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Lestat could scarcely remember a time when he’d felt so alone. In a cheap motel room just outside of Hartford, the walls of his carefully-crafted facade at last began to fall down. Memories that had hounded him for months all condensing down to a single point that felt like a blade pressing to the center of his throat. Slashing him open and bleeding him out until he wished for nothing but to burn. And there weren’t enough drugs in all the world to make the remembering stop, but Lestat had tried anyway.
He should have been on stage, but he wasn’t. His band members were all terrified of him now, so he figured it didn’t matter all that much. Everyone else had gone away, even Daniel. Stopping their final interview session before it had even begun to tell him he was sick of the lies and the pretense and he was suing him for breach of contract. A fitting conclusion to a night where Lestat had been so wasted half the fans at the show in Albany had left midway through the set and demanded their tickets be refunded.
The Vampire Lestat was over.
The Vampire Lestat was all alone.
Whatever had been in the blood he’d sucked down in the motel’s parking lot had turned the whole world into a flurry of stars. His body going weightless and then heavy as a stone, minutes stretching into hours, hours melting into one another so completely he hardly noticed them passing at all. And when he finally came to, everything was soaked in blood. The bathroom, the bedsheets, Lestat’s face, his hands, his clothes. So much red everywhere, a nebulous smattering of crimson vomit making itself known when he had no memory of getting sick at all.
On the bed, he found his phone. On his phone, Lestat found he’d sent more than a dozen texts to Louis over the course of the night. Most of them incoherent, ranging from angry to sarcastic to so desperately in love—heart bleeding all over the screen, begging Louis to come to him, offering up the name of the motel where he was staying and his room number—Lestat felt ashamed to read such things. He and Louis weren’t even speaking, hadn’t exchanged so much as a single text in weeks, so why would Louis come to him now? Why would Lestat even ask him to?
The texts were all unread, every one. Beyond the windows, the first hints of morning sun were just starting to bleed in shades of pink and gold above the horizon. And Lestat tossed the phone down on the bed and let the screen go dark. Rose to his feet, went to the coffin where it was lying on the floor next to the bed and climbed inside it. Still filthy with the blood he’d vomited, he shut the lid to the world and fell into the desperate quiet of his slumber all alone.
—
The next night, Lestat woke to the sound of someone pounding on the motel room door. He threw open the lid of the coffin, sat up and frowned, feeling the pull of something familiar in the hollows of his bones. And a heart—the rhythm of it something he would recognize at once even a million years from now. Its cadence familiar as friendly conversation, a pulse that nuzzled right up against his own until they were keeping perfect time with each other.
Louis. Lestat knew he would be there before he even thought to stand up and open the door. Pulling himself out of his coffin and crossing the room in a few quick strides, no care or concern for the mess of blood that had dried to a filthy crust all over his skin. He only hesitated when he reached the door, lifting his hand up to the knob and then snatching it away. Standing there on the precipice of whatever was about to occur as the sound of Louis’ heartbeat washed over him in soft, warm waves.
He opened the door. Louis stood immaculate and radiant on the other side, a stark contrast to the sodium lights shining their sallow haze over the motel’s parking lot just behind him. The sight of his beauty so overwhelming, so all-consuming, Lestat could feel his knees begin to quiver at once.
“Hello, Lestat.” Louis’ eyes flicked from Lestat’s face downward, taking in the mess of him, his expression hard to read as his gaze traveled upward again. “Do you wanna invite me in?”
“Hello, Louis.” Lestat swallowed, tried to hold his head up high, keep his shoulders strong. He imagined them spread like wings holding air, holding power, taking flight. “Do you need an invitation?”
“Not my room,” Louis said, the softest hint of a smile playing at one corner of his mouth. “Guess I probably do.”
