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

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.

This is an argument they could have every night for a thousand years. There was a time when Lestat found it unbearable, this dull, perpetual enumeration of faults. It sent him disaffected into the lights of the street, where at least he would be free of this dreadful insistence on unhappiness.

But all the nights he has spent not having this argument have been the loneliest he's known since before he found Louis. He does not think he will ever learn to enjoy them, but how he longs for the chance to grow tired of them again.

Lestat murmurs wordlessly as he arches into Louis' kiss, the line of his body twisting as if that little touch commands all of it. Now he can stand a brief parting, twining up and back like a reaching vine. He ends up with his leg almost in Louis' lap, bending into him at a glancing angle, his hand now drawing Louis' neck forward so he can rest their foreheads against one another's.

He smiles then, secretive and darkly warm, his eyes dipped in shadow the way an open bedroom window is on a torrid summer night. They invite.

"Then I will be hopelessly unhappy," he says, a honey-soft lie, "For as long as you like."

Edited 2024-05-18 01:47 (UTC)

Sometimes Lestat would stay to talk with him and dry his tears. Sometimes he abandoned him for the delights of the city night, or so he made it seem. Lestat wanted him jealous. Lestat wanted him in any way, really, and the falsehood (truth) of it bothered Louis. Despite knowing him for so long, it took him years to truly understand how lonely of a man Lestat is.

Louis follows the arch of him, so like a dancer twining at a choreographer's instruction. His lips search his jaw until he can't. Then he curls his hand under the crook of Lestat's knee where it bends above his lap and loosely holds him there. He's mesmerized by the blue glass twinkling at him from within a self-created gloam. They could be two very hot flames in the dark, and one has to wonder how a creature of the night is so much like the sun. Lestat slipped past the shutters of his heart while he was unaware.

"You need your eyes checked. You need your whole goddamn head checked," he murmurs softly with a rueful twist of his mouth, and he's finding the bit of dark humor in it.

"You'd be lost, and I..." I don't want to lose you. These should be simple words to say, but their love is too complicated. What Lestat finds delightful, Louis finds a quagmire. Yet they are the only ones here who understand each other and the eternity stretching out before them like this. He nestles his face against Lestat's.

"Is this place too much like your old life?"

Louis chased his own ghosts, but Lestat only ever gave the impression of wanting to forget them. He curls his fingers around his jaw and begins kissing him, still soft, more exploratory than heated. Here is his form, here in the present. He tamps down the little thread of hunger his earlier outburst caused him. He can't explain why he feels the need to handle Lestat like one of those ceramic figurines. Does Lestat even want it? But many of the things they do are not necessarily at need.

The crinkle of surprise that crosses Lestat's features is entirely genuine, the bridge of his nose rumpling in a way he'd be displeased to witness in a mirror. As much as he thinks nearly his every expression and gesture naturally graceful and charming, even he has his little human foibles.

But he cannot see himself except as he is reflected in Louis' eyes, where his most lovely portrait has always hung in shades of softened green. Then he cannot see himself at all, his own eyes slipping shut as he sinks into Louis' gentle kiss. He has been adored, idolized, worshipped - but only with Louis has he ever truly felt cherished. He makes a soft sound against the sweet seam of Louis' mouth, his tongue tracing the parting of his lips, and it would nearly be easy to leave the question unanswered.

"Of course not," he says, petting the curls at the nape of Louis' neck as his idle hand finds the front of his shirt to settle his fingertips there in light purchase, "You are here. How could it be anything alike?"

However circumstances conspire as if to repeat themselves, he holds true to his belief that this time will be different. Those old ghosts need not sink their teeth into the present, swallowing it up into the undifferentiated darkness of the past. Tonight, he has found his way back to the path between the trees, and the gnaw of his only fear has subsided to a suckle on already cracked marrow.

"But if you'd like to check my head, I am willing to submit to thorough examination," he adds, teasing, unable to resist a certain slant to the word head.

Louis likes Lestat's human slips. His love of music, his little vulnerabilities, the two of them caught in an honest moment together. Lestat's hands often smoothed over his impeccable suits in such a way as to make Louis feel like he was wearing nothing. They touch the collar of his shirt and his sweater now, and Louis wonders how these layers against the cold can feel like they're melting away.

