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 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..."

Louis doesn't have to ask twice. He barely has to ask once. Lestat nods his assent with his nose brushing Louis' cheek, making to rise to his feet only so much as he needs to in order to take his place beside Louis on the couch -

But halfway through his rise, he turns, stooping for a moment to collect a fallen artifact. He brings it up the rest of the way with him, fingers on the frame and not the glass, without looking at it directly even the once. When he settles on the edge of the couch, he puts the picture on the end table next to him, laid flat on its back with its stand folded down.

Then he gathers up his other precious thing in his arms, curving around Louis coffin-close. A far more comfortable embrace than their last, nestled in a warmth that feels itself benevolent as it radiates from the hearth of this modest home.

In the corner, Lestat's ghost seems paler, less substantial, but he's hardly paying it any attention. He's too preoccupied with stroking his thumb beneath the bloodied dew under Louis' eyelashes, his own gaze heavy and soft.

"What states I put you in."

He notes the care with which Lestat places their family picture on the table and how he doesn't look at it. This nearly undoes Louis again.

He curls close as if they didn't have the whole couch to themselves, slipping one arm around Lestat's broad shoulders and the other over his trim waist. He can feel the lines of his body slowly knit themselves to Lestat's. Just as well he's close to tears as Lestat's thumb brushes him. His eyes flutter closed, perhaps some instinct to protect himself from looking and knowing too much.

"You could be gentler about it, yeah," he says thickly. "And you wonder why I get so unhappy."

His hand leaves his waist to cradle Lestat's cheek so he can stare into his jewel-like eyes. Hair that will never grow except to grow back exactly as it was. Eyes forever transformed. Louis sometimes wondered what Lestat looked like before he was changed, but in the end he couldn't imagine him as anything but himself.

"I want... this. This peace," he breathes very close.

The distance between them is nothing. He could bridge all that's left of it with a kiss.

But he wants to drink in Louis' expression, so changed from reproach and resentment. Terribly sad, of course, as he almost always is, but a sadness that Lestat can imagine has some end to it. There must be a shore to this green sea, if only Lestat can weather all the storms to reach it.

"There's something to be said for the provincial life," he says, only half-lying. He still is stifled here, forced to eke out a meagre existence with a fraction of his strength. He has always resented confinement - and there's an irony to that, if he would let himself look at it too closely.

"Fewer distractions," he murmurs, bowing his head so their foreheads touch, and that's the half that's truth, or at least the truth as he'd like to believe it in this moment. "What is it they say - 'getting away from it all'?"

Everything except themselves, which seems less awful a prospect with the weight of Louis draped around him.

Claudia had a theory about confinement, that Lestat would refuse to be Magnus's slave just as she would refuse to be Lestat's. Like father, like daughter.

"That's what they say. They can keep their damn snow. I don't care about it. Just this."

His thumb brushes over his cheekbone, and his fingers slip down to caress the jawline Lestat is so proud of. He's very close now, warmth of his brow against his, and the growing warmth in Louis's face isn't just from the fire. His breathing synchronizes, as it must, as it cannot imagine doing anything but this. They can make peace (or raucousness) wherever they are.

But there is something to be said for seeing new places, and Milton is very difficult to leave. Louis thinks of three coffins packed into three trunks that locked from the inside.

"I'm sorry we didn't get to travel, mon cher."

He thinks Claudia would have liked Rio. He also thinks she would have tried to slip away the first opportunity she got.

If Lestat were to look at his haunting, he'd see it faded to nearly nothing, but the cause of its disappearance is exactly why he looks nowhere but at the enchanting emerald depths of Louis' eyes. Eyes that Lestat gave him, meant to be preserved throughout eternity, the brightest of jewels adorning his happiness.

He can nearly believe in that dream again as Louis pets him and whispers endearments and regrets. Every imposition and inconvenience of this place is distant and abstract as he cants his face slightly into Louis' touch, eyes half-lidding as he lets out a sweet, unnecessary sigh of contentment.

"It's not too late," he says, softly, "This will pass, as all things do."

The horror of endlessness transforms into a luxury when it's shared. Louis has yet to taste the true expanse of all the time that lies ahead of them, his span of years still confined to those his mortal life might have afforded him if Lestat had allowed them to wither and weaken him. It's different once those years have been spent. Louis will learn that, in time.

