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Louis remembers when the world stopped around them. Chips and cards frozen still. For a moment, everything was gone, safe for the voice.
Ten percent. Fifteen perfect. Do you not know your value? The man asked, earnestly curious, blissfully innocent.
Do you suffer these indignities for some larger purpose?
If only he’d known that Lestat de Lioncourt was anything but innocent. Paul thought him the devil. Paul was right about all the wrong things.
And do you think two pair will win the hour?
Louis won that night, with a grin on his face and a new friendship which blossomed uncontrollably, its roots dug straight into his tired, tired soul, tethered to its deepest, most volatile secrets.
He remembers his maker to be indulgence itself, hunting, ravaging, eating to buoy himself into the next decade. He didn’t know how to be companion to that. All he’s ever known up to that point was to make do, survive. There’s books to sort out and food to put on the table, and maybe a little time left for him to go out cattin’ with a white man. If only it were that simple.
Lestat didn’t understand that. He loved Lestat anyway.
Louis lays on his bed and remembers the taste of sarsaparilla. No matter how hard he tries, the world continues.
When Louis goes back to Rue Royale, he expects the house to be empty.
He looks at the man in front of him and sees ruin.
Lestat is thin now, more gaunt than Louis remembers. He’s bored as the hurricane rages outside, humming a tune even when he’s not playing his plank piano. Rue Royale has fallen far from its grand days, the buildings as empty as bare-bone doll houses. It’s become a tourist attraction and all the myths that come with selling visitor tickets. Louis sits next to his own coffin that still has a dent from one of their heads on it. Lestat’s next to him, writing into a notebook.
Louis peers at it, because he’s nosy, and he wonders what the other has been up to all this time. They look like poetry, some in English and French and more Louis can’t read. It sends a pang to his chest. He used to do this with Claudia, making a show at peeking at whatever she’s writing so much that she’ll shove him to the far end of the room. She was surprised at her strength at first, always apologizing, worried if he’s very badly hurt.
“You gonna publish them?” Louis asks. Blonde hair sways limply as Lestat turns to give him a frown.
“Release. They are songs. Not poetry.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.” Lestat mimics, which actually sounds surprisingly quite like him.
“You said you needed fifty more years.”
“These are mine. I do not run the risk of decimating any masterpiece.”
“Huh.”
Louis tries to look again. Lestat snaps his notebook close. “Stop snooping. And what have you been up to, besides being companion enough on your own?”
“I’ve been dealing art. Investing. Real-estate. I missed running a business.”
“I’m not surprised. You’ve always liked commerce, but art dealing?” Lestat frowns at him, amused.
“It’s fun when the buyers actually like art. Started with photography, expanded to basically everything. ”
“When did you start photographing?”
“Ever since Paris.” Lestat was there when he took his first photo. Louis should tell the other that, except he was fucked in the head and the real Lestat had never known that he was ever a photographer.
Something flashes in Lestat’s eyes. His frown turns into a grimace.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t—”
He doesn’t want to talk about Claudia, not right now. “You didn’t cut my career short or anything. I was a shit photographer.”
“I am sorry, still.”
Louis shrugs. He shifts his feet a little on the rotted hardwood floor, the movement dislodges the rocks in his heels into a dull ache like a bruise. He’s been stabbed, beaten to a pulp a million ways until his vision gave out and his eyes tinged with blood for days, but that was in Storyville. He had to be tough. With Lestat, he was allowed to be soft, and it had hurt all the more.
“It’s fine.” Louis says as he squeezes on Lestat’s shoulder.
He still feels the rush of air as he plummets to the ground.
In his dreams he keeps falling. The wind batters in his face, his ears, drying his already hazy, aching eyes.
He remembered that Lestat tasted sweet like sarsaparilla. His hair smelled like rosemary and citrus.
He used to run his fingers through Louis’ hair.
Claudia dragged Uncle Les to the street lined with window shops every week, saying walk faster, you get tired so easily.
You’re too energetic, my little milkweed.
Can we get this dress? I need a new notebook, can we please get that too?
Of course. If you promise to clean up after your meals without fail.
Claudia held him as he heaved. The stale cold air burnt his lungs. He’d been crying for so long next to the corpse that used to be Lestat.
“Breathe, Louis. Tu vas bien.” Lestat’s quiet voice comes through the speaker of his phone.