He misses the warm nights of cotton shirts and slacks, light shoes, and woven hats. He tastes them on his lips, humidity on his tongue where he touches it with his own. The cloying heat always had a quality of just waiting to overcome a person. Every year it comes back round again, every year the same: eternally blistering.

"Shut up," he huffs, shifting a little and shaking his head slightly with a suppressed smile. "I'm tryin' to be genuine, you know the meanin' of that word, right?"

Louis doesn't expect an answer to that throwaway question. Lestat does try very hard to tease and cajole him out of his sadness. (He tried more in the early years before they tired of the same song and dance filled with barbs.) It almost works. As Louis imagines laying him out and getting to work on him, Louis's eyes dilate. Lestat, golden hair spread out, at his mercy--don't think of the blood staining his white costume and the rug--

Louis swallows, trying to keep his composure, not meeting Lestat's eyes. He feels like he missed a step on the stairs like a clumsy human and became disconnected from where his body should be, and his smile is dim. He taps a distantly friendly palm on Lestat's chest.

"I'm sure everythin' down there is in fine workin' order, mon cher."

There Louis goes again, attempting a retreat from the cusp of enjoying himself into whatever new dark thought distracts him. But this time, he is already in Lestat's grasp, and he will not release Louis to his demons so readily.

"I am utterly genuine," he says, in lilting mock affront, slipping his hand from Louis' neck to his jaw to coax his gaze back in the direction it ought to point - to here, to now, to him. "And passionately devoted to the cause of satisfying your every curiosity about my working orders. But - !"

He shakes his head, miming a frown that doesn't match the light warmth of his fond regard, and lifts his hand to throw it into the air in easy surrender.

"If you insist on denying yourself the extent of my many charms, perhaps you would be content to - what is the term," a furrow of his brow, as if sifting the depths of his mind for long-lost knowledge, "Cuddle?"

The casual term sounds ridiculous to his ears. The vampire Lestat does not cuddle, the province of appallingly small children tucked into their beds with some drool-stained ragdoll. But therein lies the play of it, a delve into absurdity to amuse Louis away from his preoccupation.

And perhaps he would be nearly content, himself, to lie side by side in companionable stillness, if that is all Louis can muster himself to bear.

His chin lifts a little as it must, even if Lestat's touch is light. Lestat has the magnetism to move Louis where he will, up to a point. Louis wrestles his reluctant gaze and eventually lets it fall on Lestat again. He's frightened he will simply see the bloodied visage with the slit throat.

But there is only Lestat, and his prattling is oddly comforting. Louis can't bring himself to tell him what he imagined. Lestat makes the word cuddle sound like a weird slug he found under an upturned rock. But Lestat tonight is a far cry from the bitter, passive-aggressive vampire who would flounce off when Louis was unreceptive. Something in Louis activates, and he angles his head in a way that indicates sass.

"So I guess all that lyin' around in my coffin was just for show," he quips.

The vampire Lestat cuddles. He would sneak into Louis's coffin, twine around him, and hold him close. They would murmur in French, trying to keep their voices low so Claudia wouldn't hear. They would fall asleep in each other's arms. Lestat looked like a sleeping angel, Lucifer in designer silk.

"'Many charms' like bein' a layabout. Maybe I should put you to work."

He punctuates this with a teasing tug under Lestat's knee. Something in the tenderness and strength in Lestat's hands does something to him. He lies back on the cushions, gingerly minding his feet. This is better. He brings one of those hands to his lips. His kisses wander over his knuckles.

"Feet feel like they been parboiled," he murmurs without acid, more intent on kissing the soft veined inner skin of Lestat's wrist.

Lestat would argue vociferously that his pleasant reclining interludes deserve a more noble word to describe them. He would accept 'embrace' or 'caress' as viable alternatives, if the topic needed discussing at all. What they do in bed he has no shyness about, but what happens inside of their coffins is a private affair.

"And did you not enjoy the performance?" He demands, unseriously, permitting Louis to recline upon the couch like the painter's model he could have been in a more liberated life. As long as Louis takes his hand with him, guiding Lestat into a poised lean over him, it's satisfactory.