Lestat tipped his head to one side, tried to not think of how famished he was, how badly he needed blood. Tried to not watch the arteries pulsing lovely and red in the line of Louis’ lovely neck. “Please,” Lestat stepped back, ushering Louis into the room with a sweeping gesture of his bloodied hands. “Come in. Apologies for the mess, my band and I had quite a rager last night and this charming little room has surely seen better days.”
Louis stepped into the room and shut the door. “Charming…” His eyes darted around the room—the busted television, the filthy bed, blood tear stains making a ruin of the pillows. “Is not the word I would use. Do I even wanna ask why you’re holed up in a place like this in the middle of your tour?”
Shame rose in Lestat at once, licking at his ankles like he was standing at the mouth of some enormous flame. “Oh, you know how these things go. When you are on tour…”
His voice cracked, and he wished for nothing more than for the floor to open up beneath him and swallow him whole. Why was he allowing Louis to see him like this? Why hadn’t he at least cleaned himself up before opening the door?
“Alright. We don’t have to talk about it.” Louis shrugged out of his jacket, draped it on the back of the chair by the window, one of the only spaces in the whole room not spattered with blood. “Do you wanna talk about the text messages, then?”
Regret flared in Lestat like a five alarm blaze. What had he been thinking? Even stoned out of his mind, he should have known better than to text Louis such things. If only he hadn’t been so lonely. So utterly alone, alone. “Someone… last night. At the party.” He tried a laugh and didn’t feel it. “They must have taken my phone. I’m putting my money on Salamander, he is always—”
“Stop.” Louis pressed the length of one finger to the bow of Lestat’s mouth. Gazing at him with those eyes until the whole world was nothing but aurora green. “Just shut up, okay? I’m here. We don’t need to talk about it.” He sighed, shook his head, took a step away from Lestat and laughed a little. “But if you don’t go get yourself cleaned up right now I might have no choice but to hose you down in the parking lot.”
“Louis, I don’t know where you would find a hose—”
“Okay, we’re not doin’ that…” Louis turned around and took his shoes off, placing them under the chair where he’d hung his jacket before turning back to Lestat. “Come on, then,” he said, and all at once started walking in the direction of the bathroom.
Lestat followed as though in a trance. Louis’ very presence was some magnetic thing, instantly erasing the soul-crushing loneliness that had plagued him last night. And suddenly it didn’t matter what they’d been upset with each other about, why they hadn’t talked, the little matter of The Book. More than a century of heartache and baggage taking flight and ferrying itself out the window the moment Lestat had laid eyes on his beloved there across from him.
Lestat stood in the doorway of the bathroom watching Louis scowl at the mess. Blood pooled on the floor and in the toilet, bloody hand prints marring the walls and the edge of the sink. “Take off your clothes,” Louis said, or maybe Lestat had only imagined he did. Only sure he had truly heard it when Louis turned to him and added, “I’ll run the bath.”
His vision tunneled, hazy at the edges, watching Louis pick up the only mostly clean towel in the room and place it on the floor so that he might kneel and turn the water on. Sticking his fingers under the tap to get the temperature just right. “Must’ve been some party,” Louis said, glancing over his shoulder and lingering with it as Lestat peeled his pants off.
“One for the history books,” Lestat said, fully bare, realizing only after taking his underwear off that the last time he’d been naked in Louis’ presence—years before—they’d been doing something akin to this very thing in New Orleans. “You know, Louis, you don’t have to—”
“Get in.” Louis turned his attention back to the bath and shut the water off. Reaching for the little standard issue bar of motel soap and peeling the packaging off. Waiting, patient. His heartbeat a siren calling out to Lestat. Come to me.
Lestat didn’t protest, didn’t say anything at all. His eyes on the shimmering silk of Louis’ shirt as he crossed the short distance and stepped into the bath, the water he found there warmer than living human blood. Warm, safe—yes. He lowered himself down into the water and it was tinged pink almost at once.
