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Chapter Text

It took Lestat a week to make up his mind that he would seek out the vampire family of New Orleans. 

Only a month, perhaps, since he had first learned about the existence of the vampire brothers after witnessing their little squabble just off Liberty Street, and his subsequent discovery of just where they lived and how they made their living. And it was a remarkable thing, five adult vampires cooped together inside that house all day and night, with only each other for company. 

The father left occasionally, and so did the two brothers, although rarely —one usually sneaking out first, a violent temper leading him towards lively Storyville, where he would stalk workers and clients alike, following their terrified shadows from brothel to brothel, shouting violent religious sentiments at their retreating backs but never going as far as laying a single finger on any of them; the second brother leaving only to follow the first, his threats, demanding discretion, hissed into their shared mindspace with no regard for anyone who might be listening. 

For all Lestat knew, the vampire family of New Orleans seemed to believe they were the only vampires in the whole world.

Despite the oddness of the arrangement and the natural curiosity it inspired in him, he was determined, and very firmly so, not to care about any of them and was prepared to follow through with said plan if it hadn’t been for the letter, written in thick, monogrammed paper and slided under his front door. 

He’d had very little choice in the matter, truly. 

The language of the letter was utterly ridiculous, talking of honours and hopeful future acquaintances. It was the sort of letter only someone attempting to hide the shame of wholeheartedly believing their own superiority over their peers and disgraceful inferiority to anyone else could write. Still, there were five of them and only one of him and he was maybe a little curious and bored and wanted to know what it really was like inside their little domestic prison. He felt strongly that they might all hate each other. That could be, at the very least, entertaining and yet he feared that they would all be as perfectly boring as they seemed. 

There was also the memory of the brothers, their violent anger under a dingy streetlamp. 

‘Don’t try me, brother,’

That scent: flesh of an open wound, spit on the floor at their feet.

He could not deny it was a deciding factor. A small one.

He sent a letter back. The date was set. He wore his black suede boots and a shirt of fine silk under his most sombre suit with a bottle green handkerchief folded carefully into the pocket of his jacket. Inside that dreadful house, he would turn out to be the brightest point of colour in sight. 

The house was dimly lit and it was the wife, a creole woman of remarkable serenity, who opened the door for him, overly polite and severe with what seemed to be a perpetual look of vague distaste on her brow. They kept no servants in the house during the night, she remarked as soon as it was polite to do so. All but one had gathered in the dining room, seated around the table like dolls in a play set. 

Out of all that were present, only the father could ever be considered remotely interesting. He presided over the table on a large master chair almost swallowed up under his form. It was startling how physically large he was up close, his body and his face and his wide neck and those flat, open palms that seemed to take over as much of the room as the table. Lestat could admit he was an impressive man, well dressed in all black fine fabrics still crisp from recent laundering, with a stiff mouth and vividly awake eyes. His presence, there on his throne, like a king watching the sun set over his land, awoke a hatred in Lestat so immediate and profound that he was determined to never again subject himself to his company. 

Some time passed until he spoke, “Monsieur de Lioncourt, my son, Louis.”

Ah, the son. 

‘Don’t try me, brother,’

He came in like a vision straight from the grand showrooms of the Louvre. Walked like a man made of silk, beautiful in the most unruly meaning of the word. There were the eyes, blurry green like wet, watercolour paint; there was the mouth, the red-russet nose, the honeyed heaviness of his gaze, the arch of his back, his Adam’s apple reflecting the yellow lights of the fire, his pretty hips and waist, delicate, like a work of art, again, the Louvre came to mind, the open gardens of Paris in the spring. Those last few days under the warm sun when everything felt possible. That was Louis, walking in. Long and fawn-like in colour and silhouette. This was the beauty Lestat had sensed when he’d glimpsed the two brothers fighting under a street lamp. The sort of thing that made fools out of men.  

There was nothing else to say about the matter, the man was all of that, and he was taking a seat by Lestat’s right side and by then Lestat had already failed to greet him appropriately. 

“We have prepared some dinner, monsieur; if you are so inclined. My son hunts for us.” 

But dinner was to wait.

Conversation ran stiff and uninteresting. Lestat attempted to inquire about the origin of the rug, complimented the daughter’s beauty, and offered up some small stories about life in Paris. It proved difficult, under the circumstances, and yet Lestat felt like he was doing a pretty good job of it if one took into consideration that Louis remained by his side, bathed in the clean, fresh scent of his blood, all-encompassing, thick like a gloriously promised feast. Putting sentences together under that sort of pressure felt like an accomplishment. 

They dressed like protestants, these catholics. In truth, the whole experience –the dull tension, the boredom, the sense of having been a very naughty child who was about to be discovered and publicly shamed– prompted memories of being at church, seated on the nave with his neck bowed in submission. That is to say, the father carried the conversation. 

He used words like magnanimity, and condescension and insisted on talking, for quite some time, about his family’s position as watchers of the town, which seemed to indicate, at least as far as the father was concerned, some misguided sense of moral superiority and duty of care and punishment over mortals. At Lestat’s side, the son shuffled uncomfortably, his hands folded like bear claws over his slender knees.

“God has his angels of judgement; we accept our duty and welcome any form of servitude the Mighty demands of us.” 

Bizarre little creatures, these New World vampires. 

Lestat imagined them for a second in Paris, in the presence of those vicious coven dwellers, they’d play the violin with their bones if they failed to learn how to follow the ancient rules they seemed to know nothing about. Someone must have been a very naughty maker indeed, to have left a fledgling go under the impression that there was a God and that said God would accept any of their kind as one of his creations, much less as angels of judgement. 

Ah, but Paris. Who could bear to think of Paris now. 

Even this sad little dinner was better than that. There was no hope there, no mercy. The Godly vampire family would surely be torn apart very diligently, the useful separated from the useless, like small chicks sifted before slaughter. But then the picture of Louis’ rage in the streets, his nails around his brother’s throat –‘You are not God’s angel, brother. You are a creature, feed if you must but leave the girls alone. I mean that, do you hear me?’– came to mind and he was determined not to think of Paris or beautiful boys or families torn apart any longer. 

My father has asked you a question, Monsieur de Lioncourt.  

Louis’ voice inside his mind burned, and the warmth it created in its path, the sheer hunger of it, Lestat wished to ignore and forget as soon as it had happened. Still, the sensation remained for a second too long, tender and heavy at the back of his mind, some indication of… something. Louis’ power, Lestat’s persevering stupidity, either could be true. 

“I have taken residence in the quarter, monsieur. I’m very pleased with the place. Charming little house, and it is busy there. All day and night the music goes on and one can sit and enjoy it with the windows wide open. That’s why I chose to buy the place, although some adjustments have yet to be made and my lawyer insists I should have shopped around more before settling in one place. But I very much enjoy where I am at the moment, so it has been bought and I’ll keep it, I think. Well, why not? It’s a fine house. Although I have yet to find a decent piano for it, I'm confident one will be found, in a city like this one it will be, non?” 

Before he realised, he’d been talking for quite some time, in more animation than the house had seen maybe ever and then followed a horrid, stilted silence and Lestat was left to regret every word without knowing why exactly.

“And your wife, monsieur? Is she to arrive at a later date?” The mother asked after a few seconds of torturous silence and the question sounded so unkind in her cold, severe voice. 

“There is no wife, madame. I am at this time unattached.” And it felt, as he said it, like an admittance of some great, terrible sin. 

“Ah, so it is.”

The silence came again, it could not be stopped. 

Lestat could have excused himself. He should have, the night was proving rather unpleasant. And yet, Louis. He remained by Lestat’s side and his neck, gorgeous, corded muscle and warm skin, flawless in the red and yellow of the fire, remained curved, just so, towards Lestat’s body. 

The silence wasn’t even that bad.

Still, Lestat had yet to say a single word to Louis directly. He attempted it then, throat almost closing up as he spoke, “I have yet to visit the opera. I understand it will be quite a different experience from the way it is done in France. Would you recommend the current season or do I ought to wait until the spring?” 

He said this to Louis directly, looked at Louis, directly, and so he had the dubious privilege of witnessing first hand the subtle mocking in Louis’ eyes as he replied, “I can’t say to have an opinion on the matter, monsieur. I have never been.”

It was settled then. Lestat was determined to die of shame and go into the earth and never return to the land of the living. 

He was saved from fleeing the scene only by the father suggesting dinner. Immediately, Louis obeyed and stood up, walking towards the unseen kitchen like the dutiful son he seemed to be, and all the while his eyes, wonderful magical green eyes, did not leave Lestat’s face until the distance made it impossible for his gaze to be sustained any longer. 

Dinner was bizarre. The most bizarre spectacle Lestat had ever witnessed at a dinner table and he’d once seen his father discard lamb chops right into the gaping hole of a hunting boot. Louis carried two blindfolded and unconscious mortals into the dining room, a man and a woman of little interest. He carried them one at a time in between his arms with no small amount of elegance and deposited their bodies on the dining table with much care. 

Where were the other bodies, if not here? For there had to be more. There were six vampires in the room and two bodies of that size would hardly satisfy a man of the father’s size. 

He wasn’t to wait long for the news on how to proceed. 

“We usually share one, monsieur de Lioncourt; but Louis has provided another just for you, as our guest.” 

Share one? Between five? 

For a second Lestat believed it to be a joke and was close, closer than he wished to admit, to make a funny remark, but of course it was not a joke at all. 

Nothing was funny, or had ever been funny in this room. 

The father went first, took his fill and, when he was done, simply let go of the woman’s neck and sat back, looking for all intents and purposes unconcerned with the blood slowly seeping out of the wound he’d opened on the mortal’s neck. By then it was the mother’s turn, then the younger brother, the sister, and, when there was almost nothing left inside the poor, ashen vessel, only those rancid, poisonous last drops before the heart gave out, Louis took his fill. 

No, not his fill. There was no fill, maybe a few drops at most. The dark brown pinewood of the dinning table had been fed more extensively than Louis would be. Something threatened to overcome Lestat then, and he raged against it with what little self control he had. But it was so supremely unfair. For Louis to have hunted, to have brought dinner to the table and to be the last to eat? To get so very little for his efforts? Was that decent? 

Monsieur, it is your turn now.  

Lestat found it almost impossible to make his way forth. To feed when Louis hadn’t. He was a gentleman. Had been raised to act like a gentleman. It went against his very nature, which, if he was being honest with himself, was generally bad and selfish and lent itself to impatience and childish ungenerosity, as he’d been told repeatedly, but not now. Now he felt as if he ought to say something—

I hope he’s to your taste. I thought you might enjoy him, monsieur. Was I wrong? 

And it was Louis again, inside his head with his voice carefully tuned to a soft melody of his own natural rhythm. The rhythm was playful but those deep romantic consonants of the New Orleinians soothed Lestat’s anxieties. He had asked– what? For him to drink? Lestat could drink. Had done it before. He would do it for Louis now and Louis would see just how good he could be. 

Lestat stood from his chair and looked everywhere but at Louis and tried to will his fangs down into his mouth with his heart pounding in his chest as if he were a fledgling again.

Louis had hunted a boy for him.

The boy, yes. An unremarkable white boy of certain social status, well dressed with his dark blonde hair shaved close to his skull. There were no visible signs of violence in him as he laid there, peaceful in deep, hypnotic sleep. His waistcoat was quite pretty, if a little dusty. A pretty lamb ready to be devoured. 

Is he? To your taste, monsieur? 

Lestat looked at the boy, picturing Louis’ neck in his mind’s eye instead.

I do not have a preference when it comes to matters of the flesh, monsieur Louis. 

Ah, I’m glad to hear it then. I wish you to enjoy yourself, as our guest. 

Lestat found that his fangs had dropped quite violently into his mouth then and he was more than ready to bite into his feed. Later, he could not have recalled the taste of the blood on his tongue nor its scent or the way it must have felt to fill his belly with it. Yet he could, perhaps for a period of time that amounted to a whole lifetime, recall the sensation of Louis’ presence inside his mind as he sunk his teeth through the skin of the soon-to-be dead boy’s neck. He would recall the oddness of it, like the very early sparks of desire when, as a young boy, he’d first discovered what fun he could have all by himself with his hand down his pants. 

He drank a few sips and it was enough, more than enough, and so he stopped. Had to stop. His very nature demanded that he did so. He lapped the wound clean and repositioned the neck in a way that more blood would not be wasted when he looked up and said, “You have been so very kind to me. Would you do me the honour of having a taste as well, monsieur Louis?” 

He could see the shock on the gentleman’s face at his words. In truth, Louis’ face, beautiful at it was, was ashen, dull, severely dehydrated and the circles under his eyes were of grey, sunken skin and Lestat could allow himself to think that way now without feeling guilty for noticing as he now knew how exactly it must have came to that, what restraint and discipline Louis must have possessed to drink a few drops every night and live on like that, as if he were the smallest pig in the pen, the one who got the last of the scraps every night, for so very long. 

And yet he was still beautiful, still the most beautiful creature one could ever hope to encounter here or anywhere else, truly, and all the sudden and without much real reason or purpose Lestat thought himself almost jealous of the boy on death’s door laid on the table, as he had had the honour of being hunted by Louis, chased and touched and held and brought down to oblivion’s edge by him. 

It would almost be worth dying for, that privilege. 

“Please?” He said again, with very little hesitation or consideration for the embarrassment of such a request. There was an order here and who was Lestat, really, to deny it and who was he, a stranger, a foreigner, to beg Louis for anything when they hardly knew each other, when he had been so kind as to feed him, to host him—

“Of course. Thank you, monsieur.” Louis said, looking at him like Lestat had lost his mind.

Well, maybe he had.

Yet Louis’ voice had sounded almost thick with some sort of unknown emotion, and maybe that, too, meant something.

Louis took his place by the boy they were to share. His pretty neck straight like a swan’s as his lips came to rest over the very spot where Lestat’s lips had been mere seconds before, his eyes closing up, the smallest flash of his tongue as it touched where Lestat’s had touched, his nose against the white skin of the boy’s jaw and Lestat fought and lost and fought anew the lust and despair brought forth by that vision. A vision of Louis, what they were sharing, what they might someday share.

Lestat was aware, if only vaguely, of how excessive his reaction was to something so small, and, frankly, mundane. 

And yet.

Nothing more was to happen in the hours that followed. They retired to the parlour and talked some more and Lestat remained clumsy in his speech, deep under the spell Louis had put on him. Soon it was almost morning and the ladies had long before excused themselves from his presence when he finally found the shame to announce his intention to leave. He did not wish it, but he was a gentleman.

“Do come back next week, monsieur. We would gladly host you again and we can play cards as we will be four gentlemen at the table, even if the ladies choose not to join us. I’ll send a letter out.” Monsieur de Pointe Du Lac had said just as Lestat was to take his leave and the suggestion had been delivered quite forcefully with very little reprieve as far as Lestat was concerned. 

Ordinarily, he would have denied such a request, but, seeing as it was that he was quite desperate himself to be invited to play cards or stare at the wallpaper or talk about Jesus the Saviour, for all it mattered to him, he nodded instead and offered his goodbyes without resistance. 

It was as he was about to step out of the front door and into the ground floor gallery when he heard Louis’ voice, calling his name, low and unhurried, and Lestat had to turn, had to see what that was about. If he’d forgotten his hat or his dignity, if Louis had come to remedy either. 

“About the opera… Are you still planning on attending?”

Louis was still half hidden, face somewhere between light and dark, standing inside in the middle of the low-lit entryway while Lestat waited, frozen, on the threshold under the doorframe. Lestat would have attended a funeral if he’d asked, nevermind the opera.

“I am, yes. I’m unsure as to when, but it could be soon, possibly, yes?” He replied, and hurriedly added, “Would you do me the kindness of joining me?” And Lestat was proud of himself for saying it all in one go, voice steady and low.

“I know very little about the opera.” Louis replied simply. Still, giving nothing, not letting anything be known about his feelings on the matter.

Lestat could only step forward, closer to Louis, back inside the house, the milky moonlight behind him as he answered, “There is nothing to know, you only need the willingness to be seduced by the performance.” 

Louis nodded then, said nothing, and went back into the house without saying goodbye. 

Lestat would take it.

The opera proved to be a very good plan indeed. The next morning he sent a note, personally addressed to Louis, enquiring about where exactly he could purchase some clothes for the occasion and Louis offered not only a name and location but also his company and introduction to the tailor. They agreed to meet up in two days and Lestat could only wait and watch the house from a very discreet spot on their neighbour’s roof and hope for a glimpse of Louis during the tortuous hours until they were to see each other again. It wasn’t to be, only the father left the house during that time, so it was at a tailor shop that ought to be closed but wasn’t that he was to see Louis again. 

Louis was again dressed in one of his frumpy catholic boy suits, in all black with the shoulders of the jacket weirdly hanging off his frame and the collar of his shirt stiff and overly starched around his pretty neck. His eyes were so dull and it would have been a tragic sight if it weren’t for those eyelashes, shining against his cheeks like little pieces of black amber. 

He was alone too. Lestat had feared someone might… But he was alone. 

They were alone. 

Inside the shop, much care was put by the tailor to find everything Lestat could want or need. It was a decent shop, for an American, and it wasn’t long after walking in that Lestat started planning on how exactly he could make it so Louis would get a suit matching his under some excuse or other. A delicate matter. There was the question of modesty, as seemed to be the main reason the de Pointe Du Lac family dressed the way they did; but there was also the question of status, and the possibility that Louis might find it insulting, if Lestat offered it outright. 

He stared at Louis as he sat on the small velvet sofa by the tailor’s hat armoire. His legs were crossed and his ankles hidden under thick cotton socks. 

“I hope I am not keeping you from your dinner tonight.” He said, smiling politely at Louis. 

“It’s nothing. There will be other dinners, monsieur.” Louis replied, quite firm in his delivery. He almost managed to sound like his father. 

“Still…” Lestat had yet to let anything be as it was in his long immortal life, and he would not be starting tonight. “We could hunt together, if you—“ 

“That won’t be necessary.” And he was firmer than before and his lips had curled up as he mouthed that last word, offering the smallest hint of fangs in his beautiful, half-open mouth. 

The tailor kept shuffling around, getting things from drawers and putting other things back into said drawers until the silence grew so thick he finally excused himself on account of going down into the basement storage to retrieve a particular kind of fabric, heavier for the winter to come, that he wished to show Lestat, as he had been quite shocked to hear of  Lestat’s lack of a proper winter wardrobe. 

A winter wardrobe, for a vampire living in Louisiana.  

“Let me pay you back somehow then, for the inconvenience.” Lestat said, looking at himself in the enormous mirror facing the raised platform where he’d been positioned. Louis remained visible behind him, but direct eye contact could be avoided this way which suited Lestat very well at that moment. He could do without looking at Louis’ fangs when he was trying to get something out of him.

Louis smiled vaguely at that and uncrossed his legs, a finger coming up to touch the skin of his throat over the stiff collar of his shirt, “How do you suggest this payback should occur then, monsieur? You’re already taking me to the opera.” 

There was a very old-fashioned coquetry to Louis. It had been somewhat obvious during their last conversation; but here, alone in a gaslight room with no windows and too many mirrors, Lestat could see it so clearly in the way he acted, as if he could achieve with the twist of a hand or the pursing of lips what someone else would traditionally achieve through other, more masculine, means. Or perhaps it was simply the face he’d chosen to show Lestat, a chameleonic creature used to wearing as many hats as it was required of him. 

He is well aware, then, of his effect on me and he will use me and discard me as he sees fit, Lestat thought, not unkindly. He could hardly blame Louis for playing his cards right. 

But I am not easy to discard, my friend. I’ve been called stubborn many a time. 

“I was under the impression the opera was more for my sake than yours.” Lestat replied then, playing with the cuffs of his shirt. “Although I will confess I still hope you might enjoy it, when it comes down to it. It is only before the fact that first times are truly difficult, not as much during.”

Lestat attempted to remove his vest, playing with the words and their double meaning and Louis' curious gaze in the mirror. The stiff wool was becoming unpleasant around his ribs and he wished to keep Louis looking, for as long as he could manage; but he ran into some resistance once he actually attempted to shrug it off his shoulders, where pins had been placed to mark some specific measurement.

Good God, would something e ver go his way when it came to Louis? 

Louis stood, huffed his discontent and walked, easy as anything, to the raised platform where Lestat seemed to have been left on display by the not-even-half-decent-not-French tailor, perhaps only for Louis’ amusement. 

He appeared to be mulling something inside his pretty head and, in the meantime, his hand came up to the buttons of his own jacket and undid them, carelessly but not without grace, and the jacket was soon discarded over the back of a chair and there was only a crisp, white shirt —a much better fit over Louis’ elegant shoulders and his lithe, supple waist— covering his torso and Lestat blinked quickly, still a little despondent, and looked again in the mirror, far off and away from Louis’ form.

Instead, Lestat gazed at the armoire where a beautiful black velvet hat was displayed, a most intriguing hat, very much so. Lestat would not attempt to remove his waistcoat again, he decided, he would look only at the hat, fighting to clear the outline of Louis’ waist from his mind.

“I don’t remember saying I was against it. I am willing, am I not? Or have I given you the impression of being under some sort of duress?” 

Louis was talking about the opera, he reminded himself. The opera. 

Lestat swallowed and looked at that hat and tried to think of the opera too. To talk about the opera. Yes, he could do that. The opera.

“But would you have found yourself at one of those performances if it weren’t for me suggesting it, Louis?” 

Behind him, Louis and his white shirt and his pretty waist and his green moss eyes were closer than when he’d last looked. Lestat felt a hand, a finger, the pressure light and delicate, against the pin keeping his waistcoat and shirt together. 

“Who knows? Life is long, I hear. Maybe I have just now developed a hunger for the arts.” Louis replied, voice so very close to Lestat’s ear. The word hunger rattled him and he fought to hide it. “Will you still join us for dinner after I’ve accompanied you to the opera? My father is quite set on the idea.”

Ah, the father. The dutiful son. What would Louis not do for the sake of his family? Was anything off the table? Would he kneel and cry and beg and sell himself for it? Was that the only way in?