"As for your feet and my labours, if that's a request for me to play the king at the beggar's procession..." He smiles slyly as he dips to place a kiss on Louis' jaw, simply because he can. "I can think of more onerous duties."

Feet are far from the most intimate part of the body Lestat has learned to please. He discovered the wondrous powers of a good foot rub from consorting with any number of people prone to wearing impractical shoes while dancing, and has an appreciation for a delicately arched sole and the delicate beads of the toes.

Louis shifts and immediately regrets it. He is forcibly reminded of a distant memory of playing as a child and getting rug burn. Ordinarily he would shut up and put up, some misguided notion of being a man with dignity, but part of complaining is trying to make Lestat feel guilty about his behavior. (He sprinkles in coarse flat words just to annoy him.)

Why did he run outside? It seems foolish in retrospect, buoyed as he is by the warmth of the couch and the taste of Lestat's skin. But he did run outside. They did shiver together (apart) in the front yard.

Louis shivers in a different way at the lips on his jaw, so close to his neck. Maybe he can sit in the audience and watch Lestat on Lestat's own personal stage... A salve would be good for his feet, a salve and a lover's gentle touch...

"I'm sayin' they burn and ache and it's your fault," he grouses. "Come here, come here..."

He cups Lestat's face between his hands. He stares up into the two chips of silvery sky in it, willing them to overtake the thought of those same eyes rolled up to the whites in the waxy sunken thing on the floor. There is blood at his neck--

"Sometimes I can't believe you're alive," he murmurs tenderly. "What do you want, mon cher? What do you really want? Do it on the couch right now? Was it all a performance? Did you even like those quiet moments, playin' with my hair? Playin' at husband, wife, maker to a botched fledglin'? Two of them?"

Louis hates that word, exhibited by a slight wrinkle of his nose, but his voice remains soft with the slight rasp of intimacy, and his eyes are ever lambent with desire and self-destruction. Beneath that shining toxic oil sitting on the surface of an abyssal darkness, there is a genuine question. Louis never understood why the people who loved him stayed with him.

"Why do you bother to pretend to compromise?" His thumb brushes over the pink of Lestat's lower lip. "You taught me to love as I have never loved before, and I wasn't enough. You taught me to hate. Still not enough."

So tenderly does Louis dismantle him anew that Lestat hardly feels this turn of the knife. He shifts and crawls on the couch as Louis cradles his face and speaks his devastation, ending in a braced hover over him, one knee tucked up to support him on the outside and his other leg extended to barely brush over Louis' trousers.

How easy it would be to descend and slot them together properly, dispelling Louis' mournful contemplation with a far more pleasurable burn. He could distract him from any number of ailments with tongue and hand alone, to say nothing of the other tricks often employed to mend the rifts between them. His beauty and his body have often served such a noble purpose.

His winter pale eyes stay locked to Louis' verdant ones, a pair of eyes he has never seen repeated in any face. He parts his lip for the pass of Louis' thumb, but does not tease him with tongue or teeth. He remains chastely suspended, for all that any stranger to the scene would make much of their pose.

"I was never happier than in those nights," he says, with all the honesty that he has within him, "As for what I want..."

He gentles Louis' cheek in his palm, his other hand pressing against the edge of this meagre couch to support him. Contemplation stills his features to the serene sorrow of a saint's mourners, as captured in paintings long dimmed by age.

"Do you imagine I taught you so much, and yet learned nothing from you? That you have left no imprint on my soul, that my heart does not know the sound of yours? That each night I spent counting each curl above this troubled brow," which he touches, lightly, with the pad of one graceful finger, "Was a fog of pretense burned away by morning? I love you, Louis. I love you in your imperfections and your doubts, in your hatred and your misery, as truly as I love all in you that is good - as you have taught me to love you. If I have proved a poor student, is that the fault of my teacher?"

He shakes his head slowly, a measured arc that does not break the link of their gazes.

"I want you, Louis. As I have wanted you since before I knew the name of my want, and as I will want you for all of my eternity. You say you are not enough - you have altered me indelibly. You call to me as the moon does the tides. I live by the mercy of your cruel hand. What is enough? What is all that I am?"

