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Five minutes actually standing in the house with Lestat is all it takes. He thought he knew. He knew that Lestat saved him: that Lestat didn't want them dead, all those years ago, and did his best, which would never have been enough but was there anyway. He knew, even, that Lestat was not the man he'd been, having been standing outside his ramshackle house for a few nights now, before finally going in to see him. He knew, but he wasn't ready for this.
Clinging to Lestat, wrapped in his arms and clinging back just as much, Louis realizes with a jolt that spent so long afraid of how much he is like Lestat—a skilled predator, a willing and eager killer—that he failed to realize how much Lestat is like him. It takes finding him in this place, walls knocked bare and empty, but still stagnant, still familiar. It takes finding him in his dressing gown mad with grief and guilt to realize he lost Claudia too. Like a fucking martyr, and who's that sound like? It's odd, the role reversal of their responses to what happened: it was Louis on the voracious and well-staged killing spree, and Lestat driven mad in solitude, holed up waiting for the ratcatcher. Maybe it says something that their polar opposite reactions to the same endless pain are to each act like the other, consciously or not.
He knows it's the same pain when red streaks down Lestat's face in time with the pang in Louis's stomach. He knows when he feels Lestat's arms shake up to hold him back, when his chest shudders against Louis's, when Lestat holds him back at all, let alone crawls his fingers up Louis's back to grip him just as tightly. Lestat understands what no one else can about him. He understands what it was to lose her.
No matter what the words used, Claudia was their baby. She was their daughter, theirs to protect, and they failed her from the start, and as much as they loved her they destroyed her. It was the last thing she ever knew. Claudia knew in the last moment that Louis lied about her turning, and that Lestat could not save her, and they loved her. All of it is true. Louis has no doubts about that, and seeing what Lestat has become, Louis knows he understands this too.
They failed their daughter in both the most mundane and exceptional of ways, and yet Lestat was the only one who remained who remembered how she laughed; who remembered the way she knocked on the banister, ran around in her favorite dresses. They failed their daughter. But they had a daughter. They were her fathers. She was there and they loved her. She was there and they loved her, and they failed her until now she isn't here, and they still are.
"You were her father," he breathes against Lestat's ear. He's clutching at Louis's back. Did he do that before? It doesn't matter, he is now. His open mouth catches on Lestat's cheekbone, even through his hair. One of Armand's notes: have Celeste keep Lestat in check here, beside an excerpt of Claudia's diaries. "You were. You hear me? Lestat."
Even with a hiatus of more than seventy years, Louis's first instinct is to seek Lestat mouth-first. It's not exactly a kiss, when his parted lips land on Lestat's cheek purposefully, though it isn't not one either. It's just that taste is how he's always known Lestat, and how they've always spoken. Louis knows all he needs to from just the way Lestat's breath echoes off his neck. He would always know him among the whipping winds. The thinnest sound of his voice had reached Louis's ear as soon as they touched: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, thank God, thank God." A far cry from "I knew you'd figure it out," and yet the thought never occurs to Louis, not a dream of pettiness, Louis whose world has narrowed down to the arrhythmia of their hearts. He did kiss Lestat already, gentle against his ear. He does it again, just beside his nose.
This is what it meant to be with Lestat, Louis remembers with visceral clarity as he holds Lestat in place far enough to see clearly. To be one soul in two bodies, one universe contained in two souls. Their fucked up gothic romance. The streetlamps have all gone out with the storm and it doesn't matter. He's always loved Lestat in the moonlight anyway.
"You were her father." Louis is saying it into Lestat's ear, a kiss that is too easy to be a kiss, too easy in the dark to be anything else. Then, to Lestat's face once he reaches it: "You loved her, and she knew. She did, Lestat. And she loved you too." He can feel in Lestat's muscles under his hands that the words hit as clearly as he'd hoped. "It wasn't your fault. She loved you. I loved you. We did. Lestat."
It's everything Louis spent the last month realizing he needed to hear himself. He doesn't say that's what made it so hard, that's why they tried to kill him, why they both failed Claudia not just in the end but over and over. All those things are true, and they are both fully aware. What matters right now is that even though love did not save her, it was there. There was love.
