Chapter Text
The windows had shattered, the wind was whipping in their hair, the sound was overwhelming - and all Louis could think about was how much he wanted to pull Lestat close again. A moment ago, he might have kissed Lestat's cheek - he couldn't remember. Did he do that? He knew that he had buried his nose in the exact spot on Lestat's neck that he used to, that his arms had been clutching him desperately, that their tears had soaked both their collars.
Lestat was exactly as Louis remembered and completely different. Like nothing he expected and achingly familiar at the same time.
Louis desperately tried to catalog all the details, everything familiar and strange about the man in front of him. He was wearing a robe he had owned back in 1910. It looked well-cared for but faded, fraying despite how he must have cared for it. Faded and fraying was also how Lestat himself looked to Louis. His hair was flatter than it should be, he was wearing sweatpants, which just felt wrong, and he moved like he was afraid of the world. It was all too much to process right now.
A robe that old should smell dusty and moldy, and this place didn't look like it had running water. It certainly didn't have a shower, or the kind of big bathtub suited for the long, indulgent baths Lestat used to take - and yet Lestat didn’t smell bad. His scent, which Louis had inhaled as he held him close, was something impossible to describe that had been lost to time and had been close to dragging him back to 1910 and their first nights together. It was something beyond the surface, inherent in his skin and his blood, and memory may be a monster but the feeling of holding Lestat in his arms, being clutched by him in return, smelling him and hearing the hitch in his breath - at that moment memory wasn't a monster. It was another gift.
The last window shattered behind them. Lestat looked away at the sound, breaking Louis out of his helpless contemplation of him. He took a step back, away from the broken glass.
Lestat didn't react, just stood stock-still, shoulders hunched, getting wet from the rain pelting through the windows. Louis suddenly remembered how Armand had compared Lestat to a hurricane only a few days ago.
He had stepped into this house - if you could call it that - with no plan, no thoughts. He knew a hurricane was coming to town, and knew another hurricane was waiting inside.
There had been no choice to make once he knew Lestat was here. He had to check and see if Lestat in any way resembled the man who had lived in his mind for decades. And he had to tell Lestat that he knew the truth now. He owed him that much at least. But most of all, he had wanted to know if Lestat remembered Claudia. If she haunted him as much as she did Louis.
He had not expected anything other than to that. Lestat could have welcomed him in anger, with mocking laughter, with an attempted kiss, with a dagger - none of it would have surprised him. He had expected to walk into Lestat's new life. He had expected to walk into a hurricane. To find Lestat somewhere with a new companion to terrorize and a spree of broken hearts and corpses in his wake. He had imagined it like a daydream he stopped himself from having; another home somewhere blessed with Lestat's booming laugh, where his dress shirts lay strew over every piece of furniture because he never put them on the hanger, where his hair products took over every inch of the vanity. A place where another fledgling pressed him into the wallpaper with bared teeth, annoyed and infatuated in equal measure. Louis had pictured himself walking into that life through an unlocked door and meeting Lestat's eye. Their breaths would catch at the same time. A moment of peace might extend between them. Acceptance, grace given, and then a long walk back, Lestat's eyes turning back to the newer, fresher version of Louis.
Dozens of movies just like that had played behind his eyelids on early evenings; half-caught pastel-colored dreams that faded with the setting of the sun. In all of them, that presence. Lestat: loud, vibrant, warm, dangerous, dismissive. A carping voice, an obnoxious laugh. Expected, wrongly remembered.
This wounded, grieving man who looked so much like he remembered yet was nothing like what he made him out to be in his mind - Louis didn't know what to do with this. This wasn't a hurricane, it was a miserable drizzling cloud.
Another heavy gust of wind blew through the broken windows, making Louis shiver in his wet coat. This wasn’t the time to figure it all out. It was all too much, too soon. Daylight was approaching and suddenly Louis knew he had to leave.
He blinked and looked at Lestat, who was still staring out the window, his hands twisting the sash on his robe. Louis almost stepped closer again, wanting nothing more than to hold Lestat in his arms, tears welling in his eyes at the thought.
He blinked again and now he wanted to run, to go back to his hotel room, lock himself in his coffin and hide, regain his senses away from the visceral presence of him.