The blood at Lestat's neck winks away. Comes back. Disappears again as reality assails it. Louis's eyes fill with red. He could exist here in the bitter separation, a veil of numbness between himself and Lestat. But old feelings bubble over, poisoned though they are. He arches subtly against him, raising his knee to flank Lestat's outstretched thigh. If Louis twists a knife in Lestat, it is because he does it to himself first. Touching Lestat is like putting his body to a hot iron, and he is hungry for it.

"What kind of love is unreasonable, hysterical, cruel, only teaches me as much as pleases you? What kind of love holds our sister hostage?"

His hands smooth down Lestat's jaw to his neck to open the first button of his shirt. With his thumbs he brushes the scar. There is blood there. There isn't. There is, running over his hands from the rent flaps of skin, and Louis has to stop his shaking hands from digging in his nails and throwing Lestat bodily from him. Louis's face crumples with pain and sorrow.

"I tried to kill you," he sobs as crimson traces delicately out of the corners of his eyes. "Don't matter that it didn't take. What kind of love is that, mon cher? What kind of moon dries up the oceans?"

He lets his head turn with a dread slowness towards the kitschy living room and bares his neck, an invitation. He shouldn't; the sprint from front yard to door left him unnaturally hungry. He feels stretched thin and lacks the healthy flush of a sated vampire. But he cups Lestat's head close anyway to kiss or kill him, it does not matter which, surrendering as he did in his namesake cathedral all those years ago.

Of all the things that torment Louis, love is the cruellest. His hatreds, his terrors, his guilts, they all pale beside it. The love given to him, the love he gives to others. The love he craves and denies, withholds and bestows by turns as capricious as any of Lestat's whims. He cannot reconcile himself to love, and he cannot cast it aside. He burns in it as the damned are meant to burn in hell.

And who better to play his Devil than the one who loves him most? The one whose love is the greatest agony of all? His cruel, corrupting, irredeemable lover, the serpent in the savage garden, his tormentor and jailer and revenant.

Lestat lets him bring his head down to his throat. His heartbeat flutters under the shivering of Louis' fingers dancing over his scar, that curious slit of skin where he feels so little. As he must, as he is invited to, he parts his mouth and alights on the tender skin of Louis' vulnerable neck. His fangs slip downward, such terrible points, and he feels every jerking throb of Louis' frightened, bewildered heart against his lips.

"The love of saints and angels," he murmurs, gently. He lays the length of his fangs against the fine cord of Louis' carotid artery, their roots aching with hideous want. He flicks the tip of his tongue across Louis' pulse, and a shudder ripples through him from the crown of his head along his spine, a paintbrush dipped in molten gold.

He closes his mouth, lips coming flush to press a kiss where his teeth lay harmless. All inside of him is a bright clamour, such sound and light he cannot think through it.

"The love of the knife to the lamb's throat at the top of a mountain. Of the first murderer for his brother. Of God for His son. Should I not love you all the more, that I was worthy of being your sacrifice?"

Louis was limp and pliant in his surrender, but now he begins to shake. He can feel his heart drumming faster in his ears, and he flushes hot and heady as a human. His lips part as easily and slowly as a flower opens. He gasps and nearly pricks himself on Lestat's fangs.

His trembling body arches against Lestat's shivering one, drawing him flush chest to chest, thigh to thigh. He runs his hand up Lestat's arm to feel the strong muscle there at his shoulder.

Lestat's tongue is like a brand. He moans with sorrow, the horrible pitiful sound of the damned in torment. He moans again, quieter, a plaintive why in response to a small soft token of affection at the place where Lestat should be draining his life. He can feel his tears draining into the cushion and his hair. He can smell them. His fangs cut the air, gums smarting with hunger, and Lestat is so close and warm. If he could taste him--tear out his throat like he offers his--no--

"You're my murderer and you will not kill me," he sobs his lament. "And I will not lose you. You're in me. I carry what I done forever. I ain't got no absolution. If we love like angels, we're the angels put in Hell by God."

He turns his face away into filaments of gold where his fingers lie buried.