The definitive solidity of each statement, all couched in their own self sufficiency, draws out in time, each like an island of certainty: this happened, and this, and this. A landmark by which to navigate into shore. Lanterns in the darkness. And still, with a guilt that does not make Louis feel as guilty as he should, it's the "I" that affects Lestat most. Like he knew it would be. Like Daniel made him see it would.
He loved Louis. From the heart, not the page. He chased an American icon out of town because he loved you. Louis loved him too. He would've tried just as hard to save him. A grand and loving gesture.
He pulls Lestat in again and feels him whisper against Louis's neck, a steady and silent plea of penitence lost in the scatter of broken glass and rain lashing the roof, shaking the walls. His arms cover as much of Lestat as they can, and it's enough. And New Orleans comes in through the windows around them. And Louis is home.
The roof overhead starts creaking as Louis pulls away enough that their open mouths find each other, the slicing rain on the wind all of a sudden blocked out by the fact of their shared breathing, blood hot and intimate as it ever was. It's as if the house is shaking with them, the embodiment of their bodies, rain lashing the floors in time with their heavy breathing.
It was in such a storm, in a church, not a mile from where they are now, that Lestat told him, I love you, Louis. You are loved. I send my love to you, and you send it back round to me. And this circle, this home we barely had a glimpse of... Know it frightens me as much as it does you. And he was right. It was frightening. Lestat loved him. Louis sent it back to him. All of it was true. And when they kissed on the altar and Lestat drank him to death and beyond, only then did Louis start becoming able to know himself. And maybe it's the same thing now.
Except the storm of his transformation was a little less likely to impale one of them on a tree branch or bury them under a crushed roof, so they can't exactly sit around for hours.
"Come on," Louis says as he tugs Lestat gently by the arms back towards the hole where the door was before it blew off. And Lestat lets him tug. "Hey. Come on. With me." He's trying not to think about Lestat in one of the pairs of pajamas he packed, the absurdly expensive cotton ones with no seam, soft and clean. Even as the wind whips around them, he's failing, hard and immediate. He's thinking about Lestat hobbling the raccoon for him at Rue Royale. He's thinking about Claudia and her goat, then her screams ringing through his body over the rattling of rocks. He's thinking about the silence of San Francisco. He's thinking about Lestat's dressing gown, the grime of it under his hands. He thinks about Lestat's fine hair. He thinks about their coffin.
"Roof's gonna— Just come on. Out of this place." Lestat did everything to save his life and was really just gonna wallow for eternity, Jesus. "Bet you've got toxic mold in you, livin' here. Some kind of super resistant aspergillosis."
"Are you a doctor now?" Lestat tosses back without real effort, only half shouting over the wind and rain, never fighting Louis's pull even as he extracts himself. Louis would miss the words completely if it weren't for how he was already locked into Lestat's heartbeat, making it easier to latch onto his voice. He staggers over to the next room casually as he does, though he stays in sight of the doorway, so Louis doesn't have to chase him. "Master of the human anatomy at last?"
"You need to feed too, we'll get you something."
"Ah, so of the vampire anatomy, too. I haven't the faintest idea what you mean," Lestat says dispassionately as he tips over an upturned sofa. He returns with a carpet bag in only slightly better condition than his robe, held to his chest with both arms, the way he had just held Louis. But he's waiting for Louis's cue. He isn't running off into the wind.
"My hotel is nearby," is all Louis has to say. It's not, really, now they're almost to the Lower Ninth, but it's not like an extra couple miles matter to them. He doesn't say that it's a corner away from Jackson Square, that he'd gone there first, like he thought he'd just find Lestat on their bench, easy as that.
Because yeah, it basically turned out to be, but that's not the point. He just thinks if he mentioned it to Lestat right now, he'd dissolve in tears, away on the wind. If he'd made up his mind to come inside a day sooner, they wouldn't be here. It's the only part of this whole thing that isn't too little too late.
