Archive of Our Own ^beta

It had been a gloomy fall for London in 1958 when Louis and Armand had gone to see the play.

The decision alone had marked something of a - - transition for them. After all, Louis hadn’t found himself inside a playhouse since he’d burnt the Théâtre des Vampires and all those who tread her boards to the ground, any regard he may have once had for the stage destroyed alongside his daughter, yet he knew Armand still held the artform with something akin to fondness. In fact, Armand had made a point in those mid-century years of regularly attending the West End during stays at their Chelsea apartment, Broadway the summers they’d spend in their Manhattan townhouse, keeping careful track of productions across both professional and amateur venues. The spectacle of his former career turned specter as he haunted the stages, documenting in the little pocketbook he’d carry with him his thoughts and observations, amassing playbills and programmes, newspaper clippings and ticket stubs with the care of a collector, capturing a landscape dominated by new musicals and post-war dramas, and by the rise and fall of flush-faced stars.

For a time, Armand had kept this from him. Had been sensitive to the events of Paris and inclined to, publicly at least, make Louis’ interests his own. He’d read the books Louis was reading, attend the gallery showings Louis was attending, travel to the sweating, flyover, working towns Louis would and pretend to see the potential in them that Louis himself had, and Louis had been amused in part, but bored in almost every other. The feeling of speaking to his own echo dulling his senses as the years wore on to the point that it had almost been a relief, that night in ’56, when Armand let slip that he’d been moved by a new musical – The King and I, at Broadway’s St. James Theatre.

They’d fought, of course. Bitterly and fretfully and Louis can admit cruelly, but it had felt good to fight. Felt like the lick of a flame to a snowed-in life, a heat to thaw the ice of his frigid, shiftless mood, and his temper had risen with his voice as Armand used words like patient and over and almost a decade before they had settled it in bed. A rough hand and an open mouth and Armand had played penance like the worst actor in his old revue.

Still, a seal had been broken, and Armand had taken to mentioning his attendance at the Winter Garden Theatre and The Stoll – Kismet and The Water Gipsies and wrought, hammy dramas that would last only the blink of a season – and soon Louis was deaf to it again. Found the hurt and irritation didn’t hone with its reminders, but rather blunted with its repetition, which had maybe been Armand’s intent all along as one night he left out the paper on an advertisement for Peter Brook’s The Tempest, set to premiere at Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, and floated the thought that perhaps Louis would like to attend with him.

And Louis couldn’t say why he said yes. Couldn’t say why he agreed to accompany Armand that night – if it was to shock him or acknowledge his patience or stir another fight, if it was even to try and set the events of Paris behind him – but he had quiffed his hair and donned his Roman suit, and settled into the fine red velvet seats of the Theatre Royal with the hope of being moved in any direction at all.

And it had, is the thing. Moved him. Just not in the way he’d expected – not in the heat of the stage lights, or the entrance of a star, or the trembling voice of a girl who could be - - No. None of that so much as got a chance to register, because as the lights had dimmed, the sound had started. A loud rumble of thunder and sudden slope of rain, the theater shaking with the affect of a storm, the sort that avoided London’s dreary isle as it set sail for a newer world, and as the actors had tumbled onto the minimally laid stage, Louis’ mouth had run dry and he had found he could only watch them. One, two, then several more, rolling around the boards as if on a ship, battling the elements as they tried to secure imagined hatches, and in the moment of it, Louis wasn’t in his seat at this London theater at all.

No, suddenly with the wail of weather and the shuddering curtains around the stage, Louis was nine years old again and home in Louisiana, chasing after his daddy as he boarded up windows, fireplaces, any place that might let the weather in. Louis was fifteen, wind cutting at his cheeks as he hauled a babbling Paul in from what he promised wasn’t any sort of rapture, twenty-four between Jonah’s trembling adolescent thighs, down in the liquor cellar beneath the colored hotel off Bourbon Street, thirty-three in flesh, thirty-eight in years, exasperated, hammering nails into plywood and spitting fury at Lestat, who danced through the house like a hurricane all his own, feeding off the weather outside, and oh - - it hadn’t been fury at all. Not when Lestat had his hands on his, pulling him up and close, the bright sparking look in his eyes catching in Louis’ own, and Lestat was new to this, new to hurricanes, but it wasn’t dread or terror in his gaze, but enchantment and so much fuckin’ love, and the way he’d said it. Louis, this wild, wonderful city of yours, she’d have us hear her tonight! as he pulled him in for the dance, it - -

Fuck.

And it’s that, is the thing. That that has Louis scrambling up in his seat, yanking at his tie, shoving past the legs of pestered patrons, desperate, suddenly, for the still, the quiet, the drizzly tepidness of London air.

He bursts out the aisle and beelines for the exit, flinging open the theater doors, struggling to catch a breath he doesn’t need to take. He rounds Drury Lane, tries to let the bustle of the people, the honk of car horns, the autumnal chill chew him up and spit him back out into this moment. Stick him steady here in this spot, and he doesn’t even realize he’s crouched on the sidewalk, head in hands, until he feels the weight of Armand’s touch on his shoulder, hand clutched in a pale offer of comfort.

“Too soon, perhaps,” Armand says gently, and Louis resists the stranger urge to recoil, holds instead to the thread of Armand’s voice, tries to will it into an anchor. He shakes his head, drops his hands to hang loose between his knees.

“No, it’s not the theater, it’s the show.” He wets his lips, takes a breath. “It reminded me of the hurricanes, that’s all. Back home. A lot of memories tied up in all of that.”

Armand’s long fingers tighten just enough to squeeze Louis’ shoulder, and for a moment, he thinks that it’s working. That maybe Armand’s presence here, now, is enough to steady him. To ground him here on the street among the puddles and passerbys, that the feeling of being very far from home yawning awake in his chest is nothing that can’t be put back to sleep with a walk, a drink, a fuck in the dewy grass of the park he sometimes picks up in. At that, he feels Armand shift above him, the thought heard, perhaps, and Louis raises a hand to cup the back of Armand’s in an approximation of a comfort returned. Armand could be the fuck in the dewy grass tonight. If he wanted to be.

“We could go there together,” Armand says, and Louis can’t entirely hide his surprise when he glances up at Armand – he typically prefers the privacy of their bedroom – only he quickly realizes from his expression that that’s not what Armand means at all. “To your New Orleans. It would be pleasant, perhaps, to revisit the places of your mortal life, the places you lived, worked, the - - ”

Louis’ fury strikes like a match.

“Should we revisit your old whorehouses too?” he bites, and when Armand’s jaw clicks shut, the wet breath of regret snuffs out the flame of Louis’ temper almost as fast as it had flared. He bites the inside of his lip, rising to stand and face the other man, his gaze tracing the elegant lines of Armand’s now-closed face, feeling his own settle into an apologetic frown.

“I’m sorry,” he says, softening his voice, even though the thought of Armand in New Orleans still has his toes curling in his brogues. “I didn’t mean that. You’re just - - you’re not to go there, you hear me? She’s a - - temperamental city. Don’t know how she’d treat you.”

It’s a cool look that Armand returns to him, tilting his head to the side, inquiring, dark curls slicked back like he’d often wear them in Paris, and Louis feels a familiar tremor – Armand’s skilled hand, working the ever-broken lock of Louis’ head. Louis finds himself carefully drawing up those early memories – of his father, and Jonah, and Paul, of juddering windows and roaring grey skies and Grace’s little hand in his and - -

“You’re thinking of him,” Armand tells him coldly, seeing through Louis’ ruse instantly, and Louis stares back at him, but it’s a blink, and all his other memories slip to nothing as he falls on top of Lestat in his coffin. The creamy silk lining offsetting the pink flush on Lestat’s cheeks, the roof above them shuddering, walls shaking, glass shattering somewhere downstairs, but then - - Lestat’s mouth. Open, warm, wet beneath his, fangs sharp as Louis slides his tongue beneath them to lick his way inside.

His pulse, now, a jackhammer in his chest.

“I’m thinking about the hurricanes back home,” Louis tells Armand. “That’s all.”  

It’s like a matryoshka doll, Louis thinks now, memories inside of memories, the past a rope that can never be unknotted, and it shouldn’t matter. Not now, not when the floor is shaking beneath them, the walls cracking, the lights flickering, because this is not their house on Rue Royale, steady and sandbagged and half-boarded up, and Lestat’s not dancing down hallways, he’s trembling in his arms, and it doesn’t take all that experience, all that history, to know this place ain’t gonna hold.

“We gotta get out of here,” Louis yells, pushing at Lestat’s waist to give them a degree of separation. Just enough to breathe again, but Lestat’s not looking back at him. No, Lestat’s head is still dropped, hair a limp, muddied veil around his face as he tries to sway back into Louis, head seeking his shoulder again, his hands still holding desperately to the fabric of Louis’ jacket. Louis swallows, glances up to where the roof’s already starting to lift, the force of the wind ripping through the timber, raining shreds of wet, felt-like insulation down on them. He glances back at Lestat, who barely seems cognizant of what’s happening around them, and has to resist the urge to shake him to get him back here. Instead, he just says: “Lestat!”

It's enough at least to make Lestat twitch, to have his gaze dart up to find him, wet-cheeked from crying in the way Louis’ sure he is too. His eyes are hard to read though, his mouth quivering, he looks - - dazed almost, and fuck, has he even eaten tonight? No, prioritize, Louis thinks. He’s got to now, maybe for both of them, and he looks pointedly back up at the ceiling. 

“We can’t stay here,” Louis tells him, his voice strained even to his own ears as it battles the whistle of the wind, pitching high now through the awnings above them. He looks back at Lestat, hopes to convey how seriously they need to get the fuck out of here in his look. “I’ve got a suite up on Canal Street, we can ride this thing out there.”

In the moment of it, the invitation seems to take Lestat by surprise, who blinks back at him. Glancing a little around the room as if seeing the vulnerabilities of it for the first time – the leaks, the bowing frame, the lifting roof – but still, it doesn’t seem to really register. Lestat exhales a breathless little laugh, tilts his head back at Louis, shaking it as he does.

“Louis, I have weathered seasons of hurricanes since we saw each other last,” he assures, dismissive despite his obvious frailty in a way that stokes a long dormant exasperation, and was that something he’d forgotten? How easily Lestat could bat away an outstretched hand? “I am perfectly - - ”

Before he can finish, the shack rumbles. A full body tremor that rocks frame and foundation, has the doors banging wild, and the glass of the windows juddering faster, faster in their fixtures until - -

SMASH!

Glass erupts from the windowpanes, shattering across the dirty floor of Lestat’s shack, and the wind and rain finally forces its way in, whipping wild at their hair, clothes, bones, and Louis grits his teeth. Summons vampiric strength to hold steady as Lestat gasps, a gust pulling him sideways slightly with the force of it, and it’s all Louis can do to grab a hold of his forearm again to keep them both on their own two feet.

“Yeah, I ain’t asking,” Louis yells over the storm, looking back, lockjawed at Lestat, who swallows visibly, gaze darting around the dilapidated room, and Louis thinks he’s going to argue again, going to dig his heels in on this like he does about everything, but fuck, was he here for Katrina? Camille? Audrey? No - - there’s no point thinking that now. Not when the walls are shaking, and the roof’s hanging on by its last battens. Not when morning’s just hours away and the only thing keeping the sun’s hard fist from the back of their necks is about to be nothing at all. The thought puts Louis of a mind to just grab the other man around the waist and haul him out – thinks it’d be easier with Lestat half-starved and wasted to this wisp of a thing anyway – but suddenly, Lestat’s resolve crumbles.

“We won’t make it to Canal Street,” he says, which isn’t quite the surrender Louis was hoping for. “Pas maintenant, pas à partir d'ici.”

Not now. Not from here. It takes Louis a minute to translate it, his French rustier than he’d care to admit (he hadn’t wanted to use it, hadn’t wanted Armand to use it either, not after Paris), and the time it takes him to do it is enough for Louis to come to the same conclusion. They’re a few miles from the hotel at least, and even if they made it there, Louis’ not convinced they’d be able to get in. They boarded up hours ago, and to loosen the infrastructure to slip inside would only cause more damage. A liability. He’d signed the waiver to absolve them of him, and that means something to him, at least, it does here.

It does in New Orleans.

He wets his lips, glances back around the shack for anything that might offer cover come morning, but the place courts annihilation in a way that Louis doesn’t particularly want to think about. His resolve firms up.

“We’ll at least find somewhere with a better chance of staying standin’ than this,” he decides, dropping his hand to tie the bedraggled sash on Lestat’s robe, double knotting it, and using it to tug him forwards. A tether, a leash, an anchor, fuck - - a doll to drag behind himself, Louis doesn’t know, just knows it feels too soon - - too dangerous suddenly, to take his hand. “Come on.”

With that, he pulls Lestat to the front door, not giving him the chance to linger, or second guess, or grab anything (does he even have anything worth the grab?) and he feels it. The force of the winds outside, the howl of weather, the collision of honking, abandoned cars, falling trees and rolling trash cans, barbeques ripped from decks, loveseats from balconies, the rattling chains of a children’s swingset and the metal drag of its frame dropped halfway up the street, and he summons as much vampiric strength as he can muster. He presses the door open, feeling the weight of the hurricane against him, unsurprised but breathless when the gale yanks it off its hinges, tossing the door carelessly down the street, and Louis almost fumbles back with the intensity of it.

Almost.

He takes a breath, turns back to Lestat, who’s wild eyed and swaying and filthy and so fucking beautiful in the dark cavern of his shack, and it feels like something Louis never would’ve even dreamt of.

To be the one here, in New Orleans, pulling his maker back into the night.

Deafening, the sound of her.

A pounding at his ear drums, an aching ream of resonance singing round and round the shell of his ears. Whipping winds howling at his eyes until he can barely see, bloodied tears pooling at his lids, catching in his lashes, courting dust, dirt, debris, the smell of the Mississippi hauled outta her riverbed and up in the air, drowning him as he tries to steady his feet. He can’t vamp. Not with his hand still holding fast to the knot of Lestat’s robe, not when the hurricane would force him, them, any direction it wanted, toss them around like a cat with a muddy-shelled roach, and vaguely he realizes that he has no idea where he’s going.

Lestat was right when he said they’d never make it to Canal Street, he’d known that even back at the shack, but this is worse than he’d anticipated. Hadn’t realized how bad this one was, or was maybe just unused to it, with so many recent years spent watching the rolling Dubai sandstorms from the safety of a penthouse. Had forgotten the forces of nature that set their sights on New Orleans, this strong-backed, earthy swampland and the people who’d always lived and thrived and survived and endured in her.

And - - ah.

Something hard clips Louis’ shoulder, and he winces, feels his grip tighten in the knot on Lestat’s robe just to stop himself letting go of it, knuckles grazing Lestat’s flat, twitching belly even through the layers of fabric, and Louis turns back. Manages to train his gaze just enough to see him, bleary eyed and out of it, fragile and small out here in the elements, and Louis can feel it. Can feel the only thing keeping them grounded is the weight of his own vampiric power, because God knows how long Lestat’s been existing off mouthfuls of vermin.

Vaguely, he’s aware of Lestat’s deep voice sounding - - somewhere, but whatever he says, the wind sucks up and swallows, and not for the first time, Louis wishes that the fates hadn’t sought to humble them. Hadn’t severed the mind link that Louis had come to rely on not just with Armand, but Claudia too. He wets his dry, cracking lips, feels a yawning darkness rise up in him, thinks this was a mistake. Thinks maybe they should’ve stayed in the shack. Done what they could to secure it, although Louis knows that would’ve been impossible, and he’s still lost to it when Lestat suddenly pulls on the knot of his robe, moving sideways slightly only to stagger back with the force of the wind.

Louis blinks, questioning, tries to make out Lestat’s face, but everything’s a blur with how much he’s got to squint to see at all, but then Lestat must realize that too, because suddenly he throws out an arm, pointing in a direction, like he knows somewhere to go, and Louis nods as best he can. Steps forwards in the direction Lestat pointed, glad, suddenly, that he’d drunk more blood than usual to steel his wits to see Lestat tonight in the first place. It helps him now to summon his strength, plotting forwards in the direction Lestat had pointed.

A shopping cart tumbles past them, roof shingles, a car door, a stroller pulled already to pieces, and Louis keeps moving. Keeps pulling them through the worst of the weather, and it’s not until he sees the haze of orange and unshaking, immovable concrete, that Louis realizes where Lestat’s directed them to.

He glances back, not sure what his face is doing, if that bubbling feeling in his chest is surprise or relief or hysteria at the circumstances, but Lestat just reaches for him, and for the first time tonight, is the one to push them forwards.