"Feels like embracin' the sun," he whispers numbly. His hand slides from Lestat's shoulder across his back, clawed fingertips finding the shape of his shoulder blade through his sweater and traveling down the furrows of his lower back. "Kiss me again."

Louis' plea would turn even the hardened heart of God, if only God deigned to listen. But God is absent from this room, as is the Devil, and so his words touch only the heart that beats against his chest like a fist at the doors of sanctuary.

He rolls against Louis like a dark wave, his face still hidden against Louis' neck. He does not think of what it might look like were he to see it, made ugly with despair and desire entwined. This is how Louis wants him. This is how Louis will have him, a scorching ruin drawn into his flesh in place of absolution. How could Lestat deny him that?

Up he rises, skimming across Louis' jaw and cheek so close his face still can hardly be seen, and he slants his mouth over Louis' with all his transplanted hunger for the precious tang of Louis' blood filling the air with a haze of bittersweetness.

"My sainted sinner, my Louis." His thoughts slip into Louis' mind more gently than his tongue presses between his lips, as tender as his roving hands are insistent. "The best part of all I love. You give all your mercy to others, and keep none for yourself."

In their early nights, it rankled Louis to be at any vulnerability, particularly with another man. But Lestat, the hedonist who radiated confidence and conquering, made it clear and shocking as shattered glass that he simply did not share this concern in intimate matters. He only wondered why it had to be so complicated for Louis. He had a way of turning everything Louis knew on its head, even if he failed to see that the world did not turn on his command.

So when he moves to obey, despite being the most willful person Louis has ever known, Louis gives a faint sound of surprise lost between their lips. But then, Lestat never could keep his hands off him. When they last met, Louis took Lestat on a dilapidated wooden floor, and he was rough about it. Lestat reveled in the attention and proclaimed it love.

I'm not. I don't, he thinks in reply despite knowing Lestat can't hear him. His thoughts can only go one way, into oblivion. He's a killer, and he does it easy. He doesn't deserve mercy. How comforting it would be to finally know for sure if the Devil was real and if he would take him. Surely God wouldn't. Then Louis could put aside his human worries and cast himself into oblivion as well.

He wanted peace, and he will not have it. He is hungry. He is a void. He can't tell where one flesh ends and another begins until his fangs invade the soft slickness of their mouths. He coaxes his tongue under Lestat's, and it is tempting to bite and suck out the sweet red nectar.

"Ain't no mercy out there for me." he whispers into his mouth. "Only damnation." He adds as soft and wondering as summer rain, "And you."

Hair like sunlight chasing away the shadows brushes against his tear-stained face. It drags thin red lines on his cheek. He tugs at the end of Lestat's shirt and sweater and works his hands under. Muscle tightens and swells like the tide. He clutches his hips and rolls his own against him, and he's already hard. He bucks up against him hungrily, forgetting the slow pace they set.

All he has to do is go along. Take what they both want, what is so freely offered, what Louis clutches at with the desperate greed of the starving creature he is. He's been so alone in this awful house, rattling in even its cramped confines as if he's been reduced to no more than a poppy seed of bitterness.

For a moment, he does. He answers the jerk of Louis' hips with a grind of his own, a delicious drag of friction that sears up into the cradle of his pelvis with such sharpness that a muffled cry springs free of his lips. Every inch of his bared skin that Louis touches is alight under a shimmering veil. It's intoxicating. It's a wonder. It's a fuse racing down to its end.

He bracelets one of Louis' hands at the wrist to slow the forceful tug at his hips. His weight sinks down onto Louis, the tiny gaps of give required for the heave and toss of vigour closed up. The hungry spike of his tongue softens, curling against Louis' in a languid pass.

"Always me," he promises, only transposed with a word whose meaning suits him better. A word that is true, if Louis would but believe it.

He moans with fervor, the vibration of it bouncing off his teeth and down his throat. Lestat traps him like a pinned butterfly. He tries to wriggle, and it brings a delicious agony of unrealized pleasure and firm tension. They have always danced in the push and pull of conflict. He twists his hand restlessly, and his fingers cling to Lestat's wrist. He whimpers like an addict denied the nectar that will free him.