And in time, this softening might linger. The future he spins between them is fragile only for now.

"We'll go somewhere warm, once we're free of this place." He nudges his nose against Louis', just shy of a nuzzle. "But a dryer heat, perhaps. I think I would like to see the desert again."

"Hope it passes before I do," he grumbles mildly. There are a host of new and exciting ways in which he could perish. Louis is reminded of this every time he wakes sore from the previous night toiling just to eat. If only he could remain here in comfort and warmth, but he shuns the lion’s den.

"Can't handle the humidity?" The corner of his mouth quirks slightly upward. He teases him as he teases all non-natives of his city. It's not his anymore, he made his plans to leave it, but he will always belong to New Orleans. He will always be a pocket of civilization struggling in the midst of the savage garden.

It’s hard not to stroke Lestat’s face when he looks like a cat relaxing in a warm spot. He even touches his nose like one. Louis’s fingers wander lazily down his neck. Such a vulnerable place. Lestat taught him that.

He assumes Lestat means Egypt or someplace similar, so popular in the pictures in their time. "Tell me about the desert, then. Find any of those old tombs, get bit by snakes?"

There's a particular look Lestat only adopts when conversation ventures to a subject in his past he'd prefer not to discuss. No matter how obvious the route to those shadowed territories are, he always seems somehow surprised to find their borders approached, the gates always flung shut and barred with the swiftness of guards caught unawares at their posts.

He pulls back slightly from Louis, blinking sinfully long lashes. It isn't far enough to lift Louis' fingers from his throat, where they skim above the scanty coverage of his high buttoned shirt collar.

"There was nothing to find but the ruins of a dead empire," he says, trepidation inching into his tone as he searches Louis' face for a sign of some second purpose. Only an idle comment, surely - a daydream of an illustrated postcard, or of the unseen vistas described in one of his novels about exotic foreign shores.

"Not Egypt." He softens, dipping back in. "I would rather stand on the foundations of a new world than wallow in the wreckage of the old. You should not brood on anything so much older than you are, Louis. It invites morbidity, and you have more than enough of that."

Europe is the mother of what people (self-centeredly) call civilization in the New World, and Africa is the long-lost ancestor of those taken by force to it. They hold a distant fascination for Louis, even among the petty cares of his mortal life that he still clings to.

There does not seem to be any guile in Louis at first. It’s only when Lestat deflects that Louis wakes up. He should have woken up a long time ago. His eyes begin to burn slowly but surely like slow acting acid.

“Then I shouldn’t have started seein’ a man so much older than myself. You think I’m stupid?” He enunciates the French more than it ever should be. “No wonder she couldn’t stand your ‘answers.’ The difference between me and her is I wanted to keep the peace. I still do, goddamnit. But I will be quiet no more.”

His face cracks like glass, but the pieces do not fall from their frame yet. He would have liked to cradle peace just a little longer. Immortality did not grant him more time for anything. Time and pain still take their due, and there is only so much a man can endure. He curls his fingers at Lestat’s neck, but not with nails, as if he had never scored angry red lines across his pale skin before.

“It’s not just Europe you want to forget but Africa too? What happened to you?”

Throughout Louis' tirade (his call to account, his lament) Lestat's ire mounts by degrees, like the heat that would bake the interior of their home incinerator to dull red obliteration. He reverts to that dangerous stillness atop Louis, pupils flaring, a ripple of outrage thinning his fine mouth when Louis takes hold of his neck like a disobedient hound being checked.

Until that last question, piercing and unexpected, whistles through a chink in his high walls.

Lestat flattens his hand on Louis' chest, a bead of sorrow as quick as mercury passing behind his eyes. Perhaps it is only an illusion. Another lie, like so many that have come before, and the many that will come after.

"So little you would believe," he says, quietly, and presses away from Louis to sit upright, pivoting away on the couch. He does not like to do it. There is something far too morose about sitting there, his hands coming to his knees as he perches on the edge of the cushions, Louis' legs still curled behind him.

"Why must we speak of this again? Is it not tiresome, Louis? How many times must I repeat myself? There is no answer that would please you."

