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“That’s a dog.” Lestat was speechless aside from those three words, a rare predicament to find himself in.
Louis was staring at him, stiffly in the way that was his only tell of uncertainty in situations of import. The squirming bundle in his arms caught a button between its front teeth, tugging for a moment before it was neatly shifted to face forward, half awkward and half presentational. Lestat stared back.
“It is.” Louis looked like he’d planned to say more, but didn’t. The dog yipped in the quiet, an impatient noise to match its restlessness. An ungrateful beast as well it appeared, oblivious to being held so gently by such loveliness.
“Why?”
Louis’ uncertainty increased visibly at the shortness of the question, but his resolve remained as even as ever. He’d clearly made a decision, formerly a rare happening, but unflappable once it did. Usually such high-stakes composure was reserved for matters of state or particularly undignified feelings (though perhaps the puppy was the latter).
“There was a man in town giving them away. He’s part German Shepherd…I thought of you as soon as I saw him.”
Louis had never wanted a dog before. Too messy. Too much responsibility for their lifestyle. Too…marital.
Come now, Lestat. He always looked terribly sad saying it, a lighthearted smile that was brittle and forced. You won’t be here to care for it longer than a year. They’d been at the chateau for eight now, nearly a decade since Louis had arrived in Auvergne with a weekender bag and an air of disappointment that seemed more directed inward than at anyone else. There were two parallel imprints on the mattress now, and a vase of lilies on the right-hand night table that Lestat never allowed to brown.
“Not just shepherd,” Lestat confirmed quietly, running a finger over the broadness of the little creature’s forehead and down the flopping tips of its ears.
“Shepherd and boxer according to the sign. I hope that’s alright.” Whether it was the lack of purity or the inclusion of shepherd at all that Louis thought would be a concern, Lestat didn't know. His grip tightened slightly on the puppy’s fur at the memory of drywall shards and shredded upholstery littered around the cooling body of another dog, many years ago.
“It’s alright.” The fur shivered under his touch, wriggling warmth that seeped into his bones where it was concentrated. “It’s perfect,” he added when Louis’ blank face remained. The edges softened at his inflection. Perhaps also at the moisture gathering in the base of his throat and leeching into his voice.
“Good. That’s good.” He shifted the puppy into the cradle of one arm, petting tenderly at an ear with the back of his finger. “His name is Matisse. At least that’s what I’ve been calling him. The patches of dark on his face reminded me of Fauvism. You can change it, of course. I doubt he knows it yet.” Louis’ eyes were soft, plush and mossy with none of the hard gemstone edges from years ago as he pressed the little one—Matisse— into Lestat’s arms.
“No, I like it.” He took hold of Louis with his free hand, pulling him down onto the ottoman, until a cool nose pressed into his neck to join the warmth of fur in his lap. “You have very good ideas. Smart ones, in fact.”
There was a whisper of a smile against his skin.
“Well, I certainly hope so. You give me an awful lot of power around here. I could be causing all kinds of catastrophes and you’d hardly realize.”
“I am the catastrophe and you know it.” He lifted the puppy up, getting a good look at the creature again. The collar was the same red as his favorite court suit.
“Based on the state of the parlor, you may have competition now.”
Lestat turned his gaze away from Matisse to hear the damages. His mastiff litters had been like that once, more a danger to textiles and leather goods than to deer or wolves.
“How bad is it?”
“Worse than your mother would accomplish.” Louis thought for a moment. “Not as devastating as Armand.”
“That sounds manageable then. I’ll have someone tidy it and ensure a proper room is prepared for him.” He glanced at the clock and back to the puppy, now more interested in yawning than either of his new owners. “There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow I suppose.”
“It’s awfully late, isn’t it?” Louis stood, then hesitated as he looked at Lestat pinned beneath the creature in his lap. “Shall I bring you your bedclothes?” he asked, stately as anything and a smile playing at the corners of his lips. Lestat opened his mouth to brush off the suggestion before being halted by the muffled snore against his thigh. “Yes, I think that might be best.”