He could hear that the hurricane was getting closer. He lived here long enough to know that even vampires were better off finding shelter when it hit.
He had to raise his voice to reach Lestat where he stood only a few feet away, saying, “We should hunker down.”
This place didn't look very sturdy. There was no time to think about what it meant that Lestat lived in a place like this, what it implied for his mental state. Right now, they just had to get through the storm - literally.
He could only focus on the practical right now. “I have a hotel room. You can stay there." He only had one coffin, of course, and the hotel’s curtains would not be be enough to protect from the sun if he took the bed. “The bathroom doesn’t have windows, you can sleep in the bathtub -”
“I’m fine,” Lestat said, still looking outside, mesmerized by the destruction.
“Lestat,” Louis said urgently. “The sun-”
“Yes,” Lestat said, finally looking at him. “Of course. I-” He glanced outside again, more worried now. “I have a coffin in the back room.” He waved a hand. “No windows. Sturdier.” His head whipped back to Louis, like he had a sudden thought. There was a starved look on his face.
Louis didn't think it was blood he was hungry for. He had clutched onto Louis so tight, earlier. Had been so reluctant to let him go.
“We can…share.” Lestat swallowed. “It might be dangerous to go outside.”
Louis felt like he was being split in two between the same starvation he saw in Lestat on the one hand, and his fear and trepidation on the other. He could not remember the last time he wanted something with the intensity that he wanted to keep looking at Lestat, and he also knew that it would be the most fatal mistakes in a long life filled with them to move too fast right now. So no, he could not share a coffin with Lestat.
He needed to do this right. The first steps after leaving Dubai had been easy. Find Lestat to clear the air. Return to New Orleans to remember where he came from. Two birds with one stone, he had hoped, and he had been right. The next moves had not yet revealed themselves, but he knew that he had to take his time. Consider. Build armor to protect himself against falling into bad habits, old mistakes.
Lestat didn't look like a bad habit, though, was the thing. He didn't look like the villain in the nightmares Louis still had. He didn’t look like the smirking seducer who lured him into bed in 1910. He just looked like a man Louis had once loved more than anything, who was now broken and alone. Like he just needed someone to hold him close and talk softly to him while stroking his hair.
Maybe he looked a lot like Louis felt.
He already fell into the well once, crashing into him in desperate shared grief, and he knew he would again. And maybe that was okay, he thought. Knowing there was someone else who remembered Claudia, was haunted by Claudia - that was enough for them to allow themselves comfort in each other.
But sharing a coffin came with so much history, so many nights of long kisses and rare warmth, where they had laid pressed up together, in love. It terrified him, so he was adamant when he said, “No, I’ll go back to the hotel.”
Lestat reached for him then, a hand involuntarily outstretched but no movement beyond that, like every fiber in him wanted to grab Louis and never let go, while resigned that Louis would always want to get away from him.
He saw tears well up in Lestat’s eyes once again. He wanted to touch his face, wipe them away, kiss his cheek.
All that time he spent trying to hate Lestat had been pointless. There was no satisfaction in seeing him cry. It just made Louis feel wretched.
He shook his head. If there were still tears in his eyes, they were being washed away by the rain before Lestat could see them spilling red over his cheeks. "I have to go." He took a step back. "I have to go. I'll come back tomorrow, okay. We can -"
"Louis," Lestat begged, still reaching for him.
"- talk tomorrow. I have to go."
He stepped backwards and then, with a gasp, he took the few steps he had moved away forwards again, bumping into Lestat in his haste en kissing him on the lips, mouth closed, harsh and quick. Lestat didn't react to it, shocked into stillness.
Louis grabbed his shoulders and stared at him. He repeated, "I'm coming back tomorrow."
Lestat still didn't react, just looked back at him. Louis pressed another closed-mouthed kiss to his lips, another to his cheekbone, and then he turned and ran out the door.
Using his vampire speed, he ran to the hotel in less than a minute and made it inside, surprising the bewildered clerk at the desk.
He didn't stop moving until he was safe in his room, in his coffin. There, he lay awake for a long time, listening to the hurricane with one hand pressed to his lips, the other to his heart.