Louis breathes. One lungful of dry, burnt air. The wildfires had been raging for the past week. It’s far, but he still smells it going. He wonders if Lestat smells it too where he’s at, if he’s even in the states right now. It sounds like Lestat’s just outside a club, loud music muffled but still audible. There’s a girl asking if he wants to go with her, to which he says no.
“Tell me about your nightmare?”
“You really wanna hear about them?” Louis lets out a wry laugh. It’s good that they’re not face to face, otherwise he’d completely crumble into a mess.
“Oui. Try me.”
It’s you. It’s you beating me to a pulp and dropping me from the sky. You who crushed the bones in my back in my limbs in my head so I could be nothing but a burden for Claudia to care for. It’s you who understood nothing and everything that we used to be.
I fucking hate you.
“Some bastard ambushed me for what I said in the book. Said I broke the laws and I’m punishable by death.” Louis breaths, trying to make the air go in deeper. He smells fire. “It’s fine. I got away from him.”
“I can kill him for you. Make it look like an accident.” From the lilt of his voice, Lestat’s probably smiling.
“No law is worth breaking for me, Les.”
“I follow no creed. I live as I please. Besides, you’ve broken the fourth and the fifth laws.”
Louis laughs. Why couldn’t you save Claudia, then? “Just continue living, is what I’m asking.” he says.
“I will. Trust that I will make the most out of the twenty first century. I will always be here when your night terrors get the best of you, my Saint Louis.”
Only Lestat can make a promise sound like a threat.
Louis licks the blood from the wound in Lestat’s lips before it falls down to the leather seat. Lestat still tastes like sarsaparilla, he finds.
He’s just walked down the stage in the back of the venue into Louis’ car. When they stop necking, he tucks an unruly strand of blonde hair behind Lestat’s thoroughly pierced ear. There’s a plastic crown knocked askew on his head, probably something a fan got for him, a hint of blood on his pink silk shirt. He looks like a princess who’s walked into a drug den, not accidentally, but premeditated like a hedonist. But he’s not on anything, not tonight, because Louis can’t handle much of those anymore after 1973.
“Petit ami. Mon cher. Mon cœur de compagnon.”
“Baby.” Louis mumurs into Lestat’s neck. He looses himself in the way Lestat moans and presses himself closer.
This memory gone corporal has a way of reaching out; he rubs against Louis like a cat would. Soft and knowing, intrinsically possessive—they’re not like how they used to be, but Lestat still touches him in all the nice ways.
It’s when Lestat’s cock is deep inside him that he pants out to Louis, “You still think me a monster, don’t you?” His mouth’s open, eyes serene but welling with tears. There’s a gash on his neck from Louis’ fangs. Blood drips out in a rivulet, dropping down onto Louis’ chest. He wipes it with his thumb and licks it clean. Lestat tastes so sweet.
“If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed it is that you’re a messy eater.” Lestat mutters. “You like to slice a hole into your food so the blood flows without you needing to suck it. You still eat like a fledgling.”
Louis cradles his face. Lestat shivers. Steel blue eyes skitters away shyly.
“You’re ruining the mood.” He hooks his legs onto Lestat’s waist and grinds. Pale hands tighten around him, but Lestat has always been careful not to draw blood. It’s Louis that does the part when they want it to hurt.
“Ah—you’re tight. Calm down, Louis!”
“I want to be with you, but I still hate you sometimes,” Louis cradles the other face.
Lestat’s crying. Big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks, making two lines of translucent red.
“I’m fucked in the head. Maybe what I remember wasn’t quite right. Maybe you played nicer. Maybe I couldn’t remember.”
Louis wipes the tears and hugs him to his chest. Lestat lets out a pained noise, like a mouse stuck between a cat’s jaw. Louis holds him as his back expands and deflates with his breaths.
“I’ve always thought that ever since I read the book.” Lestat chokes out. He hides in the crook of Louis’ neck. “You should’ve burnt me. You should’ve put me down and send me to hell. I am still glad it was you.”
It’s as close to a confession as he will get from Lestat. Louis wishes they were at a church on an altar. He imagines the wedding vow as he remembers it and feels a pang in his blood stained chest.
Be my companion, Louis. Be all the beautiful things you are, and be them without apology. For all eternity.