“I am perfectly capable of washing myself,” Lestat said the moment Louis pressed wet hands to his skin and started scrubbing him down with the soap. It was a miracle, well and truly, that Louis’ hands should touch him that way. Glide over his bare skin and remind him what the act of living was truly all about. Only this, warm skin and the presence of the one he loved more than any other being in existence.
“What you’re not gonna do,” Louis said, the words falling out of his slowly as he turned that little bar of soap pink with so much blood, “is text me sayin’ you’re all alone. That you miss me more than words can say. That you love me. That you want me to—” He stopped scrubbing for a second or two and met Lestat’s gaze dead-on. “You asked me to come and I’m here. So shut your mouth and let me get you clean or I’m walkin’ right back out that door. Tell me you understand.”
They gazed at each other for a long time then. Louis swiped the bar of soap over the blood caked on Lestat’s neck, lingering there like he was trying to memorize the exact rhythm of his pulse. The cadence of the heartbeat that was exactly like his own. “Yes, I understand,” Lestat said, in a voice so small it sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Louis washed him everywhere, baptizing him in suds there in that filthy motel bathroom. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Lestat was born again, made brand new. Louis scrubbed him until he sparkled, until his hair was clean as it ever was, the water that swirled all around him so red it appeared to be nothing but blood.
“Dry off, get dressed,” Louis said after he stood up, using the towel he’d been kneeling on to dry his hands before draping it on the edge of the sink to await Lestat. “I have a car waiting outside. If you’d like to bring your coffin I’ll have my driver load it in the back.”
“Louis,” Lestat said, the name a question on his tongue. And he found he couldn’t move, paralyzed there in his swirling crimson bathwater.
“What?” Louis shot him a hard look, but Lestat could see it in his eyes, just around the edges—the softness, that thing he’d had a few precious glimpses of years ago in New Orleans. That tender thing his beloved could be when he really wanted to. Someone so gentle Lestat could almost—almost—believe he might love him back one day. If only—“You don’t seriously think I’m spending another second in this vomit-soaked hovel, do you? I got a place downtown. I’ll wait for you in the car.”
And then Louis turned around, left the room, disappearing beyond Lestat’s line of sight at once.
—
Louis’ suite in downtown Hartford was a palace compared to Lestat’s room at the motel. Floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city down below; gleaming hardwood floors and moody recessed lights that shone like stars in the ceiling. The bed was the size of an ocean, and when Lestat sat down on the sectional sofa in the living room it was like being cradled by a cloud. Or maybe he was just feeling weightless, brand new as he was. Free from care and all those silly things that had been plaguing him last night.
What was loneliness? What were those memories that had haunted him like a thousand hungry ghosts? Suddenly, Lestat found he couldn’t remember. His total focus on Louis as he filled two glasses with brandy and carried them over to where Lestat sat on the sectional sofa.
“Merci,” Lestat said when Louis passed him a glass. He took a sip, not letting his eyes wander from Louis as he sat down beside him. Not quite close enough to touch—but almost.
“So,” Louis said, and took a sip of his brandy, gazing down into the depths of his glass before setting his eyes on Lestat. “You wanna tell me about that party?”
Irritation pulled at the muscles of Lestat’s neck. “It was a party, Louis. People, music, champagne.” Flashes of memories coming to him, the state he’d been in last night. All alone on the bathroom floor wailing in between bouts of vomiting. “You remember the parties we used to throw back in—”
“Daniel tells me he’s suing you. You wanna talk about that?”
Lestat shot the rest of his brandy down in one big go and set the empty glass on the coffee table. “Insufferable fledgling. No respect for those who came before him. Must be all that tainted blood passed down to him from his maker.”
Louis hummed, sipped his brandy, set his half-full glass next to Lestat’s empty one. “I’m gonna kiss you now,” he said, plain as that. The shine of his eyes more precious than gemstones. His gaze was a tractor beam drawing Lestat in and in and in. “And then after I’m finished with you, maybe we can be real with each other.”