“I can - - ”

“I’ve got it, Lestat,” Louis snaps, loud and curt over the heady thrum of rain, trying to feel around with the mind gift for the trigger of the damned sliding doors while yanking off a few more bits of plywood with one hand and trying not to let go of Lestat’s knotted robe with the other. They’ve managed to more or less flatten themselves to the side of the outer concrete wall of the Home Depot, which has helped to obstruct some of the force of the hurricane, but the rain’s coming in sheets of muddy water now, soaking them to the bone, and dragging everything down with it, and Lestat’s not so much a dead weight behind him as a kite ready to drag, heady and light, across the asphalt of the parking lot as soon as Louis lets go of the rope of him.

He tightens his grip again, knuckles turning in there to press against the sodden fabric of Lestat’s shirt underneath and the quivering, flat belly there, and he wets his lips before he can help it. Tastes the blood-tinged sweat pooled in his cupid’s bow, blinks, lashes flicking with water as he tries to focus on tugging off another bit of plywood, and groping in his mind for the trigger and he thinks he’s found something, thinks he’s found it maybe and  - -

Fffffffftt.

The sliding door sounds with a mechanical sigh and relief uncurls in Louis’ chest faster than he can move, and he moves fast. He twists around, grabs Lestat by the bicep, then releases his hand in the knot of Lestat’s robe only to fist the fabric at his back instead. He pulls Lestat tight against his side as the hurricane howls around them before he wedges them both in through the gap he’s made in the boarded-up store entrance, tumbling them inside.

And its instant, is the thing.

The shift in sound.

Distant, suddenly, is the weeping wind and the rabid rain and the breaking of buildings, muted by the heavy walls and tremulous glass as the sliding doors click shut again and Louis refastens the lock behind them with the mind gift as fast as he can manage it.

The effect is - - strange.

Almost like being in a submarine, or would be, maybe, if not for the metal shelves of the warehouse floor that rattle behind them like prison bars. The place is dim with only the dull glow of security lights still on, but it’s dry, or mostly, at least. Safe from the elements even though the humid Louisiana air still pants between them, mixed up in here with the smell of dust and bleach and stormwater and blood, and the latter makes Louis’ nostrils flare before he can even think. The scent of it like a spell, coppery and sweet and a little thin, and he glances sideways down the long corridor of the warehouse floor, searching for - - something, any sort of source, before feeling Lestat shift against his side. The weight of him familiar, his hand still clutched in the front of Louis’ wet shirt, and it’s too easy to hold him, always too easy to hold him, but - - yeah.

Probably not useful right now, given the circumstances.

Louis gently untangles them. Releasing his grip on Lestat’s arm, the back of his robe, and retreating a step, maybe two, as Lestat clears his throat, takes his own hands from Louis’ body, and now that they’re apart, Louis can really see him. See Lestat’s hair, soaked now and stuck to the sides of his face, his neck, his cheeks flushed pink, skin pallid beneath the tepid security lights, robe dripping wet, and the top of his chest streaked with grime and dirty water. Louis wets his lips, knows he can’t look much better, and he hates that he feels some sort of way when he feels Lestat’s gaze dip to his mouth.

“We should - - ” Louis fumbles, feels oddly frazzled now, wasted by the events of the night already as he glances back towards the sliding door, watches the weather – now a sheet of grey – on the other side of the door, mostly to have something to look at that’s not Lestat. “We gotta board that up again. I think we can do it from the inside, should be okay, if we get something long enough.”

He means it as an instruction, but Lestat just stares back at him, unmoving, like he can’t quite believe they’re here, and honestly, Louis can’t entirely blame him. Isn’t sure any part of him thought he’d be spending any part of tonight breaking into a Home Depot during a hurricane with Lestat of all people, but then Lestat knew where this place was, right? Does that mean he’s been here before? For sandbags and plywood and nails to help him secure wherever it is he endured the last of NOLA’s hurricanes? Louis frowns, glances back out at where the glass of the sliding door rumbles with the force of the wind, the latch only holding because of the half still boarded up, and he remembers all those years ago and just - -

Wonders if Lestat does too.

“Remember 1915?” he asks, turning back in time to see Lestat inhale at the sight of his face again. “Remember we spent half the night boarding up the windows? Drove the neighbors mad with it. Kept asking us why we didn’t do it in the morning like everyone else?”

And truthfully, it had been Louis who’d boarded up. Lestat had had no point of comparison back then to know the importance of it, five years in New Orleans may as well have been five months for all he knew. The weather always changeable, but never before a door that wouldn’t be closed, a mouth that couldn’t be fed, and Louis can’t get the picture of him pirouetting down the hallway out of his head, wild and fluid as the storm, can’t get the sounds of their lovemaking in the hurricane out of his ears, and his mouth is suddenly so fuckin’ dry, and Lestat just - - stares at him, like maybe he’s remembering too.

Louis clears his throat.

“I’m gonna get some plywood,” he says, voice a little rough, avoiding Lestat’s gaze. “You think you can find some nails and a hammer?”

“Of course,” Lestat replies quickly, small, his own tone thin in a way it never is, and Louis tries to smile at him, tries to make it something comforting, even knowing that this is - - weird. A weird night in a weird year, and he watches as Lestat promptly turns heel and steps out onto the store floor, and then he just. Can’t stop watching. Lestat always had a way that he moved – seemed to float rather than walk – but from his memories, it was always with intent, with authority, and here, now, it’s something almost airy. Frail, like he could blow away at the right breeze, and Louis tries not to think about what that means.

No, right now, he thinks: plywood.

So he takes a breath and he steps out too.

Tries to follow the gaudy hanging signs overhead towards the section they keep the wood, keeping an eye out for anything that might be useful. He feels - - thrown mostly. Out of sorts. He can’t say this is the sort of place he’s been before, although he’s seen their advertisements enough on television and in glossy catalogues stuffed into the trash by the cleaning services for his American properties. Thinks he may even have bought and sold shares once as a part of a broader retail investment package through his firm, but oddly as he passes the shuddering racks of plastic Halloween decorations and rat traps, paint cans and plumbing attachments, it calls to mind less big box store investments than it does Europe.

Scavenging in the remnants of long abandoned stores and homes with Claudia, finding makeshift coffins in towns he couldn’t pronounce the names of, searching for flashlights, batteries, warmer clothes and bars of frigid soap. They’d slipped in through windows and broken handles on rotting doors, lived a cockroach life in a frozen continent, skirting land mines and the gun barrels of blue-lipped, long-nosed soldiers, and it’s stupid. He’s not there, will never be there again, but his hand chases behind him even as he reaches the lumber aisle, searching for his daughter’s hand.

Too much, he thinks. Inhaling. Trying to fix his gaze on the beams of wood even through the dim light of the warehouse. It’s all the wrong shape – too thick and long enough to be unwieldy, so he rounds the aisle, shoes padding wet on the concrete floors, and vaguely he wonders what Claudia would do if she was here. Hold steelier, that’s for sure, he thinks wryly. Probably cry a whole lot less.

Sure as hell wouldn’t have said thank you.  

Suddenly, his shoulder twinges, and he rolls it awkwardly, lets the pain of it ground him as he searches the next aisle, relieved when he finds the longer sheets of plywood, grabs a few, and starts back towards the entrance, and it shouldn’t be a surprise, but maybe it is.

To find Lestat there already, crouched on the floor, robe pooling wet and heavy at his feet, pulling a nail gun from its packaging with pale, still-shaking hands. Behind him, the wind howls, rattling the glass of the sliding door, and Louis finds himself closing the distance between them before he can think any more of it, surprised to find the metallic tang of blood at his nose again (maybe Lestat had eaten tonight?) as he drops the wood to the floor and pulls the nail gun box from Lestat’s tremulous grip. It’s heavier than he expected, a foreign shape in his hands – not the sort of thing he’s used to handling, at least in this modern form – but handywork had never been something Lestat was especially good at, although honestly, neither was Louis, much to his own father’s exasperation.

Still, this though - - this he knew.

Louis pops the side of the nail gun to load in what Lestat had brought with him, before gesturing for the other man to pick up the board and hold it in place over the doorway. Together, they make oddly fluid work of it. Lestat pressing the wood in place as Louis lays nails into the steel frame of the door, and it feels good maybe, right, productive in a way he hasn’t been for too long, when the last nail suddenly hits hard. The force ricochets up his arm, straight to his throbbing shoulder, and Louis hisses, rolls his shoulder back, and he doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but it’s not for Lestat’s wobbly little voice to ask:

“Are you - - are you hurt?”

It’s not - -

Fuck, not anything, Louis thinks, turning back to look at Lestat’s wet eyes, and he’s still holding onto the wood, even as he presses it to the doorframe, grip almost white-knuckled around it now (although that’s always been hard to tell with Lestat, given white’s the default with his pale ass), and vaguely Louis can smell the blood in the air again, and something in Louis’ chest just seems too tight.

Or, no. Not in his chest. Somethin’ weighing on his back, like their daughter would once, demanding attention as he hovered over the books of the few businesses he still had in his folio after The Azaelia was wrenched from his grip, and he can almost hear her as he looks at Lestat, lookin’ at him. Uncle Les asked you a question, Daddy Lou.

He swallows.

“Something hit me out there, it’s nothin’,” he offers with a shrug, but that only makes his wet shirt drag against his back, prompting a shiver to wrack through his body – a reminder as good as any that they’re both still soaked to the bone, and - - right. Another task to occupy the hour. That’s - - good. Havin’ something to focus on that isn’t this. Louis glances back across the store floor behind them, through aisles and aisles of tools and turpentine, and wonders if there’s anywhere here they might be able to find towels. Surely, he thinks, and opens his mouth to ask Lestat if he knows when he turns and suddenly now – with Lestat’s robe untied and pushed open – catches the source of blood.

“It’ll heal in coffin,” Lestat says before Louis can say anything at all, and Louis hates it. The fact that he can feel his fangs protract ever so slightly, the realization that this tangy, coppery blood hovering in the air is Lestat’s blood, that it smells - - different. A product of a vermin diet and God knows what else, but still something just inherently Lestat - - oozing from a deep gash on the other man’s thigh. Something’s sliced deep through his matte leather pants, straight to the flesh below, and it has to be from the hurricane. Whether the thing that clipped Louis’ shoulder or something else entirely, he doesn’t know, but the fact that he hadn’t realized, hadn’t recognized the smell instantly, hadn’t felt it somehow - - has their bond weakened that much? He remembers once it felt like he could smell Lestat get a paper cut from across town, but then, he hadn’t smelt him in Paris had he? Hadn’t even felt him until Lestat was six feet from the stage.

“It causes - - no pain,” Lestat adds, offering a wan smile. “Nothing, just like your shoulder.”

But there’s a strained edge to his expression that makes Louis suspect that that’s probably not true. He wets his lips, glances back at Lestat as he lowers the nail gun to the ground and watches as Lestat slowly let’s go of the plywood too, standing up a little straighter.

“Something like that…used to be you could heal out of coffin,” Louis says slowly. “Fast as anything.”

“Well,” Lestat replies, shaking his wet hair back off his neck, widening his eyes a little in show. “Things change, do they not?”

And what to make of that exactly, Louis has no idea.

So he shifts his weight, glancing back at the sliding door behind them, taking in their handiwork, and they need to find somewhere to sleep for the morning, since Louis doubts they’ll be able to leave tonight. Need to find some sort of way to clean up, and with Lestat’s leg like it is, half-starved like he is, he’s not sure how much help he’s gonna be in all that. Vaguely, Louis can hear the hurricane blusterin’ outside, can hear the metallic rattle of the shelves in here, the buzz of something electric, plugged into some sort of socket, and it’s still not Europe, but maybe he can still hear Claudia telling him to figure shit out before feelin’ it out too. He glances back at Lestat, jerking his head back towards the door.

“Lay another round of nails in it. I’m gonna look around,” Louis decides, dropping his hands into the pockets of his bomber jacket, finding crumbled leaves in his pockets that must have blown in as they walked. He fists them, scoops them out to drop them wetly on the floor beside him. “See what we’re working with tonight.”

Lestat gives him another weak faux-smile, but nods, shifting awkwardly to grab the nail gun from the ground, accommodating his bleeding leg, and Louis can’t look at him suddenly. Needs to move, needs to get away from this version of Lestat he barely recognizes, this frail, earnest thing. His feet start across the concrete, focus already shifting purposefully to the signs above the aisles, the orange bright as citrus skins hanging from the grey ceiling, and he’s about to turn the corner to one when he hears his name shouted in a too-familiar boom.

“Louis!” Lestat calls, and Louis turns on the spot to where Lestat’s standing by the door, holding the nail gun limply at his side, robe and hair hanging wet, skin a lick of snow, a lick of life in the sterile entrance of this too-modern place, and Louis waits for Lestat to say something else, but quickly realizes he won’t. Just means to stand there, staring desperately, holding to this weathered cord between them, needing in a way Louis doesn’t know what to do with.

But - - maybe Louis does.

“I’m not going far,” he calls back, and he sees it even from here, the way Lestat’s shoulders visibly loosen, placated by the promise of staying close, as something in his own chest seems to tighten. He swallows, thick, briefly overcome with the realization that maybe - - maybe he’s not so unfamiliar, and his voice is hoarse even to his own ears, when he adds: “Just - - you gotta wait for me, okay?”

What do we need right now?

What might we need tomorrow?

What do we have on us that we can leave behind?

He can still hear it in Claudia’s voice, her insistence on asking those same questions every new store, space, hall, every new dilapidated home they found themselves in in the scattered remains of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, nothing but the clothes on their back and the American money Louis had brought with him. Fistfuls of dollars they promised the locals they could exchange with the American soldiers for things Louis doubted they’d ever receive. A false hope for the desperate, and it’s on his mind now as he searches the aisles of Home Depot with intent.

What do we need right now? What might we need tomorrow? What do we have on us that we can leave behind?  

Something to dry off with, that’s what Louis thinks first, something to clean up with. He finds a few piles of towels and washcloths down in the bathroom section, bulk boxes of bars of soap at the end of an aisle, then a display washer-dryer pair in front of a range of taps and hoses, a box of laundry powder on top for affect, and shakes it, satisfied to find it full. There’s nowhere here among the spread of displayed linen closets and clothes horses and hangers to attach the hose though, so he keeps moving.

Past paint swatches and tool boxes and range heads, eyeballing a section of fizzy display lights and kitchen furniture, gaze fixing on a cheap timber pantry set-up that one of them might be able to fit in if they don’t find a better make-shift coffin later, and he’s still debating the seal around the hinges (will it let a sliver of light in?) when he hears a coo somewhere above him. Craning his neck up, Louis’ attention catches on a plume of grey-blue feathers, hooked little beaks, a glimpse of orange eyes – like Claudia’s, like Armand’s – the thought sticks, and a wry little smile finds his face. Neither of them would’ve liked the comparison.

Still, pigeons make for company, he thinks, then the thought, again - - when had Lestat eaten last? - - so, not company, perhaps, but a feed in a pinch.

What do we need right now? What might we need tomorrow? What do we have on us that we can leave behind?

He finds the staffroom through a door out the back, a sterile little room with woolly carpet and cheap, cellulose ceiling tiles. There’s a sink mounted on a vinyl-topped bench and a power outlet currently occupied by a microwave and a coffee pot – somewhere, at least, to set up the washing machine – two graffitied rectangular tables pushed together to make a square and a few ugly foam-padded chairs scattered around it.

Against the far wall, a row of lockers, and Louis makes quick work of them, breaking the locks with an efficient hand and rifling through their contents. Most are empty, but he finds a shopping bag in one with a bottle of Coca Cola, a box of tampons, a half-eaten container of stinking, by-gone sushi and - - ah, a bottle of shampoo. He pulls it out, and then in another locker finds a gym bag stuffed not with workout clothes, but rather a belt, polo shirt and dark brown slacks – changed into the gym clothes, rather than out of them, Louis supposes, hauling that bag out too. Then crackers, a crushed sandwich wrapped in beeswax and a jar of something called Cheez Whiz that Louis pulls a face at before pushing back into the locker.

A start, he thinks. Of what, he’s not entirely sure.

By the time he gets back to where he’d left Lestat laying nails in trembling timber, the other man has gone, the only sign that he’d been there at all in the scattered packaging littered on the floor, the droplets of blood and the trail of muddy footprints that lead opposite Louis’ own to the other side of the store. An earthy trail on the brutalist concrete, and Louis follows, of course he follows, and at least this feels something close to normal.

After all, it had always been too easy to follow Lestat.

He winds his way down juddering aisles of outdoor living displays – searching for his maker among hooded barbeques and rolled up shade sails and tacky aluminum sunlounges shaped like a modern caricature of a chaise – and vaguely finds himself tugged back into memories again as if by a child’s hand. Memories of the summer afternoons of his youth playing hide and seek with Paul and Grace, slipping beneath tables or behind their mother’s vanity, searching for each other’s little fingers or toes or bottomless brown eyes, as his had once been, in every room they were allowed into (and at least for himself and Grace, a few they weren’t too).