“I got the impression that your father found me just a tad bit ridiculous. An opinion shared by your mother, sister, younger brother and probably even you.” Lestat could hear himself, the petulance in his words, his only hope now was that Louis might think it a joke. Might think him indifferent. Lestat could be indifferent, he’d been indifferent to rejection before. He could bear it. 

Then came the silence and with it Louis’ hand over his right shoulder and the pin was off. Off, which meant Lestat was free to remove his own waistcoat and yet there was that hand again, Louis’. Louis’ hand over his waist, finding the top button of his waistcoat, undressing him, like he was a doll, like he was a child, like he was a lover— 

“I wouldn’t say ridiculous …” Louis said and there was a smile, yes, in his voice there was a smile and Lestat, he could not really see the smile, he was looking at Louis’ thumb, so nimble and sweet, fingering the second button.

But there was, there must have been, a smile, regardless. 

“It seems as if we are both willing to put up with a lot to get what we want.” Lestat said to the pointy end of Louis’ nail. 

Lestat was better than this.

He was no boy. He was no juvenile meeting his first lover behind a barn. He straightened himself, shoulders going back and right into the vague shape of Louis’ body. They could have touched, but they did not. 

Another button came undone, Louis did not move away, “Are you assuming then that what I want is you at my dinner table?” 

“I don’t know, Louis. What else is there to want?” And his voice was not petulant this time. Lestat found in himself all the pieces of a man scattered inside him and made his body to be tall and sturdy and finally he dared to stare at Louis in the mirror and found him looking back, just a small upward curve on his lips and those curious, green eyes. 

“Ah. Is it Louis now?”

Lestat held firm, pushing his shoulders back, “Would you like me to call you Louis?” 

A second passed and then another, Louis’ fingers moved over his chest as he held the sturdy wool of Lestat’s waistcoat between his fingertips and very gently removed it, tracing with his palm the curve of Lestat’s shoulder, his arm, his hand.

Louis stepped back, left only the vague warmth of his blood in the air behind him.

“Yes, I guess that'd be alright, monsieur.” Inscrutable, again. Louis’ turned his attention to hanging Lestat’s waistcoat over his own jacket on the nearby chair, a delicate process in his slow, elegant hands. 

“No, Louis,” Lestat said, voice hot with real anger now, “I asked, is that what you want?”

Taken aback, Louis blinked up at him rapidly, as if seeing him for the very first time and his eyes were shiny, his gaze unfocused, “I… yes, that’s alright, I…”

Lestat nodded, that would be enough for the day. 

Even just to get that confused little frown on Louis’ usually distant face, the glimpse of real interest in his gaze, that would have been more than enough. And yet, even better than that, as the tailor returned and the rest of the measurements were taken and the fabrics were looked at and carefully chosen and Louis was finally putting his own jacket back on, more than ready to leave the stuffy little room, it came to be that he was again holding Lestat’s waistcoat between his hands, except, this time, he did not offer it back and kept it instead, fingers buried in the fabric like the piece was now his and he intended to keep it.

Lestat did not dare comment on it. 

They said their goodbyes at the door and Louis kept the waistcoat. 

By the end of their appointment, Lestat had ordered three different suits to be made, but that would be just one of many purchases to come in the days that would follow. He came back the next night to the tailor’s shop and purchased the velvet hat that had caught his attention and asked for the roll of burgundy fabric to be set aside for him for future commissioning. Finally, two pairs of fine leather gloves in green and brown were ordered in what he was assured was Louis’ usual size. 

He also bought some delicates in fine New Orleanian lace and was easily tempted by a young woman in her neat, white shopkeeper’s dress into purchasing a few handkerchiefs and ribbons in pink and purple and green for the de Pointe Du Lac ladies; and maybe not just for them, if he got his way. But again, much like suits, gifting lace was a delicate matter. Next, he purchased shoes and hair pomade and had a new cigarette case made in gold details with his initials engraved on the inside. At last, he purchased a sleeping robe and some perfume and, as an afterthought, decent French soap made of lavender.

Finally, Friday came and it was time for the opera and he had his new shoes and his nice burgundy suit which Louis had liked so much, and he was knocking on the door of the de Pointe Du Lac residence and he thought, not without self-pity, that he might just be the most ridiculous, desperate man who’d ever lived. 

“Mr de Lioncourt, Louis is speaking to my father in his study but it won’t take long. Do come in.” 

It was the sister this time opening the door with a vaguely bored expression, those dark starved circles under her eyes making her look almost ghostly. She invited him to the breakfast parlour where the mother sat, reading her book of sermons or pretending to do so. 

“Madame de Pointe du Lac, it is a great pleasure to see you again.” He said with a little bow.

The ill-tempered woman did not rise, but offered a hand, almost in defiance, for Lestat to kiss. He did so promptly and sat by her side to wait for Louis. Not even her sour face could ruin his mood. 

“Monsieur de Lioncourt, my daughter and I were, well— discussing a matter where you might be of use. Have you visited Champtois’ shop? Old man is a purveyor of antiques, the best in the French quarter. Some of what he offers is quite fine, some not so fine. All imported from the continent, the old man claims. Little French treasures, or so he says. Tell me, now, are you familiar with the place?” 

“I have not heard of it, madame.” 

Quick to anger, the woman’s face wrinkled in a frown, “Ah, you are of no use then. Let us not talk about it any longer.” 

“No, but now you must tell me, madame. I am very interested in this possible quarrel between the ladies and if it is the old man’s fault I must know what he did wrong, yes? Please, do let me know more or I will be forced to make my way to the store immediately and return for the rest of the story.” Lestat replied with an easy laugh. 

The mother remained most stoic but Lestat could almost see the hint of a smile on the sister’s face. 

“Very well, since you asked. Mr Champtois attempts to sell all sorts of items, although I have yet to encounter someone who can attest to their authenticity.” Madame de Pointe du Lac was completely emotionless in her tale, “My daughter and I saw there, a few weeks ago, a small, filthy picture of a woman, but quite pretty, regardless of the dirt on it. She looks remarkably like my daughter, this picture. She has, you see, the distinct features of our lineage, particularly her jaw and nose. Very much my daughter’s face, and my grandmother’s before her.” And with her wrinkled hand she made a gesture, as if she were pinching her own chin, “And there on the inscription at the back of the frame it says ‘The Baroness’. Mr. Champtois claims she is a much-loved French baroness, recently deceased.  What do you say? Could that be the case?”

“Yes, I suppose it could be. Although the amount of baronesses I’ve met in my life is quite limited.” Lestat replied.

This seemed to please the mother who proceeded to speak some more about the various trinkets that were sold at Mr. Champtois’ store. It was soon after that Louis finally made his descent, dressed in a slightly more form fitting suit of equal blackness as all the others.

One could walk the Earth for a thousand years in search for an equal to Louis and find no reprieve.  

They made their way to the opera in Monsieur de Pointe du Lac’s car, which Louis drove with certain stiffness that installed in Lestat the need to purchase his own car as soon as it was possible to avoid the ugliness of having Louis drive him around as if he were a servant. He’d had purchased what ought to be a very pleasant box for the evening with two velvet chairs and a perfect view of the stage; but something odd had taken over Louis by the time they entered the theatre, a tension that turned the corners of his mouth stiff and the elegant curve of his shoulders into a solid, protruding mass of nerves. 

“There is still time for us to change our plans, Louis. I hear the conductor is a drunk and can barely remember where he is by the second act.” Lestat whispered, right into that small elvish ear. 

Anger took over Louis’ face and he spoke as firmly as a whisper would allow, “I can pretend to be your valet if it embarrasses you so, monsieur. But you suggested the opera and the opera we will attend.”

Embarrassment? 

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lestat said and quickly amended it after seeing the flare of rage in Louis’ eyes, “I don’t need a valet, Louis. But neither do I need to bring an unwilling man into the opera. If you wish to take our night somewhere else, I am open to it. If you don’t, here we shall stay. Now what is really the matter?”

Louis looked at him then, his chin jutting forward like that of a very suspicious animal ready to flee, until some internal decision must have been reached and his back finally relaxed, that cocky, flirty smile taking over the lower half of his face without reaching his eyes. 

“Call me ridiculous again and we will be having more than words, Monsieur de Lioncourt.”

It was a delicate balance, being around Louis. Their station, races, upbringings, and personalities would keep causing issues between them, and that was without taking into account Lestat’s inability to say the right words at the right times. How often in his life he’d opened his mouth to say something kind, to say a soothing word, only to end up saying the opposite. Breaking the glass when all he’d wanted was to open a window. 

His mind might just be as underdeveloped as many had accused him of in the past. And yet, there was another way to communicate. To make his intentions known. 

He pressed a hand to the lower back of the man now walking by his side. He did not hesitate this time, it meant what it ought to mean. Louis did not push him away. 

This much he could do. 

In their small box with its heavy, yellow partitions, Lestat ceremoniously offered Louis a seat and held the chair out for him and waited until Louis was comfortable to take his own seat. He sat close to Louis but did not touch him, he brought out the gold cigarette case with his initials engraved on the side and offered one to Louis, watching with some satisfaction as a blush bloomed delicately on his cheeks when Lestat leaned closer to light it, hand cupped around Louis’, protecting the flame from some impossible wind. 

“Thank you, monsieur.” 

And that was all Louis said for some time. 

As Lestat had expected, the conductor’s infamy had been well earned and the action on stage proceeded at a choppy, amateurish rhythm. It mattered very little, as Louis seemed to be enjoying himself regardless. Nodding often when the story demanded it, gasping, and turning his head to stare at Lestat when something shocking happened. Lestat was only looking at him, had been looking only at him since he’d made his way down the staircase at the de Pointe du Lac residence. 

There was no other thing in the room that could have compelled him to look away. 

Not the opera with all its many wonders and not any of the hundred beating hearts in the room with them; not when there was real awe in Louis’ eyes, a curiosity so open and sweet Lestat could not have touched even if he’d wanted to. It was keeping Lestat’s attention prisoner and every smile, every look, was helping him put together the image of who Louis might actually be. 

Louis, very elegant and refined Louis; he was a pampered, well loved child. Difficult as his family seemed to be, it was not for lack of love for him. The firstborn, the golden, perfect child. It striked Lestat as almost cruel. It was one thing to be the black sheep of your family and the one who is turned into a monster and confirmed to be the deviant he was always seen to be. It was considerably worse for the golden child of a family such as his to be turned immortal alongside them, cursed by the eternal expectation of good behaviour.

During intermission, Lestat could not help but ask, “How old are you, Louis?”

“Thirty-three, monsieur.”

There was again that little smile on his lips, all previous evidence of his nervousness seemed to have dissipated in the darkness of the theatre. 

“I was referring to your actual age, Louis.” Lestat replied, leaning closer, words private between them. They could have communicated silently, and yet neither of them made any indication of wanting to do so. 

“That is my age. I was re-born five years ago, I was twenty-eight at the time.”

“Five years?” Lestat’s voice leaped out of him. He was shocked, yes. Five years. And yet there was so much control in him, a determined, almost ancient passivity. 

But he was just a boy. 

“I see you find that shocking, monsieur.” 

Immediately, where it had almost felt playful before, Lestat abhorred being referred to as monsieur by the other vampire. Is that how Louis saw him? As an old, decrepit vampire who preyed on the young?

“Call me Lestat, please. We are friends now, are we not?” He had almost sputtered the words but by then the lamp lights were being dimmed again and the clogging noise of hundreds of mortals taking advantage of those last few seconds of conversation before the show was to start again had made it sound as if he were trying to ask something he shouldn’t.

Louis’ neck turned gracefully towards him while his torso remained firmly pressed against the back of his chair; a little slumped, perhaps, relaxed in the privacy of their box. Music, the first notes of a second act that would have, if performed correctly, moved someone like Lestat to tears. Now, it was nothing but background noise against the vision of Louis by his side.

Louis' closed-lipped, private smile and his pretty, glazed eyes and those long dark eyelashes and his beautiful, beautiful face tilted forward in the electrified shadows of the crystal chandelier, all pointed perfectly, only at Lestat.  

“Lestat it is.” His voice a slow, sweet whisper. 

There was no hope for Lestat, he would not survive him.

The second act had started and it seemed as if they were now good friends, closer-than-before friends, so close in fact that the fabrics of their trousers were almost caressing one another. The prodigal son and the black sheep sharing a night at the theatre. 

Very little could truly be said about the whole experience aside from the way Louis looked, the way he reacted, the way his hand had casually ended up holding Lestat’s gold cigarette case, playing with the clasp. Nothing else mattered but Louis. He was the stage and the lights and every actor on scene. 

“I am grateful, Lestat.” Louis whispered during a lull in the music. Soft words, as if a string had been tied around his lungs. “For this evening. I have enjoyed the opera very much.”

Lestat nodded, letting the pleasure of the complement wash over him. A job well done indeed. It had pleased Louis. He could, was capable, then, of pleasing Louis. 

“But I must warn you—” Louis started, and let the words fade into the beating of a distant drum.

His nose turned, a little closer still, the very tip of it kissing the silk of Lestat’s necktie, ruffling the fabric, “When I get back home, when my family asks me about it… I will mock it.” 

He stopped himself then, looked up through those dark, straight lashes of his and his eyelids shone, wet like water drops on pavement, maybe from sweat, maybe from some other unknown gift nature had bestowed upon him, “We will make a joke of it, of you. Of your French taste, of how superficial it all was: the music, the finery; how unnecessary. Only a French man, I will say to them, could truly enjoy himself in the theatre while listening to other men sing and dance and make fools of themselves.”

Louis' hand had snuck up on him, it now held the knot at Lestat’s throat, his hold was rough on the delicate fabric and his voice was liquid silver, gold, smooth, brilliant pearls glinting in the sun. Lestat felt hypnotised, seduced by how rude Louis was being, enthralled by this promise of all the little mockeries that awaited him once he so kindly returned Louis home.

“You will mock me, poupette?” Lestat whispered back with his mouth half parted in mockery of a pout. His own fingers almost touching Louis’, almost intertwined with the air between each knuckle. “I was a gentleman all night, and you will mock me for it?”

They were suddenly so close like this, body against body. 

Louis’ nose, the elegant slope of it, touched Lestat’s chest through two layers of clothes and then those green eyes went up, incandescently green in the darkness, made only brighter by the bruises under Louis’ eyes, all the little freckles and dots littered over the skin of his face, “I will. I will mock you in front of my family and you’ll be okay with it, won’t you?”

A natural coquette, yes. Ruthless, yes. All those things were true. Lestat would accept it. Would take the trade any day. What was a little mockery if it got him through the door? He would claim his dues when he could, and he would claim them in gold. 

“Yes, alright, Louis. A trade, then.” Lestat whispered back.

Louis smiled, deep creases under his eyes, around his nose, that little freckle almost an inch away from the bridge of his nose, “I didn’t offer a trade. I didn’t really offer anything, I don’t think.”

He thought winning was so easy, his Louis. This was the thing with first sons, they took everything for granted. 

It was the first touch that followed, the first time his skin touched Louis’ naked flesh. Lestat only grabbed his chin, made a little cup with the palm of his hand and turned him, watched as he went, so easily, his Louis –he would remember this, the easiness in him when he thought he’d won, sweet little lamb, no teeth at all–, head repositioned to watch the stage.

“Pay attention, Louis. This is the most important part: the woman, she is about to be tricked by her lover.”

Louis could be very obedient when he chose to be; and so he watched the stage until the show was very much over, that playful smile still on his face.

After the opera this town of New Orleans remained awake and alive and it was easy to suggest a drink at some establishment where a table could be found among people who appeared to care very little about how close to Louis’ thigh Lestat’s hand would remain for the duration of the night. 

There was in Louis a real, childlike wonder for the arts. He would open a sentence, with a small observation, almost shy, almost embarrassed that he’d found himself caring; and the longer Lestat would listen and nod and say yes, Louis, indeed the lady Carmen, she was doomed from the start, she stole what should have been offered to her freely, this hunger, this greed, she should have known better; the more Louis would talk. His eyes would open and his hands would come up right up to his face and he would say, Do you believe her guilty, then? What about Don José? What sort of hero is that?

It was early yet for Louis to understand the heroes and heroines of the opera, the theatre. He soon confessed to having been deeply deprived in that respect. Although he was well read, intelligent and voracious when it came to novels, there was a difference. The stage could not be shut off, could not be separated from the body. It was in your eyes and in your ears and inside your very chest. The theatre for the people, with all its little vulgarities, its earnestness and its joie de vivre; the opera and its lessons, its morality, the almost petulant, sacrilegious search for perfection. Lestat understood what Louis’ bourgeois’ sensibilities would seek most. He would have to be trained, then, his Louis; Lestat would train him to enjoy the indulgence of both.  

“Before the opera there was a novella, Louis. You might want to borrow it, it is part of my collection.” 

And just like that, as the lights of early morning started to tease the sky he managed to get Louis into his home with very little resistance. And there was the novel, of course, he would not have lied about such a thing. And Louis sat, sans shoes, sans jacket, with his nose buried in the pages of the small leather book, engrossed in the words, making little observations while Lestat carefully closed the wooden blinds, the thick velvet curtains, until the front door was locked and morning had fully come and he could finally, carefully say:

“I am afraid it is too late for you to head home, Louis. We have lost track of time.” 

Things are always the sweetest at the very beginning. The night at the opera being the sweetest of all. Taking Louis upstairs, to the room behind the wall with the dark wood coffin and the roaring fire; it felt like standing on the threshold of something . Lestat was determined to enjoy it, relish it all, even the shock in Louis’ face as he stood frozen with his hands curled into fists at his sides, staring at the coffin. 

“A… coffin?” Louis asked, voice tentative. 

“Yes,  only one, I fear. But we can share it, there is plenty of room—“ It took Lestat a second to understand that Louis was not enquiring about a second coffin but was simply shocked at the existence of a first. “Where else—? Where do you sleep?” 

Louis shuffled his socked feet on the carpet, uncomfortable with that line of questioning, “We couldn’t— Help still comes in during the day. We sleep under the bed, bundled up with some blankets.”

A blush had formed at the tops of his cheeks, Louis hated having been found wanting. 

“Ah, I… see.“ Lestat attempted to sound understanding.

“Do not pity me, you have your ways and we—“ 

It was Lestat’s turn to stand behind Louis, a hand firmly pressed to his lower back. Louis melted into it. Tired, he must have been so very tired.  

“You can’t sleep in these clothes, Louis. Would you borrow some of mine?”

Louis’ eyelids fluttered, those long eyelashes almost wet around his startled eyes. He looked so lost for a second, like a small calf, just born on a field in the middle of the bright blue night. 

“Yes, I would… I would like that.” 

Louis was easy to help, easy to guide, and their hands brushed one another as they undressed Louis together. He was all lean, wispy soft plains and summer warm skin and his ribcage shook inwards as Lestat closed the tiny red buttons of the satin pyjamas over his chest. Maybe the sight of the coffin had turned him soft. Louis was good at closing his mind off but some things could not be concealed, like the liquid anticipation dancing around the very front of his mind, his now naked toes curling into the carpet. 

Lestat swallowed. His mouth was so dry, his fangs large and sharp against his tongue.

Louis waited patiently, docile, while Lestat put on his own sleeping clothes, his hunched back half turned towards the coffin. He watched, half shameless half shy, eyes trained to the outline of Lestat’s silhouette, somewhat clear on the reflection of the shining wood of the closed coffin. Once that was all done, he allowed Lestat to lead him in first, together they faced the coffin and Lestat’s large hand around his smaller wrist nudged him forward until he climbed in, first with a foot and then down on his knees.

It was then that he finally turned to face Lestat. 

Down on his knees in the crisp white coffin in the blood red pyjamas Lestat had bought only for him, Louis thought to look up at him, a vision so painfully lurid and domestic that Lestat felt almost ashamed of having planned it, of having thought to get Louis here one way or another. 

“Will we really fit?”

Lestat guided him the rest of the way in with only a hand around the warm base of his neck and Louis went willingly, burrowing himself against the inner walls of the coffin. His face still a little shocked by the time Lestat closed the coffin lid around them as the darkness came, the way it always did, in one whipping instant; except this time there was Louis there and Lestat was not alone. 

Louis hesitated, “ Ah , it is dark.”

Lestat truly was a perverted, horrible, evil creature and yet he felt no inclination to stop this.

“Are you afraid, Louis?” 

“No, it’s strange but—“

They faced each other in silence for only a few seconds. 

Lestat reached through the darkness to find the spot where Louis’ head ought to be and felt Louis’ hair under his fingertips where it had been gelled down, and he continued to search blindly, by feel alone, for those small, unruly curls where his hair met his forehead, fingering them gently, tracing over and over again the untamed path of curls along Louis’ hairline, down to his ears and behind, where it touched his nape. Felt Louis melt under his hand, giving in in the darkness the way he would not have done in brightness.

“The front door, it is locked, Louis. The windows, the false wall, the coffin top… It is only us, poupette.”

And he could feel Louis softening, sinking into the silky interior of the coffin, sinking into himself, relaxed and docile, open like a flower, and it was almost cruel, almost unforgivable to say then, “But I have made you miss your dinner again, Louis. You must be so hungry.” 

Lestat heard only a soft noise, something like a yes or maybe a no, something very small, not yet formed. But he pictured those dark, deep circles under Louis’ eyes. The last to feed, the handful of drops he got every night. Lestat touched his hair again, petting him gently, softening the incoming blow. 

“Feed from me, poupette. No one will know. Even I shall forget, if that makes you happy.” 

He would not force it. He would not be selfish. Not now.

It was fortunate then, that Louis was so willing. Lestat only needed to place his wrist under Louis’ nose to feel his lips moving. Breathing only at first. short, quick puffs of air against his skin and then his teeth, his human teeth, small and blunt, nibbling on the skin like an animal fed on grass. So he waited, more excited than he’d ever been for anything else in his entire existence. 

Killing something, it was easy, animals died so easily. Feeding something, it was a delicate thing. One could not force it. One had to be patient, to wait for a very long time, to watch for signs, to hold one’s breath, to stay so very still—

He felt Louis bite into him and it was like losing oneself under the strength of a violent wave. Life itself gifted, Louis’ tongue lapping the skin, small, breathy noises leaving his mouth. He attempted to mouth Louis’ name but gave up, afraid to break the spell as Louis’ body was pressing back, right against his and it felt solid and vague and delicate and made of smoke and clear, fresh water. His hands held onto Louis’ hips and Lestat heard him groan, his nose buried deep against his bleeding wrist, the scent of warm, clean blood in the air between them. 