They're in the hurricane for only a moment, under the hotel's back awning with ease, as little cover as it provides. The phone in his inside jacket pocket is merely soaked, and the card key slipped out along Bourbon Street, but it's fine. He booked a room with a fire escape for a reason. It isn't far from them that Louis's coffin lies, and he's realized he's missed the feel of it, the cradle of the dark, the pull of the sun like a lullaby, the warmth of his own breath all around him. The warmth of Lestat's breath, his body, his blood. His cheek against Louis's forehead, trying to count every precious hair on his head before sleep insisted upon having him.
Lestat is the one curled up against him now, swaying. After the short jaunt across only part of town, from one end of Rue Royale to not even its midpoint, Louis considers his assessment of Lestat's state accurate: he's been living on rats alone, and the Millennial wasn't much of a ratcatcher at all. Louis remembers his seven years of solitude—twice over, now that he's on the other end of it, Lestat's forehead clammy against Louis's skin. And Louis breathes in the taste of him with an open mouth.
But upstairs was just a reach away, and the new steward, Khalil, had prepared Louis's room before he arrived. And then it would be into the quiet dark for the two of them, everything else shunted off to tomorrow. And Louis was fine with that. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. He hears the words in Lestat's clownish Macbeth, Claudia laughing, just a few streets over a lifetime ago, and before the sadness comes, he smiles.
Third floor room, window over the alley rather than the courtyard. Conveniently no one has boarded it up yet. The fire escape comes down easy, and Louis had unlocked the window when he checked in. Lestat is definitely slower now up the ladder, but he regains himself in time to try to make it look dignified that he's dripping hurricane all over the carpet while Louis gets him a towel, pajamas, a blood bag.
"This is comically demeaning, you must admit," Lestat says as he holds the plastic straw in front of his mouth. He won't drink until Louis acknowledges the indignity.
"This is O negative," Louis responds, "and you're vampire anemic. Drink."
And so Lestat drinks. No fight. Louis doesn't know why he bothered, really, dressed in soft clothes he accepted from Louis without question, except for the fact that this is still Lestat. And Louis is still Louis, so he pushed back, even as he took care of him.
He hangs Lestat's grimy robe over the chair in front of the wardrobe. Lestat had beelined to it and deposited his carpet bag there with faux-nonchalant haste. It should be stranger, but it isn't, because in a very tangible way, this is the man that Louis lived every day with for a very vivid three decades—more, if you count his presence in Louis's mind after leaving New Orleans. Almost eleven thousand days sleeping side by side, and he's thought of Lestat every day since. So maybe it makes sense that he doesn't think twice about getting changed while Lestat is hanging up the towels, bathroom door open, idle sounds following him. Part of him will always remember how to be comfortable around him, even if he resented it in the past.
It's that unreasonable familiarity that covers them as Lestat drinks in silence while Louis arranges the room more to his liking. They'll get around to boarding up these windows eventually, and no curtains are thick enough. Better against the inner wall, on the other side of the sofa. The sofa where Lestat is sitting, drinking from a blood bag with all the dignity of filing his nails. The image is admittedly undercut by the gentle gray cotton he's swathed in and the steady frizzing of his hair.
"You've changed," he says once he finishes another sip. Watching Louis like an owl, head twitching without moving. "Beyond the self-acceptance and the wardrobe, though it's a shame for you especially that the world has outgrown three piece suits as regular wear." Of course. Because he's still Lestat—and because he's still Lestat: "It's the way you stand. Your words."
"I have," Louis admits. He couldn't keep avoiding it, once he set foot in New Orleans again. All it took was the cab driver's habitual conversation-making for Louis to forget what the vowel in "you" was meant to be. He's been disjointed and self-conscious ever since.
"On purpose, then."
"Most of the time." He thinks about hearing his words come out of Armand's mouth. "Even those, though, I'd take back if I could."
"There is never any going back." Lestat's mouth is slanted: bleakly amused acceptance. Louis knows that face. His capacity for enduring. "Only forward."
Louis abandons the coffin to sit in the armchair catty corner from him. "Is that what you've been doing?"
And there goes the face, replaced with another familiar one. Lestat stares at the sofa next to him with blank interest, eyebrows high like he isn't thinking about much of anything. Nails lightly tracing the patterns on the cushions, conveniently not looking Louis's direction.
