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As soon as Louis had heard the conductor scream, he knew there was only one way Lestat could have caught up with the night train in spite of their significant headstart, and he also knew that same method would be required if they were to return to Rue Royale before sunrise. And yet, he had still begun trembling as soon as his feet left the ground, as if he had not known what was coming, as if it had been a great surprise after all.
Vampires did not get sick in the way humans did, not from illness and certainly not from fear—what did a vampire have to fear, after all?—but Louis nevertheless recognised the nausea that wracked his body from the night of his turning, his mother's hard expression, the sound of flesh smashed into stone. Phantom sickness, real terror. He recognised the cold, too—he hasn't been cold in a long while, just like he has so rarely been warm, besides those few hours after eating human, when his body almost remembers what it was to live again. The last time he was cold like this–
He trembles, but nothing else. He can't protest. He can't speak. Not since Lestat came into the carriage where he and Claudia were hidden, every step precise, and announced that unless Louis returned with him, he'd tear their girl limb from limb and leave what was left of her out for the sun to burn to ash.
Next to him, Claudia had shook her head no, her red eyes pleading, but Louis knew from the timbre in his voice it was not an empty threat. He'd stood up, and that had been that.
Claudia had screamed after them as they rose up in the air, her voice in his head a long screech of denial and fight you gotta and I'll catch you I will I’ll catch you and if you let him do this now then he'll make sure you never–
Louis has never been good at blocking his thoughts—he's never needed to be, except for during those first clumsy years of sneaking into Lestat’s coffin before Claudia had developed her own mental shields, and he's certain he screwed that up more than a couple times—but when her cries are cut off halfway through a thought, he realises what he must have done.
Or, no. He realises some time after, applies logic to the sequence of events after, but in the moment he is consumed entirely by memory, terrible memory, the reality of unfathomable pain and his present situation, the hyperawareness of the way Lestat gripped him tight now but any moment, any moment he could let go, and Louis would be helpless to do anything but wish he'd die, like the first (second) time.
In the moment, he thinks nothing of it. In the moment, he thinks nothing.
The train to New York had travelled at a dizzying sixty miles per hour, and Lestat had intercepted them in a little under two. Louis can't measure how long they're in the air, petrified as he is, but it's far quicker on the return journey: the sun is still safely hidden when he's once more on solid ground, and he means on the ground literally, on his hands and knees. When he first felt something firm beneath his feet after an eternity of suspension his knees immediately buckled, leaving him sprawled in the dirt and gasping for air he didn't need.
Slowly, slowly, function returns—to his limbs, to his thoughts. Claudia, he thinks, Claudia first, for what little comfort that is, and then: Lestat. Lestat. Lestat, Lestat–
Lestat is looking at him coldly when he raises his head, his eyes black and flat like onyx. Louis swallows. "Lestat, I..."
"Inside."
It's a command, not a request, and Louis finds himself obeying without thinking: it's a relic of a bygone age, from when he was mortal and his father’s favoured son. He steps into the hallway and nearly falls, supernatural reflexes barely saving him from falling down a second time—something dark and slick is pooled on the parquet floor. He knows what the substance is instantly, his fangs aching with want despite the fact the blood is old and surely poisoned with death if Lestat left it. He can't see the source, but they're likely already in the incinerator: Lestat does know how to clean up after himself. How to clean up after a kill, at least.
Lestat scruffs him by the back of his neck firmly and pushes him forward, steers him further into the house and Louis' body just goes, weak as a kitten. By the time they reach the front hall, Louis has gathered a few shreds of resistance—all of them a delayed reaction to Claudia’s last command, only now processed—and tries to stop walking, shoes squeaking against the floorboards, but it makes no difference: Lestat simply levitates them up the stairs, and Louis goes limp again, even though the drop would barely give a human a bruise, let alone a vampire.
He half expects the coffin room to be as bloodsoaked as Lestat, as downstairs, but it isn’t: it looks much like it has every night for the past three years, now that it once more has two occupants, not one. Lestat’s shoes are lined up along the one wall, Louis’ robe hangs from the hook on the door: when the wall is turned and the bed swings into view, it could belong to a man and a woman, mortal and married.
The door locks.
Lestat releases him, or he kicks free: he doesn’t know how, but the hand is gone from his nape and he’s putting space between them, putting the coffin between them, and the sense of deja vu as he looks at Lestat’s red-splashed skin is enough to unbalance him further than the flight already did. “Don’t,” he says as firmly as he’s able, holding a hand out, as if there is anything Louis could ever do to stop his Maker advancing. “Don’t.”
