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The townhouse at Rue Royale was silent as the grave when Lestat came home late one evening, flushed and sated from his second kill of the night. He heard nothing as he stepped inside, not the crackle of a flame in the fireplace nor the soft turning of a page as Louis read the night away, as he was often wont to do.
The silence unnerved Lestat. Something about it just didn’t sit right.
“Louis?” he called from the door, but there was no answer.
He had only seen Louis in passing these last few weeks, since their latest spat over Louis’ refusal to feed properly had sent them both licking their wounds, but there was usually some trace of him about, some sign of his comings and goings to reassure Lestat he was still there. He stepped into the parlor to look for him, then the courtyard, and even the kitchen, but all were as he’d left them when he’d gone out to hunt this evening, not so much as a mote of dust out of place.
Panic spurred him on and his feet carried him up the steps two at a time until he reached the landing. He threw open the door to their bedroom and walked swiftly to the mantle of the fireplace, his finger catching the wooden button with practiced ease. As the door to their coffin room swung slowly open, Lestat impatiently forced his way inside, half expecting to find that Louis’ coffin had been spirited away in the night—that Louis had finally grown weary of their bickering and left him.
But Louis’ slick black coffin was exactly where it had always been, right next to Lestat’s.
Lestat let out a small sigh, reassured for the moment that, wherever he was, Louis had not yet abandoned him, though he chafed with annoyance when he noticed that his coffin was still turned around so it would open facing the wall. His beloved’s anger would not be so easily placated this time, it would seem.
Not that Lestat could really blame Louis. Not this time. Kissing him with blood in his mouth in a vain attempt to end his ridiculous hunger strike had not exactly had its desired effect. He could remember with perfect clarity the look of heartrending betrayal in Louis’ eyes as he planted his hands on his chest and shoved with all his meager strength. Even in his indignation at being avoided, Lestat could recognize that he’d crossed a line. It was why he’d been on his best behavior ever since, giving Louis the space he’d asked for no matter how torturous it was.
Still, Louis’ coffin hadn’t moved and that alone made the pain of their estrangement easier to swallow.
His relief was short-lived, however, because a fraction of a second later Lestat finally heard something.
It was the softest sound, easy to miss from downstairs with the ceiling between them, but there it was again—the faintest of heartbeats. It was coming from inside Louis’ coffin.
Lestat crossed the room and ripped off its glossy, black lid. Horror gripped his heart at what he saw inside: Louis, his beautiful Louis, lying still and emaciated as a cadaver, his smooth brown skin gaunt and sunken around his eyes and mouth. He was still dressed in the suit Lestat had seen him in the other night, as if he had simply kicked off his shoes and hadn’t bothered—or had the energy—to change for bed.
“Louis!” Lestat shouted, reaching for him immediately. “Louis, wake up!”
His lover made no response but the barest flutter of his eyelashes, too diminished to accomplish anything more, and a pit of anguish opened in Lestat’s stomach so wide it threatened to swallow him whole.
Without another thought, Lestat pulled Louis into a seated position, propping his back up against the wall of the coffin, and slashed his own wrist with a glass-like fingernail. He tenderly cradled the back of Louis’ neck in his palm as he brought his wrist to his mouth, urging him to drink with desperate, whispered pleas.
The blood trickled down over Louis’ lips and into his mouth, a few stray drops escaping down the curve of his chin. Louis moaned softly at the heady scent and taste of it and Lestat thanked a God he didn’t believe in as Louis reached blindly up to grab his wrist and finally began to drink.
As Louis sucked down the blood flowing from the wound on his wrist, Lestat felt the swoon rise up inside him, beautiful in all its pain and pleasure. He fought against its tide to stay focused on Louis, watching with keen, anxious eyes as the color returned to his cheeks and the life to his limbs.
Once Louis could hold his head up on his own, Lestat wrapped his free arm around his shoulders and pressed a kiss to his temple, letting him drink and drink and drink until his vision began to swim and his body began to grow cold.