“You needed me, Louis. Needed this so badly.” Lestat whispered. He could never shut up, that was the whole problem. Louis did not move, thank god, he did not deny it, perhaps already a little blood drunk. He would stay blood drunk forever, if Lestat was to have a say in it. “Did you? Need me?”

There was then a little nod, Louis’ lips losing suction around him and quickly coming back again, holding on for dear life. Like he would suck him dry if he could, his hips arching forward, his ass almost touching Lestat's belly. 

“Take all you need. Anything.”

So sweet, Louis, following directions so well. Sucking and suckling. 

Lestat would not think of time, but time had passed, an eternity’s worth, by the time Louis let go of his arm. He was asleep, he did not do it consciously, this letting go was not a choice he had made. He had kept sucking until his body had given out, overfull and exhausted. Even then, his hands cradled Lestat’s arm against his neck, curled around him like a secret, for a long time still.

It had been so worth it, after all, this whole plan. 

By nighttime, when Louis finally took his leave in his day-old clothes and his wild hair, he looked deeply embarrassed and refused, quite pointedly, to make eye contact with anything but the floor tiles. 

It was alright, Lestat could, under the circumstances of all that had been achieved the night before, allow him his embarrassment. The dark eye bags under Louis’ eyes were gone, Lestat had won.

Louis might have left him but being idle was not an option. 

First, he walked to Mr Champtois antique store and enquired about the crusty portrait of the alleged baroness Louis’ mother had mentioned the previous night. The little thing was as tarnished as he’d anticipated but there was an undeniable charm to it and the resemblance to Louis’ sister was as Madame de Pointe du Lac had described it. 

Nevertheless, the small frame was rotting and a thick layer of yellowing and flaking varnish made enjoying the piece almost unimaginable. He purchased it immediately without giving the price much thought and Mr Champtois, who must have been so used to his clientele haggling him for lower prices, broke into an aggressive blush at the sight of the money placed neatly on his counter and offered to have the piece restored for only a small fee. Lestat agreed to come back in a couple of days. All in all, a very good use of his time as the store was coincidentally placed along the path between his home and Louis’ and he could watch the house quite conspicuously on his way forth and back. 

He did not see Louis. Not once.

An invitation came through his door the following day for dinner in a couple days time, from Monsieur de Pointe du Lac. Lestat wore a new suit in red herringbone and brought a bottle of wine as well as the little portrait wrapped in a pink lace ribbon and added a small note. This time, it was Paul, the brother, at the door, and he looked less than happy to see Lestat at his family home.

“You are early. Father is not back yet.” He said and turned his back on him, walking up the stairs and leaving Lestat alone at the threshold as if he were an unwanted peddler selling cheap buttons and trims. 

“Paul, who was that? Who’s at the door?” Came Madame de Pointe du Lac’s voice from the breakfast parlour and Lestat made his way there and found her sitting by the fire with her daughter, the pair stiff and aloof  in a large and extremely ugly grey sofa. 

“It seems I have shown up unconsciously early, madame.” Lestat said with a small bow.

Louis’ mother was not happy to see him but she hid it quite well and invited him to take a seat opposite to her and her daughter. They had been talking of the weather and some other minute things for only a few moments when Louis appeared at the door, his expression at seeing the man he’d fed from so wantonly talking to his mother was so perfectly guilty it made Lestat wonder how he’d ever done anything naughty as a child when he seemed incapable of hiding a single thing from her. 

“Monsieur de Lioncourt, we were… We did not expect you this early.” He said in a deep, steady voice while the very ends of his ears started to turn scarlet red. 

“And for that, I apologise, it seems I was too eager to come.” Lestat replied and watched that flush as it spread down Louis’ ears and into his neck. 

It was awkward for some time. Louis chose to take a seat near his sister, leaving Lestat al0ne on the bigger sofa as if he were being investigated for some sort of moral failure by the de Pointe du Lacs. 

Lestat still attempted to keep the conversation going and found some solid ground when, after making a passing comment about scent hounds, Louis’ sister bit the hook and enquired about his experience with hunting animals. She was fond of the sport, as her father had often taken the three of them hunting for birds and other small animals when they were children and she held many fond memories of it. 

“Louis cried the first time Papa made him shoot. He cried so hard we thought he was going to scare off every animal in the vicinity.” She said looking fondly at her brother on the sofa. 

“I was a boy!” Was Louis’ outcry and Lestat thought his ears might permanently become stained red from the humiliation. 

“Oh, please, you were old enough. I had never heard him deny Papa anything before that day,” Grace added, her hands animated in that way Louis’ had been a few nights before when he’d talked about the opera. “He stood firm and said, ‘Father, I will not do it. Jesus’ father never made him shoot anything and neither will you.’ Papa was so offended he slapped Louis right on his little, angry face and made him kneel and pray right there in the middle of the path.”

“I did shoot in the end, don’t forget to tell that part.” The brother added but Lestat could tell he wasn’t particularly proud of the fact.

It was painful, picturing a small, obedient Louis made to hunt against his will. 

It striked Lestat as particularly cruel when there had been no need for any of them to actually do any of it. Hunting for them was done merely for sport, to install some sense of masculinity or wretched self-reliance in the children when they should have been left to play and run and do as children do when there’s no fear of hunger or poverty. And what to say of the current arrangement, knowing how Louis had been tasked, night after night, with finding suitable victims to feed his whole family. Even tonight, two victims probably awaited in the kitchen, ready to be devoured.

Was Louis, sensitive and empathetic Louis, guilted by the fate he had chosen for them?

“We used to be called harecatchers, us country lords, by those in the capital. I never found it particularly offensive, not the way my father did.” Lestat said, dissipating the attention that had been placed on Louis.

“Is that what you hunted for? Hare?” Grace asked with earnest curiosity. 

“Sometimes, yes. Brown little creatures, so fast you would need a good dog to catch up to them. They would make for a good meal when times were tough and our cellars were empty.”

“What about bigger animals? What about deer?”

He could hardly speak of the wolves now, if he did not wish to lose all advancement made with Louis, so he simply nodded and added, “Yes, and any other creature that dared walk my father’s lands. I hunted with dogs and they were excellent little trackers, although there were times in winter when even the river was frozen solid and there was no grass, no trees, and we would have to return home empty handed. It was hard to tell if my father enjoyed seeing me fail more than he relished a full belly.”

I am no damsel in distress, Lestat. Don’t hide your achievements on my behalf. Was Louis’ annoyed response, but on the sofa, Lestat could see how his shoulders had relaxed now that he was no longer the topic of discussion. 

I’ll tell you about the wolves some other time. Your sister will not believe a man who wears his hair in a little bow is capable of such a feat.

It was Monsieur de Pointe du Lac who found the four of them chatting in the parlour some time later and commented on the late hour and the need to take things to the dining room as if it was his wife's responsibility to keep track of such things. She excused herself hastily and left and so did the sister who said she would go and get Paul from his room.

“Ah, Monsieur de Lioncourt, I have a favour to ask of you. But it can wait until after dinner.” Monsieur de Pointe du Lac said as he walked down the corridor, his back already turned to him and Louis.

And so he was left alone in the parlour with Louis who had yet to move from his position on the sofa, half leaned against the armchairs, leaving a very inviting empty gap at his side. Lestat looked at him very carefully and stood up, taking a seat by his side. 

“You brought a bottle of wine? We don't drink in this household, I thought you would have guessed as much by now.” Louis remarked and pointed lazily at the bottle of wine and the small package resting on the coffee table.

Oh, Louis wanted to ask about the package so very badly.

“Sometimes it is only a matter of getting people used to a thing at first, Louis. Like petting a lamb with shears when they are still very small, getting them ready for the big chop.” Lestat replied and carefully touched the very tip of Louis’ right ear where he was, regretfully, no longer red. 

Louis’ huffed and swatted his hand away but Lestat could tell his heart was not in it as his neck had arched just a little, moving closer to his hand before pushing it away. 

Eventually, they made their way to the dining room when it could no longer be avoided and Lestat placed the bottle of wine at the centre of the table and arched his eyebrow at Louis, taking a seat by his side, very happily so, when he saw Louis roll his eyes.

Dinner was tedious again. 

It seemed as if Monsieur de Pointe du Lac was determined to put a stop to any good conversation anyone could ever have in his presence by always saying the most cutting, decisive thing that his mind could come up with. He had an opinion on anything and everything and he was righteous and loud in his ways, making big thumping noises with his meaty hands on the table as he spoke, leaving everyone else no choice but to agree and nod and scramble for some other topic to discuss, only to be soon befallen by the same outcome.

At one point Paul attempted, quite valiantly, if Lestat was being fair, to say something for himself about some neighbours down the road they’ve once knew and their horrid cat which Paul hated as it was fond of killing birds and bringing them to their back door, where Paul would find their tiny bodies and be forced to bury them in the back garden. Only to be shortly quieted by his father with a rude, unkind shout. Lestat would have rather heard about the dead birds for another hour or two than sit there and listen to Louis’ father speak in his conceited self-centred speech. 

But there he sat, quiet as a doe. Nodding and accepting. He’d never given his own father this much grace. 

No one acknowledged Lestat’s wine and soon later, again, Louis brought in two mortals when his father requested it and, again, Lestat insisted he would share with Louis and no one, not even his mother, said a word against it.

Will that be enough to fill you up, Louis? 

He asked as he watched Louis neatly drain his victim. The vision was so erotic, Louis’ hand covering the man’s eyes and turning the face away from his mouth, nosing his way to the neck, his wet lips open  around the pinkish skin, showing just the smallest hint of the tongue within; Lestat just had to look away.

Be quiet, Lestat. 

As promised, they played a few rounds of card games after dinner and Lestat played the fool in the interest of keeping the peace and being invited again some other time. Sadly, Grace played magnificently, a natural strategist, and that soon annoyed her father who asked her if she should not seat the next round out, making it sound as if winning was plain greed on her part. She accepted without complaint, and claimed some tiredness and said she would retire to bed and leave the men to their games as if she hadn’t been flogging everyone at every round. 

“Mademoiselle de Pointe du Lac, before you do, I have taken the liberty of bringing a small gift.” Lestat said and could sense, in his very bones, the tension in the room at the unexpected words. 

“A gift? For me, monsieur?”

He gave her the little package and watched her untie the ribbon and reveal the small portrait of the alleged baroness, now in a very pretty white and pink frame, her smile and the charming hue of her skin returned to the original vision of the artist by the good restoration work of Mr Champtois. 

“Oh, this is—” Grace seemed quite taken with the picture, unsure, maybe on how she ought to react to such a gift. She showed it to her mother first and, blushing, soon turned it around so everyone could see. 

She looked quite pretty in that moment, more like the girl she actually was than the hollow shell she had appeared to be during their previous meetings. 

“The picture of the baroness, Mr de Lioncourt, you shouldn’t have.” Said the mother in that severe way of hers but she was pleased, she could hardly hide a thing like that. Lestat was pleased too, pleased that he’d succeeded in this small thing.

He’d behaved the part, given pleasure to everyone in the room. 

The very best guest there could be. 

And all but Louis seemed happy with the gift. His eyes had gone sharp, watching the little pink ribbon and the delicate frame. At first, he had attempted, quite clumsily, to smile faintly at his sister but had quickly turned his head away, nostrils flaring out on a violent intake of breath. 

But— But why?

Lestat could not fathom what he could have possibly done wrong. Did Louis consider it a cheap gift? Unworthy of his sister? He’d done it only to please him, it was all for him. Lestat was a gentleman, or he could be; was trying to be the man Louis could bring home to his family. 

Louis would not look at him and Lestat felt wretched, a familiar petulance growing in his gut like thick, sticky mud. It was fucking unfair, is what it was. He could have shouted, could have dragged Louis away by the back of his precious little neck and demanded to know what exactly was the problem with him. 

Louis was weak, was young, was half-starved and inexperienced. Louis could be his, damn his family and every other creature out there. Lestat did not need to please Louis at all, he could just take him.

He could do anything to Louis, really. 

But he did not. He sat there and ground his teeth as the minutes passed and nodded when Monsieur de Pointe du Lac patted his back and said, “Very kind of you, Monsieur de Lioncourt. Grace does like her pictures, as all silly girls do; not that she is usually the silly type. She's very grounded, that girl. Now, about that favour…”

Lestat could have killed the man. Could have closed his hands around his thick, meaty neck and sliced through the muscle and—

“What do you say? Poker table at Alderman Fenwick’s place on Tuesday? These are respectable men, I assure you, nothing improper, just some fun amongst gentlemen.” And the way he said the word gentlemen caused him such disgust he could feel his gums swell painfully in his mouth. 

I want to take your son from you and fuck him and use him any way I wish it, until he forgets who you made him be, until he’s as wretched and lost as I am and he will finally need me and want me and stay with me as if I were all the family he’d ever had.

He must have said yes instead, must have said and done a number of things between the sitting room and the front door. And yet, there were no memories, he was at the door and he was about to leave and he was swimming in the empty disillusion that nothing ever mattered or would ever matter for he was a fool. Every day he seemed to wake up and decide to paint his face white as a clown’s and make an idiot of himself. But there he was at the door, and there he was outside in the hot, muggy night in this wretched, torrid city and there he was, suddenly, pushed against the wall.

“What the fuck do you think you are doing?” 

It was Louis, with his hands crushing Lestat’s shoulders. A sheen of sweat, a violent blush over the bridge of his nose, those bottle-green eyes almost black in his rage. So close they were then, he could smell Louis’ anger in the spicy, exotic darkness of his blood, the wild pumping of it against his temple. Around them, the night had gone quiet.

“My sister? Why would you—?” He faltered. He was another Louis, not the shy thing in his coffin a few nights before. Not shy at all, this thing of violence, and yet he was so gorgeous like this: bigger than the night, sweat trickling down into the starchy collar of his altar boy suit. “Are you interested in her? You mean to court her? After— after we….”

Court her?

“Your sister?” Lestat could do nothing but explode in a burst of laughter, his chest expanding, almost touching Louis’. “Have you lost your mind?”

He could hardly think about what Louis was saying, the meaning behind his little outburst. In truth, it was so undeniably pleasurable to be pushed so roughly by Louis, his hands on his neck, his face so close, so very very angry. What a pretty picture they must make, their bodies almost becoming one with the flaking paint of the house, the wood digging into Lestat’s back, keeping him pinned like a martyr on Louis’ cross. 

“I see what you are doing, I see you paying attentions to her, complimenting her… That portrait? Are you going to deny your intentions when they are so clear for anyone to see? Are you such a reprobate that you would—?”

“Louis, I could walk by your sister on the street and not recognise her. I could not have told you her name until this very hour. Even now, I might go home and forget and have to be reminded of who she is anew tomorrow.” Lestat said lazily in all his cussedness. Leaning into Louis’ hold, he watched the flicker of rage in Louis’ eyes and let his gaze travel downwards towards Louis’ fat upper lip. 

“You’re denying it? What I’ve just witnessed back there? You despised them all during your first visit and suddenly you’re playing cards with my father and saying niceties to my mother?” 

As nice as it was to be crowded against the wall by Louis, there was something, Lestat knew, that would feel even better. 

Pretty Louis, angry as he was, it was so easy for Lestat to turn the table on him, to pay Louis back in kind. To take hold of his neck and keep him still, quiet, lowered down just a few good inches by Lestat’s fingers digging into his skull, right there where Lestat could turn his eyes downwards and watch him shake and resist like a hare with its small leg swallowed by a foothold trap.

“Why, Lestat? Why would you—?” Louis said weakly as his throat bobbled and his eyelids trembled.

“Louis,” He said only his name, slowly, tasted the beautiful sounds on his tongue, watched with delight as Louis’ pupils dilated, all that desire trapped inside his body with nowhere to go, no real answers to give his long, repressed lust. “You know why,”

Louis attempted to turn his neck away, “Well, say it plainly at last then. You do not desire women. Is that what you’re saying?”

He stared helplessly, like a child in need of guidance. 

“I desire you more, it’s what I’m saying, Louis. I thoughtI had made myself very clear.”

I chase the scent of your body in the darkness of my coffin. I think of you and everyone else fades away. I remember your mouth, the sounds you made when you tasted me, do you think of it too, Louis? Do you touch yourself thinking of—

Clever as he was, Louis did not react. He blinked, dazed, those immense black pupils fluttering out of view but then his body gave in, sinking into Lestat’s hold on his neck and soon all the fight had gone out of him. 

How shocking it must have been for someone like Louis. A confession such as that, so freely given. Lestat touched him more gently, petted the redden skin of his neck under his fingertips and Louis leaned closer, air quickly going in and out of his mouth like he’d run all the way here from some miles away. 

“So ask me again if I am courting, poupette.”

Louis still had him against the wall, even if power had changed hands, so, as Louis came back to himself, it was quite easy for Lestat to lean forward and take his mouth. Lestat’s lips brushed right against Louis’ and his hands, which had not long before intended to hurt Lestat, turned limp and gentle and delicate, making a perfect half-moon around Lestat’s throat. A second passed as they breathed the same air, felt each other’s bodies, on the cusp of something quite different from the stolen night in the coffin and then Louis was kissing him with all the anger and the sweetness he had no way of making sense of.

Lestat tasted Louis’ lips, so wet and warm against his open mouth. The taste of blood, of heat, of flaming flowers and hazing lights. Louis’ tongue so very shy again, the pendulum of Louis’ essence turning anew and Lestat couldn’t help but murmur, “You are so brave, mon cher,” and heard Louis whine, shake in his hold, his chest pressed to Lestat’s, his fingertips trembling and still so delicate against Lestat’s jaw.

A lifetime, right there between Louis’ hands, against his plush mouth. 

There was an inexperience to Louis’ actions and yet he did not back down.

Lestat’s tongue touched the heat of Louis’ mouth, played with his anger, responded in kind, felt Louis’ gasp inside his body, his teeth turning sharp as he lost control, as if Louis’ only wish was to drink him through this time around. 

If things were different Lestat would have liked to look at Louis, but it was dark outside, deep night hiding his lover’s lust, all the secret desires hidden under the fuzzy, enormous moon. And then Louis was trembling, running out of air, pulling back, a greedy gasp of breath against Lestat’s chin, his whole body coiled tight like a sailor’s knot. 

It was as if Louis had no control over himself, much like that night where he’d drunk from him, as if he’d kept himself under control for so long and the doors were now open, even if just a smidge and he could not get them to close again. How very intimate, to not only witness Louis’ first real encounter with desire, but to be part of it as well. 

Louis kissed him again, this time on the corner of his mouth, desperately needy, with his nose pressed against Lestat’s damp cheek and Lestat could only say, “Keep doing that and I will show you what happens after courting, mon cher,”

Louis’ eyes opened, two little silver moons, half parted. He looked like a boy for just a moment, so unsure, so hungry, his tongue pink and very wet as it chased the taste of Lestat’s mouth on his lips.

“I—I don’t…”

He could not say more or ask for more, it was too much and yet Louis would not say that. Could not, make himself say it. 

Lestat was forced to let go of his neck, touching instead the small, beloved curls on his forehead, “I understand, mon cher. You were only prepared to be very angry with me, could hardly imagine this is what would happen next, is that it? That, I am willing to accept. We’ll call it even, yes? But don’t you doubt me again, I have a bad bad temper.”

It was so quiet, the whole city, the whole continent, having gone to sleep, having given them this small moment of intimacy, so that Lestat could hear, if not see, the shiver that ran down Louis’ spine in response.

Louis, the little coward, quickly went back inside without a single word, only a nod, the red tips of his ears disappearing from view. 

Lestat had not known it at the time, but that would only be the first of many nights where he would go home alone and attempt to sleep face down on his coffin, desperately trying to remember the scent of Louis’ skin, the exact rhythm of his heart. 

Thinking about Louis, worrying about Louis, wondering what Louis was doing, and with whom, and why and how was going to become a sickness and it was already too late to do anything about it.

His next appointment with someone from the de Pointe du Lac family was to happen four days after the moonlit kiss. In four days he was to meet Louis’ father for cards at the Alderman’s home; but the meeting, while regretfully necessary if he wanted to continue being a welcome guest at the de Pointe du Lac residence, would not bring Louis to him. It was a horrible, unfair thing. Four whole days, and not even Louis’ face to reward his patience. 

Without much effort, without thought and without preparation, Lestat had become starved for the sight of him, for the scent of his blood, the caress of his skin, the fierceness of his deeply intelligent gaze. 

He sent a note, asking Louis if he wished to  attend the theatre the following week and received no reply.

Frustration grew alongside petulance at the thought of him. He wished to see Louis now, dammit. He wished to take him home and make a life with him. He would buy a ring and a car and a box at the theatre and a million portraits if that’s what it took. Was that so foolish? So impossible? 

Dark times were ahead, he knew. 

He’d jump in too fast, had let desire consume him like never before. He thought of Louis all day and all night, in dreams the image of his angry, handsome face haunted him, as he awoke he could do nothing but regret not exercising some self control over his own wants. 

He was not good alone, he should not have been left alone; and yet here he was, alone again.

Always, inevitably, alone. 

But there was nothing to be done, so instead he watched the house. 

He thought he might get to see Louis, even if just in passing. He needed to know how he was, how he felt, how he looked. He watched Paul sneak out into the night for his demonic preaching down where the whores feared him, watched Louis follow him around at a distance like an obedient guard dog, keeping him company. Because after a while it became clear that was what he had been doing: taking care of this brother who was difficult and troublesome and often lost control over his own mind and made it supremely difficult on everyone else. And yet he was cared for.

Why was it that Paul had not been locked in his room, then? Why was he allowed to roam around and make his sadness everyone’s problem? Why was he not beaten or shut out? Why didn’t his mother turn her back on him? 

It seemed hardly fair. Lestat had never been that difficult.

He attempted to distract himself with music, making his route parallel to that of Louis and his brother but without stopping at the brothel’s door. The ladies were always sweet and kind there and the music was that of the lively spirit of New Orleans and the drinks were good and light and he could talk of the theatre and make up lies about his family, somewhere, far away. His perfect made up family. 