"What you saw was a temporary arrangement: part of the creative process. I'm beginning auditions in the next few weeks, actually. For the band. I have a recording studio a few blocks from here."
"Uh huh."
Lestat takes a long drink after this, finishing his second unit in lieu of actual response. "Well."
He stands swiftly, even to Louis's trained eye, in clear use of his powers—too swiftly, because he staggers enough that Louis catches him by the arm. Gray cotton. Soft and clean. His cleaned hair somehow seems shorter, lighter without the weight of grime. His ears stick out. They didn't the last time Louis saw him. His jaw is the same as ever.
It was remembering the smell of Lestat's blood in the air that made Louis certain that what Daniel was showing him with the script was true. He would know that smell anywhere, even when he couldn't see it dripping from Lestat's ear. And then he saw his jaw clench, and Louis would have recognized it anywhere, and he thought nothing of the smell, only rage. It's not rage he feels now.
"You good?" Now, his hand is steadying on Lestat's arm. And then it's not so steadying. Then it's lingering. "Still thirsty?"
He already asked earlier, when he showed Lestat the store in the refrigerator. He hadn't asked like this. And Lestat knows what he's asking, as odd as it may be for him to be on the other side of the dynamic. Always the one asking, Louis getting to acquiesce. Seducer, not seduced. That was usually Lestat's role, til now.
"Louis," Lestat starts but doesn't finish. He's said all he needs to. They know better, just like they knew what Louis was suggesting.
They used to do it all the time. Louis managed to forget even that, and he's pretty sure he did it all by himself that time, subsuming anything good about those years that would contrast with the hollow echoes in his present. It wasn't just when Louis drank Lestat's blood either; night after night of Lestat at his throat, warm and clearer than any read mind. His passions, his memories, his self. It was the direct line to their bond, a deep tendon being hit with a mallet, shared blood flowing seamlessly from body to body in one seamless, cosmic circulatory system. Back and forth.
Louis isn't sure he's ever wanted Lestat to drink his blood as badly as he does now. The downpour has wiped him comparatively clean, and he smells like the ocean and river together, and his clothing is soft and clean. And Louis wants Lestat to have his blood in him before he tucks them in the coffin. He wants Lestat's teeth in his neck. In his wrist. He wants to take Lestat into himself completely.
"Lestat..." Louis stands, not minding the space Lestat reflexively puts between them because it gives him room to hold out his arm. Even with his mouth closed, Louis sees Lestat's teeth lengthen and remembers the same feeling against his skin. "I want you to. Yeah?"
"Freely given," Lestat says, somewhat skeptically but not a question. His teeth stay mostly hidden. Louis doesn't think he's ever seen Lestat do that before. On the other side of the curtains, the windows rattle with the wind.
"Yes," is all Louis can say. It's the only truth, after all. Always, he doesn't add, but the meaning is there in his voice. He hears a much different Lestat, confident and comfortable in the pair of them, tracing Louis's face in their coffin. Pour toujours et à jamais.
The present Lestat, eighty years later, closes his eyes. Sudden nothing. A hole where a face should be. When he speaks again, it is quiet and careful as much as it is unsteady.
"If I do—" Lestat stops and draws himself up, hair out of his face, determined and haughty even when he avoids Louis's gaze— And Louis has to hold himself back from laughter, because that is Lestat. "Will you taste of him?"
Louis is already shaking his head by the last word, and though he tries not to crowd Lestat in, he can't help getting closer, arms lax between them. There's never been a situation in which appearing casual is less of a concern, and yet Louis aims for it as he says simply, "It's been an eventful month, and I'll tell you tomorrow. But no, my blood is my own."
It's the kind of over-constructed, carefully chosen speech pattern he's been sloughing off ever since leaving Dubai, and its sudden appearance now makes Louis cringe, but Lestat doesn't even seem to notice through the poorly concealed relief and intrigue at war on his face. Was it always so easy to read Lestat? Or has another 150 years brought Lestat back around to the boy in the fur cloak he used to whisper about, in the dawn hours, where either one of them could feign sleep in lieu of response? This shivering thing in the dilapidated house. Still in the tower Louis left him in seventy years ago.
