Work Text:
The shack had been a house once. Louis kept having to remind himself of this. He could see the bones of it. A staircase that had given up halfway to the second floor. A door frame that no longer had a door. The high ceilings of the Garden District, beautiful once, sagging now under the burden of what the weather had done to them over seventy-seven years.
Lestat lived here. Lestat had been living here.
The storm had been fighting the roof for an hour and the roof was losing.
The photograph was on the mantel. He had walked past it once. He had been looking at Lestat, who was standing in the doorway between this room and what had once been a kitchen, watching Louis as if Louis was a candle he was afraid would go out.
The second time, lightning happened. It came in through the window all at once and laid itself across the mantel and showed him, briefly, what he had not been seeing. A frame behind a candle whose wick had drowned in its own wax months or years ago. He stopped and stood in the dark, and picked it up.
Claudia was probably twenty three in the picture. She was sitting sideways on the bench at the Rue Royale, one shoulder hitched up, her chin set in a mask of pure focus. She was looking off-frame. At Lestat, probably — Louis could tell by the angle of the look, by the small dangerous quality in it. Her mouth was doing the thing it did before she said something terrible. She was beautiful in the photograph in a way that made Louis’s chest tighten.
He remembered the green ribbon he had tied for her, because she was angry at Lestat that day and was willing, briefly, to be a sweet daughter to Louis as a form of protest. The glass was cracked diagonally across her shoulder. The wood was warped where the damp had eaten into it. But her face was clean. The dust was on the mantel, on the candle, on the wax. Not on her face.
Louis closed his eyes imagining Lestat lovingly wiping the dust off of her face.
"You kept this," he said.
He did not turn around but he could hear Lestat behind him somewhere, the soft exhalation that meant Lestat had been about to speak and had stopped.
"You kept this," Louis said again, when no answer came.
Louis ran his thumb along the bottom edge of the frame. He could feel where the wood had gone soft.
"S-she came in here once," Lestat said, behind him.
Louis did not move.
"I had the photograph— I took with me when I— after. After everything. I was asleep, I think. And she came in. She did not say a-anything. S-she stood where you are standing now. She looked at it for a long t-time. Then she went away again."
"She?"
"In my head, Louis."
"Oh…"
"Sometimes Claudia. Sometimes you."
"Lestat…"
"It is fine. I knew none of you were really there. I am not so far gone as that.”
Louis pressed his hand flat against the mantel and breathed out slowly through his nose. He could feel his chest ache, low and central, behind his sternum.
"You should have saved her," he whispered. "At the trial. You should have saved her instead of me. You should have given them, me."
The wind hit the side of the shack and the whole structure groaned, and somewhere down the hall a door opened or closed on its own. Louis flinched without meaning to but he kept his eyes on the photograph.
"I–I d-don’t…," Lestat said.
"I would have gone, Lestat. If that meant she got to live…."
"Louis…"
"You should have given them me and let her—"
"I would have died in her place, Louis."
Louis stopped.
"If that were possible, I would have offered them myself instead. I would have done that g-gladly. I want you to know that."
He hoped Louis did not hear the stutter at all, because Lestat had pushed past it on the strength of wanting Louis to understand, and Louis was looking at the photograph again, at Claudia's small sideways face. Lestat knew that he was hearing only the words and not the small place between the words where one of them had snagged.
Louis was crying. The tears were going down his face onto his collar and the collar of the coat he was wearing. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He kept his back to Lestat. "I know...I'm sorry."
Louis pressed both hands flat against the mantel and bent his head between them and breathed.
"Then why…then why didn't you reach out to me? All these years?"
The silence behind him went on long enough that it pressed on the back of his neck. He could hear the storm and he could hear the house complaining about the weather, but he could not hear Lestat. Lestat had gone quiet so Louis thought he was choosing his words.
"Lestat?"
He had meant it to come out gentle but he heard the edge in his own voice.
Louis turned around then but was not prepared for what he saw. He had been letting himself see only the parts of Lestat he could afford to see. Now he was looking at all of him at once and Lestat looked small.
He was standing with his shoulders rolled forward and his weight on the back of his heels and his hands hanging at his sides. His hair looked the way a child's hair sits after a long sleep.
Lestat was looking at Louis with his mouth open. There was nothing coming out of it. Lestat's right hand moved up, slowly, and came to rest at the side of his throat, two fingers flat against the place under his jaw, pressing lightly. Louis did not, yet, understand what the hand was doing.
"Lestat."
"I—"
Lestat’s jaw worked. "I t-tried."
Louis went still.
"I tr—" Lestat's eyes shut. He shut them hard, like a child, like he is trying to make a thing not be true by refusing to see it. "I th-thought you were— that you w-weren't—"
He stopped and brought his other hand up. The other hand had come up to his mouth and was hovering there, not quite touching it, as if he could press his lips closed and start the sentence over from a place where it would behave.
"That you weren't a-alive," he said, "After September eighth…"
Louis realized with a sudden pang that Lestat was trying to physically help himself speak.
"Oh, Lestat."
"It is f-fine."