The other vampire does not react at all at first, only crooking his head to one side and studying Louis like one might a particularly complex knot. And then, after a little eternity, says in a hushed voice: “It wasn’t her, was it?”
Louis blinks. “What?”
“Clau-di-a,” Lestat enunciates every syllable. Louis flinches at the sound of it. “Our darling daughter. I confess, I believed the worst of her. I thought she threatened you with something—being cut off from her forever, perhaps, or some act of violence against me—but no, no. It was you. I thought too little of her, and too much of you, mon cher.” In his mouth, the endearment sounds like a curse.
It shouldn’t hurt, Louis knows, nothing Lestat says should hurt him now, but something in him cracks a little all the same. “You thought too much of yourself,” Louis responds, masking the quiver in his voice as best he can on reflex. “Always did.”
Lestat’s face is blank of everything, but his dark eyes latch on Louis’ own, locked as tightly as a prisoner’s chain. “You left me.”
Louis swallows. “I shoulda left you decades ago.”
“You left me.” Lestat steps towards the head of the coffin, and Louis steps back to keep the space between them, even though they both know that if Lestat wants to catch him then he will. “You left our home, our coffin—you left your things, all of them: your clothes, your books, your photographs. Every gift I ever gave you. I thought surely, surely you would not leave everything behind, not willingly, and I was wrong. Is it all so easily discarded? Am I so easily discarded?”
He’s not shouting, but he’s gotten loud, his accent thickening with every sentence until he may as well not be speaking English at all. Still, Louis understands. Louis wishes he did not understand.
“Don’t,” he repeats, and it’s only by the grace of God that his voice doesn’t break. “Don’t act like you only ever gave.”
“I gave you a gift!”
“A gift,” Louis laughs. It surprises him as much as it does Lestat. “Sure, sure. A gift. Did it feel like a gift, when Magnus–”
A crash, and Lestat’s on him again, pinning him down against the lacquered floorboards, his forearm crushing his windpipe so the words won’t come. Louis doesn’t need the air: he laughs again, this time not quite silent but a rasping noise, like bone grinding against bone.
“You go too far, you go too far–! I have been too lenient, too accommodating if you think this is something you can speak on, if you think there is any resemblance between him and I! For all your moping these past years, I asked and you accepted—you accepted, Louis!” Whatever Louis expects of him as his eyes grow wilder and his expression more twisted, it is not the biting, open-mouthed kiss that he receives: he has forgotten himself, Louis thinks for a second as the arm on his neck pulls away, almost superior, only to realise that he is instinctively kissing back like he has a hundred-thousand times before.
I love you, Lestat…
Louis wrenches himself backward in a belated attempt to disengage, but Lestat goes with him, does not allow even an inch of separation: his clawlike nails are points of pressure on the back of Louis’ scalp and shoulders, his thighs caging Louis’ own tightly together, and his mouth–
It is only out of desperation that Louis changes tactics, and pushes up against Lestat’s body with all the rough enthusiasm of that first night they’d spent together, battling for dominance so feverishly they might break the bed. That’s all it is, desperation. But there is no bed, there’s no Lily, there’s no warmth and no forgiveness and no forgetting: there’s his fangs piercing the flesh of Lestat’s gum, there’s the smooth slide of marbled skin against marbled skin, there’s blood and blood and blood.
How could this not be enough, how could he not be enough?
I love you too.
“You took,” he tries to say into Lestat’s mouth, but the words are stolen away, eaten whole by Lestat’s lovely, terrible lips. “You took,” he snarls, and there’s a crack as he headbutts him hard enough that they both see stars. “You took my life! You took my family! You took my home—my body—my daughter–”
He’s aware that his fists are doing no damage as they pound against Lestat’s chest, and it’s weakness, his own weakness, and not from the hunger.
“No,” Lestat denies, catching Louis’ one wrist, hoisting it up in the air like he’s a prizefighter in the cage. “Non, that is not it.” His words are those of someone that doesn’t care, but Louis can feel—something. The most something he’s felt through the bond Lestat so loves to speak of in a long, long time. His words are those of someone that doesn’t care. Louis should’ve learned by now to listen to what Lestat says, not how he says it.
Louis can only describe the sound that comes out of him as a howl. “What else do you want?! What else do you want! You took it all! You told me–” He chokes on tears, on blood, on humiliation.
“There,” Lestat snatches his other wrist and holds them together with one large palm, and Louis can’t even find the pride to try and get away. There’s no one to see his shame, at least. The stars and the planets are blindfolded. “There, that—what did I tell you, mon cher? What has so offended you, what words were said to send you scurrying away, a thief in the night?”
“I di’nt take nothin’ from you.”
