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Lestat had spent the last hour constructing the breakup very meticulously, the way some men assembled bombs in basements; with the trembling certainty that he would regret it the instant it worked.
The apartment around him glowed low and amber beneath recessed lighting, all polished marble and impossible wealth. Louis liked warmth in interior spaces. Said cold lighting made every room feel like a hospital corridor. So the penthouse breathed gold, honey-colored reflections sliding across glass and steel while rain crawled down the windows in silver veins.
Below them, Manhattan writhed in weather. Headlights smeared across wet streets like paint dragged by tired fingers.
Lestat sat at the piano bench without touching the keys.
The front door opened.
Louis entered trailing cold rain air and irritation. His wool coat darkened at the shoulders from weather, coils slightly damp near his temples. He looked expensive in the effortless way old money always tried and failed to imitate.
And furious. Lestat’s pulse fluttered violently.
“I’m serious, Lestat, these people complain like its a hobby. Nobody wants to work anymore! They want sympathy, they want reform while holding seven dollar coffee.”
Therapy had given him language for spirals, which unfortunately meant he could now identify every one in real time while continuing to drown inside it. Catastrophizing. Emotional reasoning. Avoidant self-sabotage disguised as altruism. His therapist had once told him that sometimes the urge to leave first was simply another way to avoid witnessing disappointment arrive naturally.
And wasn’t that exactly what this was? A mercy. A final decent act performed by a creature historically incapable of decency. Because Louis deserved someone steadier, someone who did not wake clawing at phantom hands around his throat, someone who did not require reassurance like oxygen. Someone whose love did not have bloodstained hands and a starving mouth.
Lestat imagined Louis five years from now, lighter somehow. Sleeping peacefully, laughing more. Existing without the constant labor of managing another person’s storms.
“There were protestors outside the building again today. One man was shouting that corporations were ‘bleeding the working class dry’ㅡto the people who are employing them. To us.”
Lestat watched him quietly. Louis crossed the room toward the bar cart, loosening the knot of his tie with visible annoyance.
“One analyst was crying during a meeting because we eliminated her department. Crying?” He poured himself a glass of blood with the calm disdain of a king discussing crop failure. “Honestly, if your emotional resilience collapses because capitalism functions exactly as advertised, perhaps Darwin had the right idea.”
Lestat almost smiled despite himself. God, Louis could be monstrous.
Not cruel, exactly. Just insulated by centuries of survival and wealth until ordinary human fragility baffled him on a conceptual level. Usually Lestat found it funny. Tonight it made the ache inside him unbearable. All passionate in his privileged disappointment, animated and sharp-eyed. Alive in his convictions, however morally catastrophic they occasionally were.
And Lestat loved him so much it felt septic.
The sentence escaped before courage abandoned him. “Let’s break up.”
Louis froze with one arm halfway out of his coat. The city hummed below them. The rain tapped rhythmically against the windows and Lestat felt his heart leap violently into his throat.
Louis turned his head. “No.”
Then he finished taking off the coat and draped it neatly across the chair. “Anyways,” he continued, reaching for his glass again, “the entitlement is astonishing. These people have healthcare and...”
Relief hit Lestat so hard that it almlst nauseated him. It poured through him hot and humiliating. His lungs unlocked with painful force. Because Louis had not even considered it a real possibility.
The act should have comforted him. Instead rage bloomed sharp beneath his ribs because how dare Louis still make him feel safe? How dare he answer Lestat’s devastation with bored confidence?
How dare he continue loving him so casually when Lestat himself felt held together by rusted nails and panic attacks and weekly therapy appointments that left him shaking in parking garages afterward?
“What do you mean no?”
Louis drank. “No. You want me to say it in Spanish? Noh.”
“I’m not asking you, Louis. We are breaking up!”
“No, we are not. And we are not having this conversation again. Nowㅡ”
“I am overwhelmed.”
“You were also overwhelmed and offended because your guitarist bought matching bracelets for the band without consulting you.”
Lestat stood too fast. The piano bench shrieked against the marble hard enough to scrape through his skull. Everything tonight seemed to be sharpened. “Because it was,” Lestat snapped uselessly. “Because they were all standing there wearing them like some little family and I—” He cut himself off violently, disgusted by how childish it sounded the instant it left his mouth.
Louis looked almost bored, and it hurt Lestat to see that so plainly on his face. “Well perhaps I am overwhelmed by you.”