Louis nodded, pressing a kiss to his forehead before slipping around the corner. He hoped Louis’ choice for himself would be the shorts Lestat got him. The trousers he was wearing already cupped his ass so nicely that it felt like a bit of a loss for the day to end.
And it was quite a lucky day for him it seemed, Lestat finding his wish answered for the second time that night as Louis returned to the bedroom. He’d even been generous enough to leave the top few buttons of the matching sleep shirt undone. Still, Lestat took the opportunity to undo one more when Louis answered the beckon down for a kiss (and to help himself to a squeeze of the now-concealed ass he already missed so dearly).
“Really, in front of the baby?” Louis removed the wandering hand, nuzzling the back briefly before settling on the floor beside the ottoman, any previously occupiable space on top of it claimed by the dog.
“No, in front of a sleeping baby.” He ruffled his lover’s hair until it was pleasantly mussed and Louis’ cheek came to rest against his knee. “It’s fundamentally different,” he murmured, distracted now by the warm and easy expression reflected back at him from below, still as much a novelty as seeing the ice melted off a mountaintop in his childhood might have been. He fancied that a lingering layer of frost had slipped off this evening, splashes of petal pink and green grass even more vibrant than ever. “You never wanted a dog before.”
The flushing bloom of summer had made him bold (or made him stupid).
It seemed to take Louis a moment to register his words, another to think them over with some unreadable expression as Lestat played with his hair and ghosted the pads of his fingers over the strawberry flush on his mouth and the top of his cheekbones. Anything to keep the autumn away.
“You’ve never had both feet in the door before,” Louis answered finally. He took hold of Lestat’s hand, twirling the wedding band where it lay. “I want a lot of things now, and I have most of them. Our clothes in the same closet, my ring on your finger, a deed with both our names. Why not a pet? That seems like the least of our joint commitments these days.”
That was true, though decades of denial made it seem larger.
“You don’t like dogs,” was all he could find to say.
“But you do. And I like you.” After a brief hesitation, he glanced at the sleeping puppy, his eyes crinkling just slightly at the corners. “Though the little beast isn’t such a burden.” Louis sighed. “He’s rather cute, isn’t he? A very charming cretin.”
The puppy stirred in his sleep, as if subconsciously aware of the attention on him, tiny milk teeth flashing in the lamplight before slumber took hold again. Such a new life, unfathomably new to a pair of walking artifacts.
“Lucky for him and I both that you’re so easily won over by charm alone.”
“I suppose so.”
—
Watching Matisse had some greater effect on Lestat than he had ever imagined, something ineffable as he watched such a little creature, something small and sweet, something he felt such unbearable affection for, grow before his eyes, its little form blossoming with strength and size alongside its mind. It eased some ache in his subconscious, just sometimes, just a bit, to watch as the little thing grew into a much bigger thing and the affection in its eyes remained soft around the edges, as liquid and trusting in adulthood as in the earliest days.
And how little time it had taken to get there! Vampire life was slow by nature, the march of everyday living spread wide to cover the expanse of eternity. Once, the pup seemed to double in size over the same span of time he and Louis neglected to speak to each other at all, merely existing companionably for what was, in their lifetime, only minutes.
Though it went unsaid, he saw the same delighted fascination in Louis’ expression, etched around his features when the dog snuffled at his hands and sweater in single-minded greeting or placed its head on his feet while he read by the hearth (somehow even more so when the book was knocked from his hands by an impatient muzzle).
Still, Matisse was Lestat’s. Too much time with Louis and he would’ve had the poor animal fox-hunting or something equally inane and bourgeois. The obedience training was undignified enough for them both, Louis appearing equally well-conditioned to provide bits of meat or cheese for a pittance of effort in exchange. The whole thing was silly in the extreme (what use would any dog have for rolling over on command), but Louis seemed supremely pleased by each new skill, pedantic as he was. The silliness and the rugged nature of the dog was a small price to pay for that flash of fang-bearing smile.