Harmless little lies: a sister and a kind father and three little nieces with matching blue dresses who lived by the sea and liked to sing with their uncle and were in the process of learning to play the piano. All of them, every single one, loved to send their uncle letters. 

“Oh, you must spoil them rotten, Mr de Lioncourt.” Said the ladies and he thought yes, I do. This made up family of mine, I would spoil them rotten and I would be a good uncle and I would be a good brother and I would not have a temper or a messed up mind. I would be good all the time and I would be dutiful, and I would be loving, and they would love me dearly in return. 

As nice as the lady whores were, he would only talk to them and nothing more, not out of some sense of commitment to Louis, nothing as provincial as that, he reminded himself. It was not about Louis. It was simply that the ladies could not hold a candle to Louis in any way that mattered and he found no reason to exacerbate his loneliness by attempting something that might only end up in embarrassment. 

On Tuesday it was finally poker night. Lestat did not particularly feel like playing the fool and yet he went and did as he was told and was introduced quite warmly to the group of abhorrent men. He played his part and lost some money and felt nothing at all, diluted like a drop of alcohol in a glass of water, reduced to nothing. 

But there was still hope yet.

Maybe in a week he would be invited to dinner again, maybe he would be difficult then and do something to annoy Louis and be rewarded with some more of that delicious anger. Maybe in some weeks he would be able to get time alone with Louis again, to take him to the opera or to play cards or whatever else gentlemen got to do together in public and he would finally feel alive again, with his body next to Louis’ for a few precious hours.

Anyway, he’d played and lost at card and soon after Monsieur de Pointe du Lac said his goodbyes at the door and pitiful, embarrassing as he was, Lestat stayed on the sidewalk by himself and looked up at the starry sky and the yellow flickering lights of all those street lamps in this city of passion and wet faces and felt only sorry for himself for no good, real reason at all. 

How have I ended up here, I do not know why I go on, what I search for, why I insist there is something more in this vast, oppressive forever. 

It was truly embarrassing to have fallen into such pit of despair over a single kiss and an ignored note and if someone were to listen to his mind and hear just how pathetic he was—

“Lestat,”

It was Louis, right there on the sidewalk, looking tentatively happy with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the wall of a nearby storefront, his hair all gelled down and his lips curled into a familiar smile. 

It was, really, Louis. 

Lestat tried to keep his voice steady, asked, “Louis, how come—?”

Happy but subdued, Louis stepped a little closer under the yellow light, “I thought we could have a drink? Like last time?”

They could have a drink. They could have anything Louis wished for, really. 

It was that simple.

They walked to the same establishment they had visited after the opera and Lestat felt the shame born anew when a few of the ladies greeted him warmly and leaned over to kiss his cheek. Louis ignored them, chose the table by the courtyard rail, and sat with his back pressed against the drop, his hands a delicate contrast to the white tablecloth. He looked nervous now and Lestat swam between wanting so very badly to ask why and letting him sort it out on his own.

Down, on the small stage on the patio, the music seemed to pale in comparison to Louis' serious face.

“How was your night?” Lestat asked hastily as he took a seat facing Louis, trying to ignore the shame in his gut. 

“It was fine, thank you.” Louis replied softly with his hand in his pocket. “And your night?”

“Perfectly fine as well, thank you. Are we to talk about the weather next, Louis?” 

Louis’ face went hard, his nostrils flaring in a way that could only signify trouble. Someone brought Lestat a glass of Sazerac and he asked for another, ignoring the heat in Louis’ eyes as the lady whore ran her hand down his shoulder. Lestat did not feel it, could not have recalled the shape of her face if he tried. 

He’d almost expected Louis to instigate another fight, instead his voice came out soft, a little mellow, “You seem… melancholic tonight.”

“Ah, I guess I am. Maybe it’s the full moon.” 

Stubbornly, he refused to look at Louis, at the much desired shape of his lips, the curve of his shoulders. He looked at the sky instead, where a full moon was indeed shining, staring back down at him with her bone-white glare. She will be gone soon, all good things were always soon gone, or about to be gone, or recently departed. Nothing good was there to stay.

Ridiculous! You are a grown man, Lestat. 

“I… I got you something.” 

Louis’ hand came out of his pocket where he’d been keeping it for some time and placed on the table between them a small white box, the size of a finger, painted in delicate red flowers.

Was it payback? Was Louis still angry about his sister’s gift? Lestat feared his temper might not stand another humiliation. 

“Will you open it, please? You are making me nervous,” Louis whispered with a self deprecating smile, his fingers touching the corner of the box, pushing it a little closer to Lestat. 

Inside the box there was a small tortoiseshell cigarette holder, cocktail length in charming brown and amber shades, yellow streaks peaking through the darkness in a way that felt as if the piece had been made exclusively with Louis’ character in mind.

“You mentioned the other night, how you had misplaced yours, how you disliked getting ash on your fingers.” Louis said with his voice lowered and his body leaning close over the table that separated them. “I hope this one’s to your liking.”

An offhand comment at the opera he could hardly remember. Offering Louis a cigarette, Louis’ elegant hands playing with the clasp on the case, refusing one for himself. Louis had been listening, had been attentive to all the ridiculous things Lestat could not stop himself from saying to Louis in the darkness of the theatre box. 

Louis was listening now too, his face turned so determinedly, waiting for a reaction. 

“Louis,” Was all he could say, touching the cigarette holder, almost sleepy in its little box. Touching Louis’ hand on the table, caressing the side of his pinky with his own; touching Louis’ warmth gaze with his own.

Home, that’s how it felt, Louis’ skin on his again. It was home and he was so very tired of denying it. 

“Thank you,” Lestat said softly, almost shy. Watched Louis watch him as he brought it to his lips, drank in the boiling want in his eyes. 

They smoked quietly for some time, and Lestat could not help but wonder if it would always feel like this, when it came to Louis, like his heart had been placed on the table for everyone to look at. 

“I hope my father didn’t try to rope you into any of his business ventures tonight.” Louis said after a while. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to play along.”

Lestat took a long pull of his cigarette and answered honestly, “He only wanted to parade me around. But I wouldn’t have minded, money is not an issue, I can play nice.”

“He is… not good at it. He makes bad investments, knows nothing of business or…” Louis said it as if it pained him to talk about his father in that manner; and yet, under the surface Lestat could feel an undercurrent of resentment, “If he asks, don’t say yes on my account. I hope by now you know that’s not what I expect of you.”

“I know how to handle a tyrannical father, Louis,” Lestat said, sipping from his glass and marveling at the quickening of Louis’ pulse under his collar, “Were you… worried for me?”

A funny thing happened then, Louis nodded jerkily, as if made to do so by sheer instinct and quickly shook his head, looking down at his hands on the table, at the golden cigarette case he so liked, at the ash staining the white tablecloth. He hadn’t meant to show it, Lestat thought with glee, he is losing control over his beloved propriety. 

“Ah, look at you. You can hardly deny it.” Lestat proclaimed, smiling at the little blush coating Louis’ ears, “Louis,”

Louis rebelled then, against the humiliation. He looked so manly in that moment, his mouth set so very determinedly, his shoulders stiff and solid. 

“Enough,” And then softly added, “I was, yes. A little worried for you, that is.”

“I am alright, Louis. You don’t have to burden yourself with my problems.” Lestat said and felt that he meant it, that he had wished for Louis’ time and company and affection but never wished to demand from him more than he ought to give anyone.

“It’s no burden.” Louis denied and looked at him, straight into his eyes, businesslike and serious again, “Do you really wish to invest? Gonna be staying here for that long?”

There were meanings upon meanings with him. This little creature of secrets. Lestat supposed he had been raised that way, to hide what he most desired, even the hint of it could mean his downfall in the eyes of everyone he loved. And yet here he was, admitting to so much. Offering a gift, becoming reckless in the only way he knew how. 

“There are no plans for me to leave. That is to say: I’m not going anywhere, Louis.”

Louis blinked and his eyes stayed close for a beat too long, “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

Immediately after that little truth he became fidgety, playing with a loose thread on the table in lieu of facing the conversation they were having. The conversation he was having with a man he had kissed, a man he had brought home to his family after taking his blood and holding him against his chest in the darkness of a coffin. 

It must all be so very distressing to poor Louis, Lestat doubted he’d ever even dared to speak the name of any male lover he might have had. 

Lestat redirected his attention to something else, “If he’s so bad at it, why won’t he let you make some decisions? You’re a smart man, old enough to be in the family business. Is that something that might interest you? Becoming a man of business? You could have a failed business of your own, it’s a kind of first son’s rite of passage in its own right.”

“I did plan on it, once, some time ago. Taking over the family finances. My father was ill for a long time, when we were still mortal, and I started to imagine, not as a wish but as an inevitability, that I would someday be the head of the family. I thought maybe I could do something with it, something worthwhile…” He sighed then, letting the music in the courtyard fill in the silence, “Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, I don’t think I am made for it, for business. I– I worry, about the man I might become, who I would turn into if…”

Louis looked at him squarely then, like, for the first time since they’d walked in, he could see the stares, the muted, censoring humming around them as other people saw them. The difference in who they deemed deserving to sit at the table and drink and laugh and make a decent living here or anywhere else and who didn’t. How they saw Louis’ cheaper clothes and the wear on his shoes. How they saw Louis’ straight back, his impeccable manners. Louis could not afford to be rude, to say the wrong thing. Not now, not ever. Louis could have been wearing finery worthy of Marie Antoinette herself and nothing would have changed. No action or wealth could have earned him a pass from the prejudices of his countrymen. He would still have been seen and felt as inferior by all the backward imbeciles in this land and beyond. 

“Our circumstances are different, Lestat. I wouldn’t have the privilege of venturing into respectable businesses. Not in this country, not in this city.” 

It was Lestat’s turn to feel shame for what he could not change, what he knew not how to address.

If circumstances were different he knew he might have tried to make a joke of it. It was no small blessing that this wasn’t his first conversation with Louis or he felt like stupidity and anxiety might have led him to say something he shouldn't, instead of what he ought to say, “I apologise, I forget myself.” 

“Don’t, it’s alright. It will never happen now. I am to be a son forever, which isn’t even half bad, at least if money does run out we can just start eating the servants.” Louis replied with a little shrug, but his eyes remained hard. 

“We could go into business together, if you wish it. I am very open to being roped into any venture of your liking.”

Louis' half laugh filled the air, “Please, what business? Shall we dedicate our lives to good music? Great shoes? Art restoration? Whores?”

Lestat could not help but drink him in, the bitter joy in him, he felt helpless to be let in on all Louis’ little secrets. Someday he would change it, he thought. He would make Louis happy, one way or another. 

“Amuse me, then. What would you do, mon cher? If money was not an issue? If your family was not an issue?” Lestat asked with his eyes wide and his mouth soft like it was all a joke, like he did not care much for the answer.

“I… I don’t know.” Was Louis’ reply but he had his quirks when he lied. There were the nostrils, widening as they did, in deceit. There was the fidgeting, the nail scratching the engraving on Lestat’s cigarette case. 

“Louis,”

“I don’t, I—” Again, he went back to looking tense, avoiding his gaze, a door shut off and bolted. There was no way to him through that path. 

“Fine, mon cher. Keep your little secret, it is alright, I guess, to keep some things to ourselves. Me, for example, I abhor business of any kind, but I guess that’s no longer much of a secret, since I’ve just told you about it.” Lestat replied and leaned over to touch the cigarette case and the softness of Louis’ fingers on it under the deceit of wanting only another cigarette. “Still, you will keep it, for me? This little secret?”

Louis huffed out an amused laugh, “What would you do then? What does Monsieur de Lioncourt so desire?” And he said it with a little petulance and if he, too, struggled to ask what he really wished to ask.

You. There is only you, Louis.

“Well, for a long time, I was an actor. On stage.” Lestat said, arching down his neck as if taking a bow and watched with some satisfaction the way Louis’ mouth widened in surprise, “Don’t be scandalised now, Louis. I already know how sinful that is,”

Louis blinked slowly and his eyelids shone in the orange lights of the terrace as he laughed like Lestat had said something particularly silly, “Sinful? Why? Out of all things we do, why would that be sinful? Unless, of course, you were terrible at it and made people endure your performance…” Then, there was suddenly a smile so intimate on his lips, the beginning of a secret, as he asked, “Do you still love it?”

“Who talked of love, Louis?” Lestat replied, equally intimate in this quiet world of theirs and he leaned over, damn the table and damn the chairs and damn every mortal getting between them, making it impossible to grab Louis’ neck and kiss his mouth out here in the terrace, “Not these days. I– I can’t, I don’t…”

It was Louis, in the end, who bridged the distance between their hands, touching only the top of his wrist for a second, only to soon retreat, to bring that hand up to his mouth and touch his chin, his lip, to say, “You could perform for me. I have never been to the theatre so I will surely think you’re an excellent actor.”

Lestat wondered if anyone had ever wanted like this. Surely not, surely anyone who had would have gone insane from the experience.

 And then he wondered if anyone had ever really witnessed this side of Louis. The coquetry, the softness of his pup-like face when he smiled. Regardless, Lestat was weak as a boy when it came to him. Drunk and weak and needy like he would die if he did not get to keep him. 

“Are you hungry, Louis?” He whispered, holding himself very still, holding the air inside his lungs for as long as he could, waiting for an answer.

Louis nodded, his eyes were closed as he did it and Lestat watched the shadows under his eyes, the hunger he would soon put an end to if Louis would only let him. 

“Yes, I’m— I guess I am,” I have missed you, he seemed to say, or was saying, in the only way he knew how. Louis’ voice sounded so sweet, so ethereal, soft like the opening notes of a love song. 

“Will you come home with me, then?” So I can care for you, the way you should be cared for, mon cher?

A nod, it was enough. Even so little would be enough, when it came to Louis. The days of torment, the ignored note, the loneliness; all had been forgotten. 

This time, back in his home, hours yet before the night was to end, Louis went into the coffin with little hesitation. Only the smallest of pauses when he saw the red pyjama set he’d worn before folded neatly by Lestat’s pillow. He let himself be undressed, let the clothes come off and let Lestat’s hand linger as much as he dared. 

He was sweet and willing tonight and it made Lestat consider, quite seriously, if Louis had truly been worried about the whole mess with the sister, or if he thought his father might drive Lestat away. 

It was possible that Louis thought him to be a thing that might blow up in smoke. 

It was only when Lestat had him inside the darkness of the coffin, with his back to him this time, a large hand over the dip of his small waist and another fingering carefully the gap between the fabric of his pyjamas and his warm lower back that Louis spoke again in that low, honey-glazed voice, “You’ve spoiled me, I can hardly sleep on my own bed after having this. I toss and turn and I want—”

“I know what you want, mon cher.” Lestat replied, running his nose down Louis’ clothed back, offering his wrist, the skin there bursting to be broken, “Don’t trouble yourself. If the words don’t come, if you can’t say them, I understand. As long as you come back to me. I will always understand.”

Louis did not bite him then, as Lestat thought he might, even if just to keep him quiet,  instead he gasped, a small, tremulous thing as if he had run out of air.

“It is not that I don’t feel…” He whispered with his nose buried like a secret against Lestat’s offered wrist, “It is…”

“Mon cher, bite me. Say nothing more of it, it is said, I heard it.” 

Louis was tender with his bite, nose sweetly pressed against the delicate skin. His back arched at the taste, somewhat familiar as it must be by now; and his mind was a river deep, running with pleasure, warming up his bones, his muscles, tricking thick and hot inside his veins. 

He will ruin me, I will want—

“Never, mon cher. You will never want for anything as long as I live.”

After that, Louis let himself be one with his desires, he sucked and pressed his body against Lestat and whined softly until the very moment he fell asleep, still restless, gripping Lestat to him in what Lestat thought could become routine, someday. Only if Louis would let him. 

Maybe the words he’d whispered in the dark had been enough, maybe it was that Louis had been equally unable to stop wishing for Lestat’s company, the way Lestat had longed for his. Whatever the reason, that was the night that opened the doors to a different sort of companionship.

There would be no more wishing and longing for a few hours of Louis’ company, he would have him and Louis… Louis hardly pretended to want to resist. Lestat would send a small note, requesting his presence at the tailor’s, at the bookstore, or simply at his house and Louis would come, every single time, like a little dog on a bell, he turned into the most attentive of friends. Other times, Lestat would wake up, just as the sun was setting and be ready to knock on Louis’ door as soon as the night crested. 

There were nights where it could not be helped and he would have to stay for dinner, usually at Monsieur de Pointe du Lac’s request. These were dull nights, duller than the nights where he could just have Louis to himself; his shirt half unbuttoned and his hands playing with the glass like a master pianist, drinking wine and talking of literature, of the latest news from the continent, of a ship just arrived from England full of some wonderful new silks in purple and green and midnight blue. 

It was by then that Lestat had, by sheer perseverance alone, gained the privilege of buying gifts for Louis almost as often as he’d wished to. It was Louis, after all, who had opened the door to it when he’d bought him the tortoiseshell cigarette holder, and he could hardly protest when he’d received at first some small insignificant things —an embroidered handkerchief, a small book of poems, the black velvet hat from their first visit to the tailor’s. 

And then, as time went on, came bigger gifts: a tuxedo for the opera, a beautiful earthy gold and burnt yellow suit, fine leather gloves and a gold ring with Louis’ initials hidden under the shape of a small, delicate emerald. Louis didn’t always take them willingly, but they made him happy, giddy in his secret enjoyment of these attentions he found not only flattering but also a representation of something physically binding between them. He was very American in that way, so tied to his earthly possession, of his little rituals, of his name in big gold letters on a visiting card. 

Louis wore the ring on his pinky finger and quickly got into the habit of letting it sit against his lips when he got nervous, when dinner ran particularly dull, when the shared a body at the dinner table in front of his whole family and Lestat barely pretended to touch his lips to the mortal’s neck after opening the would for Louis and, instead of drinking, he turned, lips stained red, to offer Louis his much deserved turn. 

It made Paul uncomfortable, this newfound intimacy between them, and he made it known, loudly and valiantly in ways odd and impolite that made everyone unwilling to listen to him. He stood up, once during cards when Lestat had lost a round and had deemed it appropriate to leave the table on account of his continued bad luck, leaving Louis with his remaining chips. 

“Louis is no wife of yours to be getting your money just because you lost, Mr de Lioncourt.” He exclaimed, his fists raised against his own chest, “Lose like a man or be gone! Be gone I say! On God’s command, be gone!”

It was an embarrassment for everyone, this behaviour of Paul’s, so out of the realm what was polite. He seemed to swim in and out of sense, with his mind so jumbled up with words that the meaning behind them was often lost, probably even to himself. 

“I had a dog once, and this dog, it was winter for this dog. I learned to read the seasons and his paws were frozen to the ground and Louis… I love Louis, but Louis has not been sleeping in his bed. My dog told me. I have seen it, I have seen you, Louis, you were not in your bed and where was my dog? Where could he have gone without you there?”

Monsieur de Point du Lac’s answer to his son’s weakness was the same as that of any other brute father. He demanded silence, raised his fist in the air like he could, just by threatening a slap, scare Paul’s demons away. Instead, Louis was often the one to calm him down, taking Paul away, speaking to him normally in that no-nonsense voice that meant business, that meant everything would be handled and dealt with. Asking him to come out for a walk as far away from his father’s wrath as the river and the night would accommodate. 

Under the circumstances, it was natural that Paul would become part of their nightly plans, if only occasionally, whenever he could not be left alone in the house. 

On those nights they would have to change their usual route, there could be no music around Paul, not of the kind he and Louis usually enjoyed together, and there definitely could be no whores. Instead, they walked to the wharf or the small church which was familiar to Paul from their days as happy, mortal children. In the candle-lit quiet, they would sometimes sit and watch Paul pray and pray and pray, on his knees by the altar or quietly talking to himself in the confessionary. 

“It will pass, it always passes.” Louis had said on one such occasion, pressing the emerald ring against his jaw.

Lestat said nothing, but he was inclined to agree. 

He thought of a time when he too was lost in himself, and bought Paul a small rosary of Saint Dymphna that Paul pretended quite intensely to abhor but carried in his pocket thenceforth. Other nights, when he was in better spirits, Paul would stay home, content and subdued, willing to be left alone with his own demons and yet no less suspicious of the man he had quietly started naming ‘the white devil’. On those nights Lestat would get Louis all to himself and they would swap the church for the bar and sometimes the theatre or again the opera, although Louis was not overly enthusiastic of revisiting a performance. The story had already been told and he saw no point in hearing it again. 

It was a wonderfully long and dark winter as Lestat grew accustomed to reaching out into the night to find Louis in every corner and nook of the city. 

That winter, Louis had his fortune told by a witch who looked at his hand for some time and exclaimed his wife would soon give him a daughter of untamed temper and wild disposition. That he would spend a small fortune in paper and ink, that he should, under no circumstances, take a ship across the ocean. Happy and full of mirth Louis had kissed the witch’s hand and exclaimed that he ought to run home immediately and inform his mother, who he feared had long lost any hope of getting a child out of him. Instead, he’d gone home with Lestat and they’d shared a drink alone in his sitting room with the front window wide open so the music coming from the streets could still be heard and had rested his foot over Lestat’s clothed knee and asked carefully, like a child sharing a small secret, “Do you think this impossible daughter of mine will forgive me for putting so many hurdles in her way?”

“If she is anything like you, I think she will.” Lestat had replied and he’d watched the blush slowly colour Louis’ nose as he drank, the glass so delicate in his beautiful hands. 

As sweet as those nights were, things were only the more tense at the de Pointe du Lac residence for it. Madame de Pointe du Lac vocally and loudly blamed Louis for Paul’s condition, for his absences, for his new clothes and the time spent away from the family, maybe even, subconsciously, for the absence of this magical daughter that was not to be. Relentlessly, she would make little drabs at him, letting it be known to anyone who would listen how displeased she was, how troublesome she found him in any way that mattered. Louis took it in stride, used as he must be to her ways by them. 

