Work Text:
It’s like being able to breathe again. Lestat is sitting cross-legged on the floor, poker cards in his hands, wasted on a game even more worthless than the one they were meant for. On the small sofa across from him, Cookie is laughing at something, brazenly boasting of her superiority in the cruel art of gambling, while Alex steals Lestat’s index finger to poke a hole in the beer can, which he then raises to his lips.
Louis watches him from the doorway, observing the tenderness of his smile, the calm and infinitely carefree way he exists in the world, and it feels as if he’s breathing again.
“You cheated!” Salamander complains from his armchair, leaning forward to try to crumple Lestat’s cards. On the other side of the bus, Christine looks up from her computer, waving her hand briskly as she holds the lit cigarette.
“I’ve told you that you can’t always accuse him of cheating just because he can read your minds—it’s unfair, and you’ll discourage him from participating,” she says in the tone of a strict mother, as Lestat nods fervently in agreement.
His hair is loose and tousled. It looks as if he let it air-dry after his shower, without giving it much thought. His face is clean, unblemished, and plumped from the effort of the giggles rising to it.
He seems soft, as if he might melt at the slightest touch. Like clouds, condensed blood, immaterial to the touch. Above all, he seems diametrically different from what his eyes had been forced to look at just a few hours earlier.
Louis struggles to forget it; he tries like a madman to sink his claws into the load-bearing walls of his memory, only to find them fragile to the touch, seeped with moisture, soft with mold. Yet he cannot erase that affront from them.
Lestat’s face, his body turned upside down, his mouth riddled with holes, the dry, putrid seed of those who would crush him, of those who would make him small, insignificant, unchangeable—staining his cheeks, his eyes.
His sweet eyes, full of sorrow. Louis can make out their outlines now as he looks into the bus from the doorway. They’re crinkled with laughter; they’re peaceful—there’s no blood in them.
He feels Lestat in his chest, beneath his ribs, around his heart, inside it—perhaps even forming it. He brings a hand to his chest, above his breast, and finds the frayed strands of the cord that binds them, twisting them around his fingers. He must have pulled—perhaps too hard—so that a ragged breath escapes Lestat’s lips, shattering a smile.
He turns toward the door, driven by a greater force. The subtle, sweet melancholy that accompanies him as he meets Louis’s gaze takes hold of the entire room, which sinks into a deep silence.
Christine is the first to break it.
“Mr. Pitt, what an honor—if you’re here to negotiate your profit share, I’m sorry to say that the kids’ royalties are not for sale.”
Louis smiles from the shadows. Nothing but the intense emerald of his gaze is reflected in the dim lights of that bus.
“It’s great that I’m not here for that, then,” he whispers from his hiding spot, before taking a step forward into the faint cone of light cast by a lamp of an offensive shade of purple.
“Holy shit—” “What the fuck—”
The howls of the fearful, all-too-human kids, squashed into their seats, mingle together. Louis doesn’t know their names, nor how to tell them apart. He really doesn’t care.
The blood on his body is dry and crusted, tracing paths like rivers climbing mountains, from his abdomen to his throat. It then splatters—like sparse, fervent, melting snow—across his face, up to the bridge of his nose.
Lestat flinches, then freezes.
His breath is so heavy it becomes audible, and then seems to turn into a serene sigh.
“It’s not your blood,” he concludes, relieved.
“No, it isn’t, baby," Louis agrees. “Can I come over there?”
Lestat looks around, just for a second. It seems like a joke—that search for approval he doesn’t find in the horrified faces of his friends. He nods anyway, and Louis seems to drop his weapons to the ground—and with them, all the blood—at that permission.
He’s almost scared—or perhaps that’s all he feels. Every step he takes is weighed down by it; every bloodstain on the floor leaves a trace of it. When he sits behind Lestat, on the floor where he lies in the innocence of that evening, he struggles to convince himself of the irrefutable reality of that moment. He smells the scent of his skin—the tart memory of raspberries and the sweetness of almonds. He can’t help himself. His eyes close, his head falls forward. Louis feels all his weariness slip away.
Lestat is alive and well. Lestat is warm against his face, soft where his hair brushes against him. Lestat is timid, foolishly timid; as Louis wraps an arm around his waist to pull him against his chest, Lestat’s hand flinches and rests on Louis’s so delicately that it seems he doesn’t want his presence to be noticed—just so he won’t be driven away.
He slowly opens his eyes. Hidden behind that golden mane of hair, he can barely make out the shapes of things. He catches glimpses of the gazes of those gathered around him; he senses their silences, their thoughts. Above all, he senses the catatonic thud of Lestat’s heartbeat.