Louis blinked once. “By me...?”
“Yes,” Lestat screamed. “You are impossible lately,” his words tripping over each other now that they had begun. “Everything with you i-is suffocating. Galleries and b-business dinners where everyone smells like cedarwood. P-people only laugh at your jokes because they’re a-afraid you own half their company!”
Louis sipped from his glass.
“And you hate my music!”
“I do not hate your muㅡ”
“You called my songs vain and exhaustㅡ”
“It was seven minutes long. And you were screaming in it!”
“It was experimental.”
“It sounded like you were in pain.”
“It was a break up song. Of course, I was in pain,” Lestat defended. “You open the galleries and claim admirer of art when you have no regards for it!”
“Or maybe I don’t like it when you are in pain, ever considered that?”
Lestat’s pulse stumbled painfully. “Y-you always do this.”
“Do what.”
“This!” His hands moved helplessly through the air. “You stand there a-all calm while I sound fucking insane, Louis.”
“You are currently yelling at me about not liking the sound of you in pain.”
“I am trying to break up with you!”
“Then, stop trying.” The indifference scraped against Lestat’s nerves like broken glass.
“I’m serious, Louis.”
“Give me a proper reason then.” Lestat stayed quiet. Louis sighed softly, setting down the glass. “Lestatㅡ”
“I need variety.”
“Hmm,” Louis looked genuinely thoughtful. “Then buy a cashmere jacket. I told you the last time we went to Turkㅡ”
“I mean romantically.”
“Oh.”
Something flickered across Louis’ face then, a strange sort of attention. Finally. Lestat grasped it, pressed forward desperately.
“I could have anyone I wanted,” Louis remained watchful as Lestat prowled towards him. “Now that you’re just dull.”
A twitch appeared briefly at Louis’ jaw. Victory flashed mean and ugly through Lestat’s chest. He hated himself for enjoying it.
“You’re impossible lately,” Lestat continued. “In your expensive clothing deciding what museum is goodㅡboring and dull!”
Louis folded his arms. “And yet you continue to sleep in my bed, in my house.”
“I hate this house,”
“You picked it.”
“I hate that you let me pick it.”
Louis sighed. “Did you hunt recently?”
“I c-can’t do this anymore.” Lestat saw it immediately—the minute stillness that moved through Louis’ shoulders. And this time, instead of satisfaction, bile crawled up Lestat’s throat. The image of Louis stilling in pain was humiliating.
Louis turned away before Lestat could apologize. Lestat felt his anxiety jitter, his gaze landed on the porcelain vase near the fireplace. He seized it and hurled it across the room before he could think any further; it shattered spectacularly against the marble.
They exploded across the floorsㅡwhite orchids scattered like snapped bones. Louis closed his eyes. “Lestat,” he said tiredly, “that was eighteenth-century Sèvres.”
Another vase followed. Then a painting. Glass burst outward in glittering fragments. Lestat barely recognized the frantic thing moving inside his body now; like a tapeworm through his veinsㅡcontrolling his actions and movements. Panic had curdled into fury somewhere along the way. Not fury at Louis, but at himself.
“You’re acting insane.”
I am trying to make you give up on me. Lestat never worded it, but the effect of it rang through the room before he could school his expressions. Louis stared as if he knew what was happening, and somehow his silence hurt worse than shouting.
Lestat grabbed the nearest decor again, wrenching it from the wall hard enough for splintered wood to crack beneath his grip.
Something sharp sliced clean across his palm as pain blossomed sudden and bright in his senses; Lestat found it relieving, the physicality of it. The addictive sting to remind him that he was still here, still sane to care.
He watched as his blood slithered instantly down his wrist, crimson drops splattering onto the pale Persian rug beneath him. Ah, that rug. Louis adored the thing. Spent months hunting it through auctions and private dealers until finally acquiring it from some aristocratic widow in Vienna.
As Lestat watched crimson soak greedily into the cream-colored weave, a satisfactory grin overtook his ache. Surely now. Surely now Louis would be furious enough to leave him. “Shit, Lestat.”
But as Lestat watched, his smile faltered because Louis was worried about him. He crossed the room fast now, catching Lestat’s bleeding hand before another drop could stain the carpet. “That’s a deep cut.”