It holds somewhere funny in his chest, carries him forwards in the moment until he’s peering beneath picnic table settings and around the sides of gazebos, as if Lestat might be tucked up small as Louis can only imagine he was as a boy, or Claudia might - -

Claudia.

The thought closes his throat now.

Foolish, he thinks, he’d only just been remembering her, but that was Europe, that was after, and this feels - - different. To try to imagine her as a girl, because his daughter had been too old for games like that, even at 14 when Louis had brought her home. Felt them silly, preferred even then to play tea and sympathy with her dolls or jump rope or play music or write for endless evenings in her diaries. A girl when they’d made her, yes, but a childhood he should’ve been a part of already somewhere behind her. Years missed out on even then, of first steps and words and stories (had he ever even gotten to carry her in his arms beyond the night he’d carried her home?), his daughter and his sister always second to the stranger, just as Lestat had said she was that night he’d made her for him, dragged from a house Louis had as good as burned down himself.

The feeling then, dark, bitter, always there but somehow, suddenly, bottomless in its depth. It loosens the grip of childhood and whispers in the ear of his father guilt, for he was never mother or maker or the Black angel she’d called him that night, but the thief of death, saved her from a fire just so a century later she could - -

No.

Louis exhales a roughened breath, shakes his head, tries to knock the thought out of himself as he finds his feet again, shuffling from the outdoor living section of the store to the promise of green. A cart of plants first, then another, then what feels like a forest of them, hundreds of ferns and figs and pots of climbing vines, plants brought in from the gardening section, protected in this concrete cell from the wilds of the hurricane outside, and for a moment, it almost brings him something like peace. A distraction from tonight’s own odyssey of recollection, unravelling in the hallowed halls of his head.

He touches a rubber leafed peperomia, a shaggy stemmed monkey-tail cactus, feels the frail slip of sunshine in a marigold petal, and it doesn’t surprise him, exactly, to find his thoughts straying to Armand’s tenderly cultivated magnolia tree, the roots left to creep beneath the stones of Louis’ only place of solace. Years of deception counted in inches grown, in new branches, in every deciduous season.

It sparks - - something, Louis thinks, inhaling deeper, tasting the pollen of the flowers here on his tongue, smelling the mixing fragrances like the perfume his mother once wore, and he turns, thinks to lose himself in it for a while, only to stop in his path to temporary oblivion. There, among the parlor palms, stands Lestat, his robe loose again and hanging, his shoulders a little hunched, his hair curling wet at the back of his neck, and something in Louis jumps. A little Claudia where his heart should be, skipping rope in the courtyard of his chest, and he tries not to think of the way everything except him seems to slip away to nothing as Louis slowly closes the distance between them again. Lestat ever the will-o'-the-wisp to Louis’ tired and lonely traveler.

He comes to a stop beside him, looking at the clutch of lush fronded plants before them.

“In your honor,” Lestat says, echoing his words from earlier tonight when he’d used the fire gift on his fledgling, and Louis glances sideways, taking in the delicate slope of Lestat’s profile, briefly confused until Lestat tilts towards the peace lilies to the right of them. A few are in flower, their white petals curved like cupped hands against the lick of a flame, and oh, there’d been candles that night, hadn’t there? That first, last night with Lily asleep behind them, when the seal between them had finally broken.

The thought leaves Louis off-kilter. Feeling the memories of Romania, of his siblings, of the mystery of Claudia’s true childhood, of Armand’s magnolia, now of Lily, pulling too easy. Like winning a game of tug-of-war with the knotted rope of history and finding suddenly too much of it in your hands. Not yet tangled, but maybe not untangled either, and he’s barely even thinking when he asks:

“You eat her?”

Beside him, Lestat makes a sound of affirmation, tilting his pale face back towards Louis, waiting for Louis to meet his gaze, and when he does, Lestat seems to inhale something shaky, blue eyes blinking a little fast, before adding: “She tasted like lavender and Campania in the spring.”

A hundred images then:

Of Lily’s beatific smile and her soft hands and her ever listenin’ ear. How much shit had he talked about his girls to her? His business? The men who owned hers and her? His mother and his brother and his sister? What did he even know about her? Not her own family, not her own business. What had Lestat pulled from her head? From her vein? And oh, a feeling then, a little sick, a little tender, a little hot - - had Lestat known even then that he’d gone back to fuck her three nights after Lestat had outbid him? That he and her rarely did more than talk, but that night he’d chased any way Lestat might have had her, and then fucked her in the ass with his eyes closed, imagining she was him?

Shit - - the knowing look on her face after, almost amused as he’d lit them both a cigarette, unsatisfied and unsated. He wets his lips, guilt and an old, misplaced shame twisting down in his gut.

“She scared at the end?”

“Not as much as she should have been,” Lestat replies, too-blue gaze flicking over his face, and he’s trying to get a gauge of what Louis’ thinking, Louis knows he is, and it’s - - strange, after so long with Armand. To remember that Lestat can’t ever know. At least, not anymore. After a second, Lestat turns his gaze back to the rows and rows of plants, reaching out to finger one of the tongues of a parlor palm. “But isn’t that the price for the sale of a body? Whores and soldiers, they know better than most that mortal life is one lived on borrowed time.”

Louis considers that as a particularly harsh wind shakes the walls of the warehouse. Somewhere, a set of shelves drags a loud, scraping inch up the floor, a set of plastic pots rattle off their shelf, tumbling into the aisle, and he watches Lestat and suddenly wonders what it’s like in his head. Wonders what he would see if he could peel open the book of him and read his hidden pages. Wonders, suddenly, why he never thought to ask Armand what he’d seen in there those weeks or months they’d had together in Paris when Lestat was still young, but then - - maybe he’s glad that he didn’t. He takes in Lestat’s profile again, the slightly rounded tip of his nose and the perfect line of his jaw and his pink mouth and the scar that tugs at the corner of it, and he’s too pale, skin lined with dried trails of dirty water, and okay, Louis thinks. Didn’t he have a plan for that?

“Come on,” he says, tilting his head back behind them. “I found somewhere we can get cleaned up.”

And it’s the look on Lestat’s face is the thing – the disdainful twist to his expression as he takes in the blandly furnished space, gaze catching on the washer-dryer pair Louis had brought in before going to find Lestat, and the clutch of products Louis has arranged by the sink, the shampoo and the soap and the washcloths – that feels so close to something normal, something expected, that Louis just lets out a breathless little laugh. Maneuvering light-footed around the other man, Louis grabs the towels from the table, yanking off tags and hanging them over the back of one of the gaudy, foam-padded chairs.

“So it’s not exactly a bath house,” Louis says, unable to bite back his smile when Lestat gives him a pursed-mouthed no shit look in reply. Louis slips off his jacket, grabbing a hanger off the top of the washing machine to drape it up in the door frame, figuring he’d rather leave that for a dry cleaner than bother trying to get the grit off it now. “But it’s somewhere to wash the night off us. Figured we can get cleaned up while we wait the hurricane out.”

From across the room, Lestat just stares, eyes fixed on him in disbelief, like whatever he was expecting to find in the bowels of a some big-box hardware store might be more inviting, and Louis rolls his eyes. About to tell him that if he was expecting more than this, he’s taking detached-from-reality to new heights, but then - -

His gaze catches.

From the lip of Lestat’s low-necked shirt creeps a sudden sprawl of pink, and - - right, Louis thinks, feeling a heat find his own cheeks too. The disbelief maybe isn’t so much about the set-up than it is about - -

He clears his throat.

“We don’t have to do it together,” Louis offers weakly, suddenly embarrassed at his own presumption that this would be something that wouldn’t be complicated. Things had just felt - - fuck. Awkward, yes, emotionally fraught, sure, and a little unfamiliar, but it was still them, which the shack had made all too clear, and there’s not a fraction of the other’s body that they aren’t intimately familiar with.

Or weren’t, at least, 77 years ago.

The moment weighs between them briefly, seems to see-saw between the two of them as they both wait for the other to act, when suddenly Lestat shifts. He huffs out a little breath before tilting his chin up haughtily, like this is no matter at all, shrugging out of his robe to reveal a slinky, sopping wet tank that sticks like a second skin, and okay, Louis thinks, a little hot beneath the collar suddenly. Okay, so maybe he didn’t think this through, but still, he doesn’t turn away when Lestat untucks the shirt from his pants and pulls it over his head, revealing miles of lean, chiseled torso and a dusting of blond hair that Louis knows is soft as the down of a baby’s head. He swallows, shifts his weight, watching, still, as Lestat unbuttons his ripped trousers and pushes them down his skinny legs, careful around the bloodied one, letting his slacks catch at his ankles coz his damned shoes are still on, revealing - - well.

Lestat never did like underwear.

Louis sucks on his lips, trailing his gaze back up Lestat’s body (and fuck, was he always this thin?) glancing up at Lestat’s face as Lestat raises an eyebrow in something that feels like a challenge, and it’s enough to spark a response in Louis’ gut that has him pushing his own chin up. He doesn’t take off his clothes though, not yet, but rather strides towards the sink to fill it with warm water, letting Lestat smart a little behind him, but also at least crouch down without a witness to get himself out of his shoes.

As Louis waits for the sink to fill, he toes out of his own shoes, leaning down to pull off his socks. He tugs his still-damp shirt out of his pants, slipping it off over his head, shivering at the feel of the stale evening air, before dropping it to the floor and reaching for the bar of soap at the edge of the sink. He plunges it into the water, ignoring the twinge in his shoulder, and he feels it, is the thing – the stutter of Lestat’s heartbeat – for what feels like the first time in longer than Louis could ever remember. He stares down at the water, watches the bubbles form along the surface, and then - - quick as anything, before he can stop himself, glances over his shoulder only to see Lestat promptly look away, as if nervous to have been caught staring. He’s still stark naked behind him, although his arms are now folded across his chest, as if to hide the tiny pink dimes of his nipples, and Louis takes the moment to let his own gaze flick over Lestat’s body, and it’s too fast. The arousal that spools somewhere low in him as he takes in the impossible curve of his waist.

A muscle memory, suddenly felt in his hands, of just how well they fit at the dip. Just how good it feels to hold him there, how simple it has always been to pull him ever closer.

Louis tears his focus back to the water, turning off the tap before shucking out of his own slacks and underwear, a heat palpating just beneath his skin when he feels Lestat’s gaze fix on his ass. He clears his throat, grabbing one of the washcloths to submerge in the water, feeling the warmth of it around his hand, his wrist, the water still compared to the rush of wind and rain audible outside, and he raises it. Presses the washcloth into the valley of his armpit, squeezing there until the warm water trickles down his side.

Behind him, Lestat swallows, teeters on his feet, and Louis’s mouth suddenly feels very dry as he wets the cloth again to press to his other armpit.

“Come on,” he says, when Lestat still hasn’t moved, trying to stave off - - not embarrassment exactly, but maybe self-consciousness, and he grabs the other washcloth, wetting it roughly, before turning to hold it out to Lestat. He tries to shift his expression into something light, teasing, encouraging. “You know you need this more than I do.”

Still, it takes a minute for Lestat to square his shoulders and limp over to the sink. He’s pink halfway down his chest, and the color is a shade that reminds Louis of the inside of Claudia’s little coffin, something too sweet for the woman she’d be, too sweet for the man Louis knows Lestat is, but both are somehow right all the same. Were right, maybe, once. The thought has him trying to catch his breath as Lestat takes the washcloth from him.

For a moment, they’re quiet. The only sound between them the slosh of water in the sink and the muted sound of the hurricane outside, the whir of a generator, powering dim security lights, and the place is dusky. A hazy twilight mood despite the late hour, and Louis’ not entirely sure what to make of it, not really. Tries to focus on the feeling of this warm, soapy water washing the night off, just like he wanted. Tries to keep his gaze off Lestat, who suddenly feels a little too close, the coppery smell of the blood drying at his thigh enough to leave saliva pooling behind Louis molars and he searches for something, anything to say that might take the edge off.

“You know what they call this?” he asks, voice a little strained, not waiting for an answer before he says: “A whore’s bath.”

Beside him, Lestat snorts, and Louis glances up and almost immediately regrets it, because Lestat’s just - - looking straight back at him, his gaze too warm as he drags the cloth down a long, toned arm, just like Louis knows his own is. He clears his throat, scrambles with the memory, tugs at the knotted rope of it.

“Bricktop was always bitchin’ about it,” Louis adds, because she was, and the memory feels safe somehow, or at least safer than whatever’s happening between them right now. He drops his washcloth back into the water in exchange for lathering his hands in soap, rolling the bar around between his palms with methodical focus. He looks up at Lestat again, but maybe that’s a mistake too, because Lestat’s pressed the cloth to his grimy neck, squeezing it until the water dribbles down the skin there. Rides the ridge of his delicate collarbone. Louis wants to lick it off.

Which - -

Dangerous.

He drops his gaze back to the sink, handling the soap a little rougher. “Said I only gave ‘em the time to clean their tits, pits and bits, that’s how she put it. Said they deserved proper copper tubs and an hour to soak after a John, like them ladies up on Basin Street.”

“Lost revenue every other hour, bad for the bottom line,” Lestat intones, and - - yeah. Right. That’s what Louis had told him back then. The argument suddenly feels familiar, real, right, and Louis can remember arguing with his girls in fits and starts, both before he bought The Azaelia and after. That switch that had happened after he bought the place and getting to come back to Rue Royale instead of to someone else’s club, getting to bitch not to Miss Lily watching the clock, but Lestat, who would listen and agree and placate and still get on his knees at the end of it, and it had felt like something once.

That that’s what coming home was supposed to feel like. An ear and a mouth but then a body pressed to his in bed too. It lights the argument back up in his chest, chasing the memory, a familiar curl of self-righteousness that reminds him he was always good at what he did, how much he liked showing Lestat once how good he was at what he did.  He feels his accent thickening as he points the bar of soap at the other man.

“My girls didn’t bring in the money those ladies up on Basin Street did.” 

“A crime really,” Lestat agrees, and maybe the conversation is a familiar comfort to him too, because he pinches the soap from Louis’ hands to begin to lather as he watches Louis run his hands behind his own neck, down his arms, his pits, his chest. “They had a much more varied skillset. Rivalled the best whores in Paris.”

“That was the business then,” Louis says, scrubbing his soapy hands through his chest hair, down towards his happy trail. “Bein’ Black. Had to do twice as much to be thought half as good. Fuck. Still is here.”

“It’s appalling,” Lestat replies honestly, albeit a little distant, watching Louis run a soaped-up hand over his lower abs. “How people like you are treated in this country of ours.”

And there’s something to the way he says it that just - - pushes him back. Not to those endless, ever ending nights in Rue Royale, nor the hours spent fixin’ up The Azaelia, but to that card table that night before it all really began at all. Lestat, two men down, stopping time as Tom Anderson made Louis some humiliating offer, telling him his worth like he could ever have known what it was back then, what it would be.

Do you not know your value? Do you suffer these indignities for some larger purpose?

The memory has his mouth dry, has something in Louis hardening as he stares back at Lestat, who’s not looking him in the eye anymore, not when Louis drops his lathered-up hand to his cock. Cleaning himself because he wants to, but also maybe to feel the stutter of Lestat’s heartbeat in his own chest too.

“You know what I do now?”

The question is enough to jerk Lestat’s attention back up to Louis’ face, trepidation evident in his look even before he shakes his head, something small, subtle, and it feels important suddenly, that Lestat just - - sees him now.

“I have a diversified folio of assets across stock, bonds and real estate, while jobbing, I suppose, as an art dealer,” Louis says, lazily cleaning himself still as he watches every twitch of Lestat’s expression. “Flipped a Klimt recently, a Haring. My net worth is in the 1%, and I did that without you.”

Lestat blinks back at him, surprise so naked on his face that Louis feels something old and really fuckin’ ugly rise in his chest until Lestat says:

“I knew that you could,” like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Louis suddenly feels just - -

Doused with something that he can’t quite name. He tears his gaze away from Lestat, let’s go of himself, wipes his soapy hand off on his hairy thigh, and feels suddenly a little lost within himself. Why had he needed Lestat to know that? Why had he felt the need to flex - - something - - when he’d just seen how low Lestat had been brought? Seen the shack and the piano and the writhing bags of squealing rats? He’d had his businesses before Lestat, Lestat knew that, but had he only wanted more because of him? No, fuck, he barely remembers where his head was at before Lestat blew in off the port, but he knows that. Knows he paid Lestat back every cent of his investment even in The Azaelia before it was shut down, and Lestat never cared. Never wanted anything except for Louis to have everything he wanted so long as he stayed close, and he hadn’t understood it, he knew that. Lestat had never had to work, was above such mortal things as ambition, but Louis had always needed work, had needed to feel good at it, and he guesses, maybe, he’d always needed to be seen as good at it too.

“Okay,” Louis says now, still a little uncertain, a little unsteady. “Good.”