He winces his eyes shut and opens them again. His large hungry pupils blot the verdant green. He hates that he has to part their lips and their tongues even for a moment to do anything. Plaintively he nips at Lestat's lip, easy to catch the tips of his fangs on, strongly enough to sharpen the nerves and pink it, but not hard enough to draw blood. Lestat slowed him. Louis needs to devour in whatever way Lestat will allow, but it has to be given freely.

Louis knows Lestat is "always" just as he is "forever" and "enduring". Didn't Lestat hound him for years with apologies? Lestat said that Louis would only know peace when he drank human blood. Louis sought peace anyway when he tried to curl around Lestat on this couch and be at rest. If this is not peace, then it has to be some sort of oblivion at least. Let it annihilate Louis with abyssal darkness or scorching rays, it does not matter. It is not only Lestat here; it is also Louis.

"Give me peace." No, that's not quite right. Passivity never really worked with Lestat. He always loved it when Louis pushed back, as if Lestat always felt like he had to be testing some rule or other. Louis cranes his face upward as much as he can within the confines of svelte athletic lover and pastel cushions. So close, one kaleidoscopic eye stares into another. Theirs are the only vampire eyes here.

"I'll give you peace. You and me." Me and you.

Lestat's heart throbs more intensely than any other part of his body, an incandescent light radiating throughout. He wonders that it doesn't spill from his veins. You and me, a dyad forged in blood and tempered by the same. Proof against death and betrayal and the endless dark of the nights to come.

"You do," he murmurs, love pouring over the sting of Louis' teeth on his lip. He sinks into the depths of Louis' eyes, their summer swelter of want that rivals even Lestat's own insatiable appetites.

He slides their hands back beneath the hem of his shirt, dragging fabric up his side with its guided passage, arching just enough to allow it to roll in a smooth, skin-baring crumple. It pairs with another, firmer grind of his hips, this one not halted by hesitation. He sucks in a heated breath as he releases Louis' wrist to brace his hand just beneath his shoulder, holding his gaze all the while, drinking up Louis' sweet responses as avidly as he would his blood.

Sometimes, he can't stand that he cannot watch Louis through every moment they spend entwined. A delicious, agonizing dilemma: to crush them together so closely that Louis becomes invisible to his sight, or to bear the distance for the sake of witnessing him come undone.

Guard against it, Lestat said. Chase away the loneliness together. His proposed solution for the loneliness of eternity was to cleave to each other. Part of staying so long together was that there was no one else, no one of their kind, who would understand them. Claudia met just the one, and he was a motherfucker. Lestat said other vampires were vicious, but so were they. They were locked together in a viciousness they knew.

His hands move with his readily as if the four are one. He follows the roll of their hips, one, two hot breaths in time, hearts beating out the rhythm to each other like signal drums. His hand searches insistently. Louis coaxes him away just enough for his hand to run up lines of firm muscle. His thumb circles to find his nipple and work it into a peak.

"You can lick them," he breathes. He means the tears infused with blood streaked across his face, but who's counting? He drags his other hand from warm skin to needlessly cup Lestat's head conspiratorially close. He murmurs against his lips, "You made a mess of my face, put me in a state. Clean it up, mon cher."

This burst of imperiousness is much more pleasant when it aligns with precisely what Lestat would like to do anyway. He smiles sinfully sweet, the colour that rises in his cheeks making a rosy-faced devil of him, and eases himself upward by the adjustment of inches needed to lave a hot, slow path from Louis' temple to the corner of his eye.

"Like that?" He teases, breathlessly, another twisting roll of his hips as he arches his chest into the warm manipulations of Louis's clever hand. He comes alive for him, as he always does, his skin singing to the tune Louis wishes to play on it. The salt-rust of his blood tears on Lestat's tongue make him think of the breath of a lion, that lush predatory reek.

So he does it again, licking another long stripe, then another, his hands restless over Louis' sides as he shifts in never steady little glides and jolts, touch never quite settling into a satisfying rhythm. He wants to drag this out as deliberately as he laps at Louis' skin, little rough noises of enjoyment and all.