“Au contraire,” and with his free hand Lestat pushes Louis’ chin up, up until there’s no way to avoid his violet gaze. “You would have stolen away my most precious treasure. I must know what your foolish, thoughtless Lestat said, to make you leave him.”
Louis turns his head away, staring at the skirting board instead, the part where the grain of the wood resembles an abstract face, wailing in anguish. Lestat makes an unhappy noise, but does not drag his face back: for a minute, a lifetime, they sit there together in silence, tangled together on the floor. The only interruptions are Lestat’s repeated, murmured pleas for Louis to tell him, tell him what he said, so he might make it right. As if he could. As if anything Louis said now would change anything at all. So Louis says nothing, hyperaware of how the side of his face is warmed by the heat of Lestat’s gaze, and hating that the thump-thump of their synced pulses eventually becomes the only sound in the world, but never quite enough to pull away.
He doesn’t know what makes Lestat lose patience. Perhaps he saw that Louis had begun to drift, away from the room, away from the skirting board and the good rug and his own dead body, or perhaps he simply grew impatient. He was likely impatient. He had certainly gotten to his feet with a put-upon sigh, the sound being the only warning Louis had before he found himself hoisted up into unyielding arms and just as soon deposited on the bed that had once been Claudia’s—still in the pink silk of childhood, as she’d taken a new room when she’d returned home, leaving the shrine to Louis’ estranged child untouched.
It was all I had left of you, he’d told Claudia through his battered windpipe when she’d found it that way, six years on: lotsa dust and no small amount of damage from the fight, but still hers, time capsule from when she was his, please don’... please…
He could’ve spoken in her mind, of course. Would’ve been a hell of a lot easier. But then she might not have taken pity. Then she might’ve taken it away, and he would’ve been even more broken than he’d already been.
She’d taken pity. But since then, Louis hasn’t come back all that often. It’s enough to know it’s there, to know she’s there. And now he’s here, but so is Lestat, and it’s all wrong–
“No,” Louis protests, hands making fists on the sheets and nails piercing the pretty princess fabric, “no, not here, please not here.”
“I would take you to our bed,” Lestat says shortly, atop him, thighs a cage, “but I fear if left unattended for as long as it took for the walls to change, you might run away again, hm? Such a good little housewife, to make sure we always have one—bed—spare.” He rolls his hips on the last three words, and Louis’ traitorous cock is half-hard already, conditioning after so many years of Lestat meaning want and release and touch, and please please please.
“Not here,” Louis pushes at him, squirms like a worm on a hook, “Lestat no, no. Not here, not here.”
“What did I say?” Lestat’s rocking them and the bed both, and Louis hates him, hates him, hates himself, because he did this, he did. Him and his fucking weakness, him and his fucking love. “Mon cher, what did I tell you? What must I do to regain your regard? You are my everything, my companion, my own heart–”
“You a fuckin’ liar!” Louis roars, surging up. “You a fuckin’ liar, and always were! You told me I was it for you, told me—told me I had no twin, remember? Remember?!”
“Not…a lie,” Lestat chokes out, and that’s the first time Louis realises he’s got his hands round Lestat’s throat, that they’re not on the bed anymore, that now he’s the one pinning Lestat against the wall by the neck. “You…are…”
“I could bear it,” Louis snarls, through blood tears, “when I thought you did it for love, for me. When you said—said that I was the only one you wanted. When I thought I was enough, but– I wasn’t, ever. Ever.”
“You are, you always have been–”
“Don’t! Fucking! Lie!” He pulls Lestat to him, and then sharply away again once, twice, thrice. The sound of bone and flesh pulverising brickwork isn’t as soothing as he’d hoped. “You lasted what, six, seven years into eternity, before you got bored? Seven, seven fuckin’ years! Before you wanted your variety more than you wanted me—and I took it! I took it! I fucking took it! Even when you shoved her in my face, in our home, I took it, even when you spied on me, lied to me, cheated me–” Suddenly disgusted, Louis snatches his hands away, leaves Lestat panting against the blood-smeared wallpaper. “You know what you did. You know.”
“Ancient history…” Lestat mumbles something else, too, that Louis doesn’t catch.
“I shoulda left when I said I would,” Louis says, knowing it's the truth. “I shoulda stayed away. Shoulda– taken her to a hospital, shoulda let her burn. Shoulda burned with her. But you said you loved me an’ I believed you. I thought it was enough, thought I could make it enough. Ten thousand nights, a hundred thousand nights… I fooled myself into thinking that as long as you kept coming back to me, it didn’t matter. After all you said it was only me, right? Right?”