Lestat nods again, almost a little meekly this time, as he soaps his own chest, and Louis looks away again, feels off-kilter as he grabs the washcloth from the sink and starts to wash the suds from his body. For a moment, a minute, they bathe in silence. The memories not so much put to rest as they are left to yawn in the night air between them, and Louis searches for a distraction from his own tired head, and finds one as he too often did.

In the long, snowy line of Lestat’s elegant body. He swallows, glancing over at the other man again, and it’s funny, maybe. To remember how Lestat used to bathe, sprawled out in their tub in New Orleans, chest to Louis’ back or vice versa, and that feels - - a long time ago. Before Claudia even. It had been hard to bathe together with a child in the house, after all, and by the time she’d left, the habit itself had felt a distant one. One too hard to get back to. Louis watches Lestat lather up, fingers catching in the hollows of his ribs, and the suds are already coming away a murky off-white, dirty beyond what the hurricane had dragged onto their skin not an hour earlier, and maybe it’s just to move the conversation away from the one they just had, but he can’t help it is the thing. The question.

“When was the last time you did this?”

In the moment, Lestat performs to it. A deep inhale, a pursed mouth, holds himself up a little tighter as he drags his own soapy hand down his belly (and Louis won’t follow his path, he won’t), a put-on bemusement as he says:

“Had le bain de pute? Probably on the ship between the old world and the new before we even met. I have to say, I agree with your whores, this is not my preferred way to wash.”

“Lestat.”

There’s a tone to the way he says Lestat’s name. He knows it, can hear it himself, but suddenly he can’t kick the pity from his voice, and Lestat can hear it, has to hear it, with the way his lashes flutter shut. The way he takes it like a bullet.

“Louis. Je ne comprends pas ce que tu veux,” he says. “Why are you here?”

The question - - surprises him. Asked so frankly, and he wets his lips, drops his washcloth back into the sink, hears the light splash of water as he tries to wrangle his thoughts into something resembling an answer.

“I told you why, back at your - - place.”

To thank you.

He hopes he heard it. Hears it, because Louis - - he thinks he means it. No, knows he does. This promise of something hopeful ahead of him instead of the all the hopelessness that lies behind him, of what people have done to him, what he’s done to himself, worse, what he’s done to others, and Lestat looks at him again. Wet eyed and exhausted, and Louis just - - he can’t stop looking back. Doesn’t ever want to stop looking at him again, and that’s as dangerous a thought as any other, but for the moment, Louis lets himself have it. Let’s himself watch Lestat wash the grime away to reveal the porcelain skin below, the fine, thin angles of him, and he doesn’t know if its where he is or where they are, but Lestat looks small to him suddenly. Fragile in a way he never felt in New Orleans, didn’t even feel in Paris, and he wonders what he looks like in return. If he feels smaller or bigger or less or more, if these years apart from him, if these years without her, are as visible on his bones as he thinks they might be on Lestat’s.

Outside, the hurricane howls, the metal shelves on the warehouse floor clanging loud and rough, but all Louis can hear is the slosh of water in the sink as Lestat wets his washcloth, and his own quiet, unsteady breaths, and it’s like a dream, uncanny almost. The two of them standing naked on the scratchy woolen carpet in this tiny, foreign, tacky little room, and Louis watches him wipe the soap off himself, golden locks dark with water and grime, and he says it before he can think better of it:

“Let me wash your hair.”

The laugh Lestat lets out is loud as a bark, something brash that almost makes Louis jump, but then Lestat gives him a baffled look, and Louis firms up. He looks pointedly towards the sink.

“Gonna be easier for me to do it than you,” he says, because it will be, and Lestat laughs again, borderline hysterical this time at the whiplash of all of this.

“You would never - - ” he starts, only to cut himself off, but Louis knows what he was going to say. That Louis wouldn’t so much as take his coat at home in Rue Royale, not with the humiliation of the opera, of all the leases and contracts he’d had to have Lestat sign on, and it had been important to him then. To never feel like he was waiting on Lestat at home, for Lestat to know whatever roles the two of them had to perform in public could not, and would not, be replicated in their home, even if at times it inevitably was. Maybe it would still matter, if they were anywhere else, but they’re here, and it’s just them, and these weeks have wrung Louis out and all he wants to do in this moment is put his hands in his hair in a way that doesn’t involve kissing him. He wants to pan for the gold of it in the water of this place, find the riches of it again.

He wets his lips.

“I want to wash your hair, Lestat.”

With a shaky exhale of surrender, Lestat nods, and Louis grabs one of the chairs from around the table, propping it back against the counter like this is a pale imitation of a salon, and watches as Lestat drapes his towel over the padded seat before sitting down on it, not bothering to wrap it around his waist as Louis empties the sink and scoops out the washcloths. He turns on the tap again, tests the water, before scooping up Lestat’s damp hair and gently easing him back to recline awkwardly against the sink, and he feels his breath catch, when Lestat extends his neck back to reveal the thinnest white line of his scar.

Which - -

No, don’t think about that.

Not now, not yet.

Think about his hair, Louis thinks, heart hammering in his chest, taking it in hand.

The hurricane had simultaneously washed a lot of the grime out of it while blowing a lot of fresh debris into it, and Louis tries not to think about the state of his own hair either as he cards his fingers through Lestat’s locks, knuckle joints catching on knots and leaves alike. He can hear Lestat breathing, can feel his gaze fixed up on Louis as he focuses on rinsing out Lestat’s hair, detangling as best he can with his fingers before he grabs the bottle of shampoo. It won’t be to Lestat’s liking – it’s too sweet for one, perfumed with that saccharine artificial coconut that calls to mind adverts for tanning lotion and beach waves – but for now, it’s all they have, and Louis rubs it between his hands before threading his fingers back through Lestat’s wet hair, kneading at his scalp.

Dirt comes away in murky reams of soap, like muddied sea foam on a bleak day, and it lifts something inside his chest when he sees the color start to peek back through. Still darker than it’ll be once its dried, that much he knows, but it reminds him of those early baths together, touching and kissing and fucking in the tub, the copper chafing at his back as Lestat had worked his way between his legs, water sloshing over the rim, Louis’ hand buried in his hair, threads of gold between his fingers like catching the heat of a halo.

He can hear his own breathing, or maybe it’s Lestat’s, can hear his heartbeat, or maybe it’s Lestat’s, can feel a warmth low in him, the twitch of his cock between his legs, and his gaze darts sideways, over the intensity of Lestat’s gaze, down to - - yeah, okay, not just his cock either. Which - - right. Louis guides Lestat’s hair back under the water again, makes quick work now rinsing out the shampoo, before squeezing out some of the water, striding over the table to grab a fresh towel. He dries himself off quickly, efficiently, before wrapping it around his waist and turning to see Lestat sitting upright, finally tucking his own towel around himself as his hair drips wet down his back.

“We should - - ” Louis starts, gesturing to the washing machine, and Lestat blinks back at him gormlessly, and yeah, okay, Louis thinks. Legs jittery, ready for a task again, a distraction. He drags the machine a few feet over towards the sink, grabbing the hose on the back of the machine and screwing it awkwardly into the now vacant tap, and plugging the cable into the wall. He scoops up the pile of his own clothes, then Lestat’s, tossing them into the washer without a second thought, before pausing at the sight of Lestat’s robe on the floor.

The delicate collar faded from the years, but - - recognizable still, somehow. More than that. Impossible to mistake for anything other than what it is. Louis wets his lips.

“Think this’ll survive the machine?” he asks, peering back at Lestat, and oh, briefly, he doesn’t think he can remember how to breathe. Lestat looks - - not more himself, exactly, just him in a way that suddenly feels impossible to quantify. Shoulders broad and jaw chiseled, but everything else a slender slope, eyes so blue they look caught from the deep sea, his cheekbones catching the dim light of the staff room, and Louis swallows something thick as Lestat offers him a shy little smile.  

“Perhaps not, she is fragile,” Lestat says. “And - - ”

He cuts himself off again.

“And what?” Louis prompts, something jittery almost beneath his skin, but whatever Lestat meant to say, he can’t seem to find the words. His face falters into something a little vulnerable, and Louis just - - he picks up the thread. “Remember you in it that night we first - - ”

And fuck, he can’t say it either. Feels suddenly eighteen again, after his first time with one of the boys out at New Orleans University, fumbling in the dormitories after dark. No vocabulary for what that was back then, suddenly no vocabulary for it here now neither, and opposite him, Lestat just laughs, a little nervously, and then Louis does too. He wets his lips, stares at Lestat, staring at him.

“Remember you puttin’ it on, coverin’ up all of this,” he says it like he wasn’t in the midst of running away when Lestat put it on, and reaches, goes almost to pinch Lestat’s bare and tiny waist, but then jerks his hand back because - - fuck, too soon for that. Clears his throat, adds: “Remember it a little brighter.”

Lestat just smiles, a hundred emotions crossing his face before his expression draws in faux concession.

“Well, she’s been through a lot,” Lestat replies, voice a little low, a little conspiratorial, and Louis feels his own smile soften. “She’ll brighten again.”

It feels - -

Feels. Tugs somewhere deep in the cavern of him like a light, like a promise, like an inch of rope both pulling at the past but maybe tugging towards tomorrow too, and Louis can’t quite let it. Not yet. Can’t think about what any of this means beyond tonight, and so he turns on the spot, grabs another hanger and shakes out the dressing gown, moving to hang it up on the door frame beside his bomber jacket, and reaches for something else from their shared and storied past to keep them going.

“Don’t suppose Eedie’s old laundry house is still open?” Louis asks, like the woman wouldn’t be near 200 by now if she were still living. “She always did us good.”

“Closed in the winter of ’56, I’m afraid,” Lestat says, tone genuinely apologetic with it too. “Her children didn’t have her business acumen nor her attention to detail. I am yet to find a replacement worthy of her.”

And of course Lestat came back and sent his clothes to their old laundry house, Louis’ mama’s old laundry house. Of course he knew what happened to it, and there’s something to it. That Lestat would know more about these stalwarts of Louis’ hometown than he does now. He finds his mouth a little dry as he steps back from their outer garments, back towards the washing machine. There are a few toggles on it, but Louis doesn’t bother reading them, just closes the door, puts the powder in the slot and turns it on.

“I know a good - - ” he corrects himself, lest he get questioned on it: “I know people who know some good dry cleaners. Get it looking good as new again.”

“People,” Lestat drawls, curious as Louis leans back against the table, watching Lestat who’s yet to get up from his salon seat. “Lovers? Friends? Fledglings?”

And yeah, okay, Louis thinks, eyeing Lestat, who makes no effort to hide the fact that he’s fishing. Not the questioning Louis was prepared for, but probably the one he should’ve been.

“I have staff,” he concedes with a grin, and Lestat hums, amused almost, like they didn’t have housekeepers back at Rue Royale.

“Ah, master of the house again, hm?”

And it’s instant, is the thing.

The click-spark of his temper, and he doesn’t know if it’s the tone or the words or the fact that it’s Lestat, sitting naked but for the towel opposite him, hair newly cleaned from where Louis’ lathered and rinsed it, clothes bouncing around the washing machine that Louis’ just put them in, the line between caring for and serving one he never quite figured out with Lestat, but Louis feels the heat in his voice as he scoffs.

“When have I ever been master of any house, Lestat? My mother’s? Yours? Armand’s?”

“Ours,” Lestat corrects, a sudden and biting defense laced through his own tone that does little to calm Louis’ disposition. “It was our house, not mine, and you made sure you lived in it years longer than me, non?”

Which - -

Fuck.

“Yeah,” Louis bites, irritation flaming into something much hotter. “After you - - ”

And oh - - they both reel back in their seats.

Pushed back by the force of the memory dropped suddenly between them, and Louis can’t catch his breath, feels briefly in free fall like he did that deathly fuckin’ night, and Lestat’s suddenly just - - leaking - - tears pearling in the corner of his wide eyes as he shakes his head, says:

“I don’t mean - - Louis, forgive me, je ne voulais pas dire ça comme ça, I - - you were right to cast me out. I said it during - - in Paris. I know what I did, and there are no excuses, I will never deserve your forgiveness. I - - ”

He fumbles, and somewhere at Louis’ back is that weight again, Claudia’s elbows digging into his shoulders, aggravating the ache in his left one, her voice in his ear sayin’ King of Mardi Gras, Queen of Crocodile Tears and Louis feels something in him harden but then it’s just - - his gaze dips to Lestat’s neck. Finds the fine white scar he lay there, the one he saw as he washed his hair, and he remembers it. The feeling of his knife cutting through the delicate tendons of Lestat’s throat. Remembers the death rattle, remembers the grief, remembers the regret, and then - - fuck. He just feels tired.

“No, I - - I know. You’re right, it was our house, I wasn’t…” he says it honestly, if inelegantly. He exhales, rummages around in his head for what he means: “I know it was my house too, that what I had in it was mine, that I could - - influence it. Said that to you earlier tonight, didn’t I? Back at your - - place.”

For a moment, all Louis can hear is the washing machine trundling between them, mechanical in its rotation, and Louis watches Lestat avoid his gaze, submissive and remorseful in that way that he doesn’t think he’s ever going to get used to. It feels - - different though. Not a play like it felt sometimes in New Orleans, not a naked and deliberate manipulation nor an effort to win him back over, but like the yawning mouth of shame for something you’ll never be able to take back, and Louis wets his lips, tastes blood in the air, and he glances down to Lestat’s leg. Sees where his thigh still weeps, bleeding a red slash through the cotton towel, and it’s enough in the moment to make Louis frown. Finally, he asks the question he’s been thinking about half the night:

“When was the last time you ate?”

The question has Lestat glancing back up at him, surprised, eyes still wet with tears as he pushes out a performative smile, sniffing like he hasn’t just been sobbing, and clinging to the offer of a new conversation. He tilts his head, makes a show of thinking about it.

“Last night, I believe” he says. “I had a number of rats, although I admit, probably not as many as I should have. They taste worse this century, don’t you agree? Mortals settle for food made from tubes of slop and poudre these days, and the rats feast on what’s tossed from car windows or left on the street. I can’t say it tantalizes the palette.”

And probably not, Louis thinks, between the fast food and the corn syrup a lot of people taste worse too, but the statement just calls back his surprise that Lestat would deign to change his diet at all. He frowns again, thinks to ask about his fledgling, but oddly enough decides he doesn’t really care all that much about him. From what Armand had told him, Lestat always seemed to play fast and loose with the dark gift, except for when he didn’t.  

“How long you been eating rats for?” he asks instead, and Lestat huffs out a breath, swipes at his cheek to get rid of the last remnants of his tears.

“A while. I acquired the taste, just like you wanted,” Lestat says, gesturing vaguely at him, almost baiting another argument, whether he means to or not, but Louis doesn’t take it. Just rolls his eyes and says:

“You need to eat something tonight.”

“Shall we go back outside?” Lestat asks facetiously, gesturing now to the outside wall where the hurricane howls ferociously, and Louis almost suggests he could feed off him, but the thought feels - - beyond dangerous. Stupid. Too much, too soon, he knows that, and besides, no quick drink is going to get Lestat back to his old strength, and they need one of them in some sort of shape if anything happens tonight. So he makes the offer of what he'd seen earlier with a shrug.

“There are pigeons in the store.”

“Squab, delightful,” Lestat says, sounding anything but delighted. “Shall we scale the walls to hunt them?”

Louis wets his lips, gaze finding Lestat’s, holding it, even as he plays with a casual tone as he asks:

“Can you use the cloud gift?”

At the question, Lestat pauses, holding Louis’ focus, and a hundred expressions run across his face – the familiar shame, the pain, the worry, and they’re all honest, all true, Louis thinks, but it’s the last one that has his attention, because the last one is something that edges into embarrassment which is what has Louis sure Lestat’s telling the truth when he tilts his head to the side and carefully says:

“It is not currently available to me.”

Just like that, Louis’ feet find the ground again. The free fall that started the moment the memory of the drop found him suddenly gone, and he feels steady again, and fuck, he doesn’t know what it says about him and his head these days that something in him eases at the prospect. Just knows that it means something here, now, just like knowing Lestat will never be able to break the lock of his mind like Armand too often did means something tonight to him too. A thought, perhaps, worth exploring another time. Louis pushes himself off the table.  

“Guess we’re gonna have to lay some bait then.”

“They seek to conspire against us,” Lestat says, squinting up at the top of the shelves of paint cans where a cluster of pigeons seem to have settled across the tin lids, cooing softly and fluffing up their feathers in the dull light of the store.

“I don’t think pigeons are that smart,” Louis replies, tearing off another piece of the crumpled, stale sandwich he’d ransacked from the staff room lockers, dropping it on the concrete floor not far from the other crumbs as Lestat squats behind a display of paint rollers, perched to pounce if any of the pigeons are tempted by the meagre offering. It’s perhaps not Louis’ most dignified idea – they’re still practically naked after all, dressed only in their knotted towels as their clothes are battered around in the washing machine – but with the streets only just starting to catch the hurricane’s eye, it’s the only one they’ve got.

