Chapter Text
September 20, 1794
"Why did you save me?"
The question had tormented Louis since they'd fled the burning wreckage of the plantation house at Pointe du Lac. Twice in as many nights, he had been ready to embrace the pyre, and twice Lestat had plucked him from the waiting arms of death as though he alone had claim on Louis's soul.
"You're a fool, Louis." Lestat sat sprawled in an armchair in their newly-rented suite, illuminated by a candle that flickered on the low table between them. He said the words the same way he always did. Mocking. Inscrutable. And tired, now.
They were both so tired that Louis almost couldn't muster up the will to despise Lestat, and in its absence what he felt was an exhaustion and despair that seemed to be the very marrow of his bones. He lay where he'd first collapsed on the velvet sofa, pain coursing through him from the oil burns splashed across his chest, healing too slowly to see. But even that seemed inconsequential, as though the pain belonged to someone else, and Louis was merely watching from a distance.
"I wanted to die," Louis said, pressing his cool hand against his closed eyes. His palm still stank of soot and cellar dust. "I tried to die. You should have let me die." His voice threatened to break. It felt as though he was pleading with Lestat, but for what? To kill him? To leave him? To let him go into the sun? Did he even have the courage to do such a thing, or would he falter like he had when he was mortal?
Dawn was so near, and the shutters were thrown wide over the city. Soon the sky would swell violet with morning, and he would have to find his coffin, unless, unless… perhaps if he were far from here, perhaps if there were no soft earth to dig into, perhaps then he would have the conviction to finally end this madness.
"You're delirious. You're starving. You don't understand what you're babbling about." Lestat's voice, closer. He'd risen to his feet, and those were the wooden thuds of his tall boots upon the floor, sounds Lestat only made because he liked to make them. Louis knew this without thinking. "I can't stand the sight of you lying there like that! You're a vampire, not some wounded beast wailing to be put out of its misery! You need to hunt."
"Why?" Louis snapped wretchedly. "So I can wake up tomorrow night and do all of this with you again? And the next night, the very same, and the next, and the next, on like this forever, until the world crumbles into dust around us! I wasn't meant for this, Lestat. I can't bear it. To think I might aspire to be like you, always hungry, never satisfied, nothing more than a mindless appetite with the face of an angel!"
He curled into himself, recoiling from the immediacy of his own startling anger. The back of the settee cradled his shoulders and the miserable curve of his spine. "No angel," Louis murmured, not caring whether Lestat could hear at all. "I want to die; I don't deserve life, not when I was made to be the cause of so much death. I want to die, and if I don't have the courage to do that, then at least I can leave you. At least I can do that. I can't stand it anymore, Lestat, I can't bear the thought that this is all there is for us."
Could he be alone? He didn't know. The thought was terrifying, for as often as he'd sworn that he could leave. But surely anything was better than this existence. What were they to each other now? What could possibly exist between the two of them but a hollow mockery of what might have been, if only they hadn't been so completely at odds from the start?
He shuddered as the realization struck him: no creature on earth would ever know him the way Lestat could have. Despair threatened to swallow him whole. Impossible, to look into those gleaming grey eyes and think of anything but the man Lestat could never be, and suffer for how bitterly they'd disappointed each other.
Kill me, he thought relentlessly, like a prayer, kill me, put an end to your terrible mistake, Lestat, and free us both…
But of course Lestat didn't kill him. Nothing had ever been that simple between them.
"You're torturing yourself," Lestat told him, once he'd finally fallen quiet long enough. He sounded matter-of-fact, the way he often did when explaining Louis's countless vampiric failings to him, and that was worse than anger. Sometimes Lestat could sound so patient, so nearly gentle that it rattled Louis to the core. As though it didn't matter at all that Louis wasn't meant for this life Lestat had given him. As though his falling short of expectations was only expected. Lestat always remained so infuriatingly confident in himself—and by extension, overconfident in Louis, no matter what a disaster his teachings had been. Was he blind to it, or did he simply not care? The gentleness, the kindness, the uncharacteristic patience always felt like one more cruel joke Lestat was playing on him. And it never did last.
Lestat's voice was close now, very close, and Louis felt his shadow settling upon him as Lestat passed in front of the candle flame. "You're torturing yourself," he repeated, in that same gentle tone that Louis couldn't stand. "You've been torturing yourself for years." The weight of time felt suddenly immense, laden with all that had already passed, and stretching, barren, toward countless bleak centuries ahead of him. "You're starving, and you're weak, and now you've finally seen the indisputable proof of it for yourself: there's no going back to that world you dream of, no watching them live their little lives from the shadows and deluding yourself into believing that can truly be enough."