He just has to nod his head and say yes.
That night carnage surrounded them, yet the halls brimmed with a strange, unknown kind of love.
But now they’re here, in the back of Louis’ rent car. He still loves. It should’ve lost its novelty after a life of death, but it endures, tethered inside his chest.
He still clings to it as Lestat crumbles into his arms after he finishes.
The glass in Lestat’s hand dropped to the floor, shattering and grating his ears. It’s AB negative mixed with vodka. Blood hangs sweet in the sharp note of alcohol. Louis sighs. He’s not mad at Lestat, just tired at the antics.
He’s cutting his fingers trying to pick up the shards on the floor. Louis tells him off it, going to fetch a broom from a closet, gathering the glass and cleaning the mess himself. He keeps a broom, in a penthouse that needs a whole team to clean it. He’s always sweeping the floor to help mama and Grace or their maids when he was a kid. Old habits die hard.
Lestat watches him with a strange, displaced look. The clock ticks on the wall. It’s half past twelve.
“I’ve been pondering my desire to have a companion. Not that I am inclined to make another, I’m just thinking about it, imagining it. Despite my best efforts to induce happiness, I am still lonely.” Lestat says once Louis is back in the seat opposite him. His face flushed from booze and blank, baby blue eyes not staring at him anymore, but into the distance.
Louis should say that it’s a ridiculous notion to have when you once insisted to me that you’re here to have a good time. Lestat’s an artist now. He’s on the billboards in overcrowded New York the last time Louis was there. When Louis goes to clubs or venues just to kill time, Lestat’s there, in the form of a whiny voice, spouting about how he doesn’t give a damn about anything.
“Don’t make another.” Louis says. Don’t make another me. Don’t make another Claudia. “Not when you know they’ll die in a few centuries with the state of things as they are.”
“My, so pessimistic, Louis.’
“I’m just being real with you.”
“You’ve understood that death is a gift. This was why you let Molloy publish that book, wasn’t it? You’re a humanitarian at heart and can’t stand the thought of anyone who wants this but haven’t been given the full terms of conditions.” Lestat smiles unknowingly, blissfully unaware of the flood of emotions that rolls and coils in his stomach.
Louis thinks of what to say. He comes up short on reassurances. Comes with being alone, he supposes. Outside of the handpicked staffs, he rarely talks to anyone else.
“I just think people ought to be enough on their own.” He measures the glare in Lestat’s eyes from the lamp just beside them. It’s like Lestat’s looking at a sunset, warm and yellow. He thinks he imagined Lestat in a field somewhere just outside New Orleans all those decades ago. He wished he could just horse around in the grass with Lestat like they had grown up together. Maybe they’d be less complicated, more perfect.
Lestat scoffs. He looks appalled. “When I’m alone I either want to go to sleep or fuck myself into oblivion. Or hunt people or rats. I do not think that qualifies as enough.”
“When you’re alone you write, eventually you make it into music.”
“Pitchfork gave my album a 7.4. It’s okay but not a classic yet, Louis. I am not skilled enough!”
“Fuck Pitchfork. Why would you care about Pitchfork?” Louis smiles, despite himself.
Lestat blinks blearily. Something like sobriety but not quite it when he makes a sound like a huh.
“Now that I think about it, I don’t know.”
Louis laughs, because drunk Lestat has always been so damn funny. He’ll drink himself into oblivion, and he’ll take you there too—with you laughing your ass off as he bites straight into your jugular.
“I don’t know. Merde! I don’t even know!” Lestat repeats and starts laughing too. Louis feels a bit better that he’s laughing with Lestat now rather than laughing at him. “I’m a mess. Why did you let me into your home? You ought to abandon me on the streets now.”
I was waiting, for you, for me. I was waiting for us to work again. I’m still here, waiting.
Louis reminds himself that between him and Lestat, thoughts don’t mingle. The maker and the fledgling stay two individuals, despite how Louis feels they’ve merged into one at that altar; they’ve shared their sins, they’ll go to hell together, burn in the fire together.
“I won’t abandon you.” Louis promises.
“My Saint Louis.” The other taunts.
Lestat smiles like Louis hung the moon for him. He’s a disaster waiting to happen. The eye of the storm that threatens to build anew everything in its path.
Louis loves him anyway.