He slept fitfully, dreaming in flashes of memory, flitting from two days ago in Dubai to his childhood in his family home and back again, and woke up cold and unmoored.
He stayed in his room for a bit, reading emails and trying to think, but he felt stuck, restless, and decided to go outside to clear his head.
New Orleans, Louis thought as he left the hotel, might just be the most resilient city in the world.
The storm had died down, but the damage was severe. Large parts of the city had no power, half the houses in the neighborhood had shattered windows or half-collapsed roofs, and whole parts of the city were flooded. But the people continued. Life continued. There was music coming from some of the houses he passed, there were people everywhere lugging supplies around. And it looked like the damage was limited, overall. Nothing like earlier devastation the city had survived.
So much had changed since the forties. And yet so much stayed the same.
Louis, umbrella over his head, bomber jacked zipped up and baseball cap on, slowly walked through the streets for hours. He had impulsively joined a tour when he first arrived two nights ago and seen some of his old haunts, but now he followed the footsteps of his own ghost tour.
He started far out, seeing some of the newer parts of the city that were only swampland in his day, slowly circling closer through the night to the center, and the French Quarter.
In most other cities, he thought, everything would have changed since he was last here. Dubai, for instance. And of course many things did change, but it didn't seem like it in this part of town.
The house he grew up in still existed. There were more buildings around it now, though, and the street was busier. There were hotels and bakeries and many, many museums in the area whereas there used to only be family homes. But still, there it was.
Standing across the street in the rain, hands in his pockets, he watched the ghost of his father appear in the yard. He could hear his heavy steps and the way he would slap the door as he walked through after a day's work.
He saw his mother, chatting to a neighbor on the street in her always impeccable dress, her brooch shining in the afternoon light, her hair twisted back in that severe knot she favored.
He saw his sister, chasing him down the street after the stole her doll and dirtied its dress when he took it out to play in the garden, heard her shrill outraged screams behind him, the patter of her bare feet on the ground.
He saw his brother on the roof.
For the first time in a century, he didn't run from that particular ghost. He let him in. He let himself remember countless evenings up there together, in golden afternoon light and sparkling starlight, arguing and laughing and messing around.
What would Paul think of him now? There was no delusional hope to find in the answer to that question. Even his sister, the most kindhearted of them, who could accept his proclivities enough to gently tease him about Lestat in those early days, had not accepted his monstrous nature. It was a kindness, perhaps, that his brother never saw him with too-bright eyes and too-sharp teeth.
Louis stood there long enough to allow himself to think of his final sunrise, to greet the memory while looking up at the roof. He thought of the other kids that would have climbed up there in the decades since, the workmen who had renovated it. Perhaps other tragedies happened here. Or other small moments of joy.
Eventually, he greeted his own ghost, up there and down here, the human man who tried to please the people who lived here until it nearly destroyed him. Who was never accepted in this house and never would have been, even if he had stayed human. Who carried pain with him every day, so much shame and self hatred that it was a miracle it had not broken his back.
He carried all of them with him still. But they weren't heavy. He no longer resented them for not being able to see him, not being able to love him for who he was. He just loved them. He just carried them.
He took a breath and with the exhale, let his ghost flow free - the scared, lonely human ridden with guilt. The ghost looked back at him, with his big brown eyes and clenched muscles ready for a fight, but Louis just smiled at him, flashing his fangs, and turned away.
He strolled another hour or so through modern streets, until further downtown, he passed a realtor and stopped, looking at the display of property listings.
There were all kinds; small cottages like Lestat's, modern penthouse apartments like the one in Dubai, old colonial houses, townhouses like the one on Rue Royale.
He made a note to make some phone calls later, contact his assistants and book some appointments.
He kept walking, doubling back and retracing his steps, going down one street then another around the French Quarter, the Garden District, back up almost to Tremé. The streets emptied as the night darkened and the wind picked up. By the time Louis passed Jackson Square, any thought of reliving more memories on the benches there was impossible to contemplate. His umbrella had broken apart several streets back. His jacket and pants were soaked, and though the temperature hadn't dropped, the combination of rain and biting wind made him shiver and rub his arms, trying to find some warmth.