He glances over the aisle at Lestat as he drops another bit of sandwich to the floor, catching a glimpse of the other man’s pale face and gold-drying hair, and tonight’s just been hard enough, heavy enough, strange enough that it figures this would just veer into something absurd, yet oddly familiar.

Perhaps the state of undress, Louis thinks, peanut butter smearing on his thumb as he rips off another bit of sandwich, looking at the snowy curve of Lestat’s shoulder around the florid display stand Lestat’s crouched behind. He was used to the nudity, after all, if not the location. Those years after his turning, before they’d had Claudia, they had often felt little need for clothes. Their nights falling into a routine that started with Louis working, was filled with feeding and passionate lovemaking, and ended with lazy hours before dawn, sprawled out for one another in their mortal skins, talking about books they’d read or music they’d heard, or the casual gossip of whores and businessmen that left Lestat’s hand between Louis’ leg or Louis palming Lestat’s ass as they sought to conspire against both themselves.

And yes, of course it was anchored in desire, or - - no. It was their intimacy that anchored them, desire was the sea they sailed in – ever present and always a slip away from being fallen back into – and Louis, glancing at Lestat’s pink mouth and ever-grippable shoulders, would be lying if he said that he didn’t feel that still now.

He drops the final piece of bread, sucking his peanut butter-y thumb into his mouth – tasting it like a torpid paste – before he ducks behind a masking tape display and joins Lestat in the waiting game.

A minute, maybe two, the hum of the warehouse’s circuitry and the whistle of the wind outside all that’s left to fill the space, most of the pigeons half-asleep even as one eyes the sandwich pieces curiously from her place up on the paint cans, before Lestat breaks the quiet.

“You could run up, non?”

Which - - Louis blinks, leaning up over the display box to stare furrow-browed at Lestat across the aisle.

“’Scuse me?”

Lestat does a two-finger up and down gesture over the top of the paint rollers.

“You could run up,” he repeats. “Your vampiric speed must be available to you, non? If you go fast, you’ll be able to grab one.”

And fuck, he’d thought Lestat was joking about scaling the walls. The prospect isn’t one Louis’ even remotely interested in – unsure if he could truly generate the speed or even if the shelves could carry his weight, even briefly – and he eyeballs Lestat back dubiously as the other man raises an eyebrow in question.

“Lestat - - ” he starts, and his tone must say somethin’, because Lestat instantly huffs out an annoyed breath.

“They are not responding to your bait.”

“Because you’re talking.”

“Oh,” Lestat says, faux surprised across the aisle, and Louis rolls his eyes, suddenly reminded of just how bitchy Lestat gets when he’s hungry. “I was not aware the pigeonnes understood the human tongue. What would I do without you tonight, Louis?”

Probably get buried alive in your damned squatter shack, Louis thinks, but he manages to keep it to the current dilemma.

“They understand when the human tongue is waggin’, so maybe shut the fuck up.”

Lestat glowers at him over the paint rollers, and Louis exhales a rough breath, rewarded, suddenly, when the pigeon who’d been eyeballing the sandwich suddenly flaps her wings and kicks off the can of paint. A few of the others following her down, and Louis feels his fangs protract, ready to move when they hit the ground, when a flash of pale skin warps in the space in front of him and suddenly Louis’ moving too. Fast as anything, straight into a wave of feathers and flailing wings and desperate bird calls, the rest of the pigeons above them suddenly flurrying in their escape, and Louis gets his hands on one. Snaps its wing before dropping it to the floor between them, then does the same with a second, only stopping when he smells the blood in the air. He turns to find Lestat drinking deeply from the heaving chest of a third, its blue-silver-purple feathers ruffling against the delicate line of his nose.

Above them, the rest of the pigeons have scattered, leaving behind a smear of nervous bird shit and a snowfall of feathers, their frightened cooing echoing somewhere overhead as the two broken-winged birds between them scurry across the floor. Louis nudges them back towards Lestat with the side of his foot, glancing over at where Lestat’s eyes have almost rolled back into his head, and yeah, Louis thinks with a frown, he was hungry.

The air suddenly feels thicker again, the Louisiana humidity like sliding through melting butter, the scent of blood sweetening, and it’s not the pigeon’s, can’t be, Louis’ had too much of it before, but rather the blood still oozing from Lestat’s thigh. The thought makes him glance down at where its soaking through the towel, sticking the fabric to the wound, and it’s not anything he’d act on now, it’s not, but - -

It’d be easy, is all.

To get on his knees and peel it back to lap at the wound there, dip his tongue into the river of his maker-lover-husband-ex and - -

“Like licking the latrines of Paris,” Lestat says with a grimace, blood smeared around his mouth, pigeon now limp in his hands, and Louis snorts, pulled from his reverie. Wills the heat out of his cock and rolls his shoulders, focuses on gently knocking the still-living pigeons back towards the other man with the flat side of his foot.

“Yeah, well, sorry Home Depot hasn’t got a higher quality supply of vermin. Keep eating,” he says, glancing pointedly back at the two birds he’s keeping close, and Lestat looks up at him, a question in his expression that Louis hears as if it was spoken aloud. “I ate before I saw you tonight.”

Which he did – a blood bag more than he normally would too, which Louis’ again glad for – and it would’ve been good to have gotten back to the suite tonight. To have offered Lestat something more than this, but Lestat vocalizes no real complaints, content apparently with sitting down on the floor as the two pigeons scuttle along the concrete between them, their broken wings held at odd angles, and it’s something. To watch Lestat gently place the dead pigeon at his feet before reaching over to scoop up another.

He fiddles a little with its broken, still fluttering wing, the bird writhing in fear and agony when Lestat tenderly binds its limb to its chest like you would hold an arm for a sling. Pressing it there as if to ease the pain. He strokes a gentle finger down the pigeon’s head, staring at its amber eyes, and Louis doesn’t have the chance to ask if they remind him of their daughter’s too when Lestat says: “You used to do this for Claudia,” before he uses a finger to tilt the bird’s head back and sinks his fangs into its quivering chest.  

In the moment of it, the memory tugs too easy, as Lestat must’ve known it would. Those nights Claudia would refuse to eat, no matter what animals Louis dragged to her room. Those nights he’d take birds from their branches, the more exotic the better, cats and dogs from neighbors’ yards, racoons, squirrels, foxes, even once an alligator from a variety show on The Tango Belt, only to discover Claudia hadn’t been starving herself at all.

An old, long dormant annoyance spikes in his chest again as he stands over Lestat, watching him drink from the pigeon, the memory of Claudia turning her pretty little nose up at eating animals instead of people, adapting her delicately designed little bedroom into a grotesquerie something he never quite managed to reconcile with. He licks his fangs, still protracted, and gently knocks the still-uneaten pigeon back between them.

“Yeah, not that she was eatin’ them. Not good enough for Miss Priss,” he grumbles, and he’s not expecting it is the thing - - the sudden and delighted laughter that bursts from Lestat against his mouthful of pigeon. Louis blinks, stares down at the other man, who raises his bloody mouth from the bird just to glance up at him, hum, say:

“Our little carnivore,” with all the affection in the world, before he sinks his teeth back into the throbbing bird, and oh, Louis thinks, a smile suddenly twitching at his own mouth before he can help it. Warmth in his chest blowing up like a balloon fit to burst, and it’s so fuckin’ small, but he can’t remember the last time he laughed about Claudia.

He bites the inside of his cheek, works his mouth a little.

“Yeah, well, I always thought she got that from you, but here you are eatin’ - - what did you call these?” he says, faux-frowning as he leans down to nudge the still-living bird back towards Lestat with his hand this time, using it as an excuse to sit down on the floor opposite Lestat, holding his arms out a little just to barricade the last pigeon in between them.

“Feathered rats,” Lestat replies dryly, although Louis can see the smile tugging at his own bloodied lips. Louis huffs out a breath, rolls his eyes, says what he meant – what Lestat had called it earlier – instead:

“Squab?”

At the word, the pigeon coos between them, makes to dart around Louis’ now crossed legs, and he grabs it easily, holds it between his hands, feels its tiny, fluttering heart there as he watches Lestat sink his fangs back into the chest of the one he’s holding. He’s almost finished with it, death flirting with the bird’s mortal soul as its head lolls back, and Louis wets his lips.

“That never changed for her, even after we - - ” the words die in Louis’ throat, and he glances back up at Lestat, suddenly all too aware of what he means to say, of the time in their lives he wants to call on, but the other man seems unperturbed at the allusion to what they did to him that fateful, bloodied night. Rather his gaze fixes back on Louis, blue eyes brighter than they’ve been all night, alive, maybe, with the spoonfuls of sullied blood he drinks from the pigeon’s chest. It’s enough, somehow, for Louis to continue. “After we got to Europe, after we left NOLA, I mean, it was like she just shed any civility she’d had. No more manners, no more honeytrappin’, no more taste for that sort of thing. She’d rip the heart out of a man’s chest.”

He takes a breath, feels the pigeon try to wriggle free in his grip, and he tightens his hold, feels how easy it would be to crush the bones of its chest there.

“Reminded me of you,” he adds, nodding at Lestat. “Night you turned me. That fist of yours through Father Matthias’ head.”

With a wet pop, Lestat pulls his mouth from the pigeon’s chest, pink tongue flicking out to lick the remnants of blood from around his mouth, and Louis watches. Tries not to fix on it.

“I have always been a little heavy handed,” Lestat replies, and it takes him enough by surprise that Louis can’t help but laugh, ignoring the way his heart stutters in his chest as Lestat hides his grin with the pigeon carcass.

“Yeah, that’s probably the understatement of the century,” Louis says, tilting his head to the side, gesturing at him with the still-living bird in his hands. “You’re as subtle as - - well, as a fist through the head.”

And Lestat does laugh then too, good humored, as he bundles the second dead pigeon beside the first and reaches for the third in Louis’ grip. The feed, however limited, has put color back in his cheeks and – glancing down – stopped the bleeding at his thigh, Louis realizes. Been enough to ground him, and despite himself, Louis feels something in him unwind. Hadn’t realized, maybe, how worried he’d been about him until this moment.

“Subtlety is not my strong suit, I fear,” Lestat says. “I prefer an honest performance”

And well, Louis raises an eyebrow at that.

“I wouldn’t say honesty was your strong suit either,” he replies, and Lestat huffs out a breath, pointedly biting into the third pigeon instead of retorting. The bird coos helplessly, but the swoon finds it quickly, the creature’s grey head dipping back, amber eyes the color of their daughter’s fluttering shut, and Louis feels Claudia’s hand in his as she tugs him sideways again into memories of Europe.

How intent she’d been, desperate, clinging to this singular purpose as they’d trekked through the wastelands of war-ravaged Europe, the snow in their hair and the garlic slung over doors and the bad blood and all the anguish of the damned, and then - - Louis frowns. Glances back at where Lestat pulls heady mouthfuls from the bird’s vein. Wonders, maybe, about testing this honest performance.

“We saw a - - thing there. In Romania. Claudia thought it was a vampire, but it wasn’t like us. A catfish with teeth. You know what that is? Armand didn’t.”

Pulling his mouth from the pigeon, Lestat licks his lips, seems to turn the question over in his head as the building rattles with a particularly harsh wind, before he says:

“It sounds like a revenant, but who am I to say? I’ve never met one.”

With that, he sinks his teeth back into the bird to finish it off, and Louis for a moment can only stare.

The admission – both that he knows what it is and that he’s never met one – fuck. Okay. It shocks him more than he cares to admit. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear a flurry of activity – the flap of wings and the fall of something plastic onto the hard concrete floors – and it’s probably the birds still or maybe some errant rats. Creatures sheltering from the storm here with them, and none of it matters, not now, but Louis feels something like annoyance turn in his chest as he watches Lestat finish eating and place the third pigeon down alongside the other two on the floor beside him.

“So,” he says, suddenly needing - - elaboration. “Revenant. Not a vampire?”

Lestat tilts his head from side-to-side, considering.

“A vampire,” he concedes after a moment, flicking his blond hair back over his shoulder, gaze steadfastly avoiding Louis’ as he instead focuses on gently folding the dead pigeon’s wings around itself. “Just not one like us. They say the way a vampire is turned can alter his form. I don’t know if it’s true, it’s just something someone once told me.”

It’s enough to make Louis frown, to focus on the workings of Lestat’s long, delicate fingers as he starts to move the birds, and he remembers it, is all. The terrifying form of the monster that night, Claudia’s determination to see herself in its teeth, its claws, to connect with something she shared only an appetite with. 

“I thought maybe it was the blood,” Louis says. “From the war? Too much misery.”

And Lestat seems to consider it.

“Perhaps,” he says. “If you have met one, you’ll have a better sense of them than me with my secondhand stories.”

“Your secondhand stories,” Louis echoes, and Lestat’s gaze flicks back up at him as he carefully reaches for the first pigeon again, placing it on the floor between his legs and folding its wings gently around its body. A little mortuary ritual for a little bird. Was that something he used to do? Did he position the corpses before they put them in the incinerator? Louis finds he can’t remember, at least, not now. He swallows something thick. “And you never thought to share any of them with us?”

He can see it is the thing. Stripped of clothes but for the towels as they are, Lestat has nowhere to hide the sudden tension in his body, the set to his jaw and the curl of his shoulders. The flush of annoyance-embarrassment-secrecy-something that colors his chest pink, and if Louis looks hard enough, he thinks he could see the twist of his still-beating heart. Louis fists his knees, feels the weight of their daughter again, leaning at his back, looking at her father, her maker, their maker, over the top of his head.

“You think if I told Claudia I’d heard stories of creatures that would feast on the damned and haunt her nightmares she wouldn’t have wanted to find one? See it with her own eyes? Claudia? Who’d empty the ocean for proof of sirens if she could? I told you both the vampires of the world were vicious, neither of you listened. Regardez ce qui s'est passé.”

And Louis just - - stares, fixed on where Lestat avoids his gaze, folding up the dead birds in some fucked up little funeral for them, and he can feel Claudia firmer now, can hear her spitting fury at Lestat even if he can’t make out the words over his own roaring hurt, because there’s a lot of all these nights that are on him, but this - -

“You gave us no context, Lestat,” he spits, and Lestat scoffs, jerking his head up to stare at him in disbelief, lip curled and cheeks red.

“You wouldn’t have wanted to go to Paris?” Lestat says, eyebrows halfway up his forehead and voice hard. “If you knew what was there? If you knew about the Coven? Or maybe you wouldn’t, you never wanted to leave your New Orleans back then, non? But even if you didn’t, you think she wouldn’t have found a way to go? You think either of us could’ve stopped her?”

There’s a truth to it, of course there’s a truth to it, but Louis feels the hard floor beneath them, feels the tepid Louisiana air breathe between them, and the sounds of this city – so changed from when he tried to raise his unholy family here, but still here, loud and bright, and the argument sticks like all the ones about parenting always fuckin’ did. 

“I don’t know, Lestat,” he bites. “You never talked to me about it, so you never gave us the chance to figure this shit out together. We could’ve - - I don’t know. Worked something out between us, a plan for keepin’ her safe there. We were her parents, we were supposed to protect her, if you’d told me, maybe we could’ve - - ”

And just - - he looks back at Lestat, who stares back at him like none of this isn’t something he hasn’t asked himself already. The open wound on his leg nothing compared to the one his face has morphed into, and Louis feels his anger not slip away, but maybe dull. He sucks on his lips, bites the bottom one, looks down at the dead pigeons Lestat’s delicately arranged between them, and then he just sighs.

“I don’t know,” he says, resigned to it. “Maybe you’re right. She was always lookin’ for that next X on the map.”

The thought then – sharply rendered and aching in its detail – of Claudia that last night in the café, staring at Madeleine, eyes brighter than he’d ever seen them as she said Louis, she is the X. Days, not even weeks, they got together – a shimmering purity to their affection even on the stage that night as Madeleine had given his daughter what Louis never could. He feels his shoulders slope, feels his own hand reach out of its own volition, brushing the soft, downy head of one of the dead pigeons, taking in the three of them.

It was supposed to be the three of them dead on that stage too.

“I may have been - - fearful, too,” Lestat says tentatively, and Louis blinks, glancing back up to see Lestat’s mouth move wordlessly, searching for the way to say whatever it is he means to say. “That you would not want me anymore. If you had the - - options of the Coven.”

Somewhere outside, the hurricane seems to shudder back to life, any reprieve from the fury of the weather swallowed up as she sets herself back on land. The noise howls up in blistering bluster, trees overturning, powerlines, cars being dragged up and tossed down the street, and Louis can’t see any of it, not here inside the store, but somehow he can feel it. The carnage of the tempest outside of him that seems to suddenly speak to the one inside of him too. Louis stands up, anger roared back to life, stiff in his movements as he leaves his mouth hanging open a little, just to breathe in short, sharp, bitter breaths, and he doesn’t look at Lestat. Can’t make himself look at him, as he starts back towards the staff room.

