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?”

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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.

Lestat stands stiffly in place, his eyes shining with a new shade of danger worse than his temper. He wears his wounds openly, no matter how hard he tries not to. It is one of the few things he and Louis truly have in common.

There were others, once. They are all ruined now.

When Lestat pulls back the coffee table, he does it with such surprising speed it might even seem for a moment he's reclaimed some of his power. How he circles around it and comes to his knees in front of Louis only sustains the illusion, but it's only his heart that drives him on, not coiled swiftness in his blood.

"If you know me," he says, capturing Louis' hands in his own, his voice plaintively desperate, "Why will you not tell me, Louis? Why do you ask me these things? You have the mystery of my heart in your hands, and you will not share it. How am I to know what answers will please you if you will not tell me?"

To Louis's eyes, the wounded look on Lestat's face does not herald violence. Louis is not mindful of the other danger, that of Lestat's cloying love.

Sometimes vampires simply forget to move like humans, who have all sorts of purposeful tells in their actions. So polite of humans. The sudden jerk of the coffee table sends the photo clattering onto the rug. Claudia's face, framed by her voluminous curls next to those of her brother-fathers, stares balefully upward.

Louis's face contorts. He bows his head, brow coming to a soft thud against Lestat's. His hair crinkles softly against him. His fingers curl, molding around Lestat's thumb and the soft press of his claw in the dip of his palm. They talked about communication. They changed, but not enough, and in some ways they festered and rotted.

""You're not supposed to know. Only be in your knowin'. If I gave you the answers, you would only show me a false love. If I told you what to do, you'd only do the opposite. You think I haven't tried? That's not what I wanted from you."

He gathers Lestat's hands in a tangle over his heart.

"I wanted you to be a fire on cold nights. I wanted you to listen and not laugh at me. I wanted you to cherish me, not hurt me. All the companionship you promised. Love is not a cage, but you made it one... So she broke free."

His voice lilts with a finality like he is describing how a horse got loose or a storm smashed a dike: an inevitablity. A force of nature. Someone stronger than Louis and half his size. Built like a bird.

Always, always, Louis only wants to speak of Claudia. Lestat goes to his knee in prostration, and still, it is an absent daughter that Louis' thoughts turn to.

What might be the worst of it is that Louis doesn't even think what he does is a cruelty. He assumes Lestat shares his one-sided obsession with the fickle, treacherous sister Claudia, the bloody saint he treasures above all others, his token of his innate goodness in the form of a wretched woman-thing curdled like milk inside a child's body.

He wants to snap like a taunted dog. He wants to flinch away like a beaten one. He wants to nose at Louis' neck, wetly, lay his body over him with such a weight he will agree to speak no more of her. Their Claudia.

(If he could have kept her, he would have kept Louis. If he could have kept her, would they have still been happy?)

It's all a whirl inside of him, these things he wants. He feels at all ends with himself under Louis' words, his wishes, his recountings of Lestat's shortcomings. He asked for them; he cannot stand to hear them; he understands too much and too late.

"I wanted you to laugh," he says, terribly, his heart an unpalatable bitten mess on his tongue, "I wanted you to laugh with me, at all these things that troubled you so. Did I never make you laugh, Louis? Was it always a cage?"

He can just barely see a glimmer of the carefree happiness Lestat wished to share with him, like the one Lestat shared with Claudia when they enjoyed the kill. It was always there to taunt him just out of his reach.

"With you, I could be myself in a way I could never be before. Myself is a wretched thing. I thought that you should leave me, failure that I was. I've told you as much. My troubles are a part of me." He gives his hands a squeeze, as if he could graft Lestat's hands to himself and make them a part of a wound in his heart. They've been the cause.

"I wish you had taken me seriously. I wanted to love more than I wanted to laugh. But I did laugh... and I did love."

Against his better judgment, he presses a kiss to his lips, mouth closed, almost chaste. Hardly the heady rosy kind of kiss as they danced together in costume, but with the same breathless honesty.

As much never as there was always: Lestat never kisses chastely. He falls into each with abandon, never content with a perfunctory brush of lips. Even the briefest kisses would come with a whisper of heat, a promise of more yet to come.

But Louis is a fragile, icy thing. If Lestat ignites against him, as he did in the cabin, he will grow slick and ungraspable, escape the clutch of Lestat's desperate hands.

When Louis squeezes his hands, Lestat remembers how to loosen them. He doesn't let go, but twines his fingers through Louis', a displacement of want he can't infuse into their kiss. He drinks it in like a trickle of blood through an almost exhausted vein, each droplet sweetened by unmet need.

He's learned to do other things for Louis. Surely, he can learn more. He can fashion himself exactly as Louis claims not to want, perform this new role as well as any other. He's always had a gift for it.

"You are a triumph, Louis," he murmurs, his eyes closed, mouth barely parting from the kiss, the words delivered from his mouth into Louis', "I laughed at the idea you were anything but. I laughed when I should have wept for you...to still think you are not wanted exactly as you are, my impossible love."

His kiss is offered in comfort. A flame can burn, but a softly (almost shyly) lingering kiss can warm him without risk. What does he risk? Another kind of addiction, perhaps, to drinking Lestat, not blood but flesh? A perceived obligation from torrid connection? Needing his words like a human needs air?

Even if Louis can be impossible, even if he can love him, he doesn't have the heart to tell him that he can't be his. He doesn't want Lestat to weep with him, because of him, right now. (He doesn't want him sitting wretched and abandoned again.) Louis could never at his heart be cruel, though he does pierce himself with thorns that tear anyone who draws near. Were it not for the differing shades of their skin, it would be hard to tell whose fingers are whose in the knotted mess they make.

(He wants him flaring softly in the deepening night, a gentle yet irresistible heat in the dark. He wants to nestle down with him, exhausted from coupling, as he once might have done.)

His brow knits. He sniffs wetly, and he wants to weep for the quiet moments they shared before they soured.

"Can we just... sit a while, you and me?" he whispers his breath against Lestat's lips even as he opens his eyes to look at him. "Come here, off the floor..."

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cw: body horror

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