The chill was seeping into his bones, and he needed to find a place where he could warm up.
Even right now, with empty streets and dark boarded-up houses, with cold seeping into his bones, New Orleans felt like nothing else. It felt like everything he had avoided for so many years, surrounding himself with muted colors. So alive, so vibrant, so loud. So unlike his life had been.
So much like -
So much like everything he left behind.
He needed to check if it was real. There had been to many moments lately where it became clear just how unreliable his mind could be.
He didn't think he was so far gone that he would have hallucinated entire encounters, but still - the hurricane, the emotional turmoil. He had to be sure.
What he found could barely be called a house anymore. All the windows had shattered, and part of the roof had collapsed, like so many other houses he had passed.
Just like the previous night, he slowly made his way inside, into the room where he had found Lestat pretending to play the piano on a plank of wood. The plank was still there, surrounded by shards of glass.
Louis shivered in the draft coming through the broken windows. Glass crunched under his shoes as he walked around the room.
The iPad was gone, he noticed as he walked up to the window. He ran a finger over the plank of wood, across the faded red lines marking the keys. He pictured Lestat painstakingly drawing them on with a bloody finger. In the other room stood a proper piano, shattered by some kind of disaster.
The blood on the wood was old, the iPad had looked new. The house was bare, like a squatter lived there, but there was a Bluetooth speaker in the corner that looked state of the art.
As he was thinking through all the contradictions, Louis heard a sound from the back room - a series of familiar squeaks.
He took a few steps to the door, opening it with a push as it got stuck.
This room was still standing, the roof seemingly somewhat sturdier here than in the front. It was as sparsely decorated as the rest of the house and lit only by candles. An old dresser stood by the wall. There was a single light bulb on the ceiling, unlit, and an old fireplace with some dusty blocks of wood. Other than that there was only a coffin against the other wall, and Lestat sitting on the coffin, eating a rat.
He must have heard the door open - hell, he must have heard Louis the moment he approached the house - but he didn't look at him. He stayed hunched over his meal, hair a curtain hiding his face, until Louis cleared his throat.
"Lestat?"
He looked up slowly, and for a moment he seemed shocked to see Louis. And Louis felt quite the same - for a split second, the broken, empty look on his face made Louis think he made a mistake and found another blond-haired vampire hiding in New Orleans, because his maker never looked this vulnerable.
But then Lestat blinked, threw the rat over his shoulder and shook himself, and somewhere in the practiced toss of his hair Louis recognized him again.
"Louis," he said. "I thought perhaps I had dreamt you."
It was a little too close to Louis' own worries, and he wondered if it was possible that Lestat had also imaged him, sometimes, walking next to him, talking to him, smiling at him across innumerable rooms and endless years apart.
"I'm real," he assured him.
"So you are."
Lestat stood up and walked over to him. He had changed his clothes at some point and was now wearing a soft henley that clung to his shoulders and upper arms, and dark sweatpants made of a thick material. He wasn't wearing shoes, and the robe was nowhere to be seen.
His hair was a little messy, perhaps from sleeping, and fell softly to his shoulders. Altogether, Louis thought, Lestat looked good. Especially for someone living in a hovel eating rats, he looked - amazing, really. His eyes ran over him, taking in the body that he once knew better than his own.
Vampires didn't change physically, so Louis was suddenly very aware that he knew exactly what Lestat looked like underneath those clothes. His eyes dropped to his chest, the way the shirt was tucked into the sweatpants, the barely-there hint of his nipples poking through the soft fabric, and a vivid image flashed through his mind of Lestat's naked chest, how Louis' dark hands looked contrasted with the milky skin of his waist, the soft pink of his nipples. He wrenched his eyes back up to his face, cheeks warm.
He stood there, waiting to see what Lestat would do, shivering.
He walked up to Louis, stopped when he was right in front of him. His eyes ran over Louis' figure. "You're - is it raining?"
Louis looked down to where his wet jacket was dripping onto the floor. "Yeah. It's fine." He had forgotten how wet he was by the time he walked into this room.