Amazingly, infuriatingly, Lestat is still talking, even now, even if his words were running together like he was trying to say four things at once. “I meant it, do it—je t’aime, never not–”
“Then why’d you turn her?”
Lestat falls silent, stares. And then, just as Louis is feeling the slightest grain of satisfaction to have finally, finally shut him up: “...because you asked me to.”
Louis’ emotions swing violently between fury and mania. “Because I–” he echoes, then spits, jabbing a clawed finger into Lestat’s unprotected chest: “You think I’m talkin’ about Claudia?!”
The penny finally drops. Lestat’s eyes widen, enough that Louis can see the whites all the way around the iris, but there’s no apology there, no shame: “Antoinette?” Lestat says, in a voice of apparent bewilderment. “...Antoinette. This is about Antoinette?” And then, hateful devil he is, he begins to laugh.
It’s too much. It’s too much.
“Fuck you!” Louis’ throat aches he shouts so loud. “–this about you—this about you and me! This about you lying, always, always fuckin’ lying! About you hurting—hurting Claudia, breaking every promise you ever made me, her, about–"
"Oh Louis," and Lestat's anger seems to have transformed into something almost giddy. "Mon amour, mon cher—you can't seriously be saying you left because of her, because you were throwing a tantrum over an insignificant dalliance–"
"Insig–? YOU TURNED HER!" Louis bellows. To his horror, he realises he's crying, and what he'd wanted to be a shout of rage alone comes out hoarse and anguished. He pulls back his fist and punches at Lestat's face, his perfect fucking face, but his Maker blurs and his hand ends up buried in the wall. He wrenches it out, spins only to find himself caged into the corner by Lestat's long limbs. "You—fucking—you turned her!"
He's not smiling now, at least. Louis can tell that much through the blood tears, but little else.
"You killed me, you killed me, you made me a–a monster—my brother died, Lestat! My brother died and you killed me rather than let me grieve! My brother died, and my mother—and Grace, Grace is gone, Lestat, she's still alive but she's gone, she left, she left me! I ain't got no family, you took 'em. And what you gave—she was our baby, Lestat, you remember? You gotta. She was our baby, ours, and you fuckin' ran her out first chance you got, you put your hands on her, put your hands on me and I came back—I fuckin' came back! I came back because you said–"
I love you, Louis. You are loved.
"–you a liar, you always been a liar, and I believed you anyway because if I accepted you were a liar it meant you coulda lied 'bout all of it, about me, about her, about—was it ever me? Or were you just, just lonely, after a hundred years asleep—could you not wait for someone you actually wanted–?"
"Louis," Lestat sounds different now. "Louis, no, mon cher–"
"Ten-thousand nights, a hundred-thousand—with her! With her, now and always! You think I don't know where you go, who you going to?"
Lestat's accent is thicker than ever, words running into each other in dizzy circles. "No, non, you've misunderstood, my love, my heart, elle n'est rien–" He's trying to touch Louis' face, cup his cheek, and Louis won't let him, can't let him: not this time, never again.
"Don't lie to me, don't! I heard you, I heard you say it–"
"Please, no, Louis, she means nothing–!"
"She's forever," Louis' voice breaks. "You think I'm too stupid to figure that out? Whatever love you gave me—whatever it was you gave me, you gave her too. I'm not special. I was just first."
Saying it aloud feels a lot like ripping his own heart out, but not really. He could at least heal from that.
"No, no, it is not the same, it was never the–" Lestat is frantic, hysterical, a whirlwind of excuses; next to him, across from him, away, finally away from him, Louis is still, weighed down by his truth.
He nods heavily, resigned. "Yeah. Yeah, you got that right. You—you let her live for twenty years, Lestat, but you couldn't give me one more goddamn day. Which one of those sounds like a quick balm for loneliness, and which one sounds like love?"
"I do not love her!" Lestat insists, and it seems almost funny now that it's all laid out, the denial. There's nobody else to pretend for anymore. "I do not, I have not, I will never—it's always been you, my Saint Louis, since the first time I saw you, only ever you–"
"I heard you," Louis says, tired. "I heard you say it." And then, before Lestat can interrupt with another empty protest: "But maybe you're actually telling the truth. Maybe you don't love her. But you said it to her, and you said it to me, and whatever's true—if any of it ever was—you a liar. You always have been."