“That’s enough for now, mon coeur,” he whispered against Louis’ forehead before pulling his wrist free from his grip.
Still in the throes of unfathomable hunger, Louis reached out for Lestat again in blind instinct, around the neck this time, and before Lestat could stop him, Louis sank his fangs into his throat. Lestat gasped in pain as Louis tore at his flesh and again began to drink.
“Louis! Stop!” he shouted, using his superior strength to shove Louis away from him.
Once free from Louis’ grasp, Lestat stumbled to his feet and backed quickly away from the coffin. With some space between them, he took stock of how he felt: his head was pounding and he could still feel the blood slowly leaking from the wound on his neck as his body worked to repair itself, but no lasting damage had been done.
“‘Stat, what—?” Louis rasped, gazing up at him from his seated position inside the coffin, his chest heaving like he’d just awoken from a nightmare. His eyes darted all around the room before honing back in on Lestat, taking in the state of his pale face and bleeding neck. He reached up to touch his own mouth, and when his fingers came away red, Lestat watched the pieces fall into place.
“Did I—? Shit, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—“ he said, pulling himself up and climbing out of the coffin. “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping toward Lestat carefully, as a mortal might approach a wounded animal.
“No!” Lestat shouted incredulously. What a ludicrous question! “I am not okay! You looked like a corpse when I found you, Louis! How long has it been since you’ve fed?”
Louis’ grimace was worth a thousand words.
“Three days,” was his measured response, and the absurdity of that notion made a harsh laugh escape Lestat’s mouth.
“Vermin doesn’t count, Louis!” he seethed, his anger beginning to get the better of him now that Louis seemed alright again. “How long since you’ve fed on a human?”
Louis needed a moment to think about this, and that alone should have been answer enough, really—had he been feeding himself properly, his mind would have been much sharper.
“A few weeks? A month?” Louis guessed at last, and Lestat could hardly believe what he was hearing.
“A month?! You haven’t fed properly for a month?!” Lestat asked, taking a step closer to him in his outrage. “Mon Dieu, Louis. Are you insane? Are you trying to kill yourself?!”
The silence that came next was so sharp it cut Lestat’s heart like a knife, shattering his temper. He’d known that Louis had struggled with feelings of melancholy all his life, but he hadn’t realized they had grown to such a degree.
In his mind’s eye, he could see another fledgling, another dark-haired lover prone to self-destruction he had failed. The idea that his beloved Louis would follow in Nicki’s footsteps was a misery too grave to contemplate, even if he infuriated him to no end half the time.
No, not again. I cannot bear it.
“Louis…” he whispered, his voice a broken thing as his eyes began to fill with tears.
Louis looked away from him, seemingly cowed for the moment by the heartbreak on his face.
“You cannot keep living like this,” Lestat continued, his resolve and desperation growing with each word. “I won’t allow it. This ends now. Tonight. You need to hunt with me again. I never should have let you carry on like this so long, it’s beneath you and—”
A familiar indignation mounted on Louis’ face the longer Lestat went on until finally the dam broke.
“Don’t tell me how to live my life!” Louis shouted, enraged as ever by Lestat’s demanding nature.
“This is not a life!” Lestat screamed in response.
“That’s ‘cause you took my life!” Louis fired back, reflecting every ounce of Lestat’s anger right back at him.
Lestat recoiled as if Louis had struck a physical blow, his expression twisted with a maelstrom of emotions. He could do nothing but stare at Louis as he began to walk away from him, rooted to the spot by his shock, his fury, his pain.
Was that really how Louis felt?
Did this home they’d built together mean nothing to him?
Was his life here so devoid of love and happiness that it no longer counted as a life at all?
When Louis had finally disappeared out of the open door to their bedroom, Lestat snapped to action, following after him with preternatural speed, unwilling to let him have the last word. He caught up to him easily and was beside him in a flash.