Vaguely, he’s aware of Lestat calling his name behind him, but he doesn’t feel here again, not lost in memories of Claudia or Lily or Grace, but suddenly the voice of another woman. The other woman, crooning out the words of the song Lestat wrote for him, and it’s a scab picked raw over and over again as he bangs open the door of the staff room. Needing the air, the space, somethin’ to do, and when he sees the washing machine’s finished its rotation, he yanks open the door of it hard enough to pull it from its hinges. He tosses the door to the floor as he grabs their wet clothes and shoves them into the dryer instead, furiously twisting the knob as Lestat pads into the room behind him.

“Louis?” he tries again, and Louis spins on the spot to face him, stares at him lookin’ owlish back at him. Clueless.

“Worried about my options,” he says, voice hoarse to his own ears. “You were fuckin’ Antoinette, Lestat. Whole damned time.”

“Not the whole time,” Lestat corrects quickly, and Louis’ eyebrows raise in disbelief and Lestat doesn’t even have the sense to look contrite. No, Lestat squares his shoulders, tilts his chin up, even if there’s a defensive edge to his look that has Louis wanting to just - - bite him.

“Enough of the time.”

Behind him, the dryer clicks shut and starts its cycle, motor whirring as the machine starts to heat, and Louis grips the edge of it when Lestat purses his lips, intent, apparently, on holdin’ his ground on this.

“She’d talk to me. When you and Claudia - -” Lestat raises a hand then, gestures vaguely to his head with curled fingers, a childish depiction of telepathy. “- - You’d cut me out.”

It’s enough to make Louis roll his eyes, work his jaw, trying to swallow his own fury. The room suddenly feels hot, whether from the machinery or the season or the tension or all three, Louis doesn’t know, but Lestat’s petulant look does little to ease Louis’ frustration.

“You were fuckin’ her before we had Claudia,” he tells him, and Lestat opens his mouth to say something, probably about Jonah, but Louis doesn’t let him. Needs to say this, have this over him, needs to cut the memory of Antoinette loose from his head and maybe Lestat’s too. “Besides, we didn’t cut you out, couldn’t, the way you’d act up when we did.”

It’s instant, the way Lestat’s eyes widen, the way he laughs, a breathless, soft little thing halfway to a scoff, and it’s enough for Louis to feel the hackles of his own defensiveness rising. He crosses his arms over his chest, leans his ass back against the dryer as Lestat paces, still limping a little as he does, and good, Louis thinks gracelessly. He hopes it fuckin’ hurts.

“You did it constantly,” Lestat sneers, lip curled in a way that seems to extend the scar at the corner of them, widening his mouth into something like a rictus grin. “For years, she’d never stop talking, asking questions, wanting, needing, and then less and less until every room we sat in together was silent. I knew you were conspiring, knew you didn’t want me anymore, what would you have had me do? Antoinette wanted me.”

Louis scoffs, sucks on his lips, feels himself nodding as he takes in Lestat’s pale body, almost as white as the towel around his waist. Makes a show of dropping his gaze down the length of him, hoping he feels small with it, because he is, even if the urge to bite-hold-down-own licks hot and low in him, because it doesn’t matter how dead Antoinette might be, there’s never any part of Louis that doesn’t want to snatch Lestat back from her. 

“Okay,” he says, trying to keep his voice light, conversational, easy, even though he knows it isn’t. “So you decided to go out and get your dick wet, because I was talkin’ to our daughter. You don’t see anything wrong with that?”

Lestat rolls his eyes, like Louis’ the one being deliberately obtuse.

“You decided you wanted to be your own family. She wanted to be your sister, and you thought, ah, yes, let’s be Louis and Grace again. Brother and sister reunited, where does that leave me? In the grave like Paul, non?”

It’s all it takes for Louis to vamp forwards, grabbing Lestat by the chin and holding him to him, fury sparking hot in his gut, and nobody makes him angry like Lestat, nobody has him giving into himself like Lestat, and any surprise on Lestat’s face is quickly swallowed by the too-fuckin’-obvious look of arousal that has his gaze fixing on Louis’ mouth. The heat pulses between them for a minute, the scent of Lestat’s blood suddenly thick between them, and it’d be too easy to undo the knots on both their towels and handle this like they would’ve a century ago, but - -

Dangerous, Louis thinks again.

“Get his name out of your damned mouth,” he breathes instead, voice low and taut, before he lets go of Lestat’s jaw, and steps a little back, the distance loosening something in his gut, and maybe for Lestat too. After all, Lestat just huffs at the response, rolls his head sideways and holds his hands up in something akin to surrender, and it figures, Louis thinks, that they can’t last a few hours without fighting like this. This whole fuckin’ night feels like - - Louis doesn’t even know. Like too much. He wets his lips, looks back at Lestat again, who’s tilted his head back now, is staring up at the ceiling in a way Louis’ pretty sure is about calming himself down, and Louis glances down at Lestat’s crotch, cock stirred a little beneath the towel, and doesn’t need to look to know his own is the same.

He wets his lips, briefly annoyed with himself, before he looks back at Lestat’s neck, long and exposed at this angle, the light catching on the white slit of his scar, and it’s enough to make Louis swallow. He works his jaw, fingers twitching a little at his side, and he looks away as he asks:

“You think that’s why I killed you? So I could have Grace again?”

“No, I know why you killed me,” Lestat says simply to the ceiling, before he slowly rolls his head back around to look at Louis, his face plainly open in a way that makes Louis catch his breath. “I meant it when I said I was glad it was you. Glad it was her too. I made you both stronger than me, I could never have done it, no matter how much I wanted to.”

Behind him, the dryer whirs mechanically, the storm surges outside, the lights flicker yellow, grey, yellow, flirting with the darkness, and Louis watches Lestat, watching him. He shifts his weight, folds his arms back over his chest, turning over the other man’s words in his head, trying to untangle them away from the heat of the moment.

“Never could’ve killed us?” Louis asks quietly, and Lestat tilts his head to the side, darts out a tiny glimpse of pink tongue to dampen his dry lips and says: 

“No, my makers.”

Plural. Louis remembers enough about Magnus, about Lestat’s father, to know beyond doubt that he means both, and it presses like a bruise somewhere deep inside Louis. The stories Lestat only ever offers in sleight of hand gestures or films with frames cut out, and Louis just - - can’t stop looking at him again. Can’t take his eyes off the slope of Lestat’s shoulders and the narrow pull of his waist, off his arms, thinner than he remembers, off him, smaller than he’d ever have described him. He adjusts his hands where they’re folded across his chest, digs his thumb a little into the back of his bicep, claw deep enough to leave an indent, but not break the skin.

“Why’d you come to Paris then? If you were so glad it was us.”

Lestat blinks at that, surprised at the question almost, and he purses his lips, gaze flicking over Louis’ face, as if searching for any hint of what he’s thinking, and Louis schools his expression carefully. Letting Lestat choose how he’d like to tell this part of their story without prejudice.

“I came to see Armand.”

And whatever Louis had expected Lestat to say, it hadn’t been that. He blinks, opens his mouth only to close it, watching Lestat who suddenly makes a show of retying the knot on his towel, mostly, he suspects, to have something to do with his hands.

“I was bored of recovering from my murder,” Lestat tells his working fingers, shrugging flippantly, before glancing back up at Louis with a tight-lipped look. “I’d been healing for years, and it was getting tiresome. Amand heals like - - well. I’m sure you know.”

And yeah, Louis does. Felt Armand healed faster than he cut sometimes, the chaffing around cuffs, the bruising from paddles, floggers, hands, burns from wax or wick, cuts from tooth or knife gone almost before Armand could surely enjoy it, and Louis had even felt him once start to heal around his claw before he’d even pulled it out of his flesh. It was hot sometimes, but most of the time Louis felt cold to it. That nothing seemed to mark Armand on the outside only a reminder of how differently life affected them both. Louis wanted the wounds, he wanted the memories, even when they hurt – especially, sometimes, when they hurt – but Armand would cut out the hole and wallpaper the rot as if that alone would keep the house standing.

“I was under the misapprehension that he would be delighted to see me, let me have le petit verre to shed the last of this chapter, and then see me happily on my way to a new life.”

Lestat offers this simply, a performer’s bounce to his voice like he’s telling a fable, which Louis supposes he is, given that’s obviously not what happened. But still… Louis has other questions. He shifts his weight, tilting out a hip against the dryer.

“Did you know we were in Paris?”

“Not until after I’d arrived,” Lestat tells him. “I’d contacted Roget for funds and he said you had received my letter and withdrawn a sum of money.”

A thread of embarrassment weaves through Louis then, a heat finding his cheeks as he adjusts his folded arms against his chest. The thought that they’d lived off him in that brief time after having killed him, that it was Lestat’s money that bought him those first cameras, paintings, clothes, even paid for the downpayment on their little apartment - - it must show on his face, because Lestat just waves out a hand. 

“It was there for you to use.”

It’s offered simply, honestly, and Louis nods, but makes a mental note to work out how much he took. To wire it back to Roget’s or wherever Lestat’s keeping his money now (does he even have money still? The shack certainly wouldn’t imply it, but then Lestat’s wealth had always seemed endless in those sprawling nights in New Orleans). A question for tomorrow, Louis thinks, glancing back at Lestat, he has enough for tonight.

“So…you didn’t come for us at all?” he asks, not so much disbelieving, but not entirely believing either. Lestat though just shrugs.

“No,” he says, then, he seems to almost take it back, the reconsideration of it loaded in a way that makes Louis think Lestat’s perhaps thought about this before. “I may have, after. But at the time, I just wanted to be back to my full strength.”

And it’s odd, the way that the admission that Lestat may have hunted them down later stirs only warmth at its honesty, or maybe more, Louis thinks, remembering those Paris nights. Stir warmth, perhaps, at the implication that Lestat maybe couldn’t escape Louis as much as Louis could never find a way to escape Lestat.

“Armand was not amenable though, so,” Lestat adds, holding out both his hands in a flippant little gesture. It plays deliberately simple in a way that Louis knows there’s no way it could’ve been, Armand the type to let sleeping dogs lie, but only if the beasts stayed collared. He frowns, bites the inside of his cheek, digs his thumb into his bicep a little harder, gaze still fixed on Lestat.

“He told me you gave him the theater and then abandoned him and Nicki.”

Lestat exhales an unamused breath.

“Well. I’m sure he did.”

Leaning back against the dryer, Louis uncrosses his arms, fists the edge of the machine instead as he takes in Lestat, and the thought crosses his mind again that Armand has been inside his head. Has seen what Louis could never and would never be able to see, not just Lestat as he stumbled into his immortality three hundred years ago, but any moment before that too. Was able to open the book of him and thumb through his pages, to read in him any feeling, any want, to see the faces of the men and women he loved and was loved by and know him down to his footnotes and annotations, and it stirs something not unlike jealousy again in the pit of Louis’ twisting gut.

“What’s the history with you two?” he asks, and Lestat pulls a face Louis can’t entirely read. At least, can’t until he sighs, dramatic, a new performance for a new conversation.

“He is enamored with me, as so many are,” Lestat tells him, voice lilting romantically, even as he adds: “I have - - regard for him.”

It’s enough to make Louis snort, give Lestat a look like he can see straight through the farce, and Lestat offers a tentative little smile before he inhales a breath, shaking his head back at him in exhausted resignation.

“It’s too long a story for tonight, Louis,” he says quietly, like this night has been as much for him as it has been for Louis, and Louis nods in something like understanding, willing to let it go for now.

“Okay,” he replies instead. “So, you came to Paris to be healed, Armand was not amenable…”

Lestat hums in affirmation.

“He thought I came to whisk him away and became enraged when he realized I had not. He took advantage of my weakened state, kept me below the theater for weeks, months, I don’t know. Fed me from the corpses of their stage victims after the Coven had drunk every last living drop. I’d come hoping to be healed, yet it was worse than when I’d been scavenging for rats back home. The play - - we had rehearsed lines, I knew what I was saying, but - - ”

Lestat frowns then, gaze flicking up to meet Louis’ before quickly looking away, and Louis feels - -

Feels.

His own forehead furrowed, his grip tight around the dryer’s edge, his throat closed, and had he ever even suspected Lestat might be held there just as they were? He swallows thickly, voice a little hoarse as he asks:

“He in your head?”

“For most of it,” Lestat concedes, glancing back up at Louis, expression twisted into something a little apologetic. “I don’t know. My memory of it - - it comes in stops and starts. I was trying to talk to your fledgling, the woman. I thought if I could get through to her, she could talk to Claudia who could talk to you and we’d come up with something, but she was too young, and the white-haired charlatan was putting on a show in her head. Mimicry, forme de performance la plus basse, he wore her dead sister and danced around her grieving head.”

The thought of Santiago stirs bitterly in Louis’ head, and he presses his lips together as Lestat looks back at him, shakes his head, bereaved as he says: “She could not see past it to hear me.”

Long and elegant are Lestat’s fingers as he holds his hands out to the side, as if offering this sliver of story is the best that he can do, and maybe it is, Louis concedes. Lestat hasn’t had the benefit of poring over Sam’s script, year after year, nor Armand’s marked-up one so recently. Has had to rely on his own spotty memory to know what he said, what he did, where he deviated from the script, when Louis’ been able to fix in his own stops and starts. Use Sam’s writing and the scraps of ephemera salvaged from the ruins of that night to dig his fingers into the weeping wound of it all and ensure he’d never forget, but Lestat - -

Louis blinks, hard.

“You saved me though,” he says, and Lestat sucks in a wet little breath.

“You saved me first.”

“After I - - ” Louis jerks his head away from the other man, turns his gaze to the sink they’d bathed in hours earlier, feels it like a phantom limb – Lestat’s hair, woven between his fingers, then just as quick, Lestat’s quivering throat, as he drove his knife clean through it.

“Why me?” he asks, voice hoarse as he stares at the sink. “Why not her? You should’ve saved Claudia. You should’ve saved our daughter.”

“I only had the strength to do it once. I chose you, I know that, I live with that,” Lestat replies, then, like it’s the simplest thing in the world: “I’ll always choose you, Louis.”

And what can Louis say to that? A deep, punishing grief yawns awake in his chest, and he knows it’s true. That he was always the one with a chance of being saved, he knew it when he believed it to have been Armand who did it, and believes it now that he knows it was Lestat, but it makes it all feel so pointless. The ending writ from the start, Claudia’s final show performed for an audience of strangers, Louis no longer the thief of death but the harbinger of it, and it’s a relief more than anything, when the dryer trundles to a stop.

Gives him the excuse to push up off it and turn around instead to face it. He crouches before the machine, popping the door, feeling a wave of warm air kiss his face, neck, chest as he pulls out his slacks, briefs, shirt, and Lestat’s shirt too, and then - -

Well.

What’s left of Lestat’s trousers too.

He exhales, tossing the still wearable clothes back over his shoulder as he shakes out Lestat’s matte leather pants to the best of his ability, the heat from the dryer having not just shrunk them, but warped them into something hard, melting the cut fabric open and he feels a bubble of laughter suddenly rise up into his throat at the situation.

“Guess it’s been a while since I used one of these,” Louis says, like he ever has, and he turns a little apologetically to Lestat, holding up his mutilated slacks, absurd sorta grin twitching at the corner of his mouth, and Lestat casts his eyes over them, eyebrows raised and hair curled behind an ear. He limps over, taking the pants from Louis’ offered hand, and leans in a little closer, breath warm against Louis’ shoulder as he says: 

“You should know there are simpler ways to keep me undressed, mon cher,” and oh, it’s just enough like the old him, like something he might’ve said a century ago, that the laughter in Louis’ throat finally crests. Tumbles lyrically from his mouth in a way that has Lestat smiling in surprise, some tender little thing that does nothing to ease the grief, but maybe offers somethin’ else, and Louis passes him his shirt as he rounds the table for the bag he’d pulled out earlier.

“I found some spares before,” he tells him, but when he glances back to see Lestat slipping on his scoop-necked tank, he quickly dresses himself too. Relieved almost to be able to drop the towel and slip back into his now-clean, now-warmed underwear. He pulls on his black shirt, his slacks too, zipping up the fly and notching the button, before he reaches for the sports bag and shakes out the pants he’d found in the lockers earlier.

It takes nothing at all to know they’ll be too big for Lestat’s slender waist, but he tosses them across the table anyway, grinning when Lestat pulls a face at them, unimpressed with the cut or the fabric or the size, Louis doesn’t bother to find out. Just pulls the belt from the bag and slowly rounds the table as Lestat drops his own towel, his cock hanging limp between his pale, skinny legs, nestled in the brush of golden hair there, the wound in his thigh not healed, but at least no longer weeping as he pulls the trousers up and over it.