_________
The apartment smelled of rainwater, iron, and crushed orchid stems. One of the shattered vases had leaked across the marble in a slow reflective tide, flower petals pasted against the floor like damp scraps of skin. Somewhere near the fireplace, a record still turned soundlessly because Lestat had forgotten to lower the needle before the argument began. The soft mechanical rotation filled the room with the strange intimacy of unfinished things.
And in the middle of all this ruin stood Lestat, breathing like he had been running for miles.
Louis could hear it now that the shouting had stopped. Those uneven inhales dragging too sharply into his lungs. The tiny hitch midway through every breath. The sort of breathing people did after crying so hard their body forgot how to settle itself afterward.
Because Lestat had been crying. The entire time.
His eyes still wet, pulled thin across the skin like seawater after a tide receded. His voice, too—God, Louis heard it clearly now underneath the sharpness. Every sentence scraped raw, dragged upward through a throat swollen tight with panic.
And Lestat himself did not seem to know.
He had become so accustomed to surviving himself that he no longer recognized his own grief while inhabiting it.
Louis understood it because he had once loved Lestat very badly.
There had been years where Louis listened only to the sharpest version of every sentence. Years where he took panic personally and translated fear into malice because fear required tenderness, and tenderness had once frightened Louis more than violence ever could. He had looked at Lestat’s unraveling and seen manipulation where there had often simply been desperation wearing expensive armor.
He would never do that again.
Loving another person properly required a humiliating amount of attention. It demanded listening beneath performance, overlooking pride, peeking inside the little theatrical disasters people staged to disguise the uglier possibility of being left willingly.
And Lestat had spent the last hour begging to be abandoned in every language except the literal one. Louis could see it plainly now.
The breakup attempt was not out of boredom, resentment, desire for another, as he claimed. Lestat loved him so intensely, that it occasionally circled back into fear. Louis suspected therapy had unearthed some old poisoned belief recently, some conviction buried deep in childhood rot and centuries of self-loathing, and now the wound sat exposed beneath everything he touched.
He was trying to leave before becoming unbearable. Lestat, his Lestat, was a soul trying to be better. Trying be a better man for him, trying to heal for Louis. Trying to practice mercy while trembling apart from the effort of it. It would have been unbearable enough on its own.
But what made Louis’ heart ache was the sincerity. Because Lestat truly believed this was kindness, the idiot.
He stood there now amidst shattered glass and crushed flowers with blood sliding hotly down his wrist, and Louis felt affection rise inside him violently.
His beautiful impossible man. A loud disastrous creature built entirely from art and longing and damage stitched together with astonishing amount of love.
Lestat spent interviews talking about Louis without realizing he was doing it. Louis, Louis, Louisㅡrosaries of his existence left unconsciously through every city and green room and backstage disaster. Entire stadiums knew Louis preferred Ethiopian roast coffee because Lestat had once gone on a twelve-minute tangent during a concert about the tragedy of badly brewed espresso.
Fans handed the band friendship bracelets with Louis’ name engraved into the beads. Hopeful groupies knew intimate details about Louis’ reading habits because Lestat apparently discussed nineteenth-century literature after turning them down.
Lestat barely survived shopping without texting Louis photographs and paragraphs of every object and thought that he assumed might amuse Louis. It was disgustingly endearing.
And Louis himself had long ago stopped pretending his own love possessed dignity.
Louis’ silences changed shape into peace around Lestat. Louis had built businesses, buried them as well, survived enough grief to drown entire bloodlines, and still nothing in his long terrible life had ever felt as natural as reaching for Lestat in their bed half-asleep.
Louis crossed the room, carefully stepping over fractured porcelain. The bloodstained rug barely registered anymore except as evidence of panic. Lestat watched him approach with the tense stillness of a stray dog deciding whether touch would soothe or injure.
Up close, Louis could see how exhausted he was. His soul-tired artist struggling through the fluctuations of healing, the kind of exhaustion gathered from months spent excavating yourself only to discover more buried things underneath.
Louis took his injured hand gently, and blood slipped across his fingers immediately. Lestat’s gaze darted toward the stained rug for half a second before arrogance rushed in to bury the guilt.
“Well,” he said lightly, voice still rough at the edges, “I always thought the room needed a stronger accent color.”
Louis would’ve scolded him had he not seen the little toe-pressing ritual Lestat often did when he was anxious. Louis wanted suddenly, fiercely, to kiss him until he stopped apologizing for existing in such strange broken ways.