“How dare you walk away from me!” Lestat bellowed, his throat raw as he reached for Louis’ arm to keep him from walking any further.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” Louis shouted back, yanking his arm out of Lestat’s grip.
They stared at each other then, each daring the other to be the first to break the silence, chests heaving with breaths they didn’t need to take.
“Is that really what you think, Louis?” Lestat asked at last, angry crimson tears finally spilling over his cheeks. “That I robbed you of something precious the night I gave you the greatest gift there is?”
“And what gift is that, Lestat?” Louis asked, tone tired and mocking. “Eternal damnation?”
“Freedom!” Lestat shouted, anger and frustration bursting out of him once more, unable now to be contained. “From fear and shame and death, from the laws of mortal men who would deign to tell us how to live or how to love!”
Louis scoffed with an incredulous shake of his head and opened his mouth to argue, but Lestat was done listening. He took a step closer until he was right in Louis’ personal space, demanding his full attention.
“And don’t forget, mon cher,” he snarled, the endearment dripping off his tongue like venom, “that though you love to imagine yourself as my victim, I did not force the dark gift upon you. You asked me for it!”
With that, Lestat stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him so hard it fell off its hinges. He heard it clatter to the floor behind him, but by then he was already at the bottom of the stairs and halfway to the front door.
The light drizzle that had begun when he’d first come home was now a downpour, but Lestat hardly noticed as he stalked off down the street, the rain soaking into his clothes and washing away the blood from his skin. Anger burned inside him and something else, a pain so deep, so profound, that it felt as if his very soul—if he even still had one, or ever had at all—was bleeding, a tattered, wretched thing in the cavern of his chest.
It wasn’t until he came upon a beggar hunched under a makeshift tent in an alleyway near the docks that Lestat felt the gnawing hunger Louis had left him with, his throat painfully parched.
Lestat pounced upon the man like an animal, his fangs ripping into his flesh without an ounce of his usual grace. He relished the frantic beating of the man’s heart, the struggle in his limbs, and the hot gush of blood that followed as it ran down his chin and stained his clothes, something savage inside him satiated by the brutality of the act.
When it was done, his heart still ached, but the man’s blood had helped him feel a little more like himself again. He turned his face into the rain and let it wash away the evidence of his sins before he wrapped the beggar in the stretch of canvas that had served as his shelter and threw him into the Mississippi.
He wandered a while longer, until he could feel the dawn approaching, and then it became a bitter race against the rising sun back to the home he shared with Louis on Rue Royale.
This time, as Lestat stepped through the front door, the townhouse was not so quiet.
Lestat could hear the pacing of footsteps in the sitting room to his right and then a sudden quickening in their cadence before Louis appeared in the archway. He was still wearing the same clothes as before, though now he was missing his jacket and tie, and his curls were mussed like he’d run his fingers through them.
“You’re back,” Louis said, eyes darting all over his disheveled frame, and Lestat couldn’t help but scoff.
“What, did you imagine I had decided to finally rid myself of my ungrateful fledgling and find someone more agreeable to share a home with?” Lestat seethed, his tone as sharp as the pain he still felt in his heart. “If only you were so lucky.”
Hurt flashed across Louis’ face at the barbed comment and Lestat couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, the thin veneer of impassivity he’d constructed on the way home already beginning to crack.
He turned and ascended the stairs without another word, rainwater dripping off his clothes with each step he took. He headed straight for the bathroom and stripped off his clothes, tossing them carelessly into a soggy pile on the floor.
As he waited for the frankly enormous claw foot tub to fill with hot water, he chanced a look at himself in the mirror and cringed at his own reflection. The blood on his face had mostly been washed away by the rain, but his eyes were tired and his beautiful golden hair was wet and limp where it framed his face. If he was being charitable, he looked not unlike a drowned rat.
Hmm. Perhaps Louis will want me now, he mused bitterly at the thought.
When the tub had filled, Lestat stepped into the water, barely feeling the heat on his skin. He sank down until the bridge of his nose was submerged and his eyes were left above the water’s surface.