“Please,” he urges, murmuring those words with his nose pressed against Lestat’s temple. “Go ahead, don’t stop playing because of me.”
Cookie is the first to pick up the cards again, albeit reluctantly, and nudges Salamander in the side with her elbow, urging him to do the same.
Lestat sighs, turns toward him, and swallows a lump of words he can’t seem to form.
He hands his deck to Louis with a slight nod.
“Do you want to play?”
Louis laughs, a crooked, ragged laugh through the caked-on blood that flakes off his face.
“Are you playing for money?”
Lestat shakes his head.
“Then no, baby. But you keep going—”
“Do you want to leave? Do you want to go upstairs? We can—”
“Keep playing. I just want to sit here with you and do nothing.”
Doing nothing, he realizes, must be a concept so foreign to Lestat that it must seem alien. He watches Lestat’s face twist into a pout, but any urge to press the matter slips away from his chest. Louis hates him. He hates the way Lestat seems to exist in the world—as if he had no right to Louis’s time, his space, or his very existence. If he draws him closer, he does so more forcefully, and the small complaint that escapes him fades away.
“How was your night?” he murmurs against his cheek, leaving small, soft kisses with every word.
The sound that escapes Lestat is painful and heart-wrenching; he squints and lets himself go, his head slumping against Louis’s chest.
“That bad?” His question goes unanswered, except for a faint nod against his body.
“Lestat?” Alex calls out, holding up his deck of cards. Lestat doesn’t hear him; his neck is arched, his face hidden in the crook of Louis’s neck. He plants a kiss on his sweat-drenched skin—it seems, within the distance that has separated them, the most natural thing in the world. “Lestat, it’s your turn.”
“Mhmh,” he murmurs absentmindedly, as Louis’s hands sneak slyly under his shirt. “Chéri, what happened to you?”
“I had some unfinished business—don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
Lestat tries—he really does try—to persist. His lips part, his voice catches, his breath tickles Louis’s skin, but he has no way of winning. One hand rests on the back of his neck, beginning to stroke his hair; the other places two fingers on his lips.
“Shh, let it go. I don’t need to talk about it right now; I need to be with you.”
“Is he purring? Good God—that’s so fucking gross,” comes Cookie’s distant complaint. Louis doesn’t care, and he’s glad Lestat feels the same way. He’s happy—more than anything else—that he feels safe.
His head is spinning with that feeling; he feels responsible for it. For the first time in his life, he feels grateful to himself. He breathes in Lestat’s scent and etches the memory beneath his skin, while his ego swells with that awareness. He kept him safe; He is keeping him safe.
They wanted to hurt him, and Louis stopped them. Louis has made sure they can’t even consider hurting him anymore. That night, perhaps—he tells himself—it will serve as a deterrent.
Let them all see what happens when someone touches his family. What happens to those who hurt Claudia, to those who hurt Lestat. And it’s absurd and reasonably contradictory to realize how closely the two things overlap. That there is no one who has hurt Claudia who hasn’t first hurt Lestat, and vice versa, and that the only exception, for both of them, is each other.
He is almost about to invite him to leave, to head to some godforsaken hotel on the outskirts of Toronto. To take him away to sleep—just sleep—to hold him close to his chest and feel his calm breathing lull him to sleep. Then, euphoric, heavy, boisterous footsteps—like the thoughts that precede them—shatter his peace.
“We were great,” the voice of a man in his thirties, his smile distorting his words, fills the cabin.
Christine stands up to reach him, slaps the palm of her hand against his, and he lifts her off the ground for a moment.
His thoughts, however, are all racing to Lestat. They’re chaotic, incomprehensible in their haste, yet as clear as the sky before sunset in their lust.
Louis clutches Lestat’s stomach so tightly that he fears he might scratch him with his claws. Lestat seems not to have noticed a thing, not even the presence of—
“Larry, please take Lestat’s deck and play in his place—or we’re not getting anywhere here,” suggests Alex, who is still waiting for the vampire to draw a card.
Larry’s gaze falls on them, on that tangle of intertwined limbs and congealed blood. On Lestat’s face, hidden against his chest, on the impossibility of telling where one begins and the other ends.
“Hey, buddy,” he says to Louis with a nod. Louis can feel the tips of his fingers trembling, his abdominal muscles tightening. “Did you forget to take a shower before coming to see us?”
“I came to see Lestat, and he doesn’t care,” the smugness in his voice—under any other circumstances—would have irritated even himself. “Right, baby?”