Instead he guided him toward the kitchen. The city glowed beyond the windows in blurred electric halos. Rain kept sliding downward in crooked silver lines, making the skyline look as though it were melting slowly into the river.
Lestat stood stiffly while Louis cleaned the cut. The wound had already begun healing at the edges, pale sinews grappling itself together beneath the blood, but Louis continued anyway because caring for Lestat soothed something restless in his own chest.
When Louis stole a quick glance he realized that Lestat was watching him from beneath lowered lashes. Louis could feel guilt. Then came the sentence.
“YouㅡI’m bored now, Louis.” He said. And underneath it, unmistakable at this proximity was beginning snag of a stutter curling around the vowels. Louis’ heart tightened.
“You should leave,” Lestat continued, his gaze fixed somewhere near their hands. “Honestly, I-I don’t know why you stay. There are easier p-people.”
Louis felt a small smile fighting to make its way on his lips, he refrained. Because months ago the stutter would have shattered the entire sentence apart. Now it merely tugged faintly at the edges when panic climbed high enough. Improvement lived there. A fragile and hard-earned improvement.
Louis set the bloodied cloth aside carefully.
He understood the instinct beneath the cruelty. Lestat needed room around the panic now. Needed space wide enough to circle the fear without feeling trapped inside it.
So Louis moved away and walked toward the fridge and immediately the apartment shifted behind him. Louis opened the refrigerator and let cold fluorescent light spill across the marble counters. He removed two blood bags slowly, listening to the muffled movement beginning behind him exactly when expected.
Bare footsteps, hesitant and nervous, but following anyway.
Louis poured both glasses carefully while Lestat hovered a few feet away in miserable silence. In the dark reflection of the kitchen window, Louis could see the tear tracks faintly drying against his cheeks.
“You m-must want better than me,” Lestat said at last.
The sentence came out uneven. Half self-hatred. Half challenge. Louis handed him one of the glasses without turning fully around yet before walking back towards the couch. He took a seat, relaxed as he spread his arms and stretched his legs.
“Louis!”
“I wanted a peaceful evening,” he murmured. “Instead I got emotional property damage and psychological crisis.”
Lestat let out a watery sob. And Louis, hearing it, felt a strain of amusement in his face. Louis let himself sink deeper into the couch cushions and watched Lestat come closer.
“I think,” Lestat murmured, “you would have been happier if you’d fallen in love with somebody more polite.”
Louis watched the reflection of city lights slide across the curve of his cheekbone. His locks had dried into disarray after all the frantic pacing. There remained something painfully gentle about him like this.
Louis knew this version of him best; the exhausted man hidden underneath the sharp teeth. Lestat shifted while speaking, and his thigh pressed against Louis absently.
Lestat kept talking, almost dreamily now beneath the exhaustion. “And I also scream in my sleep.” His thumb moved tiredly along the edge of his bloody glass. “I ruin our perfectly normal date nights. I become a d-disaster over minor emotional situations.”
Louis made a small thoughtful noise to show he was listening, that seemed to soothe Lestat. His shoulder brushed Louis’ arm now. Louis could feel the remaining tension still humming faintly beneath his skin, but it no longer sparked violently the way it had earlier.
The panic had burnt itself down into embers, leaving behind bone-deep sadness instead that always followed after Lestat fought too hard against being loved.
“You deserve someone easier,” he whispered.
His thigh pressed fully against Louis’ now. One elegant hand drifted absently toward the fabric gathered near Louis’ waist, fingers curling there without seeming aware of it. Touching him gently, like a child clutching a blanket half-asleep.
Even in the middle of trying to convince Louis to leave him, he sought comfort from Louis.
“I’m tired,” Lestat admitted suddenly.
Lestat looked at a specific empty space for one lingering moment, suddenly hesitant. Like a frightened stray cat hovering outside an open doorway in winter, starving for warmth while still unconvinced kindness could survive touch.
Louis could smell the shampoo in his hair, could feel the faint lingering taste of metal in the blood stains dried against his skin. Then, finally, Lestat gave up the performance of distance and folded fully into him with one long trembling exhale.
It felt like coming home after years abroad and finding every light in the house still left on for you.
And maybe the blond felt the same, because Lestat melted against him completely once he was there. All long limbs and lingering sadness and expensive fabric slowly settling into Louis’ body heat. His cheek rested against Louis’ chest directly over his heartbeat. One arm slid lazily across Louis’ stomach.