He sat there, stewing in his feelings, for an indeterminate amount of time. Alone in the tub, he thought only of Louis and found he could not cling to his anger any longer, his mind turning instead to the thoughts that plagued his wounded heart.
Had he made a mistake, turning Louis?
Was his heart truly too tender, too human for the life they led?
Were they destined to keep hurting each other until one of them had the courage to end it?
He felt his eyes begin to well up again with miserable tears, his vision clouding red, but when he shut his eyes against it, in his mind he saw Louis’ face, his beautiful face, marred by righteous fury, and it only made it worse.
When he opened them again, he saw little rivulets of crimson expanding out in front of him where his tears had hit the water. He watched them swirl and spread like tendrils, their gentle meandering a mesmerizing distraction.
Suddenly, he heard a soft knock at the door and his eyes darted up from the water.
“Lestat?” came Louis’ familiar voice on the other side of the wood. “Can I come in?”
There were two impulses in Lestat’s mind then. The first was to shout, to tell Louis to get the hell away from him if he hated it here so much. The second was to invite him in and beg him, on hands and knees if he had to, not to leave him.
Neither one of them won out in the end. Instead, Lestat gave no answer, closing his eyes and sinking further into the water until he was fully submerged.
Lestat’s senses were dulled by the water around him, but he was not so deafened that he could not hear the bathroom door creak hesitantly open, nor the slow footsteps that approached the tub, nor the nervous heartbeat of the one who made them.
When he finally rose above the surface, slowly and making hardly a sound, he found Louis sitting with his back against the wall of the tub, his arms crossed on top of his knees where he’d brought them up toward his chest.
“It won’t work, you know,” Lestat said at last, gazing back down at the water. “A vampire can live for centuries without a drop to drink. And all the while you’ll only drive yourself mad, until your body withers beyond recognition and you are a husk of your former self, trapped in a slumber from which you cannot wake under your own power.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lestat could see Louis raise his head, but he said nothing to indicate he’d heard him, nor did he turn around to look at him.
“Why, Louis?” Lestat asked him, when he could bear the silence stretching between them no longer, his voice thin, barely above a whisper. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Is—is this new life I’ve given you really so terrible?”
Is life with me really so terrible? is what he meant to ask, but the words turned to ash in his mouth.
Louis craned his head around to look at him then, and Lestat could see smudges of dried blood around his eyes.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Louis admitted after an excruciating moment and, oh, even though he’d asked, Lestat was woefully unprepared for such an answer.
Lestat’s eyes began to burn with tears once more and he averted his gaze back to the water, his heart breaking all over again. He saw in his mind’s eye the faces of Nicki and his mother, Gabrielle, remembering all too well how it had felt when they had cast him aside. The thought that he was on the precipice of losing Louis the way he’d lost them was painful beyond articulation. He didn’t think he would survive such a thing. He didn’t know if he wanted to.
“Are you—“ Lestat forced himself to ask, voice trembling fiercely, the words nearly impossible to get out, “—are you going to leave?”
“No,” Louis said, turning the rest of his body around to face him. He reached across the space between them to cup Lestat’s cheek and force him to look at him directly. Louis’ eyes were also glazed with a crimson sheen and there was an intensity there Lestat hadn’t expected to see. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t want to leave you.”
The relief of hearing Louis say those words so plainly wrenched an ugly sob from Lestat’s chest. Louis made a soft sound of pity and pulled him forward by the back of his neck so Lestat could bury his face against his shoulder as he cried, the release of emotion inside him too much to hold back now.
When Lestat had calmed down some minutes later, Louis was still holding him, stroking his fingers through his damp hair with a tenderness he didn’t deserve. Lestat could have happily died there, wrapped up in Louis’ arms, secure, for the moment at least, in the knowledge that the love of his exceptionally long life had no intention of leaving him.
“And I’m not trying to kill myself,” Louis said quietly. “I just… I’m not like you, Lestat. I don’t want to keep killing people every night for the rest of my life. I won’t do it anymore.”