Oh, but those nights really bordered on unbearable sometimes. Louis with his head down looking at his hands, offering the smallest responses to any question that came his way. Grace’s attempts to change the topic, fighting bravely to find something to fill in the broken flow of hesitant conversation. Sometimes hours would pass and it would be only her and Lestat, back and forth like two puppets swapping lines for no purpose but to fill in the silence. 

Even then, Lestat did not refuse a single invitation. 

It was a queer thing. The worst of times with Louis proved better than the best of times without him. 

Privately, Louis started to be more vocal about his grievances with his family. 

“It is not enough that I hunt for them, that I make sure the servants are paid, that I keep track of our spendings, that I keep an eye on— They would blame me for the rain if they could.”

“Shall we go murder someone, mon cher?” Lestat suggested, helping Louis remove his shoes at the door. “Shall we kill your father?”

It wasn’t only platonic, this intimacy. Louis was becoming bolder in the darkness of their coffin. He would feed leisurely, sometimes for hours, only leaving small, kitten licks over the open wound instead of latching, and pressing his body back into Lestat when he pleased until Lestat thought he might die in there, bled dry and rubbed stupid under Louis’ command. 

Louis was a master at self-denial and so their clothes remained on and there was no possibility of release, not under the torturous care Louis put into pretending it was feeding and feeding only that he was interested in. And yet he became increasingly restless in his sleep and Lestat would sometimes wake up to Louis flat on his belly, his hips moving against the padded bottom of the confined space, still deep in unconsciousness, wet panting and incoherent babbling escaping his mouth. Lestat could do nothing but listen, drinking in the sound of Louis’ body in the dark, of his thumping heartbeat, wild like a rabbit’s as he chased the pleasured he denied himself every waking moment. 

“Oh, poupette, look at you,” Lestat would whisper and hear Louis’ pulse quicken as it reacted, even in sleep, to his voice, to the tender touch of a hand against his lower back providing only a small anchor for Louis’ hips to push against. 

Louis was a ripe fruit, more than ready,  and yet he would not be touched, would not let himself be enjoyed in any way. This wild fear in Louis would not be coaxed out of him by any other way but waiting. He was not unlike those little fretful birds so scared of everything they would hardly fold their wings and rest even when the water was still and the sky had long cleared.

And yet, Lestat had to concede to him, he pretended so well. Pretending to be unaffected and aloof as Lestat sat there, barely concealing his interest, staring, sometimes for minutes on end, at the obscene curve of his waist, at Louis’ hands caressing the pages of a book or rubbing the shiny face of that damned ring against his lips. 

That isn’t to say Lestat was unwilling to play along. 

He was willing. 

He would have crawled a thousand miles like a dog on a scent with nothing but the promise of home if that was what it took to have Louis. Maybe Louis was right to be scared, Lestat often felt like a dog in his presence. Ravenous and hungry. But, alone, they both pretended it was nothing but a game, when, in fact it was that serious, torturous and thrilling and the most important gamble either of them had ever taken. 

And so the winter months passed and then one night, as they sat together in the de Pointe du Lac’s small sitting room after some hours of listening to Paul read from his sermons book in very monotonous solemnity, with Louis at his side slowly becoming limper and limper against the back of the velvet sofa and, as every member of the family inevitably fell under the spell of unending boredom, leaving, eventually, claiming it was time for sleep, to rest, to prepare themselves for bed, to flee, until only he and Louis remained, sitting quite alone and comfortably in their small, private bubble that Louis had finally asked, approps to nothing, “Do you still want to know? What I would do— If I…If I had a choice?”

He had sounded so pretty, asking that, with his chin pressed against his chest and his eyes half-lidded and silver green in the light of the fire that Lestat could only nod and hold his breath. 

“Maybe I would have been a writer. I think I could have been a decent one. I was writing, or had started writing a novel, or the idea of one when my father— When we were given the Gift. About… I don’t know, I thought it could be something, you know? Young Negro boy from New Orleans, my father had sold his plantations, there was some spare money and I could— I thought no one’s gonna stop me now. I might just go to Paris and visit Oscar Wilde's resting place and drink coffee in cafes where all the chairs face outwards, participate in literary salons and take a lover and… I don’t know, I was a young boy then and the world seemed so big. I had almost forgotten, I think, how big I thought it to be.”

“Why not now? You could still write it, Louis.” Lestat said quietly, “There is time, mon cher. So much time, in fact.”

“What? About being… this? No, I don’t think I want to read about my own life as much as I did when I was mortal. And the Great Laws prohibit it.”

But who cared about those, Lestat thought with no small bitterness, whoever had created them did not know Louis or they would have added a little addendum on the end, making him the one and only exception. 

“No one would need to know you wrote it. You could include some confusing untruths in there, just to be sure.”

Louis laughed, lazy and open, elegant body almost liquid over the sofa, such an obscene picture with his shirt sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up, a tired smile on his mouth, “I could write your story, I’m sure it’s riveting. You’ve been a Lord, an altar boy, a hunter, an actor, a monster—”

“If that’s what you want I will tell you all but I fear you will lose all respect for me. I was a very weepy child, and, even as an adult, I did not much grow out of it, mon cher. Why, why, why has God abandoned me, why are my dogs dead, why does my mother not love me—?”

With his foot, Louis touched Lestat’s knee, almost as if he meant to kick him but found no energy to follow through with his plan, “You weren’t so bad, I am sure.” And after a pause, “Interview with the vampire Lestat. By Anonymous. Would you really do it?”

“Try me, mon cher.”

The whole world had once again been reduced to nothing but the space between their bodies and Lestat thought he might just reach out and pull Louis closer to his until, inevitably, his body would split itself in half, right down the middle, to accommodate him. A big, open gash in his chest for Louis to make his home. 

Instead, he looked down at the body beside him, at that stubborn brow and sleepy half closed eyes and grabbed a docile Louis by the chin opening his mouth for a kiss, crowding him against the back of the sofa with his bigger frame until he heard a gasp, Louis arching up, half soft, half despondent, his tongue coming out to taste Lestat’s. 

He kissed Louis’ mouth open; kissed Louis slowly with the sole intention of paying him back for all the hours of leisure feeding in the coffin during which Louis had gasped and sucked and rubbed his cheeks and nose against Lestat’s skin but would not allow even the smallest touch back. Sometimes even the feel of a finger down the back of his neck would be enough for Louis to grunt, to whisper his discontent. Spoiled and overindulged, that was Louis, and Lestat had been made to take it and endure but here was Louis now, with his guard all the way down in the bright light of his family’s sitting room. 

Under him, kissed and touched and caged, all sweet and lush as if he had been caught, was, finally, willing and supple. Louis laid back whichever way Lestat moved him, tongue coming out again and again to lick back when Lestat pressed his against the open heat of Louis’ lips. It must have been instinct by then, licking Lestat, after feeding from him for so long, a natural response to the scent of his skin, trained so well to respond to Lestat’s touch.

Desperately sweet, Louis gasped as Lestat touched his neck, pushing him back, back, back, horizontal on the plush sofa, until he laid there, his knees half parted and his pretty shirt a mess, buttons opened without much care, his collar bent and devoid of all shape. 

“Open your mouth for me, mon cher.”

And, for once, Louis listened and let his eyes flutter close, loose and willing, lulled into trust by the late hour, a belly full of blood, the comfort of the fire and Lestat’s hand around his neck, pressing down, opening his jaw just a little wider, kissing him soft and hard and as if he wished to drown him, to keep him under his spell for as long as Louis would allow it. 

“You must be tired tonight, to allow this to happen,” Lestat said and did not wait for an answer before kissing Louis’ mouth again, lest Louis say something and ruin the moment. 

Lestat kept him there, weighted under him. Louis’ eyes, half parted and unfocused, gave the impression that he was somewhere else, far inside himself. Lestat kissed his cheek and the side of his neck, the caress of a fang touched the skin under his ear, tracing his heartbeat. Only then he felt Louis thrash, suddenly wide awake, aware of his little animal heart beating under a sharp tooth, of the danger of his situation.

“Are you going to—?” He gasped, using a hand to grab Lestat’s shirt, “You can’t still be angry about last time. You gonna— Bite me? As payback?”

Lestat could only laugh because the simple idea of payback when he was running his nose down the side of Louis’ neck, when he had Louis on his back , with his mouth on its way to looking well fucked felt so ridiculous, so supremely stupid, he could only say, “When I bite you, Louis; it will not be payback, it will be a reward and you will beg me for it.”

A small shudder wrecked Louis' body and his chest expanded on an exhale. Lestat could feel him, just the way he did in their coffin almost daily by then, desperate for release but unwilling, those little blocks in his beautiful head. How sinful, how bad, how soon, how dangerous, how stupid—

And Lestat was not mean, or he tried not to be, but he could only open his mouth around Louis’ neck and mock bite him so tenderly, letting the sharp points of his vampire teeth leave a small mark on the skin without piercing the flesh. It could be like this, mon cher. If you wanted it, but you don’t, of course you don’t, it is so improper. His jaw wide open and then almost closed, wetting the skin, dragging his tongue over it, feeling Louis shake, his fingers tense around nothing. 

Nowhere to go for Louis, no escape under him, his voice so very low, so desperate begging, “The door, we should— We, ah, Lestat, we need to lock the door—”

“It is locked, I’m sure,” Lestat lied and ran his nose down into Louis’ collarbone, unbuttoning the very top buttons of this shirt he’d gifted him. The delicate little spheres covered in silk –so excessive, for a simple button but who could care, it wasn’t too much, not for his Louis. Only the very best for Louis. 

“You are a fucking liar, you—”

And his shirt was open fully then and there he was, skin unbearably soft, unmarked like the spoiled boy that he was, his belly trembling under Lestat’s hand. He yanked on the shirt, watching it come out from where it’d been tucked inside the waistband of Louis’ trousers. 

“Turn the lights off,” Louis begged but rested his foot over Lestat’s thigh, incidentally widening the space between his knees, inviting Lestat to lean closer to him. “At least, we should—”

Lestat took him by the chin again, his skin so yielding, so soft under Lestat’s rough fingers and asked, equal parts curious and mean, “Aren't you tired of playing this little game, Louis?”

Oh, but that little chin was so brave, jutting forward as Louis’ eyes hardened, stubborn and determined, he was a man, Louis, as he said, “No, I am not,”

A thrill travelled down Lestat’s spine and he felt rough, dangerous in his physical power over Louis, not because Louis couldn’t push him off, he could, even now he could use his knees to kick him into the wall with ease. He’d been feeding Louis for months, gifting him as much of his own strength as was possible. And regardless of physical strength, Louis did not fear him, had never been given a reason to fear any part of him. No, this was all Louis’ doing. Acting as if something was being done to him all the while he was doing anything in his power to make sure that this very thing happened and that it happened exactly how he wanted it.

This was Louis saying, I am willing to be played with tonight, to be a little fragile for the fun of the game, but only now that I want it, only this way and no other. Only with you, only you get to see me. 

Hot against Louis’ temple he whispered, “We shall play then, mon cher. Anything you wish for.”

Louis' head shook no, shook yes, turned as if to look at the door, his fingers shaking against Lestat’s collar. A part of him wondered if Louis would want to be held down with his hands over his head, really be made to take it. But no, Louis… Louis just looked up at him, blinked hazily as if he were lost somewhere far far away, and a hot, heavy hand came down to loop around the column of his neck and down over his exposed chest, the valley between his breasts.

Against his small, flushed ear, Lestat said, “And what am I to do with you? You don’t even know what you’re asking me for.”

He touched the hair under his belly button, the pretty curve of Louis’ lower belly, waited there to feel Louis’ ragged intake of breath against his fingertips. But Louis did not like that, did not like to wait and his foot came down hard to kick Lestat’s thigh. 

“Stop it, Lestat, ”

He couldn’t help it, it took a thousand moments for his hand to reach Louis’ clothed cock, the hardness evident under his trousers. What a sight, Louis’ back attempting to arch off the sofa, his mouth trembling on an inhale, his eyes wide open in what felt like hunger but looked like shock. 

This was good. Too good. That shocked stare, af if Louis could hardly believe it. Louis’ willingness and his trembling fingers. It felt sublime, irresponsible. Louis had to be doing it on purpose.

Lestat let his hand rest, almost the ghost of a touch over Louis’ hardness, his other hand determined now, reaching for Louis’ waist under the creased fabric of his open shirt. Lestat could hardly blink, could not stop looking, could not miss even an instant of Louis’ face as his hot fingers found his lower back and then down, over the curve of his ass. Louis eyes widening, the shock and desire and need in his face as Lestat caressed the path between his asscheeks. Only then Lestat bent down, chest to chest to Louis, his mouth inches from Louis’ as his fingertip, warm and solid and entirely too big, touched Louis’ hole. 

“Lestat,” Breathless, Louis sounded filthy and scandalised and so fucking hopeful Lestat could hardly believe what he said next, “Not my—”

And because Louis had liked it, because his knees were caging Lestat against him with enough force to break bones he pressed a wet, open kiss against Louis’ scandalised mouth and whispered, “Nothing is ever to your liking, cheri. The lights, the door, my finger in your ass. You are so full of complaints, are you not, doll?”

Louis had been right after all, It was a very good game, this game Louis was so eager to play. So good, all of it. Louis’ loose little mouth open like a door, his wet, pink streaked eyes so tender and sweet. Lestat kissed him some more, drinking the scent of his blood and the small sounds he made when he touched his entrance, lightly pressing in and out as if mocking him. Lestat could have done this for hours, might have done this for hours, actually, the same way Louis had drunk from him for hours in their coffin. 

Louis’ face was a scrunched up little knot, “Stop– Stop looking at me like that,”

Lestat pressed his finger against the warmth of Louis’ hole instead and watched Louis open his mouth with no sound coming out of him. This part was tricky, Louis felt good, hot, but tight, too tight to really do anything to him. He was always going to be a challenge, there had been no doubt of that, but now he was here and there was real concern about hurting him.

Lestat kissed him gently on the chest and removed his finger, watched as Louis’ mouth opened again as if to complain, to ask for it back, and just as he was doing so Lestat folded his finger in half and pressed the curved bend of a knuckle in, right into that tight clench of muscles. 

“What—?”

Louis was still breathing hard and trying to process exactly what was happening by the time a whole knuckle, broad and thick, had made its way inside his body. It was easy after that. A second knuckle, another bent finger, and then down, and  in until the base of his hand was pressed against Louis’ loosening hole, then a tight squeeze over Louis’ hard cock and he was shaking, blinking rapidly like he wasn’t completely sure if he liked the sudden stretching of his ass or not. 

“Does it feel good like this, mon cher?” Lestat asked sweetly, licking down Louis’ chest, over his ribs and belly. “We have to open you up first. Do you remember the witch? How am I to give you this daughter if you won’t put out then?”

“Lestat, ah, Lestat,” His fangs were out and he looked lost, out of it. Poor Louis was going to end up biting himself if he wasn’t careful. 

“I guess it is like that, with girls like you…” He increased the pressure against Louis’ rim, his own fangs scraping the skin of Louis’ belly, leaving a small trace of blood and spit on his flushed body. Louis’ eyes opened up, half wild as he registered the word girl. As he clenched around Lestat’s fingers, “Oh, but I wonder now, seeing you like this…”

“‘m not a girl. Lestat, ah, I’m not— “

He kissed Louis, once, over the waistband of his trousers and brought his bent fingers out of Louis slowly, and by then he was a little loose and it was easy, so very easy, to push three fingers inside of him, only this time they went straight in, deeper than before. Louis went breathless from it and his cock twitched, stiff against the palm of Lestat’s hand, “Has anyone touched you here, mon cher? Am I to be the first? The one you’ve waiting for, is it?”

Oh, Louis did not like that, still breathless, eyes unfocused,  “Who– who said I waited–?”

Another kiss down the fabric of his trousers, inhaling the scent of blood pumping wildly inside Louis’ veins. Tricky, yes. Lestat was not immune to him, he, too, wanted this badly. Wanted the prettiest boy in the world to admit for once that he was interested too. That he wanted him, even if it was only this he wanted. That they could be more than stolen moments and feedings in the dark. That one day Louis might even want to be fucked, to be held at night, to be showed what intimacy like that could feel like.

Lestat inhaled him and ran his nose over the outline of Louis’ clothed cock, trying not to sound as desperate as he felt, “But you have. Waited for me. You had to make sure it was right first. Had to make sure I could behave in front of your family, that I would feed you and listen to you, really listen. That I was the man you deserve, is that right? Am I? The man for you, cherie? I have tried, I really have, like never before. Tell me, Louis.”

His face hidden from Louis and his cheek pressed against Louis’ cock, fingers opening him up firmly, Lestat tried to remember that this was not the time to ask for what he wanted. That Louis would not like that, that he would leave and take every good thing Lestat had with him. This was only about Louis, about showing him how useful Lestat could be. How good it could be if he kept him around. 

“Louis, tell me please, this is what you wanted? Yes?” He begged, pathetic, trying to touch Louis just the way he deserved to be touched. 

“God, yes, you don’t– You don’t need to ask me that you know—” Louis huffed, annoyed and his mouth made a small choked noise, and Lestat rubbed harder against his cock, using his face and his fingers to give him everything he could ever want.

“But you are so tight, poupette.” Lestat groaned, half lost in the haze, drunk on Louis’ pleasure, in the beauty of his wrecked face, the scent of his skin, “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Most beautiful girl or boy, pretty all the time, but like this, you are so beautiful. For me, yes?”

Twisting his fingers he felt Louis clench. He was inside of Louis, he could feel Louis. Feel him inside his head and around his fingers, feel every intake of breath, the trust in Louis’ heart. The bursts of pleasure as he was fucked open like this, just a few of fingers, just that. But enough, more than enough. 

“Good, ‘t is good, Lestat.” Louis replied to a question never asked, his voice low and half-wrecked, “Perfect, like, like this—”

Yes, mon cher. So have I earned it? Is it enough? What else do I need to do to have you?

It was Lestat’s turn to feel desperate, on the brink of something huge, as if this were the one defining moment of his life with the prettiest boy he’d ever seen pink cheeked and ready to come under him.

“Mon cher, look at me. Louis,” Blinking up at Louis thought the mess of his own hair Lestat wanted only to see Louis, to feel him so close. 

With some difficulty, Louis did look at him, held his gaze as he shook, overwhelmed by the stimulation, the crude feeling of fingers moving inside his ass. He was so good, his Louis; so good that he fought to keep his eyes open even as he came, a small breathless sound like he could hardly believe it, his back arching beautifully off the sofa, his fangs glistening in the firelight. Only then did Louis close his eyes, his body dropping boneless on the sofa like a used toy. 

Lestat found his mouth immediately, kissing him frantically, chasing the sweetness, “My love… Next time, there will be no games, mon cher. No games, just us,” Lestat whispered, pathetically tracing Louis’ cheek with his nose. 

Louis only laid there, panting and nodding vaguely. Fucked out of his mind, was it? It certainly looked that way.

Clumsily, between kisses, Louis tried to speak, “Do you want me to do—”

“No, I want to take you upstairs and put you to bed, mon cher.” Please, he thought but didn’t say, let me stay, just a little longer.

Slowly, like a little creature leaving the netherworld to join the living, Louis was coming out of the haze and his eyes were turning sharp, looking down at Lestat through his lashes in such a queer way, as if he were seeing him for the first time.

“You don’t want me to touch you?”

“I want to take care of you.” It’s all Lestat could say, desperately fragile, feeling the weight of Louis’ gaze on him. 

Louis didn’t say a word but he allowed Lestat to take him upstairs and they glided together through the quiet house, so quiet they heard only the floor creaking and the door closing and the rustling of blankets under the bed as they laid together in the nest of fabric Louis used in lieu of a proper coffin. 

“I will speak to your father about a coffin,” Lestat mumbled into the warmth of Louis’ neck, reaching for his hand in the dark, pulling him closer.

“Gotta be quiet now, love.”

He was, quiet, until the morning came and sleep took him, if only in short, lousy bursts. 

Lestat could not remember the last time he’d slept outside of a coffin, not since… Since longer than forever, maybe. Several lifetimes ago. He was restless for most of the day, unable to sleep, replaying the night in his mind over and over until he was sure he had made a mess of everything. 

But there was Louis, deep asleep with his body turned to his and his fingers tangled in the loose collar of Lestat’s ruined shirt. So he stayed, quiet and still and eventually asleep and awake again and when night was about to break he left without making a sound and walked back home with his cape over his head under the last tremulous minutes of late sunshine, just late enough to inconvenience an unhappy shopkeeper and purchase a small fortune in paper and ink and writing supplies.

He walked home and wrote several dozen notes, only to throw them all in the fire. 

One made it. A pathetic thing, consisting of a few, incoherent words. 

‘What is the name of this feeling when your hand is in mine and I remember the sun and the scent of the earth and the water touching my face when I was a boy and you were not yet born? I remember you there, in all my happiest memories. I don’t think I could have ever been that happy, otherwise.’

Of course he did not send it, merely kept it. And then, the one he did send. 

For your novel.

Yours, always,

L.

The note was sent along with the paper, the ink, a dip pen in silver, several ivory notebooks, very simple ones. The best he’d been able to find in such short notice. 

He ought to buy better supplies for Louis. A matter of both urgency and importance, Louis would need the best. Louis wanted to write. Did Louis have a writing desk? His brute of a father hogged the study to smoke cigars and pretend to read his bible or some other nonsense so one could easily assume that no one else got to make use of the space but him. There had been no desk in Louis’ sparsely decorated room. Only a bed, an ottoman, those ugly brown drapes like mud after a flood. How dreadful, the whole room, tragically sad. Nothing like what Louis deserved. Gifting Louis a desk might prove difficult, but not impossible. 

No answer came, on that day, to the note that had been sent. 

Lestat rushed downtown and broke into every furniture store that very same night and searched with all the determination of someone about to lose his sanity for something, a piece both utilitarian and of remarkable beauty. Naturally, a fine mahogany bureau plat, French made, imported, would have been best but his search yielded no satisfactory results. Everything he touched felt cheap, made of thin wood, stinking of chemicals and the unbearable scent of mould. 

He returned home empty-handed, to no note from Louis. No invitation to dinner. No news. 