The downsides, as it was, were few, but present. Such a loyal comrade was an undeniable delight (Louis, a nearly perfect companion himself, still tired of Lestat’s singing and fidgeting far more quickly than Matisse), but presented…challenges. Intimate ones. This was not a problem Lestat had truly anticipated initially, but one that presented itself with great haste and at the rather inopportune moment during which he had his mouth full of the only thing as pleasing as blood. He should've known.
Even his lover’s perpetually active appetites had no bearing on his sense of propriety when it came to Matisse, as protective of his sexual modesty in front of the dog as one might be in the presence of a human child. That seemed rather hypocritical considering Louis’ habit of sharing the space heater with Matisse in any state of undress while getting ready in the evening or preparing for bed, but the odds of their activities resuming if he said such a thing would have been dangerously low.
Still, the dog was welcome back in when their breath slowed and the afterglow had subsided (and only then, as it would take him mere seconds to wedge them apart with his bulk to sleep in between if the mood struck). Matisse fit in the bed rather well, sandpaper paws and sharp elbows digging into Lestat’s side only marginally as Louis used him as a propping surface for his book.
“That’s not what he’s for.”
“He doesn’t mind.” Louis flipped another page. “It doesn’t even wake him up.”
A pointy foot scraped over Lestat’s hip bone as the snoring between them increased.
“A husband might cheat on his wife without her finding out. Is it still immoral?”
Louis raised an eyebrow at him.
—
The dog was so caked in mud when it emerged from the indigo fields that Lestat hadn’t recognized it for what it was at first, his step faltering at what looked more like a filthy bear cub than a canine. Two basins of warm water later and the impression had changed little, though the muck had been thinned to something more like Mississippi River water as it soaked into the chaise in front of the hearth. Brown marble eyes stared at him from under a mop of fur, glistening with interest as Lestat rambled to it under his breath.
“What is that?” Louis asked, voice flat. The hard lines of his riding jacket gave a sharpness to his silhouette in the doorway. A damp draft made his shadow flicker in the firelight.
Lestat straightened his shoulders but reclined into the cushion the way he knew made Louis clench his teeth. “Has your ego finally grown large enough to obstruct your vision?” Perhaps a poor course of action if he intended to get his way, but satisfying nonetheless, even more so when he saw Louis’ grip on his crop tighten.
“Put it outside, Lestat. It’s making a mess and it’s not raining any longer.”
“I’m keeping it.”
The crop dropped to the floor with a muffled clatter as Louis made his way to the writing desk to open his ink and sealing wax.
“No, you aren’t.” He wasn’t even looking any longer. Dismissive. He sounded like Gabrielle on a bad day. The Marquis on a good day. It made Lestat’s skin crawl.
“And that’s your decision to make?” His nails snapped a section of thread in the upholstery. This was escalating the fight. Lestat didn’t care. The dog snuffled at the gap in the cushions.
“I am the master of the house.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
Louis’ lip curled, eyes taking on a cruel arsenic gleam that meant Lestat had landed a hit. “This is my home. Put it back outside or I will.”
“So you can have it as an hors d’oeuvre the moment my back is turned?”
The drawer to the desk slammed closed, barely covering the instinctive snap of teeth he knew Louis so loathed succumbing to. Another success. (No, it wasn’t).
“How nice it is to discover another creature for whom you have more compassion than you do for me.” He was seething now, breath heaving shallowly and eyes narrowed, the equivalent of a snarling rampage for anyone else.
“Well, the dog is kinder than you are.” It was nearly March now, but Louis refused to release his grip on winter’s chill. It clung to him no matter the season it seemed.
Something in Louis’ posture shifted, anger giving way to disgust before his eyes. The mutual heat of their fights never lasted long. Louis didn't think highly enough of him for that.
“Dumber more like. How fitting that you would have such affection for a creature that has no ability to see you for what you are.”
“And what is that, mon chéri amour? A dog can’t change its bark.” He grinned, knowing how ghastly it must look.
“Mon dieu, I don’t know, Lestat! Surely there was some point, even once in your monstrous existence, that you wanted to be better than this! Christ above, haven’t you ever wanted to be good? To do good?”