By some miracle, his tears have stopped, and he tries to push out of the cage of Lestat's arms, but he’s immovable, like the trunk of a thousand year old tree, and Louis is so, so tired. "Let me go," he shoves at his confining limbs hard, harder, knowing the very action is useless. Lestat's a hundred years his elder, and has fed recently, fed human. Still, he pushes. If he just gives up then he bared his soul for nothing, like he did everything else for the last thirty years for nothing. "Just—lemme go, Lestat, you don't want me, you haven't wanted me for–"
"I want you," Lestat says, no longer content just to trap Louis with his body, but instead pulling him close, until Louis can feel the pounding of his black heart through his clothes, still in time with his own. "I've always wanted you. I'll never stop wanting you. I love you, Louis."
"Don't," Louis says hoarsely, feeling like he swallowed a dozen needles at once. "Just—don't."
"You are the love of my life," Lestat continues.
"Stop it, this is cruel. You're being cruel."
"I will never let go. It isn't possible. I love you. I love you. You are a part of me, the best part of me, the only part that makes me wish for a longer eternity."
"You're an asshole," Louis snaps, turning his face away so he doesn’t need to look in Lestat’s lying face, and then when that doesn’t provoke any kind of reaction: "You’re a monster. You don't need me, you did just fine without me for a hundred an' fifty years—you only want me cause suddenly I'm not gon’ be here anymore, just like before–"
"It's you. It's always been you. Even before I knew you, before you were born, it was you. Louis, my Louis."
"You replaced me. You replaced me. You have your companion, and it isn't me, so just let me go and stop this fuckin’–"
"I'll kill her," Lestat murmurs. "I'll kill her for you, mon cher."
Louis tries to disguise the shudder—the thrill of what could be hope or desire or something else he should know better than to feel.
“You had your chance,” he tries to keep his voice even, because he can’t do this again, he can’t. “You made your choice. You chose her.”
“It isn’t even a choice,” his Maker denies, bending his head forward so Louis can feel the outline of his lips against his neck. He’s so warm. He’s so alive. He’s so convincing, for a dead thing, mimicking its unfortunate prey. Perhaps he’ll even squeeze out a few blood tears, to really sell it.
“Then you shoulda chose different.”
“I am,” Lestat insists. “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her.”
“Heard that before.”
“I’ll kill her,” he repeats, like a prayer for absolution. “For you, mon cher, I’d do anything.”
Louis swallows, pictures it. The way it should’ve been, more than twenty years ago—Antoinette Brown, nothing more than charred bone and burnt meat.
He hadn’t even hated her back then, not really, for all that he would’ve happily seen her dead for the way Lestat’s hand had fit against the small of her back: a human falling in love with Lestat was something that was more likely to elicit his pity than his loathing.
Being in love with Lestat wasn’t her crime anymore than it was his. But surviving him–
“I don’t believe you.” Louis replies, just a second too late to maintain his position—immediately, jubilantly, Lestat is covering his face and neck in kisses fast and hard. “I don’t believe you,” he says again, firmer, but Lestat gives no reaction to the denial, instead interlacing their fingers with exaggerated movements, nipping at every digit before laying kisses there too.
When he looks up and their eyes meet, there’s a kind of mania in eyes, a wildness that makes Louis’ nape prickle. “I’ll do anything,” he says, soft and dangerous. “Anything.”
He wouldn’t, of course. This is Lestat. There is plenty he won’t do for Louis, that he’s proven himself incapable of: drinking animal blood, keeping to one bed, loving their daughter the way she needs to be loved. But Louis does, despite himself, believe this: he’ll kill Antoinette.
He’ll kill Antoinette. He’s going to kill Antoinette.
Is it enough?
Claudia is—gone. She’s smart, she’s strong, and she’s not stupid: coming back for him would be stupid. She’s in the wind, she’s underground, she’s—lost, but only for now. Not forever. Even Lestat can’t hold a grudge forever. And when Antoinette is gone, maybe… maybe…
Is it enough? Is he enough?
Lover, murderer, maker.
“You make another one an’ I’ll fuckin’ kill you,” Louis snarls before smashing their mouths together in nothing so tame as a simple kiss. “I mean it, mon cher. I’ll tear your heart outta your chest with my teeth, eat it slow before I cut your head clean off.”
“I’d let you,” Lestat gasps into the hollow of his throat, wrecked, like he thinks he actually means it. “If I’m not with you, it’s not—I’m not–”
“And then I’ll leave,” Louis hisses, wicked and honest: “I’ll leave your corpse to rot in the sun. Alone.”
“You’ll never leave me again,” Lestat growls, bites down. Louis can’t control his reaction—to the claim, the need, the words, the violence, the monster, the lover. A raw, wanting noise, wrung not from his chest but his very soul: the thing that Lestat held as surely as he did Louis’ body, and twice as tight.
After that, he finds himself beyond words, but it doesn’t matter: the bargain is struck, sealed. Blood for blood, like it began.