Chapter Text
There is someone in Louis’ fortress. He knows this before he sees the intruder, because there is the distinct sound of someone scraping the wooden boards. Louis knows the sound well because last summer he and Paul had carved their initials on the highest place they could reach on the back wall.
Paul is likely the reason for the intrusion, Louis thinks vexedly as he picks up his bat from underneath his bed, because he keeps leaving the window facing the side yard unlocked for all sorts of critters and little rodents to come right in. It’s one of the reasons he isn’t allowed in Louis’ fortress very often, the other being that he’s a big old tattletale and if he were to see whatever animal that Louis is about to find having crawled its way inside, he’ll be running to tell momma faster than flash.
Gracie isn’t allowed entrance at all, on account of being three years old, a girl, and a total crybaby.
Louis sighs, braces himself, and pushes aside the small wooden bookshelves hiding the wicket door behind.
The last time a rat had sneaked in through a rain pipe, momma had come close to locking the entrance completely and disallowing Louis from ever playing there again. It had taken Louis a whole week of begging and getting daddy on his side to convince her to change her mind. To salvage his fortress. And so, as scared as he is to face whatever is there, a strange sense of resolve fills him as he wriggles through the crawl space and into the hidden room.
With quiet, slow movements, he raises his bat, but the nervous quick glance around reveals no rats—or squirrels, or raccoons, or, God forbid, a big old skunk!
Louis lowers his bat and wonders if he’s imagined the noise after all, until a flash of yellow catches his eye—right there, on top of the cupboard daddy had built for him where Louis keeps his favorite toys. He quickly raises the bat again with shaking hands, his breath catching in his lungs. Louis' mentally listing all the rodents daddy has taught him—capybaras, chinchillas, rats, lemmings, and the one with the funny name that Louis can’t now remember. Except none of them are yellow. He contemplates running away, then, faced with this unknown, and calling daddy instead. But then the figure moves—up, up, and up, until a pair of wide blue eyes are peeking up at him from behind the cupboard.
Louis blinks. Not a rodent or critter at all.
“Hello?” Louis says, tilting his head.
The blue eyes get even wider then, blink once, and then quickly disappear behind the cupboard once more. Louis lowers the bat as the boy rises slowly and faces him.
“Who’re you?” Louis asks.
He's only a little bit taller than Louis, he thinks.
The boy is quiet as he fidgets with the hem of his t-shirt, baggy and too big on him, with letters and a logo on it that are far too worn and faded for Louis to decipher. There’s a big bandaid on his cheek that also looks too big for his face and his blond hair is tousled and messy in a way that would have momma calling him an unkept and wild boy, dragging him back in with a spray bottle and brush.
“Who are you?” Louis repeats.
The boy furrows his weirdly pale brows. “Who are you?” he asks back, and he sounds strange in the way Lily’s parents sound strange when they speak English.
“You first,” Louis says, arms folding in front of him, because this is his fortress, and this boy has entered without permission.
The boy blinks, considering, and then says, “Lestat.”
“Lester?”
“No,” the boy grimaces like Louis' words had been deeply offensive. “Le-stat.”
He says it slooowwly, like Louis is stupid, and Louis doesn’t like that very much, so he scoffs and says, “what sorta’ name is that?”
The boy pouts and folds his arms too. “It is mine.”
“How’d you get in here?”
Lestat points a finger at the window to the far left of the room where he’s left it wide open on his way in. Paul isn't gonna be allowed in here for at least a month, Louis decides. He briefly considers barring him access for forever, but then he might go complaining to momma, and then Louis won't be allowed in here either.
And that won’t do.
Louis sighs. “I’m Louis De Pointe Du Lac,” he announces, because even though this boy is an intruder, momma always says it’s proper to formally introduce oneself.
Lestat’s eyebrows raise. “Es-tu français?”
“Non,” Louis says, surprised to hear the French. He focuses very very hard to piece the right order of words together. “Mais je parle français.”
Lestat gapes a bit, eyebrows raising. He says some more things in rapid French, so fast that Louis has to stop him and ask him to slow down.
“Why are you here?” Lestat asks slowly and in English instead.
Louis sighs. This boy must either be stupid or rude. “This is my fortress,” he says, chin raised high.
“Forest?” Lestat repeats in that funny way that he speaks, eyebrows furrowing.
Louis rolls his eyes. He doesn’t know the word in French and doesn’t really care to remember. “This,” he says instead, making a wide motion with his arm at the room around them, “is mine.”
Lestat pouts and shrugs. “I didn’t see your name on it,” he says in French.
This boy is both stupid and rude, Louis decides.
“That’s my house, right there,” Louis points towards the door leading to his bedroom and house. Well, it’s his parents’ house, technically, but it’s where he lives! “And this,” Louis points around again, putting a firm and final foot down, “is mine.”
Lestat frowns in turn, and points in the direction of the opened window, “ma maison.”
Louis is momentarily confused until he thinks, Oh, this boy must be with the new family that had moved into the next door neighbor’s guest house who had “an ostentatious amount of furniture for people who were renters.” Or so momma had said, peeking out the window with a dissatisfied eyebrow raised. Daddy had tsked and said, “Now, now, Florence, remember Matthews 7:1."
Louis isn’t sure what ‘ostentatious’ means, but he thinks maybe Lestat is ostentatious for breaking into his fortress without permission.
“That’s rude,” he says, instead, because he doesn’t think Lestat is smart enough to know what ‘ostentatious’ is and Louis’ not sure if he’ll pronounce it right. “You have to ask permission before entering.”