"Lestat. Please." Again, Louis doesn't move, but he holds out his hand, wrist first. The absolute oddest reversal of their positions, and yet Louis doesn't care in the slightest. All he's thinking about is that now he remembers Lestat called him "mon cher" in 1973 and wishes despite himself to hear it again. "Let me."
Lestat meets his eye with the pretender of a snarky grimace, and when it folds far too soon, his gaze falls again. Not a no, but not a yes. Not yet.
So Louis rolls up his sleeve and moves slowly, settling behind Lestat, forehead resting against his shoulder and nose full of the smell of his hair. He wants more than anything to hide under his hair and mouth along Lestat's neck, toothless until Lestat asks for it, then with the blood circling between them two, one body, one mind, one bliss. But it's not the time, he knows. First things first.
(Still, a small part of Louis is all too glad to recognize the feeling, missing for decades, as uncomplicated desire. He wants to fuck the heaviness from Lestat's face, but he won't. He wants to lick Lestat clean like a cat, starting at his throat, but he won't. There was a reason he kept having to tell himself he can be there for Lestat without being with Lestat, and he knows that it's because if he doesn't, he'll forget all about keeping that promise.)
As Louis moves into position, Lestat finally touches his wrist, unobtrusively faint at first before becoming the gentlest hold as their heads settle together. Their arms align from elbow to palm, Lestat's fingers wrapped around his metacarpal bones, thumb hooked over Louis's. Hygieia with the snake twined around her arm. Louis can hear the hems of Lestat's pants brushing his ankles when he leans into the touch. Then he reaches around with his other hand and slices into his wrist, hand falling back to Lestat's waist as he finally drinks.
It's loneliness first. Louis presses his closed mouth to Lestat's shoulder and feels it in its entirety. Mold in the rugs, the walls, the ceilings. Fevers in the wake of Katrina, of Andrew, the air sweet with the smell on the clearer nights, Lestat out among them wired and leveling like the plague. Splinters in his fingers, skin healing around them without a trace until he tore them again. Waves of regret. The carpet bag Lestat brought, now stashed in the wardrobe. He wouldn't let Louis see it, and there's the second feeling: shame. For twenty-seven years, Lestat thought that he had failed at the thing he risked everything to do: keep Louis alive. The shame of failing to keep Louis alive— Shame, because he— Shame, over—
Her hand in his, her hand at his throat, her hand disintegrating and unreachable in the noon sun...
It's gone as soon as Louis knows what it is, lost when Lestat pulls Louis's wrist far from his mouth, turning under Louis's arm instead. This time he's the one with his face buried in Louis's shoulder. Louis feels the press of his closed mouth, the tremble and regained strength of his arms. He knows what it was now: shame, because he saved Louis over her.
"Don't," Lestat cuts through. He pushes Louis away right back to his slightly outstretched arms, holding him in place just far enough to stand. "Louis. Please. I can feel you."
His hand comes up to Lestat's face, though he doesn't land, too afraid of touching the sadness there, lest he take it into himself and they both end up weeping again. It's lucky that Lestat pulled away before the images came through clearly, before the reflexive avoidance fell through. There's a whine in the back of his throat ready to be let out.
"You haven't said her name yet."
They can't stop talking about her now, it seems, even when they try to talk about anything else. But of course they do. No one else would ever listen to them. But this was his husband; this was their daughter.
"No. I can't bear it. Not tonight." Lestat's hair flails as he shakes his head, looking an awful lot like it did a hundred years ago. His hand lands in the center of Louis's chest the way it did then too, so easily neither of them notice it.
"Alright. Okay." It has never been easier to agree with him. "But know I feel it too."
"If— Will you promise," Lestat starts haltingly. There is the smallest smudge of blood on the corner of his mouth, the only proof of what happened, Lestat reverently full with the rest. "Will you tell me about her. Life in Paris. I only know from— I'd like to know."
"How do you mean?"
Lestat sniffs and stares resolutely at the ceiling. "The theatre. Her— Companion. I would like to know about her. What she meant to Claudia."