Lestat blinked, or thought he did. Only—no. That wasn’t right. He couldn’t even breathe, couldn’t move a single muscle. “Okay, Louis,” he managed to squeeze out, sucking an enormous breath in the split second before—
Louis crashed forward, took Lestat by the hair with two gentle hands and licked into his mouth. All at once—Lestat felt as though his whole body was being lifted up into the clouds. He was lighter than feathers, lighter than air. Drawing Louis close to him and allowing himself to be kissed and kissed. And when Louis straddled his lap, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Like—ah, yes, there you are. Right where you belong.
Louis deepened the kiss, and it felt to Lestat that he was crawling bodily inside him. That he was swallowing Louis’ pulse, opening his jaws wide to drink the miracle of his heart whole. Hands roaming over clothes until Louis got two big fistfuls of Lestat’s shirt and unceremoniously ripped the front of it open.
He kissed Lestat from his neck to his collarbones, tracing the ley lines of his arteries with the tips of two bone-white fangs slowly, slowly. Lestat didn’t have much blood left to give, but he’d gladly offer it up to Louis should he ask him to, should he so desire to take it. But when Louis mumbled something that almost sounded like, “Drink from me,” Lestat could not allow himself to believe it.
“Louis,” Lestat breathed the sound of the name, somehow half-hard in spite of his need for blood. “Cheri…”
“I hunted when the sun went down,” Louis said, pulling back, his pupils blown so wide the greens of his irises were gone, gone. “Before I came to you. I have enough. And you need…”
Lestat’s whole body felt like it was flooded with light. “Of course,” was all he could manage. “I am…”
Words were lost to him, the sound of Louis’ heart drowning him as he watched his beloved stand up, slip his shoes off, then his socks, then his shirt. Not touching his pants or the bulge that was just forming at the front as he looked Lestat deep in his eyes as said. “Get comfortable, make room for me, you can take it from my neck.”
Though Louis did his best to sound casual, he couldn’t hide the hints or arousal flooding his tone. Couldn’t hide the growing bulge in his pants, the way his fangs were poking down and slurring his words. Lestat understood exactly, knew what this act had always been to them. Not merely sharing blood or feeding, it was making love.
Somehow, Lestat got his body to move. Shrugging out of his torn shirt and positioning himself in the corner wedge of the sectional where there was ample space for the two of them to spread out. Where he could open his legs wide and offer Louis a cozy place to settle between them. His heart was a wild stampede in his chest and it was no use trying to control his breathing. Watching through his fuzzy tunnel eyes as Louis came close and sat down and nestled right against him.
The moment Louis’ back pressed to Lestat’s chest it was like finally being made whole. Skin-to-skin like prayer, something most holy. Louis knocked his head back against Lestat’s shoulder and sighed, his body trembling gently. Slowly, Lestat drew his nose up along the length of his neck. The body and the blood, the blood…
The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Lestat felt like a child again, a most innocent thing still thirsty for the light of his God to shine upon him. Yes—Louis, his Louis, the blessed warmth of him unending. Louis’ blood smelled sweeter than nectar inside him, and Lestat ached for it like the aching for manna from Heaven. And when he allowed his fangs to pierce Louis’ artery and drink the first sips of him down, it was in every way like being made vampire anew.
Louis, his beloved, his one true maker. Lestat snarled against the wounds his fangs had made and began to gulp him down. The feelings that flooded into him so vivid it was almost like hearing Louis’ thoughts, a thousand sacred emotions from his beloved stroking over his nerves and filling his veins. Feelings, so many feelings—each one of them a miracle because they were for Lestat. The enormity of the love he felt so real he could almost allow himself to believe it, almost allow himself to think it was true. That Louis wasn’t just bonded to him as his fledgling, but because it was a fact of his soul that he loved Lestat. As simple as that. Love, love, love…
Louis moaned when Lestat slipped his fangs back in. “Yes,” he said, the word but a breath from the font of his throat. Lestat pulled them out and rocked them back in just to hear him moan again. “Lestat…”
Lestat’s hand fluttered over Louis’ belly as he drank, savoring the quiver of his torso, running the pad of his thumb over one nipple, then the next. Feeling the life flooding into him and filling his veins and his arteries. The love he was drawing from Louis all tangled up with a flare of arousal and swelling his cock to full hardness. Yes, yes—had there ever been anything else? What was Lestat even doing in Hartford? He couldn’t remember. It was as though he’d been created to do this and this alone, and all that came before and all that would come after was mere background static.