Louis watches the red stain Lestat's pink tongue until he's can't anymore, and his long lashes sweep his eyes shut. He often assigned Lestat the role of virile knave, but Louis gentles under his tongue. It's not just the ministrations of a mother lion, not just the ravenous lover, not just the hungry beast. Something controlled yet obeisant yet dangerous all at once. He didn't think he'd like it this much as it smooths and stokes him at the same time. He didn't think Lestat would have the appetite for being told what to do after their tiff, however intimately.

"Mmmhh," Louis answers wordlessly, tilting his face up towards him. His touch grows firmer. He molds Lestat to him, tries to chase his hips and his hands and shape him. There are statues in the Louvre he's always wanted to see, marble dipping and puckering under Bernini's hands as if made of flesh.

"...Fucked up... this is fucked up... fuck you, mon cher," the one who asked him to lick him mutters softly but quickly like a hurried pattering of unexpected tropical rain. He takes Lestat's lips and steals back some of the taste of saltwater blood with his tongue.

He presses his thigh insistently between Lestat's. His foot makes a glancing rub on the couch, and his breath catches with sudden pain and surprise. He sighs into his mouth, and it is the sigh of a martyr who walked across coals, but there is no God to hear it, only a fallen angel in a stolen sweater. Louis rumples it worse than ever as he roughens the pass of his hands.

"Take it off," he murmurs urgently in a remembered high from the blood. His eyes glitter darkly like black opals ringed with emerald.

Lestat rocks gently against Louis' thigh, cloth constricting and agitating the throb the motion cannot assuage all on its own. He licks the corner of Louis' mouth when he gasps, yet another little tease, but this one meant as sweetness. He thinks he'll carry Louis to the bedroom - a pleasure to anticipate, as much as Louis is sure to protest the indignity of such handling.

"If you insist," he purrs, and whether it is to the fuck you or removing his sweater he leaves as an exercise for Louis. All in good time. For now, he rears back, not quite resting his full weight on Louis' hips, and peels out of his sweater as neatly as shucking a pea from its pod.

He knows how he looks when he does it: sinuous bend and rippling musculature, his hair falling loose and careless around his smiling, flushed face. He undresses like unveiling art, with all the expectation of admiration that comes with it.

Then the slide of his palms up Louis' torso, skimming his sides with long fingers, thumbs passing over the lovely span of his chest. He leans over him, traces of blood colouring his lips, and looks at Louis for a long, wondering moment.

"You like it," he says, half-confident, half-question, "Fucked or not. Or because, hm?"

They've held each other close within the confines of a coffin, not unlike the narrow space of a couch's cushions, but a bed allows for more. Owing to their sun affliction, coffins are for real sleeping. Beds are for... everything else.

It does cross his mind to suggest Lestat carry him there. His feet would hurt to walk on. He didn't protest Lestat carrying him upstairs on his first night of undeath when he burned himself. He was capable of standing, of walking, but it hurt. Right then, he felt a mess. Right then, he couldn't go home. The townhouse on Rue Royale was his home. Lestat said so.

Louis doesn't ask him. Bad enough he's Lestat's fledgling. No way will he infantilize himself and match the word. Louis has too much pride wrapped up in masculinity, dignity, and wanting to be taken seriously. But if Lestat suggests it, Louis can put up a token resistance before giving in.

Louis has no ornate performance or flame of hair to adorn the economical way he strips out of his sweater, unbuttons, and shrugs out of his shirt. Nevertheless, he is quick, deliberate, and he is graceful as he rises up just enough to allow the fabric to fall away. He has strength, but there is a delicacy to his features as well. He tosses his things carelessly over the back of the couch as if he still has the money to pay someone to tidy, wash, and iron.

Not thinking of himself as seen through the eyes of another, he forgets the very faint but still healing scratches on his back and shoulders from Lestat's claws last month.

"I... 'Because'...?"

His brows knit together. His hands pause in the midst of admiring Lestat's form, one hand running down his chest and the other on his bicep. He didn't give it much thought. Does he deserve it in his self-made hell? How can Louis chart the winds of a tropical storm when he's buffeted by them? How can Louis examine his own mind when he's lost it? Lestat drives him crazy. Paul with his birds had more lucidity, Louis thinks sadly.

He shakes his head to dispel the melancholy and give himself some cover. "You're the one who's fucked. Gon' be in a moment."

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