Lestat frowned and with a quick look to the fireplace, used the fire gift to light up the blocks of woods there. They had looked like they had been there for years, and Louis' heart clenched at the memory of how chilly he had always felt when his diet consisted only of rats. And yet Lestat had never thought, apparently, to light a fire to warm himself.
Lestat shifted on his feet for a moment, then grabbed Louis' shoulder with one hand and looked at him, making sure it was okay to touch him. When Louis didn't react, just looked back, he moved in and hugged him.
He grabbed Louis close, buried his face in his neck. Louis could feel him exhale deeply before he slumped into him. He reached his own arms up around Lestat's waist, let himself hold on. He tried to keep more of a distance than yesterday, to not get lost in the scent of him, the memories, yet still let himself enjoy the feeling of being held like this.
"Thank you for coming back," Lestat murmured into his neck.
"Yeah," Louis said. He stroked his back, let his hand linger on Lestat's nape. "Figured we have more to talk about."
He felt Lestat nod, before giving Louis a last squeeze and moving back again.
"Will you tell me," Lestat asked softly, "about your life? Where you have planted your roots, how you occupy your time now?"
Louis gives him a small smile. "If you'll do the same."
So they sat themselves down, right there on the floor of the old house, close to the fire, leaning against the wall next to each other, and talked.
Louis told him about Dubai, his routine there. Eating animals, supplemented with willing live donors and well-sourced blood bags. His various businesses around the world, the houses he owned in five different continents, the art he bought and sold and how it made him rich. He carefully left out the presence of Armand at many of the business, the dozen homes he has lived in that were in Armand's name, the life they shared.
He felt Lestat stare at him as he talked. When he turned to him he saw tears glistening in his eyes.
“What's wrong?”
“Oh, nothing,” Lestat said with a shaky smile, turning away from him to hide his face. “I merely -”
He waited, giving Lestat a moment to compose himself, tamping down the irritation, the expectation of a barb, old insecurity and impatience.
Lestat took a slow breath and said quietly, “I forgot the sound of your voice. The exact timbre of it. I remembered how I loved it, but its exact sound faded. You sound different now, yet the same as well. To hear you again is -”
A sob halted him. He took another breath and darted his eyes towards Louis. They kept flitting away and back, like he couldn't bear to look at him full on, but also couldn't look away. He said, “I missed you. Maybe that is obvious, but I should tell you. I missed you terribly. Did-”
Another shake of his head, a wry twist to his mouth as he hunched in on himself, sure that there was no way that Louis could have felt the same, could have ached for him in any way.
He remembered in the old days, the good days, sometimes almost absentmindedly saying to Lestat ‘I missed you’ as he came back home from a long hunt or a night spent with Claudia, and how it would light him up, how it would make his lips curl in his best smile, the smile Louis loved best at least, shining and cocky but sweet, a hint of bashfulness to it.
He still didn't know what he wanted from this. How he felt about Lestat now. But he knew that he did ache, for 80 years, that he dreamt of this man constantly. And that his heart was breaking seeing him like this. In the past, there had always been an urge to hurt Lestat, to get under his skin, to make him feel some of the pain that Louis felt. But now, seeing him broken like this, there was only an urge to restore him, to make his back straighten and his eyes gleam once more.
“I didn’t,” he said. He cleared his throat, an unexpected clump of emotion making his voice come out hoarse. The pause was long enough for Lestat’s face to fall even more, but he quickly continued the thought. “I didn’t forget your voice.”
He took his phone out of his pocket and unlocked it, quickly navigating to his saved files, all backed up several different ways both digitally and in hard copy, and found the music file he was looking for. He didn't look up at Lestat until it started playing.
Come to me / And let my ever-loving arms surround you
Lestat froze at the sound of his own voice coming out of the speaker, staring at the phone like it would jump out of Louis’ hand and bite him.
Louis, meanwhile, looked at Lestat. Lets himself look. He felt feverish at the vulnerability he was showing by doing this, the peek into the darkened chambers of his heart that no one ever knew about, no one had been allowed into in a century - maybe ever.