Lestat is lost, far away somewhere, yet immeasurably close. Perhaps he’s beneath Louis’s skin, among the secure fibers of his ligaments. In his veins, where the blood flows, or in his chest, crumpled like the rope tied around his heart, clinging to it like a child to a stuffed animal. Louis takes the cards from Lestat’s fingers, slipping them away with a gentleness he regrets never having shown him, and hands them to him carelessly.
He clamps one hand around Lestat’s thigh, clinging to it, using it as leverage to turn him around, inviting him to straddle him. He would sense it even without the restraint of those thoughts—the festering, putrid jealousy dripping with envy that Larry exudes, and which infests everything with its stench.
Louis, he realizes, thrives on it just as he thrives on blood.
“Comfortable?” he asks Lestat then, gloating over his abandonment, smiling against his cheek.
“Mhmh,”
“Good,” he kisses his temple, “good, baby.”
“Mr. Du Lac, I suppose,” says Larry, as he takes a seat on the arm of the sofa. His thoughts are racing, clouded by a maniacal envy of that possession. They wander through a jagged imagination, devoid of surreal fantasies. He imagines what Lestat and Louis will do after abandoning them, yet he struggles to conjure images too far removed from some voracious thrusting in an anonymous bed.
Louis can only imagine the disappointment Lestat might feel if he were ever to grant him his body.
"Obvious assumption, Larry."
"Weren’t you two on non-speaking terms, Mr Du Lac?"
Louis forces out a laugh, which makes Lestat laugh too, if only out of sheer inertia.
"Were we, baby?," he asks, turning to him, lowering his face to his, breathing in the air directly from his lips. "I can’t remember."
Lestat laughs, open and airy, as nothing else in the world has ever sounded that amusing. He places his hands on Louis’s face, brings it even closer to his own just to press their lips together, lick inside his mouth with that all-too-warm, all-too-soft tongue, making Louis’s whole body tremble with it.
“Still are,” he giggles, between one kiss and the other.
He wonders how it’s possible that all the anguish, the anger, and the resignation of that very evening have vanished from his consciousness. He wonders how he can, now, with Lestat’s body crushing him, feel so light, with a childlike recklessness guiding him. He looks around; he sees Lestat in everything and nowhere. He feels him, in any case, as part of that place, its sole supporting wall.
He observes the depravity, the lust, the brazenness of those cardboard walls. The used condoms pinned up as trophies, the faded Polaroids serving as decoration. It’s the same lewdness as in that haunted house, beneath the floorboards—only more innocent, more incongruously good. He doesn’t feel out of place while doing it; it’s as if that very place celebrates that same freedom. He doesn’t know if it’s Lestat—his body, the unbreakable bond of his soul, the beat of his heart, so identical to his own—or his scent that makes him harden so much. He doesn’t know if it’s Larry—his presence, his fantasies, the chance to show him what Lestat wants and from whom he wants it. The chance to remind everyone present that they are nothing but a temporary and mortal consolation—not a chapter, not even a paragraph—and that Louis is his very ink.
He presses Lestat against his pelvis, wanting him to feel it, and it’s so stupidly easy. A high-pitched moan escapes his lips, his body trembles, his abdomen tightens. He bites the skin on his shoulder—without fangs, through the tank top—just to silence himself.
“Do you want to show him?” he asks, leaning close to his ear, perhaps a little too loudly. He pretends to be whispering, and yet everyone can still hear him. “Have you seen what he’s thinking? Do you want to show him what you really like?”
And he looks at him, a single eye peeking out from that curtain of honey and wheat, straight into Larry’s tired eyes. He laughs, and he’s wicked as he does it, and he thinks highly of himself for doing it. Louis presses Lestat’s mouth between his fingers, forcing it open—not that he needs to force him into such obedience. Lestat is compliant, softened, and lascivious. His tongue is warm and wet, peeking out from between his swollen lips. Louis lets his saliva drip onto it, only to lick it away.
“Be a good girl and take me out of my pants, okay?”
Lestat’s hands tremble with anxiety and anticipation. They fumble with his belt, the zipper, the buttons. He pulls it out with vehemence and reverence, continuing to caress Louis’s face with his kisses. Louis is warm, hard, throbbing, and purplish in his hands. He grunts at the prickly, shy warmth of Lestat’s skin.
“Guys—” Cookie’s lament is filled with disgust, yet no one really objects to the scene.
Lestat giggles, and Louis loses himself in the dizziness that envelops him. He clasped his hands around Lestat’s waist, slipped them under his sheer shirt, pulling it aside slightly without taking it off. He caressed Lestat’s protruding navel and felt Lestat clench his thighs in response. Louis looks over his shoulder, glances at Larry, and smiles at him.