To say of what happened in the days after having Louis on the sofa is to say that nothing happened and yet a thousand things were done, or prepared to be done, or planned to be done. There was the business with the desk which he’d decided would be imported at whatever cost from Paris, his lawyer would discreetly handle the matter. There was the issue with the second coffin, which he’d vehemently refused to buy for his own house but was determined to somehow get to Louis’ room. And then, there was the music. He was composing again, more out of sheer desperation than true inspiration. 

He had no piano, he’d forgotten to secure one. Too busy with Louis all these months to really think about a piano. 

He wrote a dozen little melodies in the first day alone; by the second day, one of those was almost a fully formed piece. He refused to write it down, and yet the music would not leave unless he did. He had no music paper, that too, had to be purchased. 

The hours could almost be seen to to pass quickly in the kaleidoscope of faux diligence and dedication, yet it had only been seventy-nine hours since he last saw Louis by the time everything that could be purchased had been acquired and every note and melody in his head had been carefully put to paper and soon scrapped, tossed away or left unfinished and, yet, after all that, there were still no words from Louis. 

No note, no news.

On the fourth day Lestat woke up early on an unusually hot night with a clear sky and no wind to keep aby the humid air or the ever-present Louisianan mosquitoes –horrid little creatures, content to buzz around as soon as one stepped outside, waiting for a taste of blood from any unsuspecting victim. 

At the de Pointe du Lac’s everything was quiet, all lights were off and the structure creaked and hissed as the wood, the panelling, the stairs, all its pieces became engorged in the wet air, under a moonlight bright and fuzzy, bathed in brass heat. And yet, there was something eerie about an open window on the second floor. Something about the silence that was not just human silence but the lack of thoughts, of heartbeats. No one was home. There was always someone home. Could that be true? Had they all left?

Louis wouldn’t just leave.

He would not leave. 

Louis wouldn’t do that. 

It was a ridiculous thought to even consider. Louis carried his blood within him, he was his as much as if he’d been his maker and if he wished to run now, to leave him here, then he would pay. Lestat would follow him to the ends of the earth and he would nip him by the back of the neck the way animals do, the way dogs carry their puppies, limp like dead bodies in between their teeth and he would carry Louis. He would carry him, alright. To their coffin. To a clearing in the woods where no human had ever stepped foot. To Saint Louis, or Antartica, or the Amazonian. To wherever it was that people went to not be found. 

And yet, he could not find Louis’ mind among the cacophony of vampire thoughts in his head. It was an embarrassing thing to admit to, even to himself, this madness taking even that from him that should come easily. There was a Louis inside his mind, but it wasn’t the real Louis, it was his Louis, the memory of him on his belly in their coffin, with his lips kissing the palm of Lestat’s hand, half incoherent.

‘The first man I killed, he’d called me a negro boy, you know the way they say it? Negro boy, he shouted it, wanted me to turn around, we were outside, it was almost morning. Negro boy. He just kept repeating it. Negro boy. He was easy to kill. The second one, his little friend, he hadn’t said anything, just stood there with a grim face like I should understand he didn’t agree with any of it. He was even easier to kill. He was crying, he pissed himself. I didn’t even feed from him. Father said it would be hard, for a boy like me, but I didn’t feel anything. Now I only need to picture it in my head. They’re saying that word, they’re calling me boy, they’re asking my mother to step out of the way so their ugly ass children can walk ahead on the sidewalk. I feel nothing, they mean absolutely nothing. I could kill you,’ A kiss, Lestat remembered it, so tender on the palm of his hand, ‘ I only need to put the image in my head and you would be gone. I wouldn’t feel a thing…’

Lestat had said no games. Next time, there will be no games. He’d called Louis a boy, a girl. And in the moment it had felt right and good and Louis’ eyes had shone, pink iridescent sheen of tears, wet with excitement. Louis had wanted to play. 

Had he?

Had he wanted to say no?

To push him away?

Had Louis been planning, even then? How to kill him? How to be rid of him forever?

‘I only need to put the image in my head and you would be gone. I wouldn’t feel a thing…’

Lestat felt like retching and, in fact, his stomach did a valiant effort, a small, violent jump, the way one feels when a horse leaps up into the air with no queue from its rider. Nothing came out, of course, he had not fed in some time. But this could not be the end. The empty house, the locked door. It could not be the end.

‘Gotta be quiet now, love.’

Louis had said that, too. Right before falling asleep, and Lestat had been quiet. Quiet for so very long. Quiet thoughts and quiet mind, almost. 

Wretched thing, maybe he hadn’t been completely quiet then but he could be quiet now. He could be; forever, if Louis wished it. 

He made to move, he had to find Louis and explain, just how quiet he could be. How good. He could take any punishment, because it would mean that Louis cared, that there was something in him that could be rehabilitated. And in his mind he shouted Louis, Louis, Louis and there was no answer but he would not stop calling him. He followed the scent of blood, the path, down the road, the muggy air dampening his hair and the back of his shirt and his socks and his feet inside his socks, his socks inside his shoes. 

There was blood to be found. 

Down the path he could smell fire, and the electric scent of an open wound, pouring blood. He ran and ran and found that it was at the little church where they’d gone together all those times, where Paul had prayed and confessed alone in god’s silly wooden box while he and Louis talked of one thing or other, of a little poem Louis had read, about a white deer with no horns and a boar without bristles and the change that came upon them without reason. 

It was the little church of Louis’ and Paul’s childhoods as mortal boys and it was on fire, several of the pews laid in a pyre near the entrance and Paul stood, alone, by the altar, bathed in blood and holding a priest’s head between his open palms as the priest, close to full exsanguination, hung lifeless from his arms, bobbing like a doll. 

Ah, Paul. Lestat could have laughed, it was Paul. 

Not even all of Lestat’s self-obsessed tendencies could have denied what was the most likely answer to the situation at hand. Louis had not run from him, Louis had left in search of his brother, as he so often did. A brother who was here, now, in some sort of bout of madness, playing god with a half-dead priest. It was a most sobering thought and he almost wanted to laugh; the whole world was always about him, wasn’t it? 

Well, no need for panic then. It was only Paul and Lestat didn’t care about Paul. 

“Paul, you’ve played with your food for too long, you can’t even drink from him any more. What a waste,” Lestat said, making himself known to the man on the altar. 

Paul faced him, still a dozen feet away, standing in a pool of blood with his clothes soaked to the skin and his face wild, the left side contorted up as if in pain. He held on to the body in his hands and Lestat heard a wet, crunchy noise, as if the priest had been squeezed to mush. 

“White devil,” Paul’s eyes were crazed, lost in some dark, muddy haze as he attempted to look over at Lestat and not his bleeding victim, “The Devil called you here?”

“The smell of blood and fire called me here. And the whole neighbourhood soon, if we don’t get out. What is your business with him? He’s already dead, lucky him.”

Lestat watched Paul as he looked around, almost as if for the first time. There were only a few sources of light besides the big fire and the heat of the flames and the smoke was making Lestat’s skin crawl. It was then that Paul looked at the fire, really looked, and a dangerous emotion passed through his face. 

“There are thoughts in my head, white devil. Someone… someone put them there, these are not my thoughts. It is someone else who has done this to me and I can’t get them out, can’t get rid of them.”

Then he gazed at the fire again and Lestat felt a lurch in his stomach, something in his mind screaming to do something, to say something. Paul wasn’t physically large, but he was stocky, wide boned like his father, no doubt strong like him too and he would not be docile with Lestat the way he was with his brother. Fighting him was not the best course of action.

“What do the thoughts say, then? Perhaps it’s just some other vampire messing with you.”

But Paul would not listen, he walked instead down the steps of the pew, his footsteps echoing through the empty church, “Do you see the fire, white devil?”

“I see it, yes. Impressive. Well done you.” 

What was there to say to someone like Paul? 

There was no trust between them. Lestat had done his best to ignore his ramblings, had resented him openly when their minds found a shared space. The truth was that they had been in competition for Louis’ attention for months, and what was there to do about that now? He would never wish to understand Paul, there were too many parallels between them. Youngest son, mother’s favourite, the madness, the sadness, the search for religious meaning in the cruelties of life. But Paul was loved, he had his seat at the table and Lestat would never be him and that was all and there could never be anything else. 

Except that Paul was here now, and he was staring at the fire. 

“Fire purifies, white devil. You know the words? The words, the words, they say: our God is like a refiner's fire. He refines, He purifies. He removes all the impurities.” Paul shouted it, whispered it, his mind was loud and felt poisonous.

“God did not light that fire, did he?” Lestat took a step closer, a faux little spring in his step. “And what did that poor fucker you hold now do? Not that I generally oppose the murder of priests. There’s always something with them, isn’t it? Nasty little creatures, grabby hands.”

Lestat reached out, as if to come closer and put his hands on the nasty pile or wet robes that was no longer a priest. His eyes were closed but Lestat heard his heart, weak but still pumping. So he was alive after all. How tragic.  

Only a few feet separated them now but Paul was watchful, his eyes darting from Lestat to the fire to the priest and back. He is going to jump and I will have to watch him burn and nothing will ever get better. 

He did not care about Paul, did not wish to spare another thought for him and yet, the fire…

“Fire purifies! Did you not hear what I said? I know what I have to do, I know what I should do and the devil speaks through you and you try to trick me but I will not be tricked, I will not ,” Paul panted the words and his throat bobbed, a raw sound of rage and pain and anger leaving him as he walked closer, the flames almost licking his shoes.

Paul could not jump in the fire. He could not. He had to go on. There was more, to go on. 

“Jump then! Go into the fire.” Lestat shouted, trying to conceal the panic in his voice. If this didn’t work, if Louis found out he had said this to his brother in his last moments… “That’s what the devil wants you to do. And I would know, wouldn't I? Jump! Go! You will be his forever, he will have you and torture you and make you renounce God. Is that what you want? Then jump, go on,”

But it was Lestat who jumped, closer to Paul and, in the heat of his words, he smelled the blood but also the fear, Paul’s fear. 

He’s so scared, he doesn’t want to jump. 

Paul’s face turned boyish in the yellow flames, his mouth wet with blood like a messy child’s. He was just that, so young. Younger than Louis. Younger than sweet Nicki, of years passed, who he’d loved dearly, who had also jumped in the fire and never stopped believing in his own sinfulness. 

Paul spoke quietly then, voice high, adrift, “Louis… Where is my brother?”

The flames could have taken Paul but Lestat had him first, he placed a hand over his right shoulder, gently, like he would have done with a horse afraid of the hunt.

“Louis is not here, it’s just the devil and you, and the devil is telling you to drain that priest dry and jump in the fire.” Lestat tried to be gentle with his words, what would his mother have said to him if she were here now? If it was he who wished for the end of things? “But we could go find Louis, Louis would know what the right thing to do is,”

For a second, it looked as if it was not going to work. Paul’s gaze turned cloudy again and he shook, his shoulders tensing under Lestat’s hand. But he let go, dropped the priest on the floor and stood, very still, with his arms by his sides, swaying gently. 

“I love Louis.” Paul said then, blinking rapidly. “I don’t…want to go in the fire, I’m— Are you really a white devil? Was I right?”

He could be led away then, carefully so, as Lestat tried not to spook him. They were close still, to danger, but he guided Paul so his back was to the fire, tried to speak, replacing the sound of the flames with his voice, “Only sometimes. But Louis keeps it away, he’s good like that, your brother.”

Paul nodded in agreement, and his head tilted to the side, “He is, yes, that’s true. I’ve made a big mess... Father will not be happy.”

They were almost at the end of the narrow aisle that led to the street and Lestat felt weakness growing in him like the aftermath of a real, terrible fright. The fire, his cheeks were still warm from it, Paul’s clothes, his shoes, the fire, all smelt awful around them and Lestat was hot all over from the closeness of that horrible fate.

“Shall we kill him, you think? Your father? He scares me so,” Lestat said in a joking manner but his voice shook, still weaker than he wished it to be. He pushed the street door open and made sure that Paul crossed the threshold. 

“That’s the white devil speaking,” Paul replied but did not seem much concerned. 

“Maybe it is. What about the priest? Did you know him?”

Paul’s eyes had gone back to their usual amber and he did not flinch as he stared back at the limp body far far away now, inside the burning building, “He was filthy. Filthy thoughts, filthy hands… “

He seemed to be thinking now, with his chin almost touching his chest. Louis did that too sometimes, eyes down and fixed in some memory as if he were swimming, frantic, in murky, swamp waters.

Lestat let go of his shoulder and guided him to rest his back against the door, “Paul, watch this,”

He ran back inside, quick as the blink of a human eye and grabbed the bloody priest, ripping a hand off its body like one would pluck a stem off a rose and threw him in the fire. He was back at Paul’s side before a second had passed and he could see, there, in Paul’s boyish face, the shadow of a smile. 

“We keep this one, sacerdos in æternum.” Lestat said and shook the severed hand around, watching the white fingers flop like they would on a cloth doll. 

It cracked a laugh out of Paul, weak as he was, “He is with the devil now.”

“Lucky him,” 

Well, he’d rescued Paul. This was a new feeling. So scarcely he got to do the right thing that the whole way home he feared something might still go wrong. But all the fight had gone out of Paul and he was easily led upstairs to the guest bedroom where the second coffin he’d purchased for Louis had been temporarily placed only the night before. Lestat washed the worst of the blood off him and helped Paul into the coffin in some borrowed clothes. Some time passed before he could leave the room altogether, not until he was really sure that Paul was asleep and he wasn’t about to run out of the house and into the night again. 

He thought of changing his own clothes, thick with the scent of smoke but Louis was sure to be frantic, searching for his brother still, not knowing what could have happened to him. He called then, using his mind the way he hadn’t dared to do before. Repeating his name over and over again over their shared mindspace, Louis Louis Louis. Louis, Paul is here. Louis. Louis, Louis, Louis. 

Finally, it came. Louis’ voice weak, far somewhere, a fury of panicked thoughts in between. 

He is with me, asleep. Unharmed.

Louis must have been some distance from the house but in time he arrived, wet like he’d been swimming or walking through an ocean in search of his brother. He still looked beautiful, it was a crass thing to say, but he did.

“How—?”

“At Saint Augustine you will find a fire, if there is still a Saint Augustine by now. He was in some sort of fit, he is fine now. Asleep, in coffin.” Lestat said and tried to not let his emotions get the best of him. 

He found that he was tired too. Exhausted to the bone, to the spirit, from days of frantic running around town, searching for just the thing he could purchase to fill the void. Seconds, minutes, hours of wondering why his notes went unanswered, of chasing a meaning to his life, of looking for clues about what Louis had meant, what any of it meant, truly. 

“He’d been struggling for some days… Father put him in the basement while I went hunting and he panicked. Mother and Grace heard him screaming, sent a message out for me, but he got out and…”  There was shame on Louis’ beautiful face and all resentment left Lestat’s body. “I looked everywhere, I’ve been looking for him for hours and I couldn’t—“

“Could have called for me, Louis.”

“It is not your burden—“

“There is no burden but the loneliness of each night without you!” The words were said almost on their own, as if it was the exhaustion that had spoken them instead of him and Lestat found that he was shaking, looking at Louis like he might vanish, go out in smoke and prove it all to be untrue, to be a thing he’d made up in his mind. “Every day, there is only you and you— You toss me around, you ignore me—“

“My brother is ill, Lestat.” Louis replied, tense and closed off, angry too. So beautifully angry. 

“Was he ill four days ago when I sent you my letter?” 

Louis turned his head to the side, his neck tense in that manner Lestat had learned to reconcile with Louis’ private anger. He was retreating, silent in his little shell, again. 

But then, something curious, his face turned again and he was looking at Lestat, something suspicious but warm in his face, “How did you know where to find Paul?” 

“I didn’t know he was gone. I was looking for you, Louis.”

“And did he—? What was he doing?” 

“He was… in a bad way. But he wanted to see you. That’s how I managed to get him out of there.” 

It was a night of exhaustion, perhaps because of the heat or the months of pantomime. 

Louis had played the dutiful son and then had gone home with a man and laid with him in almost every way two men oughtn't lie with one another. Paul had fought voices in his head and terrible urges and the certain fear of losing Louis to an agent of evil. And Lestat had fought the ghost of loss and loneliness and uncertainty. He’d wanted Louis hungrily, in selfishness and ravenous desire. Secretly, had fantasised about stealing him, severing him from his family as one would tear a fruit from a diseased tree. 

But Louis would not go, he was another branch in the tree and the tree was awful and should not exist but did exist and Lestat couldn’t have one without the other. He would never have Louis, unless he could accept that.

Louis spoke, his neck bowed in exhaustion, “I am afraid, everyday. Every day, I wake up and I try to walk this line. The tightrope is so fragile under my feet, I think… I think I might fall and split my head on the pavement and I’m— I’m scared I won’t get to keep any of it. You will go, or someone will go. My mother blames me for everything and my father resents me for everything, and my sister hates me for sport and I’ve done nothing to her but to be myself and my brother— he needs me. And that’s the worst part. And you—“ 

It was Lestat’s turn to feel shame, to bow his head and beg Louis for forgiveness. And he would, but he also wanted to touch him, the beloved curls of his forehead, the tip of one perfect ear, “I am sorry. I have been… I have been selfish. I apologise. Forgive me, mon cher.” 

Lestat had apologised to Louis more often than he’d ever done to anyone else in his whole entire existence before him. 

Louis shook his head but leaned into the touch and his breath was ragged and soft and the familiar scent of his skin felt like a gulp of fresh water, like ripe, crisp apples, “I have neglected you, I’ve been… It’s been difficult,” 

“I understand, Louis.” Lestat said and felt that he meant it, that there was something solid now between them.

Louis nodded. His heart was pounding in his chest as he reached for Lestat’s hands, he lifted them up and placed a kiss right over his knuckles as he stared at Lestat, green ocean eyes wet like fog. 

“You and me, from now on. You send a note, I will answer.” 

“Every time, Louis?”

“Well, I have an excess of writing supplies at the moment. So, yes.” 

It must have taken some courage for Louis to say that, to make a joke when his heart was so wild in his chest. He kissed Lestat’s knuckles again and, for a second, he paused and closed his eyes and breathed, deeply, the scent of Lestat’s skin like he’d missed him. 

Louis missing him. It was certainly possible, perhaps. Nothing had been spoken, in truth. Perhaps it would never be spoken. Perhaps they would live perpetually in this limbo between nothing and everything until one of them grew tired of it. 

“I am hungry. Shall we go to our room?”

There was a little smile then, tired and, yes, hungry, on Louis’ mouth. But it was not blood that he really hungered for because, as they went into their coffin together, he turned immediately and kissed Lestat first on the mouth and then on the cheek with his hands so tender in Lestat’s hair, pulling him closer still in the darkness. 

“Missed you, do you believe me?” 

Lestat found that he did, that the hours must have been excruciating for Louis too for him to vehemently insist on making his feelings known when he usually shied away from any true display of affection. 

“Let me feed you, and I might start to believe it.” 

Lestat could only think of Louis then, of his alive body, his warm hands and soft lips. Tonight, Louis had not seen the fire his brother had created and, if Lestat had any say in it, he would never see it. 

“In a week, or… I think a week or two might be enough. When my father has calmed down and is in a better mood, I will speak to him about me moving out of the house. About moving here, if you… If you want me to.” Louis whispered, just as the night was almost over.

Lestat chose to believe him and kissed the back of his neck instead of answering.

Paul and Louis returned home at sunset the next night but, all the same, nothing truly changed except for their knowledge of one another. Paul still openly disliked Lestat and went on his long rants when Lestat’s presence at his home was of particular concern to him and Lestat still sat through tortuous long dinners and spoke of nothing but the most mundane of subjects and brought wine and placed it on the table and listened to Louis’ father as he spoke of his duties, his many vexations and beliefs.

But that wasn’t really true, about things not changing. 

Everything has changed. Because now Louis would open the wine and he would bring five glasses to the table and pour from the bottle until there was nothing more to be poured and he would sit on his chair by Lestat’s side and play cards with his half of Lestat’s money and every night, as time came for everyone to retire, Louis no longer walked upstairs into his room with the dreadful brown drapes, he went home, to Lestat. To the coffin that was to be theirs. 

A week came and went and time moved forward in that queer way it did when one was waiting for something to give, to sprig like flowers do when the time is right. 

“Monsieur de Lioncourt, could I have you in my study for a moment?” 

Was all Louis’ father said, a week and two days after Paul’s incident, and Lestat looked at Louis and expected him to be worried but unsurprised and instead his face was shocked, confused, as if he didn’t have a clue of what was happening. Lestat went and, in the study, he sat with his back straight and his hands folded over his knees like a boy about to be taken to hand. 

“I did not thank you for the whole business with Paul, monsieur.” The man said, taking a seat on his old man chair, betraying no emotion. “You are a good friend to Louis and to us, and you have proven yourself loyal, and honest—“ 

Lestat tuned him out, it was impossible not to at this point, as he had trained himself over months to ignore the sound of his voice out of sheer survival. 

“I fear I have yet another favour to ask of you. It is a delicate matter and I must ask you not to discuss the matter with Louis.” 

Monsieur de Pointe du Lac did not wait for an answer before placing a small envelope on the table. 

“If you could take care of this for me… A past indiscretion, that has turned quite wild and needs a temporary solution. If you have a basement, that should do it. We can speak of it further then. Do we understand each other, monsieur? Man to man?” 

“Ah,” Lestat said, and could not utter a single word more. He did not understand.  

A small envelope on the table. He reached for it.

It was a name, an address, a small scribble on the back. 

Claudia de Pointe du Lac 

Fourteen at the time of the Dark Gift

Chapter Text

He told Louis about the girl immediately. 

As he walked home with Louis, the heat, the sticky night, the lights, the tense line of his own neck made it seem as if he were trying to carry a wet, hot handful of liquid in his open palm. 

Louis did not react in anger, he did not react in confusion or great grief. To be fair, for the longest time, Louis did not react at all. He stood in the foyer with his right hand half hidden inside his pocket and listened in complete silence and offered only his left hand when the little note with the girl’s name was handed to him. 

For seconds if not minutes Louis looked only at the note, a full, tropical landscape of inner turmoil on his face.

Then a reckless laugh, like something had been torn out of his chest. 