The sharp retort Lestat had planned, poised himself for, never materialized. The silence hung heavy between them, his dignity sagging under its weight (and that of something more painful), even more stifling than the fetid, humid air that slithered in the open windows to choke the candle flames. Louis’ once-silken waves had puffed around his head like a stormcloud from the dampness of the New Orleans spring. Lestat wished he would smile more.
He knew immediately that Louis was at a loss, gawking at his involuntarily hunched body in surprise and no small amount of bewilderment. Of all the many arguments over the past two years, the cruel and scathing words hurled between them, the shredded fabric and broken furniture, very little had garnered such a reaction, Lestat knew. Never something so seemingly mundane. Regardless, it was clear that Louis knew somehow, some way, though surely not in a way he could imagine, that he had won before the fight truly began. There was nothing Louis coveted quite so much as Lestat’s defeat, perhaps not even blood.
“Call for the overseer,” Lestat whispered. “Perhaps he could make use of the dog.”
The boots in his line of vision stayed still for a long moment before spinning on a heel and disappearing.
—
Though he knew the questions it would raise, Lestat was still prone in bed when he felt Louis stirring beside him. The touch came first, weight shifting behind him until a gentle hand lowered to rest on his bicep and a leg draped over his hips. Then the words.
"What’s troubling you, mon amour?”
"Nothing.”
It was a silly game to play, but one Louis indulged for the sake of Lestat’s fragile dignity. As he expected, only silence followed, though he was pulled closer until his back was pressed against skin. Louis knew he couldn’t bear the silence for long, that he hated it so deeply it would draw an answer from him. “I was dreaming.” He waited for the prompt to bolster his courage.
“Oh? What about?” The warmth of lips fluttered against the base of Lestat’s neck. Louis was always warm there now, rosy with blood and satiation instead of painted with beetroot in a mask of life. It seemed the world narrowed to that point of heat on his skin altogether. His dreams weren’t what they had once been either, the scale shrinking as the scope of his existence did until only Louis remained in both. A response formed treacle-slowly in his head, but a cool hand stroked up and down his chest from behind until at least the seizing stillness in his breast loosened. Louis’ touch could do that, rub the tension out of his heart like a knotted muscle.
“Do you remember the stray dog that wandered onto the plantation? It was near the…end.”
“I believe so.” The hold on him tightened. “That was a dreadful night. One that was my fault if memory serves.” Lestat didn't correct him, though perhaps he should have. For now, it felt good to be absolved.
“The dream was about that. And I don’t care to remember those things. It makes me miss you in the past from right here by your side.” Lestat lay still, his jaw clicking back into place. There was no further interrogation, just Louis breathing deeply in his hair.
"It is strange to remember, isn’t it? I know so vividly how I felt and yet it seems impossible from here.”
“I’m glad it does.” The weight of the body behind him felt comfortably leaden, no longer stagnant but rooted instead, a cat that had kneaded the blankets and settled into his life belly-up rather than continuing to watch from a perch on a far windowsill.
The bed shifted again, this time in front of him as a far more graceless presence thumped against his torso and it made itself at home. Louis’ hand left his chest momentarily, ruffling in Matisse’s fur. “Bonsoir, mon chou."
Lestat hummed an assent, nuzzling into the fur engulfing his face. A paw slapped at him, followed by a whine that penetrated straight to his eardrum.
"Your monster requires a walk,” Louis muttered, burrowing further into the blankets. It was a rather sweet habit, tender and kittenish enough that Lestat was momentarily inclined to leave him be. But only momentarily.
“Our monster.” There was a soft groan into his spine. “You would really force your husband to trek through the woods all by his lonesome so you can get your beauty sleep?”
“Mm, I think I would."
“Even if there was a reward at the end?” He shifted his hips backwards in a slow grind.
“You drive a hard bargain.”
He smirked, repating the action. “Could be harder.” After a clear inner struggle came to its end behind him, Lestat felt a firm press of hips against his backside. “I’ll get our clothes then.”