Louis wrapped both arms around him instinctively, holding him close with the deep desire of protecting something profoundly precious. Lestat’s weight on his chest settled perfectly, always perfectly. As though Louis’ body had spent centuries unknowingly shaped around this exact purpose: holding Lestat after difficult nights while his own heart resided in the blond’s hands.
Lestat let out another tired breath against his chest. “I’m still awful,” he murmured weakly.
Louis lowered his mouth into the gilded curls and kissed him there slowly. Then he rested his cheek against the top of Lestat’s head and listened quietly to the sound of his breathing evening itself out at last, gentler now, calmer now, while the entire deformed glittering apartment slowly gathered itself back together around the shape of them curled warm together on the couch.
For a while neither of them spoke.
Louis listened quietly to the rain and the low electric hum of the city beyond the windows and allowed himself the private selfish pleasure of simply having him here. Safe. Alive. Curled instinctively into Louis even after spending an hour trying desperately to convince both of them otherwise.
Then, very suddenly, Lestat shifted slightly against him, enough to tilt his face upward from where it rested against Louis’ chest. His voice muffled and sleepy through the fabric of Louis’ shirt.
“Louis, would you still love me if I was a worm?”
Louis closed his eyes. A slow sigh escaped him, heavy with exhausted fondness. Because of course this was where they had arrived emotionally after the psychological warfare and shattered antiques.
Lestat asked absurd things only when he needed reassurance badly enough to become embarrassed by needing it directly.
Louis opened his eyes again and looked down at him. His face had gone loose with comfort, mouth softened sleepily at the corners now that anxiety no longer held it tight. His lashes cast delicate shadows beneath the apartment lights.
“Lestat,” he murmured quietly, fingers combing slowly through warm blond curls, “this is the fifth time you’ve become a worm.”
Lestat frowned immediately. “Answer me, Louis!”
The seriousness of it nearly made Louis laugh. The world had always expected love to arrive with fireworks or orchestras or tragic declarations in the rain. But nobody spoke enough about this version of itㅡof somebody trusting you enough to ask idiotic questions while half-exhausted in your arms.
Louis brushed his thumb lightly against the curve of Lestat’s jaw before answering.
“Yes, I would still love you if you were a worm,” he confessed, “I would choose you over every other insect in existence.”
“Really?”
“Really. Scientists would discover new species daily and I still would not care. I’d carry you around in one of those absurd little ventilated containers children use for caterpillars. I’d put leaves in there. Tiny rocks. I would become emotionally unbearable about your well-being.”
A bright and helpless smile unfolded slowly across Lestat’s face at that. A laugh escaped him before he could stop it, vibrating against Louis’ chest, and Louis felt the sound spread through his body with astonishing tenderness.
“I love you, Louis,” Lestat whispered.
Louis’ grip tightened. Because this ridiculous beautiful man cuddled against him, smelling faintly of crushed orchids and leather and iron hints of blood—was the center of nearly every meaningful thing Louis had left in the world.
Outside, the city still churned endlessly through its own dramas. Protesters still gathered outside Louis’ offices carrying signs condemning men exactly like him. Markets would open tomorrow. Politicians would lie beautifully on television. Civilization would continue grinding itself bloody in pursuit of money and power.
And yet, everything worthwhile humanity had ever created had come from souls shaped something like Lestat’s.
All the art, every tune of music. And the poetry, and cathedrals. Paintings that survived wars. Love songs written at four in the morning by desperate people with trembling hands. The entire world remained survivable because things like these existed inside it.
Louis existed because Lestat existed alongside him.
Louis lowered his mouth to Lestat’s forehead and kissed him hard enough to make him laugh softly again. Then kissed his nose, the corner of his face, and beneath his eye where earlier tears had dried into the skin. Hard, lingering kisses pressed everywhere Louis could reach while Lestat squirmed beneath the affection, giggling helplessly now, trying unsuccessfully to protest through laughter.
“Louis—!” The name snagged briefly on a joyful stutter.
Louis kissed him again immediately after hearing it. Lestat laughed harder against him, happy and alive in Louis’ arms while rain silvered the city outside their windows and the ruined apartment glowed around them like the aftermath of some beautiful domestic disaster.
And holding him there while Lestat laughed warm and alive against his mouth, Louis thought he could survive every terrible thing left in eternity so long as this sound remained in the world.