“Did you know that he can come just with this? Isn’t that right, love?”
Lestat is lost, overwhelmed. He nods.
Larry snorts, tries to laugh, but fails miserably in his attempt to appear unfazed by that sight. He grabs a can of beer from the coffee table, rips it open, and brings it to his mouth.
Louis presses his wet, swollen tip against Lestat’s navel; he trembles, moans, and whimpers so much that Louis is forced to dig his claws into his hips to hold him still. He looks down and catches a glimpse of his cock dampening the sheer fabric, its hardness distorting it, its tip curving into the perfectly round navel.
“Is your clit too sensitive, baby?”
“Yeah— Lou— Please,” his whines are obscene and obscenely desperate. His pants are wet, the outline of his hardness presses against his leg. His smell is overwhelmed with need, more than it is with lust.
“Get a fucking room,” Larry snorts, before Salamander slaps a hand onto his mouth.
“Do not get a room, guys! Feel free to do whatever it is that you are doing,” he rushes. “This is a space free of judgment!”
“Don’t worry about us, guys,” Louis says, lifting Lestat off his lap only to set him back down again right away. “Keep playing.”
He feels the skin of his cock rubbing against the fabric—it hurts, and it feels so good—Lestat’s belly is warm and soft, his pubic hair is stained with his own fluid, his navel swollen, sensitive, small, yet it takes him in so well. Lestat gasps with every thrust, every time Louis lifts his hips and lowers him back down, as if he were riding him, as if Louis were forcing him to do it.
“Does that feel good, hmm? My cock rubbing against your clit? I don’t even need to fuck you, do I? I don’t even need to fuck that pretty pussy, do I?”
“Louis, Louis, please—I need this so much—” His face is wet; crimson tears trickle down, staining his hair. Red rivers on the sweetest honey, like blood on wheat. Louis gathers his hair in one hand, twists it around his fingers, lifts it from his shoulders, from his face.
And he wants to—he wants to so deeply. He wants to be inside him, to give him what he’s asking for, what he deserves, but he can’t. Not here, not in front of the others. It’s not something he’s ready to share— he doesn’t know if he ever will be.
“That’s not true, baby girl—that’s not true. You don’t need it at all. You can come a hundred times, just like this.”
Lestat sobs. His saliva stains his own mouth as he begs, making threads from his lips to Louis’s, as the latter grants him the safeness of his kisses, all over the warm, pink skin of his face.
“You are so pretty, baby— all flushed red for me, all compliant. They can all see it, how good you are for me, how much you want me.”
“So much,” he mutters, as he begins to ride Louis on his own right. The warm cock hitting the sensitive spot of his bellybutton over and over again.
“Such a fucking slut— they are all thinking the same. That you are such an easy, sloppy lay,” he mutters against Lestat’s cheek, smothering it with spit, as he pulls cruelly on his hair. “Are you sloppy, baby? Is your pussy all wet? All open?”
“Yes,” Lestat whines, as his bunching gets more vigorous. His skin his sweaty, his tits move with every thrust. “Yes, I’m all wet for you— putain de merde.”
“Just for me?” Louis grunts, as he feels his own stomach tightening, dangerously close to the edge.
“Yes— for you, only for you. You are the only one— rien que pour toi, ta pute—“
A high-pitched moan cuts off his words. Lestat’s thighs tremble, his body lost in spasms. Louis feels a wet, sticky sensation on his own leg before he pours his own seed—warm and placid—into the small, sensitive navel. He doesn’t even catch his breath before turning to Larry. He does so with Lestat collapsed on top of him, his own arms wrapped so anxiously around that body that he seems terrified at the thought of having to share it.
“Did you hear that, buddy? Just for me.”
Larry doesn’t answer; he stares him straight in the eyes without saying a word. Louis can sense in his thoughts a clear desire to smash his face in, along with that annoying and undeserved urge to lick the sweat off Lestat’s throat.
“Since we’re on such familiar terms now, Mr. Pitt,” Christine finally says, having remained silent until then. “How about giving up your merch shares instead of the delightful sexual favor you just received?”
“I don’t think so,” Louis snorts, letting out a half-laugh, before leaning down to kiss Lestat’s shoulder.
Christine snorts, returns to the computer, and shrugs.
“At least I tried.”
“Did he fall asleep?” Cookie asks him then, whispering indignantly, pointing at Lestat’s limp body.
Louis smiles; he doesn’t think he’s ever been so proud of anything. He nods, then reaches out his hand toward her.
“Give me a deck—and let’s bet real money, or your royalty shares.”