Louis let his hand drop from his eyes, and light and Lestat filled his vision, his smooth face the very picture of some awful, inhuman sympathy. How could any living creature look at once so anguished and uncaring? It seemed to Louis as if his plight moved Lestat terribly, and yet his acting to stop it would have been unthinkable.
Lestat inclined his head toward Louis, his expression searching, as though he were trying to read Louis's mind like one of his mortal victims. Sometimes Louis felt sure that his every thought was written inside him like the pages of a book for Lestat to flip through and discard as he pleased. Most nights it made him feel exposed; tonight, Louis hardly knew his own mind.
In that same gentle, awful voice, Lestat went on. "And now you know the truth, don't you? What I've been trying to tell you all along."
"I've learned too many truths these last two nights," Louis said wearily. "Which one is that?"
"That you are what you are. There's no place for you with them now, not the kind you tell yourself you want. Their rules don't matter anymore, don't you see? You could have been one of God's angels in all your righteous glory, and it wouldn't have mattered to her. Their world is theirs alone. They don't want to live with things like us."
Stricken as he was, Louis couldn't find the words to protest, and was left to wrestle silently with what he feared might have been another of Lestat's unbearable lessons.
Lestat sighed, and something seemed to change in him, though what, Louis didn't know. Perhaps some tension in his full brow, or a darkening of his gaze. Or perhaps the way he pressed his lips together tightly as he looked at Louis's raw and wounded chest, where the charred and ragged edges of his shirt were soaked with his blood. The exposed flesh glistened an ugly pink, and here and there blood seeped in a thin trickle at the surface. Louis had half forgotten his own pain until Lestat's attention fell upon it. Now he nearly felt aflame again, as though his eyes alone could burn Louis to cinders.
Louis inhaled slowly, and the rise of his chest seemed to trouble Lestat in some way. He realized only then that he hadn't been breathing.
"Here's the proof of it," Lestat said, gesturing at Louis's misery with a subtle and elegant wave that made him wince. "You reckless, sentimental creature." Sympathy made his voice into something unfamiliar. That, too, felt cruel. "You really hoped she'd love you back?"
Louis made a quiet sound, and let his eyes fall shut again. Had he wanted that? If he'd been a mortal man, perhaps he might have felt the sorts of things that mortal men were meant to feel for mortal women. But what was that love to him now? He tried to imagine feeling it for her, replacing his intense but distant tenderness with intimacy. The thought seemed blasphemous.
"I thought I could undo... this," he explained in quiet distress, only coming to the understanding of it as he was speaking the words. "I know it sounds foolish, I know it sounds vain, but I did. If she truly believed I was an angel, if I could find a way to save her from destruction, then I… I thought…" He shook his head. He trailed off. He didn't know.
"You thought…?"
Lestat's hand, startlingly warm, covered his where it lay curled upon the cushion, and when Louis's eyes flew open he appeared utterly compassionate. Had he ever looked like this since Louis had come to him? Louis couldn't think of a time, and his instinct was to jerk away.
Or, rather, what he thought his instinct should have been was to jerk away.
Instead he let Lestat curl those long fingers around his own, feeling miserable and baffled by the simple sense of comfort that it instilled in him, and the horrible knowledge that Lestat was the only creature in this world who it could come from. Because the awful fact was that Lestat was right. He always had been right. What else could Louis expect out there? A world of fearful whispers and suspicious looks, unless, like Lestat, he could bear to linger in the company of doomed mortal victims. For what mortals but their victims could ever truly know them?
His thoughts swirled, hazy as smoke in lamplight, but his hand remained beneath Lestat's, neither moving away nor returning the gesture. He tried not to wonder what Lestat was thinking, though he knew, as always, that the ache in him would only deepen with the attempt.
The candle flame guttered, and light danced on Lestat's features, and for a moment he could have been nothing more than a beautiful young mortal man. Again came that sickening near-regret. He'd died so young, thought Louis at the same remove he felt from the throbbing in his chest; had he sold his life for power, or for freedom, or was he, too, seduced by something he hadn't fully understood? And if so, why had he then returned to the old man he resented so terribly? That mortal boy who'd lost his books and his monastery was years dead now, and all that was left of him was this bitter, vicious monster.
This monster who still loved the father who'd taken that from him.
"I thought I could do good," Louis whispered, ashamed to the core of how completely futile it all sounded now. "I thought I could be good." Lestat's eyes blazed silver and gold in the candlelight, and Louis held them, wracked with such anguish that he felt he'd crumble if Lestat looked away now. "Haven't you ever wanted that, Lestat?"
Silently, he begged: please understand me. Please. For all I know now, you're the only creature under God who could possibly know how this feels, and I can't bear to be alone in this.