The sound was tinny coming from the phone speakers, the recording obviously old, and it echoed in the empty room, but they both listened to it reverently, quietly, as the Lestat from 85 years ago crooned about how they will ruin each other, mourn each other. Things were already broken, then, but Louis still remembered that time like innocent days of yore. There was so much hurt still to come.
As the song ended, they sat for a moment in the silent room, only the soft crackling of the fire around them.
Lestat’s wide eyes looked up to Louis, finally meeting his eyes to stare at him. “Why is that on your phone?”
He shrugged, a casual gesture at odds with the deeply not casual series of actions it took for that song to exist in this way. Starting, honestly, with how the initial recording had been the thing to break his resolve way back when, making him swim a river with the record clutched in his hand. Making Lestat rerecord it later, her voice erased.
And then, damningly: Knowing the plan for Mardi Gras and still packing the record in his trunk. Taking it with him across Europe on what should have been an clean break. Making room for it in the back of a closet in their apartment in Paris, underneath his undershirts, hiding it from Claudia. Packing up the apartment later, weeks after the trial, holding it in his hand while Armand was stacking up picture frames to put in storage, thinking about new beginnings and old betrayals, almost throwing it on the pile of trash, and then in a guilty movement as Armand turned to look at him, hiding it in a pile of clothes and putting it in a suitcase.
He had lugged that old record around the world, country to country, rarely listening to it because there was always a chance of Armand walking in when it was playing on a turntable. But sometimes he did. When Armand left for a few days, which rarely happened, a handful of times through the sixties and seventies. Once, in the San Francisco apartment in 1973, high on the blood of a weed-smoking rent boy, he had played it a dozen times, face pressed between his knees. Aching.
He had it transferred to a CD in the nineties, and then, “I had it digitized about ten years ago,” he admitted.
Everything else was too much to say aloud, but if Lestat put any thought to it he should be smart enough to figure out that Louis carried his voice, and by extension him, with him all this time.
He ducked his head, suddenly afraid of what might be showing on his face.
“You kept this? Listened to it?” Lestat sounded bewildered. “Why?”
To torture himself. To feel something in the those long, boring years. To self flagellate, hating himself for wanting to listen to the entreating voice beckoning him, the voice of the man that killed his daughter. For wanting to remember what it was like to be loved like that.
He didn't say any of that. But he said another thing that was also true: “So that I wouldn't forget your voice.”
“I would have though you wanted to forget…everything,” Lestat said carefully. There was more than a hint of how he used to be in the intense way he stared at Louis, his eyes burning through him, in the way his hair fell over his shoulder as he cocked his head, and maybe it was that spark of his old self that let Louis respond with honesty.
“At times I did. Often, even. But it became clear, over the years, that it’s impossible to forget…” he hesitated, wanting to say ‘it’s impossible to forget my past’ or ‘what happened’ but looking into Lestat’s eyes, he told the truth, “...you. It's impossible to forget you. And if I was going to remember you, I wanted to remember you right.” He looked away then, guilty. “I didn’t. That's clear now. I thought you came to Paris to kill us, so I was wrong about you. And I -I remembered other things wrong, too. Even this,” he held up the phone, “sounds wrong. Your voice is different on a recording. And I think you sound less French now.”
“Well, I have lived here for a long time. Longer than I lived in France,” Lestat said, distracted, still staring at Louis.
Louis nodded. That made sense - Lestat didn't sound American, exactly, certainly not like a Louisiana native, but the English lived more naturally on his tongue now, a distinctly American twist to some words.
"I never thought you'd still be here. I always imagined you starting over in a new city, with a new companion. Sure, you'd probably think of me sometimes. Think of her, too. But I never considered you could be…here. In this shack." He looked around the room, again. "Were you…waiting here? What is this?"
"Waiting - I suppose," Lestat shrugged. "But not for you. I thought I would never see you again. I certainly did not expect you to just stroll in someday and -" he barked a laugh, "- thank me, for god's sake." He shook his head, incredulous. "I was waiting for it to go away. To stop thinking about her every day. To stop seeing you in every passing shadow. To stop the- " He rubbed his chest, over his heart. "- longing. The pain. To be ready to, as you say, start over."
Louis took a long look at him, the pain on his face that looked too well-worn, like an old habit. Like his features, that used to so often be grinning, sneering, laughing, were now only used to this crumpled sadness.