“A child!” He exclaimed, sounding almost wild, almost out of his own body. “And she is his, I am sure. He who—”

And he was laughing again, clutching the little note and looking up at Lestat with something desperately dangerous in his gaze. His pupils having gotten smaller than Lestat had ever seen them, two small pinpoints in a sea of dark, dangerous green. 

“Whatever you do with your life, Louis, you will not embarrass this family. Those were his words, the first time I asked if I would be allowed to attend university. And what did I do? Nothing. Nodded, said yes sir. Lowered my head and yes sir ed the way I have been raised to do and I have served him, and I have obeyed him and I have carried this— This shame inside me and he…”

That dark laugh came again and then Louis was walking to the windowsill where a large vase full of flowers, placed there by Lestat housekeeper early in the week, rested and Louis, without hesitation, took it between his hands and smashed it straight through the window. 

So there was some anger after all, but it was gone just as quickly as it had come and Louis was still holding the crumpled paper with his assumed half-sister’s name between two fingers. Music filtered in, happy voices from the street below could be heard through the broken glass of the window.

“Put her in a basement… I’ll sooner put his head on a spike and watch the sun melt the skin off his fat face.” Louis said, and looked at Lestat with the certainty of a killer, “You and I will look for the girl. Leave him out of it, I’ll handle him.”

Louis was particularly attractive when all the polite hesitation had been stripped off him. Lestat could not help the thought that, under all his softness, his tenderness, his persevering naiveté, there was real strength in Louis. He was not, as he had first appeared, in the business of being anyone’s victim. Lestat could only wonder if his father was aware of this fact. If he knew, even just in some remote corner of his mind, how much of his position depended on Louis’ love and generosity. And more so, how fragile that generosity was, how close he’d crawled and, even now, continued to crawl, towards the edge of it.

“Whatever you want, mon cher.” Lestat replied, and felt that he meant it. It would be, in the end, whatever Louis decided.

Something had broken in Louis, as it would become apparent in the weeks that followed. The last remnants of a role that had never really suited him started to visibly deteriorate. Louis woke up the next night in their shared coffin and ordered Lestat to get dressed and ready to visit the address his father had provided. 

The girl, naturally, wasn’t there. 

“You wait out here, love. No one's gonna hand you that girl.” 

Louis, in his elegant bourgeois suit, the one with the green and black stripes, went in on his own and Lestat waited patiently outside the modest house, smoking a cigarette and feeling, exceedingly so, as if he were a husband waiting for his wife to deliver his first child to him. 

Inside, Louis attempted to find out where exactly the girl had gone and had been so kind as to leave his mind half open so that Lestat could listen in. 

“I told her rich daddy already, I don’t know where she went but she smashed every one of my poor windows and ripped off my door like an animal, splintered the wood, she did, with her fist. Yes, her fist, sir. She is no child, this creature you search for, but a dark, demonic spirit. That’s what that demon did to my house. Rotten, rotten work, and I came mighty close to calling the police but what for? Ain’t no sense in trying to get anyone to do anything about a devil. Should have called a priest when I had her still in the basement but her daddy… He did paid for her to be kept here, bless him, and he visited; but that was before everything turned dark, real dark. Yes, but he did visit, and snuck me a few extra dollars when he did so. He tried, that poor man. But there was no trying with her.” The woman told Louis, her mind flooding with memories of a small girl, silver boned with vivid, intelligent eyes. “He ain’t a bad man, her daddy. He wanted to pay for her to stay here and I told him the Ursulines might take her, before she really went under, but he didn’t want to hear it. And soon, after she were sick, she went devilish, started screaming and banging on the walls and saying she was thirsty and— It don't matter now, as I said, she is gone and good riddance.”

“How long ago?” Louis’ voice was sharp, all but gone was his good boy accent then.

“Since she left?” 

“Yes,” Louis replied, and offered her a dollar bill for her troubles, “And since she came to your care. Since she turned… demonic.”

She accepted the money offered and answered truthfully, “Left a few months back, beginning of winter maybe. No shoes on her feet, the daft girl. But she never was too bright. Before that, before the basement, she was here for two or three years, someone else had her and wouldn’t care for her no more. Her daddy said she was to stay in a house with no other children, that the girl was no street kid to be running around and getting into trouble with bastards or worse. Mind you, she was the worst of the lot, but her daddy never wanted to see that. You have kids? Know how they are?”

Louis must have shaken his head no, the woman went on, “She was alright, at first. Quiet. Spoke well when her old man visited. Maybe twice a year he came. Gave her some pocket money and asked her if she was reading her books and speaking like a lady. And then one day the air got thick, you know, the way it do after spring, and she got ill, but everyone got ill then and most of them died or were better off dead. I told her daddy he better come and take her somewhere else, I was not about to die for some petty dollar, my body was worth more than that and I was no sick-nurse. I went to his big house, up there with the rich folk, when he didn’t answer my letters, and his wife told me I was mistaken and that I better leave, like I was some beggar and I said ‘No, ma’am. I ain’t mistaken, go get your husband.’ I did not mention the girl then but the wife knew alright that it was some dirty business that brought me there and she kicked me out and I knew why she did it and good for her but not for me, I still had the sick girl to feed and keep alive.

“This was right as summer was ending, the fevers, I tell you, the fevers were worse than the heat, everyone was close to dead in body or spirit and it was said that it was the air or the mosquitoes or the devil sending his punishment on us sinners. I’m not laughing, sir. Not at sinners, no, but I ain’t no sinner and I haven’t been sick a day in my whole life. So, you see, I wasn’t about to go down with the undeserving. Amen, not me, no. Well, the daddy came then, finally, and looked at the girl and asked if anything had been done to heal her. I told him there ain’t nothing to be done, the sad thing was almost blue, flaky in her nasty sleeping clothes, sad and ugly, dried like a grape. Ugly like one too. She was ugly, it’s not unkind to say the truth. I told him it was too late and that I would not bury her, that he’d have to do it. She was no child of mine, after all; so I would dump the body at his door and see how his wife liked it. It was no nice thing to say but I’d waited, tried to find him, before. Not on me, burying the child, after all that. He went very still. I was never afraid of a man like him but he is mighty big and he was not happy with me.”

“But she did not die?” Came Louis’ voice, breaking the callous tale.

“No, he asked me if I had a basement with no windows and I said yes but it was damp and very dark and he said that he would get the good doctor and the doctor would see her there, out of the heat, he said, and to stay away from the basement and lock the door. And I did. I never saw no doctor, but the girl was alive down there. I didn’t see her again but she was in there for a week and she was alive, very much so. She screamed… Oh, sir, she screamed. You can’t imagine how she screamed, boy, did she scream, I still hear it, in my head like… Well. And she said she would kill me if I didn’t open the door. I told her her daddy had said she was to stay in there and he was the one paying me and she told me, shouted at me, that she had no daddy and ain’t ever had no daddy and that she was gonna smash my skull open. Little thing she was, sir. Built like a bird. I had to laugh. I had the keys, she wasn’t getting out, no. See, I had the keys. Still do. But she did get out, as I told you. Demonic. Broke my door and my windows too, I told you, yes? Lucky I was, and I’ve always been very lucky, my sister always says, I wasn’t home when she did it or I don’t doubt she would have tried to kill me. Well, I never saw her or her damn daddy again. And my door? My windows? I paid for them myself and I still ain’t too happy about that. ’Tis not right, no, sir. You understand,”

And that was the whole concern for this woman who had been entrusted with the care of the little girl. The door, the windows, the basement where the girl had been kept. The basement, particularly, felt like an eerie memory Lestat did not own but felt he owned all the same. Memories haunted by a great thirst and stone windows and deep, bone chilling darkness. 

How mighty the girl must have felt when she left that basement, all on her own, shoeless and free. Even the foundations of the house must have shaken as she went off into the night.

“Well, that was quite the tale, ma’am.” Was Louis’s voice then, interrupting the woman. Asking for money, she was. Asking, again, who Louis was, how he knew the girl. Her thoughts swimming with plans on plans on clumsy plans. He was a rich boy, surely, and he had come to find this girl and she was going to make some money off of him. She was a lucky woman, after all, she always got some money in the end. 

“You must be tired now, ma’am. After all that,” Louis’s voice was his deep, pious boy one and he was guiding the woman by the arm, deeper inside the house, past the small, cramped hallway and into the bedroom with the narrow bed and the heavy wooden furniture and the small, private bathroom, all the way to the back of the rickety building.

She was almost at her bed but wasn’t scared, or confused, Louis had made it all make sense. She was only tired. And she would get her money soon, after she rested, and the boy’s hand on her arm was very gentle. He had gorgeous hands, this boy, tan, the colour of paper bags and church pews and good roux and he was putting her to bed, tucking her in. 

“Goodnight now, you are so tired,” Louis said warmly, sitting by her side on her narrow, lonely bed with its faded purple blanket. “Oh, I almost forgot, the girl’s previous address…”

“In my notebook, in the kitchen, sir…” She replied, already fading into unconsciousness.

“Very well, then. Sleep now, ma’am.” And with that Louis pulled from his pocket the meat knife he’d first seen lying on the woman’s kitchen counter and very neatly sliced her throat open. 

Soon he was crossing the threshold and nodding at Lestat, absentmindedly tucking the notebook and the single dollar he’d paid the woman with inside his pocket.

He looked, despite himself, half repentance, half accomplishment for having killed her. 

Lestat felt almost compelled to ask why but one look at Louis made him happy, for once, to be silent.

“This whole time, she was only a few streets away.” Louis said eyes pale as the moon, and started walking away from the house without as much as a look back. 

Louis went to their coffin still thinking about the tale of the girl, the basement, the yearly visits from a father who had never betrayed even a hint of her existence to his loyal son, who’d not once dared to ask for more than he thought he had earned. 

“The second bedroom, I think it should be painted pink for the girl.” Lestat couldn’t help but say as Louis lay by his side in their coffin, his face hidden in the curve of one arm. 

Louis slept the opposite of defensively, he’d noticed. He slept with his back to the world and his nose quietly hidden into his own body and the vulnerable bend of his neck visible and open as if he had retained in some manner that human trust in the innocence of the world. 

“Not every girl likes pink, you know? Grace didn’t, when she was little.” Louis replied but the reprimand held no heat. 

“We could repaint it when she’s here. I would hate for her to arrive and think we had not thought to paint the room before she got here. A coffin too, we should order one soon.”

Louis hesitated for only a few seconds before answering, “What else then? What else will she need?”

“Clothes, of course. But there’s no use in attempting to purchase much of that without her here. Shoes. A writing desk, all girls her age need a writing desk. A gold locket, girls her age like gold, or they did when I was young; a grooming set, in mother of pearl if it can be found. I’m forgetting something obvious, surely.”

Louis laughed, the tip of his nose suddenly visible as he faced Lestat, “I doubt that.”

Lestat reached out and touched the back of Louis’ hair as he had grown used to when they laid together, the feeling just as wondrous as the first time he’d been allowed to do so, “What’s on your mind, mon cher?”

Silence responded and, even as his fingers touched Louis’ soft body, Lestat felt as if he might all be alone in his head. 

Often Lestat tried to tune out Louis’ thoughts from his own perception. An endeavour usually ruined by his own insecurity, that gwaning need to know how Louis felt, what he thought of him, if the end was near. More often than not he found that he needn’t have fought with himself at all, Louis’ mind had already been blocked off to him.

There it was, now, the silence. The door firmly closed.

Then Louis’ voice, cracking it open, “You might not believe this but I had a little sweetheart once, when I was a boy of twelve. She was the goddaughter of a friend of my mother’s and we met at church. I would stare, during mass, at the back of her hair until she noticed me, and she did, eventually. Hazel, was her name, she had soft hands and a very sweet laugh. I would walk her home after church and she would refer to me as her gentleman. I wanted to buy her a locket, like lovers do, but lacking the funds for gold I made it out of carved wood. I was no woodworker so it was an ugly thing but it gave me so much pleasure to have made it for her. Even then I thought, if I can do this one thing for a girl, if I like her enough to do this, it will mean that I can truly be like any other man, that I can love a woman and marry her and do what good men do with their lives. My father was proud of the little locket and my mother asked our cook to make sandwiches for us and as I went around to her house and asked her, hat in my fist, if she would go steady with me she laughed and said ‘You are a very nice boy, Louis. Let us be good friends forever instead.’ In the end she only… She had only to look at me and no locket or flowers or nice walks home together would fool her. Girls are so awake, so early. After, she kissed me on the cheek and I knew, even then, that she had only done me a kindness. It’s funny, how people see us so clearly, way before we’re able to see ourselves.

“As life would have it my first real kiss happened with her brother, a younger boy named Jonah, only a few years later. Right behind that big house of theirs, in sight of her small window. But by then I had already come to understand that a family and a life like what I once imagined I could have with her had never been in the books for someone like me.”

A deep breath into the quiet of the coffin and Lestat said only, “How naughty of you, Louis. And I thought this was a sweet story.”

In his mind he held the image of this small Louis, of all his hopes and dreams. Small, precious things like those. A first kiss and a first disappointment and a wooden locket probably lost to time. And, selfishly, what a wonder, to be allowed a glimpse of this Louis and all the things he had once wanted. Up until a moment before, only Louis had known about it, and now Lestat did too. Only two souls in the entire world understood.

“It is a sweet story,” Louis huffed, his body sliding closer in the confined space, “It was all very sweet and proper. Don’t you go imagining some wild thing—“

“Oh, if someone knows just how sweet you can get when you want to, that is me, mon cher. I do not doubt you—”

Next to him in the darkness, Louis thrashed in protest, “It is almost midday. Go to sleep, will you?” But his voice had gone softer, calmed in the aftermath of his confession.

The next night they visited the girl’s previous address where she wasn’t to be found and from there came an even older address where they barely remembered having ever housed her, Louis was exceedingly polite to everyone he talked to and managed to charm every lady he spoke to, all of whom offered to contact him if the girl did indeed turn up at some point or other. It was to be a dead end but if Louis was upset by said development, as Lestat suspected he was, he hardly showed it. 

Hardly showed it, was there a more Louis turn of phrase than that?

A new search strategy would have to be devised. Louis, quick and intelligent as he was, thought the girl would have to feed and bodies were bound to turn up wherever she was. And so started the search on newspapers and magazines and any and all printed documents of relevance Louis could get his hands on for sordid tales of gruesome murders in alleyways and mysterious bouts of illness leading to premature, unnatural deaths. For a while, much to Lestat’s astonishment, it seemed as if this might lead to some fruitful information: a Creole muckraker who’d gained renown for an exposé on the overcrowded, rat-infested worker dormitories belonging to a commercial laundry in which girls as young as six were kept either working the line or locked inside shared bedrooms had, as of recent, turned to reporting, quite avidly, on what she called the local macabre. Exactly the sort of stuff Louis believed would help them find the girl.

On a Monday she reported on the death of two gentlemen, both found dead against the outside of a midtown hotel with their heads almost severed as if by an animal’s teeth. The following Wednesday it was a woman, almost drained of all blood with her purse and her shoes missing. On Friday it was a young man who’d just seemed to have bent over and died in the middle of an alley near his home.

Louis ardently believed these to be connected to the girl. He was genuinely alone in this hopeful belief, but Lestat entertained him.

“Don’t be upset but I’m pretty sure that last one was mine, mon cher.” 

Seated on the little stool by the window, Louis folded the newspaper in half and sighed, “You are not being helpful, you know that?”

“I am trying to be, I assure you,” Lestat lied with a kind smile.

However, on that same Sunday things were looking up for Louis as three men had turned up dead near a road leading to the Barataria Basin. All seemed to be dry as husks, not a drop of blood in their bodies; the journalist believed them to have been victims of a satanic mob taking over town and, if one were to consider the six other bodies found in the vicinity of the far removed roads… Well, one could be led to suspect it was so.

“I can safely assume that wasn’t you, was it?” Louis had asked with a smug smile entirely too fitting to his elven face. 

Lestat had to admit to it then and there: it had not been him; he would not have stepped on the marsh for all the warm blood in the world. Louis, moody but quietly victorious, held on to the little hint of something as if his very life depended on it.

The girl must be out there , to the particularly wild and unwelcoming extent the expression out there had been given by those residing near the Mississippi. 

The three bodies near the swamp-like terrain outside of town made it a very pressing necessity for them to secure the purchase of an automobile as, according to Louis’ estimates, it was no small area and they couldn’t anticipate finding the girl easily and, if one considered the distance and the potential time that would be consumed in the search, they could’ve hardly borrowed Monsieur De Pointe du Lac’s car everyday without alerting the mother or the very clever sister of their mission. 

With this in mind, and by recommendation of their housekeeper’s husband, they first went together to a place where good American automobiles were sold. Lestat thought it best to let Louis pick one for them. It was a simple matter: Louis knew automobiles and he did not. Louis cared about automobiles, and Lestat, simply, emphatically, did not. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, the white salesman took one look at Louis and refused to negotiate with him. Naturally, no automobile was purchased and the night was quite ruined for everyone involved.

Soon after, they found a second salesman at a smaller dealership in Central City. He was an old friend of Louis’ and it was clear that he wished to be more— a fact that irritated Lestat but, all too aware of the offense that had been done to Louis at the last shop, he was quietly determined to be the bigger person on that matter. He behaved the best he could and they purchased a shiny, unforgivingly expensive automobile. American made beast; a noisy, shiny thing that made Louis all giddy.

They drove it home, or Louis did; Lestat wasn’t sure his first attempt at driving the thing should be at a place where other people would see him fail. He did get off and crank it, as undignified as the act proved to be, every time the iron beast demanded it, like a gentleman would. 

“We could probably have gotten a better model at the first shop, but this one will do for now.” In contrast with his words, Louis’ hands caressed the smooth metal of the wheel as he drove home. “You could always trade it in for a better model after some time, if you go back there by yourself.” 

“That’s unlikely, mon cher.” Lestat replied.

“And why is that?” 

“Well, the first man, he is dead, my love.” Lestat added, matter of fact, his confession almost drowned by the horrible unnatural sound of the engine.

Louis did not reply for some time, as the road had become busy and his face quietly thunderous, “He is? Are you sure?” 

“Quite sure, yes. How could he not be?”

That, at last, had milked a laugh out of Louis, and thank the heavens for that. For some weeks perhaps, although time was never Lestat’s strongest suit, this whole business with the girl had been grating on Louis’ nerves quite a lot, leading to a persistent sour mood and one too many short replies. A thing bad enough in itself, worsened by the fact that said mood had not gone unnoticed at weekly family dinner where Paul had cornered Lestat in the foyer and quite plainly asked, “Whatever is the matter with him? Have you been quarreling? I thought you better than that, Mr De Lioncourt.”

“We have not been quarreling and it is not my doing!”

Unperturbed, Paul had only replied with a quick, “Oh, don’t bluster then! Keep father entertained tonight or they might actually fight one another before the night is over.”

And with a pat on the back and a complicit nod Paul had walked away, sure as he’d ever seen him, that Lestat would do what he’d been told to do. The fearful thought came then that, at some point or other, this whole family had grown to see him as some harmless little puppet, sent by mail and delivered to their doorstep to entertain them. 

Well, that certainly put an end to his good mood.

They drove home after dinner in their new automobile and, once again, Lestat was the one who got off his seat and cranked it and got his very nice blue trousers dirty in the process. 

“What’s got you so huffy tonight? My brother pick on you again? That’s it?” Louis asked, politely putting his own bad mood aside to enquire after Lestat’s. 

“I am not huffy, Louis.”

But Lestat did go into coffin that morning with his back half turned. By nightfall the next day the date had finally been set for them to head out in their blasted automobile far out of the lovely, lively New Orleans and into the horrid swamps where the three bodies of the exsanguinated men had been found. They shared tepid hopes of finding something out there, even if the land was wide and difficult to access and the iron beast might need to be abandoned by the side of the old road at some point in their search. 

Lestat had been contemplating for some time what exactly one wore to visit the Mississippian wilderness when Louis came into the room and leaned against the bedside table with a thoughtful little expression on his face. 

“It’s no use going out there tonight. I just heard it on the radio, heavy rains all night and most of tomorrow. Tropical storm.” Louis did not look particularly upset at the news, but it was always hard to tell, when it came to Louis being or not being upset, “I thought we could go to the theater instead, if you’d like.”

If you’d like. 

Bewitching, impossible man. He’d said it with a small smile and the imprint of Lestat’s cigarette case visible through the pocket of his most stunning olive green blazer.

Lestat forgot about his wardrobe and the sad prospect of a night out in the marsh and looked at Louis instead. At his face and his neck and the creases around his mouth and the very peculiar shape and size of his fingers as he played with the ring Lestat had gifted him some months ago. 

“There isn’t anything new for you to see, mon cher.”

“A repeat performance won’t be too bad.” Louis admitted then, with very little hesitation. 

And wasn’t that something. A repeat performance, and Louis being open to the thing. Louis who never read a book twice.

“I thought you’d be very happy with the change of plans.” Louis touched the side of his neck as he said it, a sure sign that he was growing impatient. “I’m not an idiot, I know you don’t want to go out there.”

“It isn’t that I don’t wish to go but it’s unlike you to offer such a thing so easily,” Lestat replied, “I wonder what I’ve done to deserve it,”

There was a queer little pause then but it was far too late for Lestat to take the earnest words back and the crease between Louis’ brows was so pronounced and pretty and curious Lestat thought he might as well say something rude to get Louis to forget the stupidity of his statement. 

“You— You think you have to earn—“ Louis was saying then, something like pure shock settling on his features. 

“If it’s quite the same to you I’d rather we listen to some music tonight, I am not in the mood for mediocre acting.” Lestat interrupted him, making quite the show of turning around and dropping his sleep trousers at his feet. 

Louis did not reply, not immediately, and then his hand was there, strange and soft, reaching around his torso, caressing Lestat’s lower belly, “You should wear the burgundy suit.”

It was not like Louis to let things go so easily and yet, as he was leaving the room and the warm imprint of his hand could still be felt by Lestat over his skin, he heard Louis add an almost mocking, “We’ll walk, I don’t want you ruining your suit with all that manly cranking you’ve grown used to doing tonight.”