And okay, so it’s not Lestat’s usual look, Louis thinks, unable to quite bite back the affection in his own expression at the sight of Lestat, freshly clean and fed in his slinky tank top, clutching at the waist of a pair of pants that’ll be on a race to the floor if he lets go of them, the fabric swallowing up his thin legs and yawning wide around his narrow hips. Lestat glances back at him suddenly, and whatever look is on Louis’ face is enough to have him rolling his eyes.

“Between the shampoo and the pigeons and the abomination you’d have me dress in now, I have to say, your scavenging is yet to satisfy,” Lestat says toothlessly, and Louis just laughs.

“I don’t know, I think I’m providing adequate services,” he hums, unwinding the belt and taking in the length of it. “Just given your lifestyle choices, of course. I’d even say store pigeons might be a step up from street rats, and you know, the pants would be less of an issue if you wore underwear.”

“I don’t like to feel restricted,” Lestat replies, which might mean something if Louis hadn’t seen him in literal corsets before, to say nothing of wearing leather pants beneath a bathrobe in the first place. Louis makes a vaguely placating sound in the back of his throat, and tugs the belt straight, eyeing off the leather. It’s a little cracked, a little worn, but it’s also too big for Lestat. The notches in the belt starting a good inch after what Lestat would need, and it’s a strange feeling, maybe. To slide his hand down the leather and know exactly where to sink a fang to make it fit, knowing the size of Lestat’s waist as well as his own, and so he does it. Letting his canines protract to pierce the belt, gaze flicking up to see Lestat watching him with hooded eyes, lips slightly parted as Louis lifts his head again. He rubs a thumb over the hole, smooths the edges of it before walking over to Lestat, batting the other man’s hand away when he goes to take the belt from him, and instead teases the end at the first belt loop just inside of Lestat’s hip.

They’re close like this, too close maybe, but Lestat’s heart beats inches from his, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter. Louis circles his arms around Lestat, feeding the belt through the loops of the pants, heat pulsing in his cheeks, chest, lower as Lestat doesn’t pull his gaze from his face, doesn’t close his mouth, maybe doesn’t breathe either, and there’s a memory somewhere here too.

Of taking Lestat to his tailor, before they were together, shedding the Parisian dandy from his body and pulling him into 1910, dressing him the way that he wanted to dress him, helping to adjust his belt, vest, tie, shirt, electric with the excuse just to touch him.

And that - -

That’s never gone away.

He does up the buckle, finding his self-made notch is the perfect fit he knew it would be, even if it leaves close to a foot of excess belt hanging from the buckle, and vaguely, it reminds Louis of earlier in the night. Of dragging him through the hurricane by his knotted robe, and there’s something to it. The thought of holding onto him again like this, and he just - - tugs it, just to make Lestat stumble forwards an inch.

And oh, he comes ever closer, their toes bumping on the scratchy carpet at their feet, and it’d be so easy to close every other distance. To lose himself once again in the well with no bottom, and Louis wets his lips, feels Lestat glance towards his mouth, panting, feels Lestat’s breath there, warm on his face, and outside, the wind howls, and Louis keeps hold of the belt.

“I haven’t been back in NOLA since the night we killed you. You know that?”

Lestat’s gaze flicks up to meet his at that, eyes a shade of blue Louis doesn’t think should exist outside of paintings, and he’s surprised a little when something in Lestat seems to unwind.

“Je suis soulagé d'entendre ça,” Lestat says, voice a little low, a little thick, and Louis opens his mouth just enough to taste the words. Wine and honey, when they should taste like street corners given what he just ate. “I wondered. Thought - - what would it mean? If you’d come home and I had not felt you? To not know in Paris was impossible enough.”

This close, he can see the scar at the corner of Lestat’s mouth, a remnant from a mortal life, it has to be, from somewhere else he’d once called home, and Louis wants to drink from the cup of his memories. Wants to know everything that’s ever happened to him, before this life, wants to know everything that’s happened to him in the 77 years since he saw him last.

(Here, the whole time?)

“It’s a lot,” he says, honestly, earnestly, thumb caressing the belt so he doesn’t caress Lestat’s hand, wrist, face. “Bein’ back.”

“The city, she has missed you, mourned you. Cried in my ear every night for the loss of you.”

Louis nods, drops his head before he can help it, stares at his hand, holding the end of Lestat’s belt, sees Lestat’s hand reach suddenly to hook a finger tentatively in the hip pocket of Louis’ slacks. It’s delicate, desperately intimate, and Louis swallows thick, feels his throat tighten, a pressure build behind his eyes, and he won’t cry, can’t. Not now, not with everything this night has blown from the boughs of him.

“You said I saved you first,” Louis says, gaze lifting again to find Lestat staring back at him, cheeks already wet again with tears. “I couldn’t let you die either, even - - she hated me for it. She thought I always chose you too.”

Lestat shudders in a wet breath, chest heaving in the sorry light of this sorry room, and something in Louis’ chest tightens when Lestat shakes his head.

“And yet you ran away with her,” he says, voice breaking. “Lived your years with him.”

And yeah, okay - -

“Suppose I did,” Louis says quietly, paying it, his thumb finding the notches of the belt that are too big for Lestat’s slender waist, feeling the rough splinter of the leather, the place where the owner probably usually wore it, and there are words still on his tongue. Words that he never really chose either of them over Lestat, how could he? His heart wasn’t Claudia, skipping rope in his chest, no matter how much he wanted to be. His heart was here always, wasting away in New Orleans, wearing memories of their love on his shoulders, while Louis tried to excavate his body from the crypt he had locked himself in to find his way back to it.

To him.  

He means to say it, he does, when Lestat suddenly clears his throat, unhooks his finger from Louis’ pocket and takes a determined step back, gently tugging the end of his belt from Louis’ wanting hands.

“Come,” he says, swiping the tears from his cheeks and painting on a performer’s smile. “It’ll be sunrise soon, we should see to coffins.”

And with that, Lestat tucks the belt around himself, and slips his way out of the room.

“I don’t know why you bothered with your whore’s bath, Louis, you could’ve just stuffed us both in the machine à laver and been done with it. Your sense of modern appliance utility for the undead apparently knows no bound.”

“I didn’t think we’d fit in it,” Louis muses, a little tickled by Lestat’s growing exasperation. He tilts his head back to the refrigerator – a double doored behemoth in the standing display – and tells him quite seriously: “But you’d definitely fit in that.”

With that, he glances back up at Lestat’s deeply offended expression, and laughs before he can help it. He wanders closer, lifting the fridge door again, oddly enjoying the sound of the rubber seal as he lifts it, gesturing inside.

“It lets less light in than the pantry, it’s sturdier than the planter boxes, and it won’t take up as much space in that storeroom as the shed. I think we could hide it too. Relatively speaking.”

Hide is perhaps a bit of a strong word, Louis will allow, glancing into the plastic interior of the appliance, but he thinks it allows them some means of discretion. That they may be able to leave it in its packing box and make it simply look like unsold stock as opposed to so obvious an anomaly. The storeroom they’d found after all felt mostly like overflow, but without the minds of employees to pry in to, it’s hard to tell. Regardless, Lestat still doesn’t look convinced.

“I have slept in many places in my three centuries on this marble we call Earth, but I draw the line at kitchen appliances.”

“If you have a better option, I’m all ears.”

It’s a genuine offer, but there’s still a satisfaction in watching Lestat flummox around for an alternative. He smiles toothlessly at him, gears shifting as Louis waits, resisting the urge to tap his foot just because he knows that the risk of annoying Lestat into either stubborn determination or submission are typically equally weighted. After a minute, Lestat gestures with a rolled-out wrist to the aisles behind them.

“We could make something,” he decides. “Conveniently we are in a store offering an array of tools and materials for handy men such as ourselves.”

“Sunrise is in twenty minutes,” Louis says easily. “And it took us twice that to even cover up that awning window, you suddenly think you can build something that quick?”

Lestat huffs out a breath, lifts his chin defiantly and Louis swears he can see a flash of Claudia then in a way that exasperates and cuts in equal measure, and maybe he hadn’t expected that. That he’d hoped to feel her presence here when he came back to New Orleans, but that he hadn’t imagined finding the ghost of her so often in Lestat’s looks. His lips curve into something halfway to a smile, taking in the other man, as he argues:

“What part of three centuries do you not hear, Louis?”

Which - -

Okay. That is all Lestat.

“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug, feigning boredom. “Probably the part where it took three pigeons to get that 300-year-old leg to stop oozin’ shit. So how many do you think it’ll take to stop a 300-year-old brat burning alive?”

Lestat shoots a tight-lipped smiled back at him, and Louis can’t help but return it, something a little less antagonistic, a little more affectionate tinting the edges of his, because this just - - fuck. Feels like them, is all.

“Fine,” Lestat hums, voice weighed down with a loathed surrender that leaves something in Louis a touch smug. “We’ll do this your way.”

With that, Lestat lifts the refrigerator from the hard concrete showroom floor and walks it down the aisle and back towards the corner where they’d found their small, mostly unused storeroom an odd hour or two ago. After all, the first thing they’d done after leaving the staff room after they’d dressed was to find whatever place they might be able to barricade themselves into for the day – create themselves their own crypt here in the back room of a Home Depot, and there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, Louis’ sure, as he follows Lestat down the busy aisles of this place to the room they decided they might survive in.

It's dark already in here, with the light off and the awning window covered, not a sliver of light to sear their unholy lives to a holy death, and Louis feels more than he sees Lestat lower the refrigerator to the floor between them. With Lestat’s robe and Louis’ bomber jacket hanging from the boarded up awning and the pigeon corpses in a small pile on the desk in the corner, it almost feels an intimate parody of their old coffin room, and Louis swallows. Trains his gaze to find Lestat in the darkness, his limbs lost in the density of fabric around his legs, cinched by the belt he’d laid at his waist, pale arms catching whatever light might still slip in from the hallway and it’s enough to make something in him tighten as he looks at the refrigerator between them.

“I’ll get us another,” Lestat says suddenly, and Louis’ head jerks up before he can help it, the tightening of his chest like a bone cracker to his ribcage, and no, he thinks, how could you ask that of us tonight? He thinks, dry mouthed and hot blooded, but that’s - -

Fuck.

Louis doesn’t know what it is, just knows suddenly, honestly, what he needs.

“Might be safer to share,” he says with a put-on shrug, plays it like nothing when he knows it isn’t. “Faster to wake each other up if something happens.”

Dangerous, a part of him thinks, but then Lestat looks back at him, wide eyed and tentatively, desperately hopeful, and Louis thinks maybe this sort of dangerous doesn’t have to be so bad.

“If it’s what you’d like,” Lestat replies slowly, and Louis smiles before he can help it, locking the storeroom door with the mind gift before pulling open the fridge door and stepping barefoot inside. The plastic back of the appliance is cool and slick against the sole of his foot as he turns back to Lestat. Drops his brow in faux consternation, says:

“No funny business now, boy,” just to see Lestat swallow a smile. Hold his hands up in surrender, as he watches Louis sit down in the fridge, lying back until his shoulders hit the wall of it. It’s an odd fit – not coffin or cupboard or cavity beneath the floor – all places Louis’ slept in various chapters of the last 90-odd years – and it probably shows on his face as he looks back up at Lestat, trying to school his expression into something both amusedly appalled himself yet still inviting as he rests back. No easy feat, he’d be the first to admit, but Lestat huffs out a breath, clambering into the fridge with soft, clean feet, sliding down in the appliance until he lies beside him, and Louis tries not to think about the stutter of his heartbeat (Lestat’s heartbeat?) when he reaches above them to close the refrigerator door.

And oh - - is it the darkness? The proximity? Louis doesn’t know, just feels himself adjust, feels Lestat do the same, curve their bodies to face each other – somehow without touching – and suddenly all Louis can smell is Lestat. All he can hear is his breath, the too-sluggish rush of his blood, and he can’t even remember the last time they slept together in a coffin, because they’d never in a makeshift one. He’d avoided it entirely towards the end, too worried about slipping into forever with him, his head always a lost cause when it came to Lestat, but especially Lestat within a hand’s reach, and he feels the warmth radiate off Lestat’s body, and just - - fuck.

Maybe this was a mistake.

(Why doesn’t it feel like a mistake?)

Louis inhales a juddery breath, glancing up at the slots of the refrigerator door above him, begging for shelves to be fitted, and feels Lestat shift beside him. Trying to navigate the limited space between them, and suddenly, it’s another memory, of Lestat beneath him that night after the altar, after his turning, legs spread to take him all in as Louis’ skin had crackled and dried between them, the closeness not something to be run from but something Louis had felt that night to be chased and sought after for eternity, and despite himself, Louis feels it again now.

He shifts uncomfortably against the plastic, knows he’ll feel it in his back tomorrow, in his hips and neck, and he remembers all the terrible places he and Claudia slept across Europe, huddled and hiding, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, remembers his brother. Remembers Paul crawling into his bed the night they brought him home from that hospital in Jackson, talkin’ about mattresses stuffed with wet newspaper and dreamin’ out loud about a heaven that Louis can only hope has found him now.

And lord, if he still prayed, it would be that the angels had held him before he hit the ground.

And he feels him then curled into his side like he’d felt Claudia against his back, thicker chested than Louis ever was but eyes the same color Louis’ were once, before the dark gift dipped his irises in the forests of immortality, somehow able to make himself smaller than Louis could ever let himself be. Paul, who could let death talk him off a roof while Louis could only ever let it talk him onto one. The thought holds somewhere strange in him, and he takes a shaky breath, grips at his own side, like he could feel his brother there if he wanted it enough.

He tilts his head to the side, focusing again on Lestat who’s lying on his side already, facing him, but careful not to touch him, and Louis wets his lips.

“Can I ask you somethin’?”

Like he hasn’t been asking Lestat questions half the night, but Lestat just makes a noise of affirmation, and Louis’ still holding the ghost of Paul to his side, and he thinks he’s spent all night asking himself why he never wanted to know what Armand saw in Lestat’s head, without ever asking himself what Lestat saw in his.

And that - - that he wants to know.

That, suddenly, feels like the only thing he wants to know. He sucks in his lips, tightening his grip on his brother’s hand, asks:

“What was it like in my head? Back when I was human?”

Even in the darkness, Lestat looks taken aback by the question, his heartbeat stutterin’, his head dropping, and Louis shakes his own. Needs this suddenly in a way he’s never needed anything else.

“No - - no romance, okay? No bullshit. Just - - tell me what it felt like.”

For a moment, all Louis can hear is the muted sounds of the storm outside, and the beat of Lestat’s unsteady heart. It takes up space – both of them do – but Louis’ own organ feels ready to tie itself in knots to match Lestat’s erratic pace, needing too desperately to feel in sync with him even when Louis feels anything but.

“It felt like home.”

And oh, Louis squeezes his eyes shut, feels the pressure there of unshed tears, says:

“Lestat…”

Even as he forces his eyes back open to be met with Lestat’s darting gaze, his bobbing throat, like he knows he’s given the wrong answer, and Louis exhales. A grimace finding his face even as he turns his body towards Lestat’s.

He gives it a minute. Let’s them just - - look at each other for a beat, maybe two, tries to organize his thoughts in his disorganized head, and finally, he just says it.

“I was in a dark place when we met,” he tells him. “I know that now. Been - - talking to someone about it. I was angry, I felt so much, all the damned time, and it was heavy on me. I hated myself, Lestat, I know that. Was it that that felt like home to you? That that made you choose me?”

Not a whisper escapes Lestat’s closed mouth, and Louis gives it time, he does, but Paul’s hand is slipping from his and he can’t feel Claudia in the dark in here. Can’t feel anything that isn’t the erratic beat of the other man’s pulse, and is that what Lestat had wanted? A dark mirror in his hand? An echo to his pounding, rabbit heart? Or worse - - does he even know why he picked Louis at all? Louis exhales a wet breath.

“Really?” he asks, voice rough, strained, pained. “Nothin’?”

Lestat hesitates, makes a little sound, reaches a hand forwards, like he wants to touch him, then withdraws it as if he’s changed his mind. Unsure how to handle any of this tonight, and Louis’ got half a mind to roll over and try to let sleep take him, when Lestat finally starts to speak.

“Slipping into the minds of mortals…it feels different for all of us, non? You told me once it was like a book to you, pages you could flick to or through to find the story, and I wonder sometimes if it was like that to Claudia too. One of the ways you were the same. Armand, I think for him it’s a puzzle maybe. Something he takes apart and fits back together, to me - -”

Lestat shakes his head, nose wrinkled, almost a little embarrassed.

“There weren’t many houses where I grew up in the Auvergne. We were in a very small town, and sometimes at night I’d walk and I’d try to find them just to look in their windows,” he swallows, a little bashful when he glances back at Louis. “Searching for families happier than my own.”