"Lestat—"
"It is— it is nothing, it is an old— it is nothing, Louis."
Louis crossed the room and he was in front of Lestat in a second. His hands were on Lestat's face, framing his jaw. Lestat went very still under his hands. Louis could feel the small fast pulse in his throat working under Louis's thumb.
"Look at me."
"I am l— I am —"
"Lestat. Look at me."
Lestat opened his eyes. There was something in them Louis had never seen, in any room they had ever been in together. It was shame and fear.
"I’m sorry I wasn't looking at you," Louis said.
"It is fine. You could not have known. It is an old— it is an old th-thing, it does not— it does not signify. I have had it since I was a b-boy back in Auvergne. It hadn’t come back in a long time."
“Oh, baby,” Louis murmured. He pressed his forehead to Lestat’s. He moved one hand slowly from Lestat's jaw to the back of his neck and settled it there.
He was thinking about every fight they had ever had in their home at Rue Royale, and how loud Lestat had always been in them, and how Louis had hated the loudness, and how he was now standing in a dilapidated shack holding a Lestat whose voice had gone so small it could not get out of his mouth. The difference between the two was jarring to him.
He was thinking about the way Lestat had filled rooms. The way Lestat had taken up all of the air in any room he entered, performatively, insistently, almost like he is afraid that if he stops talking, the silence will reveal him. Louis had told himself, in the worst of the nights in Dubai, that Lestat had been too much, too loud, too large and too willing to drown a room.
But what did he actually remember of Lestat?
He remembered the brat. He remembered the lover who had been beautiful and impossible and who had a kind of operatic confidence about him. He remembered the cruelty. He remembered the largeness of the cruelty, the way it had matched the largeness of the love, the tenderness, the way Lestat had been big in every direction.
But now he wondered if that version of Lestat he remembered was even real. Had he inflated the figure of him like one inflates an effigy so that what’s being burned is more satisfying to burn? Had Lestat ever been the giant Louis remembered?
He wasn’t sure of anything about Lestat at that point. The one in front of him now, this was the only Lestat Louis could be sure of.
He kissed Lestat at the temple, above his eyebrow, and at the cheekbone. It felt like pressing a cloth to a wound to slow the bleeding.
"Take your time," he said, against Lestat's cheek.
"Louis— "
"Take your time, Lestat. I am not going anywhere. I will wait as long as it takes.”
"I— "
"Shh. Take your time."
He kissed him at the corner of his mouth. He felt Lestat's hand come up and grip the front of his coat. Louis covered the hand with his own and held it where it was, pressed against his chest, against the place where Louis's own heart was beating in tandem with Lestat’s.
Lestat closed his eyes. "I told him," Lestat said.
"Told who?"
"A-Armand. When he called me after you hurt yourself…, ” Lestat’s voice broke completely. Louis rubbed his back, encouraging him to go on. “I said it to Armand when I thought— I t-thought you were— "
"Lestat."
"I thought you would not be alive to hear it. But I needed to say it Louis….I desperately wanted you to hear that."
Louis could not move. He was looking at Lestat's closed eyes and could feel tears forming in his own.
He gathered Lestat in with both arms. He wrapped his arms around the small ruined shape of him and he pressed his mouth to the top of Lestat's head and held him. Lestat's hands gripped the back of Louis's coat with both fists. He pressed his face into Louis's collarbone. Louis could feel him shaking. Louis could feel his own face wet against Lestat's hair..
"I'm here," Louis said. "I'm here now, alive."
"I t-told him that I l-love you. I love you, Louis. My Louis. I love you, mon cher."
"I know, Lestat. I know. I have always known. I have never doubted that."
He drew back and took Lestat's face in both his hands again. He looked at him — at the wet eyes, at the trembling mouth, at the man he was married to and the man here now — and he kissed him.
He kissed him with the accumulated weight of all the years of not having kissed him, of not having touched him, of missing him so much that he hallucinated a version of him. Lestat's mouth opened under his without resistance. Louis kissed into him. He found Lestat's tongue and then Lestat was kissing Louis back.
Louis made a small ragged sound that Lestat caught and was kissing him as if he were going to be stopped, as if there were a clock somewhere counting down. Louis bit, lightly, at Lestat's lower lip. He licked the place he had bitten. He pulled back just enough to breathe and then could not bear the distance and kissed him again, deeper, his thumb stroking the line of Lestat's jaw, his other hand fisted now in Lestat's hair and holding him in place. Lestat's hands had let go of his coat and had come up to Louis's face. They were kissing each other now, the way they had used to, and Louis thought this part at least was true, that this they had had and they still had, and his memory of this was at least accurate.
“Your hair is wet,” Louis murmured, against Lestat's mouth.
“The roof is leaking, Louis,” Lestat murmured back, smiling. Louis kissed the place where the smile formed.
They did not know what came next or what shape their future held. But one thing Louis knew, with a clarity that surprised him, was that he wanted Lestat. He wanted to learn how to live honestly and love honestly. He wanted to see Lestat and remember him just as he is and not some distorted, evil version of him that his memory had been twisted into offering him.