Louis's palm turned upward, finally, where it lay beneath Lestat's, and he was startled by the urgency with which Lestat responded, tangling their fingers together with a clumsiness that was surely Louis's own fault. He stared with wide eyes at their white hands laying palm to palm, Lestat gripping his so tightly that Louis couldn't help but hope he understood.
He hadn't been this close to Lestat since the night he'd died. Not in any way that mattered. The moment felt suspended, hushed, as though he might shatter it by speaking or acting too rashly. Perhaps Lestat felt the same, despite the impulsiveness that ruled his every action; perhaps that was the reason for the agony of indecision in his expression.
Louis's heart was racing, and he no longer felt outside himself, but fully present. He was wounded, and aching, and desperately lonely, and he could hear his own blood in his ears and feel Lestat's pulse against his palm, and he didn't want to let go. He needed this connection, whatever it was, as powerfully as he'd felt the urge to die. He needed to know someone else understood. Even if that someone was only Lestat.
It was Lestat who acted first, lifting his free hand between them, fingers tugging roughly at the knot of his cravat. Louis's fingers tensed against Lestat's, his whole body riveted to that sight. It was as though in some instinctive way he knew what Lestat intended to do, even as his mind refused to form the thought. The white silk was stained here and there with ash and smoke—oh, how Lestat would hate to see the state of it, he always kept his expensive clothing so pristine—and beneath it, as the layers were unwound and pulled aside, his smooth skin seemed to glow.
He'd fed downstairs. He'd made sure Louis was watching when he did it. And the blood was working in him now, animating him, making him into something otherworldly and impossible to resist. And there, beneath the shadow of his jaw, his pulse beat a quick and steady rhythm inside his gleaming flesh.
"Drink from me."
Louis's heart thundered in his ears as he forced himself to tear his eyes away from the incomprehensible temptation before him. He tried to look away, but Lestat was so close, kneeling in front of him, that there was simply nothing else to see. Lestat's eyes seemed to bore into him, a question burning in them that Louis couldn't possibly understand. Louis parted his lips to speak, but he made no sound, only shook his head in mute disbelief. He'd gone still as if entranced, his back pressed tightly against the sofa. His hand was still gripping Lestat's.
He was starving. He knew that now with all the intensity of a lightning strike. He was starving, and he'd been starving for years. How had he not realized it before? The thirst was a living, demanding thing, animating him with its own force of will, making his fangs long and sharp behind his lips. Yes, he needed it. Yes, he knew it. He would be half-mad with thirst tomorrow evening if he didn't feed. And this was no murky furtive animal blood, or a torn-out mortal throat, but Lestat.
That blood. He hadn't tasted it since the night Lestat had made him. He'd been so sure he never would again. But how many nights had he fallen into dreamlike trances, staring mystified at the pale blue web of veins that branched from beneath Lestat's lace cuffs as he longed to understand this nameless thing between them?
And now here it was, that blood from which he'd drawn his own immortal life, pulsing beneath skin that seemed as delicate and lush as the first ripe fruit of summer… oh, there was no question that he wanted it. He was seduced, caught in a current from which there was no escape, the same as he'd been that very first night. But the source, oh God, the source! Again, Louis trembled, and Lestat's look of concern darkened, surely frustrated with his tortured indecision.
Perhaps there was a spell in it. Some magic to bind Louis to him. Or perhaps he truly was dying, and Lestat simply refused to let that happen.
"Louis," Lestat urged, frustration creeping into his voice, and the sound of his name drew Louis out of his near panic. Lestat's eyes were bright with anxiety, and he looked as if he couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to press closer or recoil completely. He looked like someone other than himself, Louis thought, someone beautiful and vulnerable and capable of love, and that miserable yearning struck him again. It wasn't just that he disliked Lestat, Louis realized with staggering clarity. It was worse than that. He had spent years grieving for a vision of Lestat that had never been real at all.
"I'm leaving you," Louis whispered desperately. He didn't know why he was saying it. Whether he wanted Lestat to back away and spare him this awful temptation, or for Lestat to know there was no bargain being made with his acceptance, or for Lestat to talk him out of leaving entirely.
"And I'm trying to stop you," Lestat pleaded—imagine, Lestat pleading! He shook his head, and his loose curls caught the golden gleam of the lamplight like a halo. Was it possible? Lestat, vulnerable? Lestat, needing him? The plantation was gone, Louis wanted to protest, his investments weren't worth all the pain they had inflicted on each other, but all he could muster was a faint moan, embarrassingly hungry.
"I'll tell you anything you want to know." Lestat clasped Louis's hand between his own, and that desperate promise was as heady as the rush of his blood. "I'll answer your questions. We'll talk, I swear. I can't promise you enlightenment or understanding, but whatever I can tell you, it's yours. You can make your choice afterward. And if you still can't bear it, then…" Lestat shut his eyes, and a terrible knowing sadness seemed to pass through him like wind through grass.