He should know the warning signs of imminent combustion, but Louis is as insolent (familiar) with Lestat as any young vampire testing their strength. Louis is not so young now, but they burn together all the same. His heart picks up a faster beat under his hand.

Lestat rarely moves away from him except perhaps to make a (needlessly) dramatic exit. It's the wrong moment for that, or Louis would have suspected that outcome.

"Bein’ pleased is not the most important thing to me, Lestat. Is it to you?" It might be, given that Lestat so desperately tries to chase the darkness from Louis. "It gives me no deeper meanin'. It answers none of my questions. It keeps some part of you from me."

He clutches his own heart where Lestat's hand abandoned it. His legs shift restlessly against his broad back. But his voice is soft, close to breaking.

"You keep talkin' about love, but our... our hearts do not beat as one. I never know anymore why you won't talk of things. Pain? Spite? I used to think it was to keep me with you, but you don't have me anymore."

The ghost in the corner stirs. When Lestat glances to it, it seems not to have moved itself at all, except to flush with pale colour and substance. If there is reproach in its eyes, he refuses to stand it, averting his gaze to another fragment of the room. It lights on a dumbly smiling ceramic sheep, fat as a wad of cotton, tended by a round-cheeked shepherd boy with eyes askew.

He takes rejection poorly. Louis knows this. There are times Lestat suspects him of wielding it as a goad, as if Lestat is some recalcitrant charge of his that must be disciplined into compliance. There are worse times when he thinks that Louis does not mean to cut so deeply - that the depths to which he drives his knife are unknown to him even by the shadows they cast across what ought to be their happiness - that, perhaps, Louis barely understands him at all.

Back and forth they go. Moments of perfect synchronicity, followed by the plunge into estrangement. He hates to be made tiresome nearly as much as he hates to be refused, and he feels infinitely tiresome, in this moment.

"Do I dredge up your every youthful misery and misadventure?" He rebukes, a line of a tattered script recited without passion. "I give you myself, as I am, not some - funereal taxidermy." He raises his hand and flicks it sharply through the air, cutting away at the very prospect. "Would you have my infant teeth? My moth-eaten coats? The earth of my unfilled grave? What tattered ghosts would you have me conjure to displease you to your satisfaction?"

"But you knew me. You knew me and my struggles, but I didn't know you. You didn't just spring up out of the ether. There are reasons why you are the way you are. You thought I would transform completely when I died, but I was still the man I always was. You should have left me and drank the joys of the world as a vampire drinks."

There are times when Louis works all his tricks to coax Lestat this or that way, and there are times, like now, when he is incapable of subtlety and can only be himself.

"But you didn't. You stayed with me longer than you should have."

He slumps to rest his forehead on Lestat's shoulder like one of Claudia's discarded dolls. The facts are what they are, however much Louis pretends and Lestat deludes himself. Louis tried to kill him on Claudia's orders, and the betrayal chipped away at Louis's humanity. Louis is not the same anymore, so how could he think that he could just go back to the way things were? Back and forth they go, but,

"I'm tired, mon cher. We should be makin' a soft bed together, but it's just a bed of thorns. I shouldn't've come in."

This accusation has the rare ability to silence him. Lestat does not slump, or heave a sigh, or engage in any of the little pretenses of mollifiable sorrow. His stillness is a testament to the strange, distant sadness that lies far deeper within him than Louis has ever touched through deliberate effort.

It has always been the incidental moments, when Louis has not tried at all, that he has reached through the shroud of decades to brush sunlight over that darkness.

The sheep mocks him with its docility. This whole house mocks him, littered with the alien debris of a life not his own. He misses his things, his comforts, his trappings of refinement. He misses their home, ruined as it is. He misses their bed, for all of its thorns.

"Do I know you?"

His hand slips upward, fingers finding the outer edge of Louis' cheek, gliding along it to seek out the back of his neck. He cradles it, grip anchored with a gentle weight.

"Do I know all of you?" He turns his face to rest against the top of Louis' head, voice soft. "Every secret chamber of your heart? Do you think yourself not a mystery to me? You are a constant revelation. What joy of the world could compel me as you do?"