Shifting his weight, Louis slowly rolls more onto his side, never taking his eyes off Lestat, facing them together in the dark as Lestat keeps talking.

“That’s what it feels like to me. It’s like I’m walking through a town, familiar, but not known to me, past houses any hour of day or night. I look in through their windows and sometimes it’s people playing games or tearing down the wallpaper or making love or weeping in black spaces, it - - varies. You, the street was dark, yes, but all your lights were on, and I’d press my face to the glass of all your rooms and they were so full and bright and pulsing with life and you were angry and tender and your hands were open and your fists were clenched, and I felt in you a fire that would warm a life without burning it down.”

For a moment, all Louis can do is stare at him. Taking in the earnest twist of his maker’s expression, the way his tongue darts out to dampen his dry lips again, the way he meets Louis’ gaze, like he really wants him to hear it, as he says:

“Louis, I have seen darkness swallow men whole, but darkness, she has only ever danced with your shadows. Your hand holds too much light for her to take.”

And oh, that’s not right, not true, Louis thinks, feeling remorse for even asking like a seed to be choked on in his throat, and he shakes his head, hair brushing with static against the plastic wall behind him.

“You saw a fantasy, Lestat.”

It hits, he can see that, in a way he could never have predicted. Lestat curling inward, his mouth quivering, his eyes growing wet in the dark space of the refrigerator and Louis clenches his eyes shut so that he doesn’t have to see it. See him. A yawning fear that the nights ahead won’t have the answers for him that he wants coming alive in his chest, the fear that he’ll have killed and lived and survived and endured only to die in the sun again, and it feels too much, the endless clutch of this right now, pulsing inside of him, when suddenly Lestat says:

“I don’t think so.”

Louis blinks his eyes back open, sees Lestat looking back at him again, and his shoulders are still curled and his eyes are still wet, but he’s determined when he adds: “It’s been a century, your family is lost, our daughter is dead, we have been strangers to each other for so long, yet you’re still here, are you not?”

And oh, Louis supposes, staring, the words falling through him like an anchor, not answering anything, but keeping him briefly steady, because yeah.

He guesses he still is.

A creak, a crack, a slip of honeyed light from the teardrop-shaped bulb they leave on for Claudia (she likes to rise most nights to meet it is all), and then his own voice, rough with intent, loaded in its whisper.

“Lestat.”

He’s rewarded by the sound of Lestat’s coffin top unlatching, the whine of its hinge as he peels the thing open just enough to peer out, blue-eyed and blond as a Botticelli, even in the slice of him Louis can see from his own opened coffin. Louis can’t help but grin, raise an eyebrow in invitation, in flirtation, when Lestat wets his lips, gaze darting sideways to where Claudia’s sound asleep, and it’s all it takes for his lover to haul the lid open, fast enough it groans loud and - -

“Shhh,” Louis sounds, hearing the laugh in his own voice, giddy in the moment of it even as he presses a finger to his mouth to quieten him. He glances down at Claudia’s unstirred coffin before fixing back on where Lestat climbs gracelessly out of his own, limbs lacking his usual fluidity in his haste to get beside Louis.

“Don’t you shush me,” Lestat says with a pout as Louis shuffles backwards, making room for Lestat to clamber in next to him, the warmth of his body already speaking to the heat of his own.

“I missed you,” Louis hums, because oh, he did. Missed the press of him between his legs and the stir of him against his thigh, the close of his hand around his hip, and the press of his mouth against his, and Lestat reaches up now to cup his cheek. Big hand and slender fingers softer than Louis knew a man’s could be before they met, face bright as a light in the dark.

“You missed me?” he asks, voice a spell, and Louis can only lean in to kiss him home as he closes the coffin lid above them, reducing the world to them and them alone. Until all Louis can feel is the warm hollow of Lestat’s open mouth, the blunt edges and sharpened points of his teeth as he licks his way behind them, the firm weight of his body against his, until all he can hear is Lestat’s tender moans, his stuttering heart, until all he can smell is the soft linen of his pajamas and the delicate touch of iris and - - coconut?

No, that’s not right, Louis thinks, forehead furrowing, and he purses his lips which aren’t pressed to Lestat’s at all, and there’s not a body against his, and there’s no scent of soft linen, and even the iris smells muted, but the coconut - -

Louis blinks and suddenly his eyes are open not in his coffin at Rue Royale, his daughter feigning sleep a few feet away, but back in New Orleans all the same, with Lestat not pressed against him, but staring back at him in the dark, shoulders curved and expression too tender and lips just ever so slightly parted, and Louis suddenly feels the air punched out of him.

Feels his heart trip (or is it Lestat’s?), palms sweat, heat slip from cheeks to chest to the ever wanting thing between his legs, and it’s the next night, it has to be, which means they should open the heavy door above them and get out of this place, but his arms can’t, won’t, move, and he’s - - nervous, suddenly. Caught in the riptide of the ocean of their desire, of their need, and Lestat looks no better. His face open, raw, bare with so much fucking love, and they’re not home in Rue Royale, Louis reminds himself. Not in the comfort and safety of that time before their daughter burned in Paris, before he slit his throat at Mardi Gras, before that fateful, hateful night Lestat dropped him back to Earth. No, they’re in a refrigerator in the backroom of a hardware store and life has stopped and started a thousand times in a hundred years, but none of it seems to matter when they’re both here, knees touching, their calves slowly entangling beneath them like roots below the forest floor, and a look of earnest, honest fear crosses Lestat’s face when his bare ankle bone knocks against the side of Louis’ foot, the skin-to-skin contact like lightning to the earth of them, and Louis just wants to kiss him and then he does.

Collides with him like a treefall, no, like a fucking planet, and Lestat’s already got his mouth open to receive him, and then they’re just hands-limbs-hips-lips-bodies. He gets a fistful of fingers tangled up in Lestat’s coconut-smelling hair (and it’s still wrong, that, but that’s a problem for another night), while his other hand grabs at the neck of his trashy, slinky tank, yanking it up just enough to pull it from the waist of those horrible pants, enough to get his hand up inside the silk, to finally get his hand on the dip of his tiny fuckin’ waist, and Lestat’s own hands are on his face, curling warm against the back of his neck, and he kisses him like the only air he ever wants to breathe again is air Louis’ breathed first.

But when has that ever not been the case, Louis wonders, rocking his hips against Lestat’s just to hear him gasp against his mouth, to feel his rapidly hardening cock slide against his own, even through the layers of clothing, to feel Lestat’s hand tighten against the back of his neck as Louis threads his fingers harder into Lestat’s hair, guiding his head ever closer as he fucks his tongue into his lover - - ex-lover’s mouth.

No, never not been the case because Louis’s done with lying to himself, and he knows he’d have Lestat anywhere – at the altar, in his coffin while their daughter slept, on the dancefloor, in his mind on the thrilling, ruinous streets of Paris, fucking here, inside a fridge in the aftermath of a hurricane, and there’s a metaphor in there somewhere but Louis doesn’t care to find it. Not when Lestat shifts forwards enough to slot their legs together, urging Louis thigh between his own just to start riding it. His hips roll up, searching for friction, and Louis groans, the sound rough in his throat, at the feel of Lestat’s still-clothed crotch dragging up and down his leg, his own slacks chaffing the hair there in a pleasure-pain that goes straight to his hardening cock.

He untangles his hand from Lestat’s hair to grab his ass instead, pull him firmly against him as he pushes his thigh better between Lestat’s legs, putting pressure against his balls as Lestat pants loud against his mouth, pace already growing erratic as he grinds his cock into Louis’ sharp hip. Louis’ own lust waiting, sated for now by the not-unpleasurable rub against Lestat’s hard lower abs.

Still, he keeps kissing him. Biting at his lower lip, tugging at it before fucking his tongue back into his mouth, just to hear Lestat keen, breathless as he ruts against Louis’ thigh, his ass firm in Louis’ hand as he squeezes it, leveraging his grip there to pull Lestat ever closer, and it takes nothing at all. Takes another few thrusts in the dark for Lestat to come wet and hot and fast in his borrowed slacks, and the smell of him – sweaty and messy and sticky with his own satisfaction – is enough to make Louis grin. Enough to make him slide his mouth sideways, fangs protracted, and he won’t bite him, not now, not yet, but he drags a canine down the scar at the corner of Lestat’s mouth as he adjusts Lestat against him, tilting his hips higher up to grind his own hard, thick cock against Lestat’s now slack one, but Lestat just - - gasps.

“Non, ah - - Louis,” Lestat cries, voice pained, and Louis quickly pulls back a little. He’d liked this once, Louis’ sure, the pleasure-pain of post-orgasm sensitivity, but now, Lestat’s face is flushed pink, his eyes a little wet, and Louis loosens his grip on his ass only to have Lestat arch his hips back to press himself firmer into his hand. The messages are - - mixed.

“You okay?” Louis asks him, and he can’t hide his surprise when Lestat leans in to briefly kiss him before shifting in his arms.

“Just, ah - - ” he twitches when their cocks accidentally brush again. “A little too much these days.”

Which - - Louis blinks, loosening his hold on Lestat’s waist too as the other man tries to disentangle their legs, turning onto his back.

“When was the last time you - - ?”

“Let me - - ”

And suddenly, Lestat’s pushing Louis back against the side of the refrigerator and making awkward work of turning around in the space, and Louis has half a mind to ask what Lestat’s doing (and maybe complain about the wet patch on his thigh and his still hard cock), when Lestat wriggles backwards to press his back to Louis chest and his ass to Louis’ crotch.

“Like this,” he says, reaching back to find Louis’ hand, to put it back on the curve of his waist, and Louis’s not thinking anything at all until Lestat peers back over his shoulder, a tender, tentative look on his face that has Louis’s heart beating somewhere in his throat. He tightens his grip on Lestat’s delicate waist, sealing himself firmly against Lestat’s back, and it feeds the hungry mouth of his eternal need to be home – to feel Lestat’s back against his chest, to feel his thick cock against the curve of Lestat’s ass, and fuck. Even through layers of clothes, he can feel the shape of him, and it takes nothing at all to rock his hips against him. Takes nothing at all to feel home in the give of him, and Louis pants, presses wet kisses to Lestat’s neck as he starts to gyrate against his ass, hears Lestat’s breathless moans echoing in the space around them, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll last either. Not when his cock finds the crease of Lestat’s ass through their clothes, catches in the seam of him, searching for a way in, as Lestat grinds back against him, and it’d be too easy to pull his slacks down, to slip Lestat out of his own and give them both over to the ocean of desire they’ve never been able to fight the tide of.

The too-sweet taste of Lestat’s skin finds Louis’ tongue again as he mouths at the join where his shoulder becomes neck, grazing his teeth there until Lestat’s blood sings for his attention, and he won’t bite him, can’t bite him, doesn’t know what that would mean (doesn’t know if he could stop), but temptation winds like a snake through his gut, so he sucks a bruise there instead. Drinks in Lestat’s high-pitched whines and wills Lestat’s pale skin to blossom purple beneath his touch as he feels the heady drag of his cock against his ass, pre-cum soaking through the fabric of his slacks and he’s close. Knows he's getting ever closer as ruts against Lestat, balls tightening, and his hand moves from his waist to his chest, sliding up until his thumb finds his clavicle, and he pulls him back against his own chest and oh, he held him like this that night didn’t he? Knife in his hand as he killed him, and his fingers rise of their own volition to delicately cup Lestat’s throat as he fucks against him, trembling a touch over the line of his scar, and his mouth unlatches as Lestat drops his head back to Louis’ shoulder, his eyes shut and his mouth open and his hips curved back to press himself against Louis’ cock, and all he says is his name. All he says is Louis, voice gravelly and broken, and Louis’ coming harder than he has in years. Soaking through the cotton of his slacks, and he holds Lestat still back against him. Hopes to leave a stain there just like Lestat did against his thigh. A keepsake for at least the time it takes to fade.

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that. Panting in the still-closed refrigerator, a night outside that will ask questions of them and demand plans, and Louis doesn’t want to answer to any of it. Wants to stay here soaking in the smell of their sex, Lestat pressed to his chest, Louis curled around him, like a shell to this soft and tender thing between them, hiding them both from the world that would have want of them, from the past that would haunt them, but still, Louis thinks, blinking his eyes back open in the dark.

Still.

Not now.

Not yet.

“I can’t stay,” he says quietly, gently caressing the scar on Lestat’s throat with his thumb, fingers still holding lovingly to the curve of his neck. “You understand that?”

And he feels it there more than he hears it, the way Lestat chokes on a sob. Louis exhales, breath warm against the back of Lestat’s neck, he’s sure, blowing a little at the hickey he’s left there, billowing his hair, and this is the right choice, this is the right choice for right now.

“I’m not ready, I need to - -” he flounders, searches for the words, feels Lestat’s chest wrack against his body, and moves his other hand to curl around his waist. To hug him in close. “I need to keep figuring myself out, work out - - what parts of me I’m keeping, what parts I’m letting go of, and I can’t do that with you,” he says, right as Lestat says: “I love all your parts, Louis, you have nothing to get rid of.”

He sighs, exasperated, because:

“That’s what I mean, I can’t - - grow with you or I’ll just grow into you. I need my own patch of the garden for a while. Need to figure out what sprouts in me, what’s overgrown, what needs cutting back and what needs pullin’ out.”

The trembling against him - - it’s worse somehow than it was in Lestat’s shack. A full bodied thing that has Louis holding him ever tighter, the pressure building behind his own eyes, tears pearling wet at the corners of them before he can help it. He takes another breath, tries to guide them through it.

“You need that too, don’t you? Are you even playing your piano anymore? Thought once your heart beat more in time with it than me, like it played metronome for your fingers on the keys, and it don’t feel right to me. You not playing.”

Lestat’s fingers find his forearm then, clutching desperately to him as he chokes on another sob, and Louis lets the tears come then. Feels a sob in his own throat because no part of him doesn’t want Lestat here in his arms forever, no part of his bruised and aching heart wants the distance, but he knows he needs it. They need it.

“I don’t want you growing into me either,” Louis says. “Like you did at The Azaelia. I don’t want us - - workin’ together. Don’t think it’s good for me or you. You gotta stand on your own two feet too. I want you upright, I want you yourself, Lestat, coz this ain’t it. How you gonna dance with me if you can’t stand up on your own? Need us both to get better so maybe we can be better together, I need you to just - - not need me for a while.”

“Louis, non, mon cheri, you’re all I need, I - - ”

“Please, Lestat. Give me this. I need to be more than you, more than him, more than her. I gotta figure out where I fit in forever so I can keep bein’ here.”

Lestat’s body wracks as he weeps, and Louis adjusts his hold, letting go of his throat to meet his other arm around Lestat’s waist, turning this embrace into a true hug, and he thinks maybe this is a mistake. Maybe they could close the lid and sleep here forever, but they’re in a fridge not a coffin, in a damned hardware store, and the days won’t surrender to the nights much longer. He wets his lips, tastes his own blood tears caught in his cupid’s bow, and takes another breath.

“I need to hear you say it, Lestat,” Louis says, and Lestat shakes his head, curls catching on the tip of Louis’ nose.

“I missed you too much,” he whines, and Louis drops his forehead into the waiting valley of Lestat’s shoulders, feels a yawning hurt, affection, need, but more than that, a wavering commitment which - - he can’t. His tears drip onto Lestat’s skin, and it only seems to make Lestat weep harder.

“Lestat, please,” he begs, and Lestat’s hand chases up his forearm until he finds Louis’ hand, clutching desperately until Louis turns it around awkwardly. Let’s Lestat entwine their fingers, lets him press their clammy hands together, lets him hold him back, in the only way Louis will let him right now. Lestat exhales a wobbly breath, drops his head sideways, until he can press his lips to the crown of Louis’ head, and cry as he says:

“Comment puis-je te refuser quoi que ce soit? Tu peux avoir tout ce que tu veux, je te donnerai n'importe quoi, je m'arracherai le cœur si cela peut aider à soulager le tien, je t'aime plus que moi-même.”

And Louis’ French is dusty, but somehow he needs no translation. He sucks in a wet breath, says:

“All I want is time,” and is relieved to feel Lestat eventually nod against his head, nose buried in Louis’ hair, as Louis’ is buried in his shoulder, chest pressed to his lover’s - - ex-lover’s - - future lover’s back, and Louis presses his lips to the skin there and holds him tighter, and he thinks of the coffin room that night in Rue Royale, the night he dreamt of, and the words find his tongue before he could ever stop them.

“I missed you,” he murmurs now into the curve of Lestat’s shoulder, and he knows Lestat hears it. Feels it as Lestat weeps, and he’ll miss him again, miss him in these nights ahead before they reunite, whether for months or years or decades, because he means it. Lestat gave him this gift of time, and now, finally, Louis intends to use it.