Later, Louis would think it was that expression that finally made him do it.
The hand he'd curled against his wounded chest reached out, crossing the gulf of inches between them. Slowly, slowly, until his fingertips landed as lightly as a flower petal against the hot rushing pulse in Lestat's throat. Save for the frantic beating of his heart, Lestat was perfectly still, the most exquisite anticipation etched upon his porcelain face.
Louis moved first. But it was as if that tiny motion had unchained Lestat, and suddenly Lestat was above him, a pale and glittering shadow that eclipsed the room. One of them made some desperate, breathless sound, and the other returned it, and he didn't know what it meant besides yes and please and now and need. He buried a hand in Lestat's cool golden hair, dragging him down, crushing their bodies together until they were nearly one being, his nose brushing Lestat's jaw. There, he caught the mingled scents of soot and wood smoke, velvet and cellar dust and carriage horses and two-day-old cologne, but nothing at all to mark him as Lestat. Did they have no natural scent at all?
"Louis," Lestat said roughly, shuddering against him. His voice was a bolt of lightning down Louis's spine, and his blood was right there , and Louis could smell that, could hear it, could feel it down to the very core of him, a rhythmic liquid whisper that promised this would all come to an end.
He drove his fangs in deep.
Lestat made some low sound that rumbled against Louis's lips, and Louis moaned. The blood gushed hot across his tongue, each swallow of it warming him, filling him deeper. This was nothing like animal blood. This was an oasis, a sacred fountain, consecrated wine that poured down his throat in long and eager gulps. This was his maker, the source of his life, his own life mingled with Lestat's and flowing into him, as it was always meant to be. He could feel that steady heartbeat in him now, matching his own, becoming his own, each pounding drum an echo of his name.
Never in his years as a vampire had Louis ever allowed himself to sate his terrible hunger, and he was helpless against the tidal force of the swoon that took him.
Locked together, they fell outside of time.
Was it seconds? Minutes? Impossible to say. But at last, the drumming of Lestat's heart receded into its own distinct rhythm, and slowly, Louis began to return to himself. His lips still sucked at Lestat's skin, and as he withdrew his fangs, he felt Lestat gasp. It was primal; Louis was helpless to it. He made a quiet sound of need, lapping at the healing flesh until he realized what he was doing and, wincing at the wanton animal display, began to pull away.
But with his back now reclined against the arm of the settee, there wasn't far to go. Perhaps that stopped calamity. Lestat didn't seem to register his halfhearted attempt to escape from the embrace; he simply let his forehead fall against Louis's chest, that hand still clasped just as tight between his own. He didn't seem eager to mock him for anything that had just happened, and gradually, Louis's wariness receded, replaced with a tranquility that reminded him of wine and good sleep and winter nights.
Lestat was unusually quiet for what felt like a very long time. Louis didn't mind. It was possible to forget who he was, when he wasn't talking. He stroked his fingers through Lestat's hair, not caring that it was Lestat's hair, simply lost in the sensation of silken ringlets sliding past his fingers. Everything was golden: the reflections of the candlelight that shimmered in the chandelier, the careless mass of curls beneath his hand, the blood that now raced through both their veins.
Louis knew better than to ask what it had meant.
But he couldn't stay silent forever, and eventually, in a soft and wondering voice, he pointed out, "You never told me we could do that."
Then Lestat did draw back, letting go of Louis's hand. The air felt very cool on his skin as Louis flexed his fingers, and he realized with a shock that the pain in his chest had vanished completely. Lestat stayed crouched beside him, arms folded on the arm of the sofa, chin pillowed atop them. His skin was paler now, but his eyes were just as sharp as he watched Louis.
"Would you have done it if I had?" Lestat asked evenly.
There was no answer Louis could have given him. He sat up a little, pulling his ruined shirt across his chest. It was hard to look away from Lestat's face, though once again Louis had the unbearable sense that he was being judged by some standard he would never understand.
"I don't know," he finally answered. His thoughts were sluggish, meandering through the past as though his memories were pages in a book about someone else's life. He didn't even know what "it" was, really; only that when Lestat's blood had passed his lips, he'd felt a satisfaction he'd never known in all his life, and that it was already beginning to slip away from him. He wished Lestat would take his hand again. Bereft of that strange unexpected point of contact, he felt suddenly absurdly alone. "You said we could talk."
Lestat's brow furrowed, and he let out a breath between his teeth. He seemed at war with himself again, touched with a reticence that Louis had rarely seen him display. And then Lestat said something that astonished him completely.
"Tomorrow," said Lestat. "Tomorrow night, we'll talk."