If Louis has his facts, Lestat will have his. It is almost fair. Louis does enjoy his fairness.

"If you had not come to me, I would have been lost." He curls his fingers closer. "Is that what should be, Louis? Is your bed softer without me in it?"

If Louis knew how much Lestat felt the porcelain figures mocked him, he'd shake his head at his pettiness. Louis is of the opinion that joy is better found elsewhere, anywhere other than himself--even in the insipid ceramics of a pastel-loving stranger long gone. Lestat is overcome by the dark still waters of a lake, and Louis is a millstone.

"I don't use my bed."

His bed is soft, but it is cold. No one to share it with, so he goes directly to his coffin, alone.

You're a challenge every sunset, Saint Louis, and I'd have it no other way.

His shoulders shake with silent sobs, and his eyes sting. He curls into him as if he could have it all back, as if Lestat burying his face into the cloud of his unstyled hair is all it takes. He clutches the crook of Lestat's elbow.

Louis would call Claudia the one good thing he ever did in this world, his redemption, but he squandered even that. He refused to burn Lestat, threatened her over it, and what is there left for her? What is there left for any of them? A broken shell of love? A heart twice wounded? Louis wonders that Lestat isn't lost already, yet the possibility of that happening sends an arctic chill gripping his heart.

"Ain't no mystery. There are those who look at the trees and the sky and find revelations in the simple ordinary things of nature." That's him, simple. Louis only appreciated life after he died; with his new vampire eyes he nearly lost himself as he fell in love with the night. "Are you one of them? Were you?"

To twist to take Louis inside his arms would require Lestat to part from him for a moment, and a moment would be too long. He leans back against him instead, letting the line of his body and the counterhook of his hand be embrace enough.

Liberated curls are electric against his cheek. Louis' sob roll through him like thunder. The lightning strike came and went years ago, on a street in New Orleans, and still the light burns in the smoking hollow of his heart. He saw such a thing happen to a tree, once - red embers glowing out through its bark, ash slick through its still-green leaves, ablaze from within in the pouring rain.

Is such a thing simple? Ordinary? Should he be able to look at a river without imagining the storm and the sea, a stone without picturing the ages? Would he be content if he could love what was simple and apparent?

"...I was an ordinary thing of nature." He confesses, and perhaps he even believes it is true. "An uncultured, wild creature, hardly better than a dog. I knew nothing - I thought less."

Harsh words, spoken with threadbare and nearly surprised nostalgia.

"I remember myself." Standing sentinel still, he imagines, if he were to open his eyes. "I don't remember revelations. I remember...I thought that, sometimes, I was happy."

Elsewhere in the house, a fire cackles in a hearth. Outside, the wind swirls snow around corners and sweeps it into the path broken across the lawn. Animals sleep in their dens, seeds sleep under the earth.

"Stay with me," he says, stroking his thumb over the nape of Louis' neck, "One night."

Lestat likes to go on and on about this or that, flaunting metropolitan French culture with ease. It's easy to forget that temper (vulnerability) he displayed when speaking of his family, his father--anything but cultured or metropolitan.

Sometimes Louis feels like he glimpses it when he sees Lestat carving a path through the deep snow with his feet, gun slung over his shoulder. There is nevertheless in it a wild and open horizon. Now that horizon can only be a dark night.

Come to me.

Louis takes a shuddering breath against Lestat's shoulder and brushes his hand against his cheek. (Lestat is eternally clean-shaven.) Whenever Lestat touches his neck, there is an undercurrent of danger and sensuality no matter what else he may be feeling. It's especially apparent when the touch is soft. Louis has found that, since becoming a vampire, his eyes fall on necks more than they did before, and he has a newfound appreciation for how vulnerable they are.

"You think that will be a comfort? Make you happy? It won't." Ever the pessimist. "If you were lookin' for happiness in America, you picked the wrong person. I am... difficult. I... don't know how long I will stay."

It's hard for Louis to be honest. He's always been a hypocrite about it in large and small ways. But Lestat does make him feel some kind of way, and Louis does want to comfort him. He presses a gentle kiss to the edge of his jaw. Without his heightened senses, he has to imagine the touch radiating out like a drop of blood falling into water.

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cw: body horror

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OUGHGHGH

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