my personal property, aside from the contents of this...charming little house."

Louis recalls Lestat telling him the name of the person the music box's tune is connected to. That little song... Lestat said it took him a century to try for love again. And look where it lead them... standing in the wreckage in a cold and desolate place. Louis nods distractedly at the mention of the holiday hog or whatever it was. He does not sit at affected ease like Lestat.

"I asked it for... blood. I was--hungry." Well. Lestat knows all about his unsuccessful hunting forays. "I had my coffin at least..." he continues.

And the cane knife. He is glad he was not carrying it today. He is, understandably, reluctant to. He is also reluctant to tell the whole truth, but did he not just get on Lestat about lying? It seems as though Louis had let the habit of lying grow into a monstrous tangled thing. He can feel himself squirming internally.

Externally, his toes curl where they nestle against Lestat.

"And--and my knife." He can't look at him. He looks at his hand on his leg. He wants to touch it, soften any blow that might engender. Claudia planned the act, but it was Louis who slit his throat.

His fingers stretch out towards his, then draw back and curl in like a spider shriveling too close to a flame.

"Picture?" he asks instead, trying not to let his throat tighten any more.

Lestat observes the progress and retreat of Louis' hand with a rare lack of comment or motion on his own part, his long, pale eyelashes an insufficient veil for the vivid blue of his eyes in their watchfulness.

He flattens his hand over Louis' shin and gives it a short squeeze. It's the sort of gesture Louis might welcome or bristle under, depending on how he takes to his own vulnerability in the moment.

The knife. The hesitation. The curl of his toes. Lestat hardly needs to see his ghost in the corner to know that it haunts them both, at times more real than the flesh and blood body he inhabits. But it is not the only ghost between them.

"One moment," he says, French syllables tripping off his tongue, and he rises gracefully to standing before he glides from the room. He'd intended to withhold. It's a thought that passes fleetingly as he crosses the threshold of his lonely bedroom and crosses to his hiding place, retrieving the modest framed photograph from its wrapping of black velvet scavenged from a dead woman's sewing drawers.

Claudia looks up solemnly at him, her expression as serene and mysterious as the painted ladies in their portraits she used to take such delight in imitating in their various poses and costumes upon the divan in the parlour. She had smiled in her play then, quite spoiling the mimicry. She had not yet understood what it meant to never grow up into their shape and stature.

Lestat returns, setting the photograph upright on the coffee table so Louis might see it where he lies reclined, and stands behind it with an expression much like the one captured in the frame: remote and enigmatic.

Louis has his knife. Lestat has this. He thinks he knows which is the crueller of the two.

He doesn't bristle at his hand, but he nearly chokes. He curls up with the bundle on the couch, absent Lestat's warmth, only supported by the unnecessary number of plush pastel pillows. Lestat places the photo on the table like a loaded gun.

Louis is surprised it hasn't been thrown into the fire in a fit of temper. He stares at them, phantoms of their former selves captured in black and white. Who are the people in this photo now? Who is Lestat, left alone in such a fashion that bloody night? Who is Claudia, surely bereft of both fathers and brothers now, intent on searching Europe for traces of her kind? Who is Louis?

Louis carefully picks up the photo and cradles it in his hands. He misses her. The hurt pierces his heart more sweetly than any large-eyed cajoling Claudia (or Lestat) could conjure. Lestat looks impassive, but Louis is a bleeding wound.

"You wanted to replace Claudia with Antoinette," he murmurs quietly, tracing the frame's edge with his fingers. "What made you think I'd ever agree to that? Sometimes I think you're just tryin' to get a rise out of me."

The impassivity dissolves into bubbles of consternation, Lestat blinking at Louis as if he's said something profoundly absurd. His mouth goes so far as to drop open voicelessly, the ease of language failing to come to him in the face of such a ridiculous statement.

"Agree to it?" Lestat holds his hands out at his sides, brows creasing in both confusion and, in his temerity, a touch of betrayal. "Louis - "

There's any number of things that Lestat has said on precisely this topic within the theatre of his mind. Some of them have been clever, others heartfelt, yet others a scourge of acidic temper vented. In all of them, Louis reacts exactly as Lestat wishes him to - with humbled understanding, or contrition, or despair giving way to repentance.

The real Louis is never so accommodating.

"Of course I wanted to get a rise out of you," he says, Louis' turn of phrase echoed back to him in the lyrical swell of Lestat's voice, "I wanted anything from you. Some sign - "

He can stop his tongue. He cannot stop his thoughts.

I wanted to see you again.

Lestat's ghost stares at him from its post beside the couch. He imagines reproach in its not-yet lambent eyes. Lestat looks away, bitterness threatening to add the shadow of years to features forever untouched by them.

"Your disdain is a cold shadow, Louis," he says, softly, "Your absence. You don't know...you imagine you understand. But you, who has always been loved - how could you begin to?"

Louis sets the photo down delicately. It takes a great deal of effort not to rise to Lestat's theatrics--and he does it anyway. He tries to slip off the couch to his feet, but recoils the moment his throbbing toes touch the ground. That is not an option he wishes to endure, so he sits up as straight as possible under the circumstances.

"You want love so badly, why do you drive people away?" he near-whispers in agony. "Are you so surprised Claudia left you--left us--the first time? I know you kept Antoinette alive because of me. You think I don't know you? You think every time you turned away from me because you'd rather laugh than have a real conversation, that I was never alone?"

His eyes fill finally as he stares at him, wretched. He's left wanting, but he hates having to beg Lestat for anything. Louis should leave, but he finds himself unable to, and it has nothing to do with the burning on his feet. As much as his humanity fights to exist, maybe he truly is a vampire, desperate to be filled with all the life Lestat can give him, but his monstrousness is not enough.

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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