“Then let me do it for you,” Lestat sniffled, and he felt Louis’ fingers pause in his hair.
He leaned back to look up at Louis’ face. His green eyes were narrowed in confusion.
“You need blood to live, Louis,” Lestat said, begging him to understand. “Without it, you will waste away to nothing, driven mad by your hunger. You cannot expect me to just sit here and watch.”
“I know,” Louis sighed.
“I won’t,” Lestat continued, reaching up to caress the curve of Louis’ jaw with wet fingers. “I love you too dearly for that.”
“I know,” he said again, softer this time, his eyes shining. He sighed again, tipping forward until his forehead was resting against Lestat’s. “I love you too.”
“Then let me help you,” Lestat said desperately. “Drink from me instead, if you must, but drink.”
Louis pulled back a little and Lestat could see the idea had sparked some interest in his eyes, but it was quickly snuffed out by his conscience.
“You would need to feed more to compensate,” Louis argued, shaking his head. “More people would die.”
“What if I said I would kill them anyway, just for the sport of it,” Lestat asked, running out of options. “Would that ease your conscience?”
“You wouldn’t,” Louis said, voice hard, and ordinarily he would be right. As a general rule, with some notable exceptions, Lestat did not kill without feeding.
But there wasn’t a rule on this Earth Lestat wouldn’t break to save Louis, even from himself. If he needed an excuse to start drinking human blood again, Lestat was going to give it to him by any means necessary.
“Wouldn’t I?” Lestat asked, daring him to deny it a second time.
Louis’ mouth pressed into a thin line, but he said nothing more.
“Make their deaths worth something, Louis,” Lestat urged in a soft, pleading voice, stroking the apple of his cheek with his thumb. “You can give them that, at least.”
Lestat watched the conflicted look in Louis’ beautiful green eyes turn to resignation and he knew he had won.
“Alright,” Louis relented. ”Alright, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you,” Lestat sighed, relief flooding through him once more, and he leaned forward to brush his lips against Louis’ other cheek.
“You’re a bastard,” Louis replied, but without the heat it was usually accompanied by.
“A bastard who loves you very much,” Lestat smiled cheekily.
Louis huffed what sounded suspiciously like a laugh, the corner of his mouth ruefully turning upward.
They stared at each other for a long moment, neither one quite ready to part, before Louis broke the silence.
“Alright, I’ll let you finish up in here,” he said, and then after the briefest moment’s hesitation, he leaned down to press a soft, tender kiss to his mouth, their first in weeks.
Lestat had gone so long without the feeling of Louis’ lips against his own that a truly pathetic whimper was torn from the back of his throat when Louis pulled away so soon. He chased eagerly after his mouth for more, reaching up to wrap both arms around his neck and pull him closer, but he soon felt Louis’ hands on his forearms stop him.
“Not tonight, Lestat,” Louis said, but he softened the rejection with another kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I’m too fuckin’ tired.”
Lestat felt a pang of disappointment, but he nodded in understanding—it would take at least a few days of regular feedings for Louis to feel like his old self again. He watched as Louis rose to his feet and started to leave the room.
“Wait,” Lestat said suddenly, gripping the edge of the tub nervously with both hands.
Louis paused and turned around, a question in his eyes.
“Will you sleep in my coffin tonight?” Lestat asked, and maybe he was pressing his luck, but the thought of spending another night in isolation was almost physically painful. He needed to feel Louis in his arms again, to hear his heart beating in time with his own.
A fond smile appeared on Louis’ exhausted face and he nodded before he left the room.
Lestat sank back into the now-cold bathwater when the door closed behind him, resting his head back against the edge of the tub. He wasn’t sure if he had managed to truly solve their problems tonight—if Louis would wake up with a change of heart or if perhaps they had at last reached some kind of understanding.
What he did know was that when he finished drying himself off and went to ready himself for bed, Louis was in his coffin waiting for him, and for now that was enough.