Even though each sentence ends on a lilt too close to a question, there's no mistaking it. It's as sharply beautiful to Louis as the wind cutting through his hair, the wind off the water. It breaks through like lucidity in a fever, clear and whole.
(It's not all selfless; no one says it like him. Louis still hears it in his sleep.)
"I'll tell you. I promise." A thin but honest laugh shudders out of Louis. "It's a story."
Lestat manages to look down at the sound, down to Louis. There's blood on his shoulder, from Louis's wrist. "A dressmaker. She was your fledgling. I could feel it, on the stage." He takes another composing breath and gestures to the wardrobe, where he'd tucked away his carpet bag. "It was her favorite color, but she would never wear it."
Her voice is still pitch perfect in his head. Reminds me too much of the sun: all warm. But it's from Paris, when the world came back into color.
"I'm not sure she remembered ever telling me. But she did," Lestat says, and he's adamant all of a sudden, holding Louis's gaze even as the latter starts to connect some dots. It's a recitation, a defense, a mantra. "I remember. It was when we went to the botanical garden, July, 1919. I taught her how to snatch a ribbon off a hat without the wearer ever noticing. It was yellow, and she asked me—"
"Okay. Okay."
"To tie it in her hair."
"It's okay." Louis can't help it, he has to hold Lestat's face in his hands, know he's there, this man he's always loved. He has to hold him as his eyes go pink again, in defiance of himself. It feels, for a moment, like when he first found Lestat again, before he realized Louis was there because he loved him. Lestat hissing like a cat, suspicious and bristling, not knowing that all Louis wanted to do was hold him, that the reason he wouldn't touch Lestat yet was because he would never want to stop again.
But in Louis's hold he's docile: a kitten, not a lion. Pajama soft. And Louis knows that it means the truth of their relationship—that they are both capable of being someone they usually wouldn't be if they are completely and utterly alone—remains, so he takes the opportunity to keep shushing Lestat long after he needs to. It must still be true, because Lestat lets him. Louis's thumb lingers near the faint smudge on Lestat's face, but he doesn't clean it up or rub it in, staying carefully at the edge. Too precious with it as tangible proof. Always precious with proof.
"I remember the ribbon," Louis says as he holds Lestat still, even though he's the one crying now, nodding over and over. The extraction of the memory is more painful yet nowhere near as hard as when it was Daniel prying his past open. Lestat doesn't need to pry. It blooms before him, open without a touch. It just also hurts that much worse because of that. "She used it as a bookmark. Gave it to a kid in port in London." London where his sister's honeymoon would have started. Lestat might know that too. He's got no idea.
Eyes still shut, Lestat sniffs definitively before he says, quiet and between them, "We should hang it up."
Louis isn't sure he's referred to the two of them as "we" since he realized Louis wasn't there to hurt him. Their past selves, the two and three of them, they were "we", but starting from the moment Lestat could not hurl it at him as ammunition, everything was "you" and "I." They were a single entity once: "Finally, there's Louis and Lestat", "And Louis and Lestat said—", "Ask Louis and Lestat". Louis is hearing it as one word in Tom Anderson's voice, of all things, which just proves the point how long it's been since they were anything more than Louis, and Lestat. Which is when Louis gets it.
"That's what's in the bag," Louis explains to himself, leaning back. Ears ringing.
"It's gotten a little wet sometimes, over the years. Dirt and the like." Lestat's voice cracks on the last word, but he's hurrying ahead already. "But I took care of it, even in the tower. When Santiago dropped it on me, it was only in the water for a moment."
Ears still ringing. He has a half incoherent thought that this is what it must feel like to find a Klimt in someone's attic. It's not happiness, but it's something like it, and it's a bright amount of feeling that Louis hasn't felt in far too long, and frankly he can't be bothered to pretend he doesn't feel it.
Because for the first time since her death, there is more of Claudia in the world now than there was the day before.
He understands without question why Lestat never opened the bag. If Louis touched it now, saw it for the first time in seventy-seven years, he would collapse and stay there until his bones eroded into nothing. And he's still alit with gratitude, eyes shut against the light, short breaths interspersed with shorter kisses to random corners of Lestat's face.