He put his hand over Lestat's on his chest, feeling his heartbeat.
He focused for a moment, listening.
"We're still in sync."
Lestat rolled his head to the side as it was leaning back against to wall to look at him fully. "Foolish of me," he said, "to think I would ever move on from you."
Louis shifted, turning towards him as well. His knee fell to the side and touched Lestat's. The place where they met burned, even through both their pants. He moved his hand higher up, to Lestat's neck, wanting to better feel his heartbeat. He let the thumping shiver through his fingers, his arms, until it reverberated through his whole body.
They sat close enough for Lestat to talk in a soft, barely-there voice. "When I thought of you, sometimes I hoped you had freed yourself from him, found another path. Sometimes I managed to hope you had found happiness with him. Mostly, after 1973, I-" His eyes closed in pain. "-I just hoped you were all right."
Louis rubbed his thumb soothingly over his neck. "I am." He shook him a little. "Hey. Look at me."
Lestat opened his eyes, red tears pooling in them.
"I'm okay."
Lestat nodded, a heartbroken smile on his lips. "I knew you would always carry the things I did to you. That you would have to think of me when you thought of how you were made, how she was made. That you would take that pain with you for eternity. But I always hoped that you were happy as well. Were you happy, Louis?"
Louis tried to answer, but he choked, not knowing what to say. He hated that for the second night in a row he was trying to have a conversation and largely failing. There were too many emotions too close to the surface. He hadn't processed anything that happened in Dubai yet. He knew, because the question hit him like a truck. Was he happy? Had he been happy at all?
"I don't know. Everything is such a mess. I need to figure some shit out."
"But were you happy with him? Did the gremlin at least manage to make you happy?"
"Sometimes," Louis admitted. And that was true - between the numbness, the boredom, the grief, they had good times. He had enjoyed Armand's company, sometimes, been glad to have him as a companion to walk foreign streets with, navigate the ever changing world. But - "Mostly, I think I was numb. You remember how dark I could get - that didn't change." He considered Lestat, next to him. The sparks running through his body from where they were touching.
"There were good times and bad. Like always. And our bad times were never as bad as with you." Falling through the sky, slamming Lestat's face into a coffin, the white-hot rage of seeing him bent over some bimbo at a club. "But the good times were also never - never as good." Dancing with Lestat and Claudia in the courtyard, Lestat playing him a melody on the piano as Louis's head rested on his shoulder, kissing him softly in their coffin.
The tears spilled over and started streaming down Lestat's cheeks as Louis looked at him. He said, "I always assumed that whenever you had to think of me, you were wishing we had never met."
He shook his head, tried to keep his voice steady. "I tried. When they buried me in the coffin, after the trial. On the train when I left Paris. On endless days, lying in bed, I tried to think of another life. About making a different choice back then, changing our first meetings. Even tried to imagine saying no to you in the church. But I would always -"
He sniffed, desperately trying to stop the tears, but it was no use. This was what they were, now. Two broken men, crying on the floor.
He remembered holding on to the recording of Lestat's song, the way he would replay it to make himself feel something, a reminder of how Lestat loved him once. He remembered the ghost he could never exorcise, who kept showing up in his darkest days, a soft smile on his handsome face, showing him compassion and friendship.
He said, voice broken and gasping, "I couldn't let go of it. Of you. The way you saved me, when we met. You showed me I could be loved for who I was. I would remember the way you would look at me, smile at me. I'd remember our home. Our daughter. Our life. And I just couldn't- I couldn't. Despite everything, sometimes we were - "
"We were beautiful."
Lestat squeezed his hand, smiling at him through tear-streaked cheeks.
Louis wanted to close the distance between them. Lean their foreheads together. Hold him close. Relearn the taste of him.
But he stayed still and just looked at him, letting his hand be held. He couldn't allow himself anything more. He knew he wasn't ready.
For a long time they just sat there breathing together, until eventually Lestat whispered, "I'm so sorry, Louis."
Louis thought, for a moment, about saying he forgave him, but he wasn't sure he did. He wasn't sure of anything, except, "I'm sorry too."