Lestat frowns, eyes roaming around the room as though properly seeing it for the first time—the big tent that daddy had moved here that Gracie no longer played with—it was stupidly pink, but Louis had allowed it in place of having no tent at all—the little green toy soldiers lining the bookshelves holding his and Paul’s books, the small storage containers packed to the brim with the family ski equipment.
“C'est vraiment tout à toi?” Lestat mumbles.
“Oui,” says Louis, “see there,” he points at the wall by the flat mattress, “those are my initials. Mine and my lil’ brother’s.”
“Oh.” Lestat looks down at the small piece of metal in his hands that Louis is just now noticing and that momma and daddy would never let him keep around, and then back at the space behind the cabinet where he had been sitting. Small carved out gashes line the wooden floor where they didn’t used to. That must have been where the noise had come from, Louis figures. When Lestat notices that Louis has caught sight of them, he looks down at the untied shoelaces of his Converse and blushes.
“Désolé,” he mumbles, “I did not know it was your… fotes. ”
And Louis can’t help it, the giggle that bursts out of him at the way he says the word. “For-tress,” he corrects in between bouts of laughter. Lestat grimaces, his blush deepening with embarrassment or anger, hands clenching at his sides, and then he's quickly making it for the window he'd come from.
Or he tries to, because when he takes a step, he suddenly stops, makes a pained noise, and kneels down on the floor.
Louis stops laughing. “What’s wrong?” he asks, “are you hurt?”
Lestat doesn’t answer, just keeps sitting with his head bowed down holding on to his knee. His hair is so long and messy that it’s fully covering his face, so Louis kneels down and peeks his head in under the cascade to take a look at him upside down. “What’s wrong?” he asks again, Lestat’s hair tickling his nose. Tears are streaming down his cheeks, and one of them drips down on Louis face as he watches him.
Louis waits and sits with him for some time and Lestat stays quiet for so long that Louis decides that maybe he doesn’t like talking very much at all. So he inspects himself.
Lestat’s legs are skinny and pale like the rest of him, except that one of his knees looks bigger and redder than the other.
“Did you fall?” Louis asks. He pokes a finger at the knee where it's red and then feels bad when Lestat’s head shoots up and he winces. “Sorry,” Louis quickly says, “does it hurt very much?”
Lestat just pouts, so Louis tries in French, “Es tu tombe?” but that just seems to make him even more upset. More tears slip down his cheeks. Lestat angrily wipes away at them and hides his face behind his hair again.
Now that Louis is really seeing—and not so mad anymore at Lestat’s rude intrusion of his fortress—he thinks his cheeks had been blotchy from the start and his eyes red like Gracie’s get after a very loud meltdown at the zoo.
Louis frowns. “Est-ce que ça fait mal?”
Lestat shakes his head no.
He must be embarrassed about falling then, Louis decides. Louis understands. A few weeks ago he had sprinted so fast towards the back door trying to get to the pool that he’d ripped right through the mesh screen and then down he’d gone right on his face. Paul had laughed and laughed at him for a good ten minutes and so Louis decides not to laugh at Lestat now. He tells him about his fall instead, shows him the little cut on his left cheek that’s almost fully healed and that daddy had said wouldn’t scar—and that even if it did, it would make Louis look very cool and manly. Lestat doesn’t respond, still, but when Louis reenacts the collision a sudden loud laugh bursts out of him that has his cheeks reddening one moment and smiling shyly the next.
His bottom tooth is missing. Louis shows him the one on his top row that’s all wiggly and weak and that Lestat confirms when Louis lets him touch it with a tentative finger.
“Paul says they’ll have to pull it out with a string,” Louis tells him solemnly. “Paul's my lil’ brother," he clarifies. He gives the tooth another wiggle, “that sounds scary, don’t it?” he confesses.
“Oui,” Lestat says, worriedly.
Louis sighs and tells him about when he noticed it start moving after taking a bite of an apple, and that he hopes Paul is lying or wrong about the string since he’s a whole year younger than Louis and so not as smart, and had Lestat’s momma and daddy ever had to pull his tooth out with a string?
They sit for some time, cross-legged on the wooden floor, and though Lestat doesn’t confess to him how he’s fallen like Louis does, he’s at least stops crying. They play with the green toy soldiers and talk. Or Louis talks, mostly, but Louis doesn’t mind it very much because he likes talking and Lestat listens well. He tells Lestat about the fortress, about Gracie and the ugly pink tent in the middle of the room, and how he and Paul had climbed on a tall chair to engrave their initials onto the wall and almost fallen in the process, and does Lestat have a fortress in his house?
From time to time, Lestat gets confused, so Louis has to stop and think hard and say things in French instead until he understands. And then eventually Lestat starts talking too and he says some words wrong again, but Louis tries hard not to laugh at him in case he cries again and because momma says it's rude and unbecoming. One time, he'd been grounded for a whole week because he'd giggled when Lily's momma had said stars instead of stairs.
Lestat is in the middle of telling Louis about the town he’s from all the way in France with the hard name that Louis can’t pronounce and which makes Lestat laugh in turn, when a voice from somewhere outside calls, “Lestat! Combien de fois dois-je t'appeler?” and Lestat stands so quickly that he winces again. This time, though, he doesn’t cry or lose his footing.
“I have to go now,” he tells Louis.
Lestat’s already climbing out the window before Louis can tell him that, maybe if he asks permission next time, he can come to Louis’ fortress again and play with his new Rock’em Sock’em robot toy.