There were times, following the dreadful tour group around Bourbon Street, where Louis was caught on the flagstones, reflecting Lestat's shoes and Claudia's laughter as they walked boldly home through the night after a play, Lestat skipping ahead to re-perform favorite lines for her amusement. And it stung, the way it would have had the reminder come even a day before. But he saw the beauty of it too, and the clarity of its happiness rang through so strongly that for a moment, he was glad for the memory. They had been happy, and in that moment it was enough. Just as that fact would have to be enough now.
Lestat has had the truth of what happened to Claudia for decades longer than Louis's matter of hours, but the fact that they haven't talked in seventy-seven years—in eighty-two, in longer, frankly—means that there's a lot he can share. He can do for Lestat what was just done for him: that happiness otherwise unattainable, the memory of a better feeling.
"I have her diaries," Louis says, calm. "All of them." Their noses align perfectly. He doesn't have to speak above a murmur, so he doesn't. "You can read some. You should."
It isn't said to be cruel. It's not even a thought of either of their minds. They can't be anymore, not when it comes to her. Reality is cruel enough, and it took Daniel putting it into words for him for Louis to realize that things like her diaries don't have to be just symbols of the inevitable failure that followed. So much of Claudia's life was overshadowed by its end—what happened to her, what they did—of course in hindsight but even at the time. But not all of it, Louis realized as he flipped through the first few years: years of ribbons and laughter and carrying her on their backs at the end of the night. There are moments in Claudia's words that are simply good, and those can be real too. They are proof of that too.
Lestat doesn't understand that yet. But maybe Louis can show him. Maybe that's why he still hasn't walked away, despite remaining certain in his decision to stay alone, to find who he is. Or maybe it's just too hard to leave Lestat—it always has been, in the past.
"It's okay," Louis says again. "I know. But it's okay."
"She is with me... every day. And still I miss her."
"I know, baby. Exactly. That's... exactly." The sun is still far from rising, but his pulse sways at the words in the exact same way it does right before dawn. He is a unique kind of tired but he stays on his feet until Lestat leans back first. Then he nods and opens the lid of the coffin.
Even once Lestat turns the last light off, the city outside is more than bright enough for them to see. Which means it's more than enough to watch Lestat by. When Louis was human, there was something about looking at Lestat. It was looking more than looking: an experience above and beyond the norm. When he looked at Lestat, he saw only Lestat. After he was turned, he thought it was because part of him knew then that Lestat was something other than human, tying up his mind; then the maker, fledgling bond, kept him drawn to Lestat. But it was never any of that. He just loved to look at him. He loved when Lestat saw him.
So now Louis sits in the top half of the coffin and waits for Lestat to follow him. And he waits until Lestat is meeting his eyes without trepidation—tucks his hair behind his ears first, just to make sure they can see each other completely—to say, "I missed you."
The night, bright; the coffin, open; the words, certain. Though they will be touching, they are not just then. For a very long time, Louis worried he would never be able to recognize the real Lestat again: that he would always see, first and foremost, the shade he'd been haunted by for longer than he knew the real thing. But he knows now when he touches Lestat's hand, it will feel like his hand, because nothing else has ever felt like it. And he trusts the knowledge so much that it is enough to know it's real, and so to clearly set aside the horror of their romance for the moment to make it clear that no matter what, he cares for Lestat. His forever husband, sealed with the kiss of life on a bloody altar. If they ever could have separated, that time was gone.
Louis lies down first so that when Lestat cries, he'll do so down into Louis's plain black shirt, black coffin lining. Lestat doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. All he has to do is crawl forward into Louis's arms and bring the coffin lid down with him. His soft clothes stay clean. The rest will wait for sunset.
‡
(The air in the coffin is as humid as Louis remembers. He smells Lestat's blood and hair and realizes his memory has not drifted an inch. They talk for long enough that it almost doesn't hurt, exhaustion taking the pain out of the words, leaving only the exchange of secrets. The two words he says the most in that coffin are "Lestat" and "love", past, present, and future tense. Lestat was, Lestat is, Lestat will be. When Louis sleeps, he dreams about New Orleans and knows he's already there, and that it will be waiting for him when he rises.)