Instinct had him by the base of his brain, and Lestat let his hand fall down to grip Louis’ hard cock through the front of his pants. “Yes,” Louis said, growled, moaned. Pressing up into the contact and rocking his hips as Lestat began to stroke. “Baby, please, let me—”
Lestat separated his mouth from Louis’ artery, lapping at the wounds to catch a few more precious drops before the world began to spin to pieces all around them. They were on each other like wild, mindless things, Tearing at what remained of each other’s clothes until suddenly—as though Lestat had only blinked and it happened—they were both totally naked.
Lestat had no time to speak or make a move before Louis was on him. Pinning him down by his hips on the sofa and mouthing at the head of his cock. No preamble, no prelude—just a mouth on him so starving it was like he’d been aching for centuries. “Baby,” he muttered against the bruise-dark head, and rolled his tongue against it, and shot his gaze upward as he said, “Let me show you…”
He couldn’t help the sound that cracked from him the moment Louis swallowed him down. Groping at Louis’ hair, his neck, his shoulders as his legs spread wider like he couldn’t help but invite his beloved in. Swallow me, devour me, take anything you want to. Louis blood swelled in Lestat’s veins in a way that was almost orchestral, it was something triumphant. His eyes flooding with blood tears as he watched Louis’ mouth sink down on his cock one throbbing inch at a time.
Louis took him halfway and pulled back, breathed, massaged his balls and drew his tongue through a bead of pre-come leaking from the tip. And when Lestat whimpered, “I won’t last, cheri,” Louis laughed, flashed a grin that was utterly devoid of fangs, and said—
“I don’t need you to.”
Louis sank back down until he choked, and pulled back only a little before sinking down again. Pushing himself deeper, harder, until Lestat had pink-tinged stars dancing in his eyes. Until all he could do was hold on for his dear undead life and allow Louis to take it all. His legs spreading impossibly wide as Louis bottomed out on his cock, taking the full, pulsing length of it deep inside his throat. Thinking, near madness—fuck me, crawl inside me, make me yours, I’ll be everything you want. The mere thought of Louis inside him enough to send Lestat bounding right up to the edge and then over it as he started to come.
Louis swallowed every drop, only pulling back and coming up for air when Lestat had started going soft. And Lestat could only lie there buzzing with the warmth of afterglow, chest heaving and a whole galaxy of stars turning in his eyes. Watching Louis’ hand fly over his own cock as he spent himself all over the flesh of Lestat’s bare thigh. Whimpering Lestat’s name like it was some holy thing, blood tears falling from his eyes and mapping twin trails down to the blessed arches of his collarbones.
Louis collapsed on top of Lestat the moment it was through. Pressing soft, lazy kisses to his neck and jawline until their hearts had mostly settled. A warmth spreading from the center of Lestat’s chest out to the rest of him as his hands roamed the bare planes of Louis’ skin. Finding every dip and subtle blemish exactly as it had been over one hundred years ago, exactly as it would be a hundred years from now, a million. The shape of him something Lestat could have drawn from memory, understood as perfectly as he understood his own.
“We can talk a little now,” Lestat said very gently, tracing the knobs of Louis’ spine up and down, up and down. Terrified and fearless all at the very same instant. “I suppose. If you’d like to.”
Slowly, Louis tipped his gaze up, a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah, Lestat,” he said, and pressed a kiss to Lestat’s chin so gently he could have wept. “Let’s talk.”