And Lestat wanted to ask about the rain and the suggested walk but decided not to and indeed there was no rain as they walked to the whorehouse with the decent band and the open patio and, when the woman at the door asked where they would like to sit, Louis very confidently suggested their usual table by the railing where the rain, if there really was to be any rain, would have ruined their drinks and even their night and, as they took their seats, sure as night, there were only a few, large clouds and the wet, pungent scent of a partly overcast sky to welcome them. 

They’ve become, him and Louis as a unit, quite the locals at this particular whorehouse. The women there were both old and young and mostly pretty albeit occasionally not so pretty but instead seductive in that sensual, primal way some not so pretty women had about them. Lestat had noticed a while ago that it was the young, clumsy girls who found it difficult to converse with men who were often the ones tasked with taking drink orders from men like him and Louis, those who were known to spend some money on drinks and tips but none on private rooms. One such girl came eagerly to greet them soon after they’ve been sat and she had a very pretty Caribbean face and a quite persistent stammer and was bold with her actions, leaning down in her frilly coral dress and touching Louis’ shoulder first and then Lestat’s arm as she came to drop off their drinks.

Louis’ mouth pinched tight as a rosebud. 

“No rain,” Lestat pointed out, distracting Louis from the sight of the young girl’s retreating back.

“The radio said there would be,”

“Aha, and yet there’s none. Curious.” 

“How’s your drink then?” Louis asked, determined to change the subject. His ears were already blushing and his hands, betraying everything, were roughing up the white doily placed under his drink. 

A little upset, maybe yes. But something else too… Something in Louis’ mind tonight.

“I have tasted better,” Lestat replied and kissed the rim of the glass with a wink. 

Louis was still hesitant, playing with the doily, using his nails to pull on a loose string near the seam. 

Their stuttering waitress came back then and placed her hand over Lestat’s shoulder as she bent over to offer a shy little, “Miss Carol, s-s-she said to ask y-y-ou for a req-request, s-s-s-sir?”

“A request, dear?” Lestat replied, conscious of the small, feminine hand touching his back and the way Louis reacted to such things. 

“For the musicians-s, s-s-s-ir.”

“Tell them to play some Billy Bailey, dear.” Came Louis’ reply, smile sharp and a little short, the poor doily tightly held in his fist by then. 

The one eternal —eternal as vampiric life or perhaps longer still— issue with Louis was this: it was quite impossible to stay even just a little mad at Louis for he knew so well when the sugar jar was about to be empty and he would impishly pour some more into it before one could begin to fear the sweetness might be over for good. So, as the girl went to give the musician’s his request, Louis suddenly stood and pulled over his chair and sat quite closely next to Lestat, a few inches at most, all under the guise of peering down into the courtyard to look at the musicians as they started to play the song, the song requested by Louis on his behalf, Louis who knew, somehow, that Lestat very much liked the tune but had never directly requested before on account of some embarrassment related to the lyrics. 

He’d certainly never, ever requested it in front of Louis. 

A mistake, maybe, to think anything could be done or felt without Louis knowing of it. 

“A good singer, we should send her a tip before we go,” Whispered Louis, close enough that his breath caressed warmly the side of Lestat’s neck. 

Downstairs the singer begged for her lover to come back home, to stay this time; ‘Bill, honey, daddy you’d better bring it on home.’

“Aren’t you in a good mood tonight, mon cher?” Lestat pointed out and watched from up close the small blush starting to colour Louis’ neck. But of course, Louis was not in a good mood. He was in some mood, but surely not the happy kind. 

It was all very confusing, which wasn’t unusual, when it came to Louis. 

Their closeness as they watched the band was certainly improper, even for a place like this, and usually it would be Louis who would move his chair away and retreat back into the safety of the opposite end of the table. Except now he was leaning closer instead, his long, beautiful fingers casually touching the shoulder seam of Lestat’s jacket. 

“You want to hear what my father said to me last night?” Came Louis’ intimate murmur after the song had ended as he shuffled even closer to Lestat’s side, his eyelashes impossibly dark and luminous in the moonlight. 

This, the first mention of Louis ever talking to his father about the girl, even when Lestat knew he had. Even when he knew it had not been pleasant, that it had cost Louis dearly, having to wipe every last inch of respect he had for his father by confronting him with the truth.

Lestat must have nodded, tried to look back down into the courtyard. This was hardly the place to kiss Louis. Hardly the place to put his hand on the soft belly that lay hidden under several layers of fabric and make a mess of him against the rickety little table. 

“He told me to not bother you. Oh, yes, don’t be shocked, he did. ‘Whatever your issue with me, do not start acting childish and bothering Mr De Lioncourt, Louis. He is a busy man and has important business to handle.’ What do you think of that, love?” Said Louis and his voice was sweet like Amaretto, “It got me thinking, that. Am I really a bother to you, huh? Too busy, for me? That it? Want me to go into the parlour and take up embroidery?”

“Poupette—“

Closer still, Louis rested his cheek on Lestat’s shoulder, looking up tenderly with those cat-like eyes, green ocean moss glittering like sparks, “Well you can tell me the truth now. I’m giving you the chance, if I am so much a bother to you, that is… If you are so very busy —”

Lestat did what he knew he shouldn’t but who really cared about shouldn’t when Louis—Well, that was all, really: when Louis. He reached under the table where he found Louis’ thigh, the very perfect fit of it under his hand and squeezed it, stroked his thumb along the inseam of the trousers he wished Louis weren’t wearing at all. 

“Did it upset you, mon cher? Not being able to tell your father how little of a bother you are to me? How desperate I am for every second of your time? Who, exactly is bothering who,” He matched Louis’ tone, watched those black pupils dilate until he looked like he might turn wholly animal  any second, “No wonder…” Lestat added as he petted the small dip in Louis’ knee, up and down into the seam of his trousers, “No wonder you two stayed at each other’s throats all night, poupette. Even Paul noticed, asked me to fix whatever was wrong with you. Did you know? Asked me, to fix you.”

He encircled Louis’ thigh then, fingers splayed wide around solid muscle. So solid and so fragile under his palm. Louis really was a vision then, with his mouth half parted and his tongue quickly darting out to wet his lower lip. 

“We are not talking about Paul,” He protested but made no move to get away from Lestat. 

“No?” Lestat mocked sweetly, “What are we talking about then? The supposed rain?”

At that the blush finally broke free from the confines of Louis’ neck, up into his face and down into his chest like a flood of fresh red blood spilling out of an open gash. 

“The radio said—“

Easily, guiding him by the chin, Lestat pulled Louis’ warm face to his. Nose to nose, almost mouth to mouth, air travelled between them and he felt the tremblings of lust pulling him closer and closer to Louis and yet he did not. Waited instead, looking at Louis, eyes raking his face, memorizing every dip and mole, every wrinkle and shadow on his perfectly wild appearance. 

“Where is it then, Louis? There is no rain, which means you lied, poupette. You lied because you wanted to spend the night with me. Out here, out of the house and out of the coffin, where your father could see us. You wanted him to see… Well, I don’t know, I might be so foolish as to believe you wanted him to know who I belong to. Who I obey. Who tells me what to do and when to do it, what to wear and what to buy and who to speak to and where to wait for you to come back and order me around. I am wearing the suit you told me and I am drinking the drink you ordered me and I am here, instead of knee deep in mud somewhere out there, only because you told me to. Is that right, Louis? Am I right, in hoping that is why or are my hopes truly that foolish?” 

Down in the courtyard the singer had started to sing anew. Something about a boy in love who’d begun to sigh, look up at the sky and tell the moon his little tale of woe; down, under their little table, Lestat’s hand inched closer up into the tantalising promise of Louis’ lap. 

“Is that what you think? That I want to parade you around—?”

“What I hope, not what I think, dear.” Lestat replied, his voice had gone deep and he couldn’t help but rock his wrist against Louis’ lap, feeling there the answering twitch of Louis’ cock under his smart woolen trousers. 

“You make it sound as if I have you under my—“ Louis’ protest was so weak, so very soft, one could hardly call it a protest at all. 

“You think I do not know how much you enjoy having me at your mercy? I do as you say and I am so obedient and, even when I wish it, which is all the time, all the damn time, Louis; I do not touch , I do not dare to touch because you—“

“Lestat—“ 

And there were Lestat’s fingers, shaky but determined, against the outline of Louis’ hardening cock under the table and Louis shuddered and a little sound came out of his mouth like he was about to ask for more and his pupils were by then so very big, two gorgeous black dots, endless and—

“C-can I get you another drink, s-s-sirs?” The little waitress said, unaware of the very real danger she was in as she touched Lestat’s shoulder again. 

“You better run along, dear,” Came Louis’ savage snarl and his voice was so unusually aggressive the poor thing could only stand frozen in place with her hand still lightly resting over Lestat’s shoulder. “You better—“

Lestat squeezed his cock, held Louis right there, under the table, under all that pressure, for one, two, maybe three seconds, until Louis’ black eyes were back on his. 

Savage little creature. This was the dangerous side of Louis no one got to see. If it hadn’t been for Lestat being there to stop him, he didn’t doubt Louis would have killed the girl, just because. And he would have killed the musicians, and the woman at the door, and the oblivious patrons all around them. Just because he’d felt affronted by their presence and he wouldn’t have felt guilty for a single second. 

Louis would have felt guilty about not feeling guilty, oh yes. Definitely that. But only in a self-indulgent sort of guilt for he couldn't care less about any of them, he only cared about this image of himself, about the perceived humanity he ought to have, as he had been human once, and that wasn’t something he could allow himself to forget. But, even then, there was something he cared about more.

“Shall I ask her to look under the table, Louis? To see how busy we are? How very little a girl is needed when you and I are together, poupette?” 

A bright red blush formed and grew, dark over Louis’ forehead and chin and he shivered, involuntarily tipping his head back and baring the line of his slender neck.

“Don’t—Don’t say shit like—“

Louis’ cock was so hard by then, a heavy weight under Lestat’s palm and his thighs were shaking, his pulse so quick each beating of his heart was visible if one were to look at the perfect skin of his neck and those lips, parted and wet as if he were about to speak, to say one thing or other, to ask Lestat for a kiss, to beg for a taste of his blood—

“Mister De L-l-lionc-ourt? Miss Carol s-said— if you want a room with…with me, like— like last t-t-time? She said it’s on t-the house.”

Well, now Lestat was inclined to kill the girl himself. 

But it was Louis, with his fist suddenly clawing at Lestat’s lapel and his eyes so open one could see the full white of his eyeballs who said, “The girl will leave, Lestat. You will tell her to leave. Now.”

Lust had turned to fury inside Louis at the suggestion of a room, a room with some woman, small and delicate and feminine, with her hands all over him and her hips and her cunt…

As if Lestat had ever wanted anything of the sort.

But there was no point in saying that now, Louis had gotten up, shaken Lestat’s hands’ off him and his long, gorgeous legs were carrying him steadily out towards the front door, all righteous indignation.

Louis, mon cher.

Louis, I have never bedded that girl. 

Or any girl in that establishment. 

Or any girl or woman or boy or man or creature in this whole city. 

In this whole continent there has only been a single person who I have known carnally or even sensually. 

I have not looked, or wished to look, or touched or wished to touch since—

Those were the thoughts being shouted at Louis, his retreating back steadily maintaining a generous distance between them, rushing, as they were, all the way home and all the while nothing from Louis. Only silence, only that dreaded, simmering silence he was so good at and Lestat felt the burning anger in his throat and wished he could just push Louis against a wall or a door and have his way with him and show him how impossible it would be to want someone else when even just putting his lips to Louis’ ear felt like there might just be a mighty god after all. 

Maybe the words had done something, after all, because Louis was suddenly turning around, looking at him from behind dark pupils, “If I ever see you inside that saloon again I will cut your hands off, you understand me, love?” Louis spit out the words, unlocking the front door of the townhouse with one hand and reaching out to unbutton the collar of Lestat’s shirt with the other. 

Lestat was right behind him, suddenly finding that he was the one with his back against the closed door, “I have never—“

“What sort of man is known by name by every whore in town, Lestat?” Said Louis, unrelenting in his fury. Gone was all the languid sweetness of the man whose cock Lestat had fondled under the table, now Louis was all anger, his hands pulling on Lestat’s lapels as if wished to rip them off.

“But I have not bedded any—“

“No! You have wooed them instead. Talking to whores until all hours of the night, is it? Telling them about your life? Your family?” With quick fingers Louis continued, quite savagely,  to unbutton the front of Lestat’s shirt. “There will be no more of that, you hear me? It is done, you are done,”

It was an impossibly confusing anger and it only became more confusing when, shirt completely open to reveal his white undershirt, Louis’ hand pressed him harder against the door by the throat, caging him quite easily with the heat and width of his body. 

“Do I have to repeat myself, Lestat?” Louis hissed and under his sharp nails Lestat’s belt was cut in half by one of Louis’ nails before an answer could be given to the question just asked. The leather flopped, loose and useless then, held in place only by the loops of his trousers.

There was a second, in which nothing happened, and then another, in which Lestat realised, finally and with no small amount of pleasure, that Louis had him half dressed as he stood there panting, red and sweaty from sheer jealousy, making a mess of his clothes and caging him against the door and his right hand was right there, making its way into the wristband of Lestat’s underwear and he was—

“Louis, I swear to you, ah—“ 

Louis’s hand was a perfect fist around his cock, firm like he knew the shape, like he’d known what he would find, what Lestat would like. And Lestat felt wrong-footed by the suddenness of the encounter, the fierceness of Louis’ savage want, the scent of his lust, blood pumping in his veins as those green eyes turned darker than the end of a long, unexplored hallway. He had not prepared for this, for the intimacy of it, the privacy, the impossible curve of Louis’ angry mouth, the heat of his skin. He spared a thought for the role he was supposed to be playing: he the seducer and Louis the seduced. That was his role, who he was supposed to be, and yet he felt useless, looking down into Louis’ eyes as helpless as a prey animal.

“This belongs to me,” Louis was saying, snarling into the crook of Lestat’s neck, using his fangs to cut the skin and lap the small trickle of blood that came out and he was fisting Lestat’s cock, hard as it was held in Louis’ hand. Hard too, the touch of Louis’ delicate hand. Up and down he was touching the head and the shaft and reducing Lestat to nothing with the soft skin of his palm rubbing against the pulsing veins under the head and—, “This, too, belongs to me and only me,”

As if to make sure his point was clear, Louis pressed his mouth over his, open and tasting of sweet, delicious blood. Lestat’s blood, of course, his open wound where Louis had left him bleeding. The warmth of Louis’ tongue touched his own, frantic and a little pushy and he whispered, mumbled, right against Lestat’s lips, “If you want to talk you talk to me, if you want to lie or to discuss music or to rant about the fucking weather or the quality of American-made goods you talk to me, you understand? Tell me— Tell me you understand, Lestat,”

Lestat must have nodded then, overwhelmed under the immense pleasure of having elicited this reaction out of Louis. He looked almost wild, this jealous version of Louis, ruffled and rattled with his mouth latched to Lestat’s neck like an animal ready to tear him apart. 

“Louis, you are the most beautiful—“

“It’s time for you to shut your fucking mouth, Lestat.”

It wasn’t the words that threatened to have Lestat on the floor, it was the swift movement of Louis going down on his knees, elegant and masculine, with the perfect line of his back rolled forward as his fingers unbuttoned Lestat’s trousers. It took less than a second and then he was there, perfect eyelashes touching the skin of Lestat’s pelvis as he nosed his way forward, closer still to the hard cock trapped inside his right fist. 

“Louis,”

A plea came, pathetic and breathless for it was inconceivable. What Louis was about to do, the heat of his lips, less than an inch away from the head of Lestat’s cock, spit coating the corners of his lips as if he were eager, and his cheek so sweet, rubbing the skin of Lestat’s thigh, spreading that heat everywhere. His left hand came up then, cupping the underside of Lestat’s balls and it was, impossible. It couldn’t be. Not Louis’ mouth, not his cheek or his hands touching him like that. He had not earned such a thing, had not planned it. The lights were on. Behind him, the streets were inches away, where people were walking past, where anyone could hear them, as they were, wild and filthy and seconds away from making a mess on the rug. 

“Swear it to me and I will let you put your cock down my throat and breed my mouth.”

The words came, were said and heard and yet they couldn’t be real words. There was no world in which Louis would say such a thing, not to him. It was simply not a thing he could get, a thing so good. So wanted and so immensely undeserved. 

Louis licked him then, touched the very tip of his cock with his tongue. A flat and slow drag of his tongue along the skin, as if he were savoring it, unashamedly. 

Louis’ tongue. Louis’. 

Louis’ voice rough and deep, as if chewing on the words, “ Swear it. You’re mine. Swear it and you can fuck my mouth for as long as you want.”

This was insanity and Louis— 

Louis was licking him again, small kitten licks over the head, sweet, so sweet, filthy; as if he needed to convince Lestat, as if he actually believed that Lestat needed to be seduced, to be made to promise to be faithful when—

“I’ve been yours since the first time I saw you. Since the first time you looked at me. No, it is a lie, since… Since before I knew you. I’ve been yours, Louis. I’ll be yours forever, not even the sun could keep me away from you, Louis, I…”

Louis sucked him in, spreading his lips and his tongue, welcoming Lestat’s cock into the scorching heat of his mouth until the head was pressed against the silk-like skin of his inner cheek and even then, further in, using his fist and the tip of his nose to get closer. Until everything Lestat could feel was Louis. 

He was made of Louis, enveloped and held and had like he belonged to him. 

Something indescribable fizzled up his spine and he thought he might cry, and suddenly Louis caressed his hip, gentle like Lestat was a boy that needed to be coddled and cherished and Lestat felt his knees almost give out under him. He forgot to breathe, his hands fisted at his sides, unable to move, frozen in place by the magnitude of what Louis was doing, by the feel, both physical and emotional, of being wanted in such a way.

“Lestat,” It was Louis’ voice, half-wrecked already, his eyes so deeply green they looked almost brown, almost mortal, “You can touch me, it’s alright,”

And he went back in, with his tongue circling the shaft and his mouth so tight and Lestat did touch him then, almost as if he feared he might not be real, that he had made the whole thing up in his head. That this was only another one of those dreams, where he rutted into the coffin and tried not to disturb Louis’ sleep. 

You can touch me. Had Louis really said that?

“Most days I don’t believe you are real, you can’t be— Louis, you can’t be for me, I—“

Forced to bite his own tongue to keep himself from saying something truly stupid, Lestat tasted his own blood on his tongue, caught the little cough Louis couldn’t control as he took more of Lestat’s cock into his mouth, his throat shaking to accommodate the length.

Louis. 

Beautiful, difficult, untouchable Louis, on his knees with Lestat’s cock in his mouth and his calf eyes half parted but not closed. Looking up at him instead, at Lestat, blood tears trapped in the sweep of his eyelashes. Lestat’s hand reached for his hair, touched his ear and traced the outline of his cock on Louis’ cheek. 

“I don’t deserve you,” He whispered and felt it in his bones that it was true and that he was never going to let Louis go regardless. 

Louis’ eyes screwed shut and he pulled off, a thin line of spit connecting his mouth to Lestat’s cock for one marvelous second. 

“Lestat—“ Louis croaked and looked away, flushed and younger than he’d ever seen him, his hands fisted at his sides as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. And then he was reaching up again, his neck arched back as he spun them around clumsily; Louis, with his back against the door then, Lestat looming over him, large and not completely in control of himself.

“Go on then, use me, teach me how to take it for you,”

And there was that coquetry again but it felt so earnest this time, with those green-brown eyes looking up at him like he was pleading to Lestat to take care of him, to put him in his place and teach him how to please and who was Lestat to ever deny Louis anything. 

Deny Louis anything, ha.

It was preposterous.

Lestat grabbed him by the back of his hair and pried his loose mouth open with his thumb, keeping his jaw open as far as it would go, touching Louis’ tongue, forcing his thumb all the way in until Louis was almost gagging and bending forward involuntarily and then, only then, did he push his cock back inside his mouth just as Louis was trying to inhale. The air, the suction, it was enough to push the head of his cock all the way in, inside the tight clutch of Louis’ throat and he gagged, just a little, and Lestat could smell the sweetness of his tears as he started to cough. But Louis was a fighter and, just as Lestat pushed farther in, he went soft, his throat opening up, supple and yielding as his chest expanded, his shoulders falling in complete surrender. 

And the sounds. As he was choking, running out of air he did not need. Something like a sob left Louis’ mouth and Lestat could hear his throat working, swallowing around the intrusion, whimpering for air and blinking as his knees shuffled under him. 

“You are a fighter, mon cher. Your body, ah, it resists. But not for me, for me you are so soft and you are open, and— Ah, I fear there’s nothing I couldn’t do with your body. It was made for me, wasn’t it?” The words were filthy and yet his voice came out reverent, as if he were the one under Louis, dancing to whatever music he chose for him.

Louis’ throat was wild around him, clenching and unclenching around an intrusion that it wished to welcome. Louis lifted his eyes then, wet with precious pink tears like a weeping Virgin Mary in a church wall. The sweat on his face made him look like a saint, a creature of the divine, as his mouth remained obscenely split open for another man. 

“This body, it would do anything for me, right mon cher?” Lestat panted, swept under the current of his own pleasure, “Give me a child, if I asked, wouldn’t it? Take my seed and make me—“

Louis was nodding, or he was shaking, all air gone from his lungs by then and Lestat touched his lips to his thumb and pressed it against Louis’ top lip, wet with spit and precome and watched in dreamlike awe as Louis’ whole body went lax, soft as if a lever had been pressed to turn off any instinct in him as he’d given up, given himself over to Lestat. And so his back rolled forward, his perfect shoulders soft under Lestat’s closed fist, a thing, this meaty fist of his, all too heavy atop Louis’ bony clavicle.

“You asked and… I am yours, yes, but you are mine, Louis,”

And to make a point of it he grabbed Louis more firmly by the hair and pushed, in and as far as his hips would go and came, thick and leisure down the perfect wet heat of Louis’ throat. Lestat was not good and he was not kind and he was not, in any sense of the word, deserving, and yet he had gone and found this. Found Louis. And Louis, Louis had wanted to do this with him. Had found him deserving, worthy. Had let him touch him and used him and, when Lestat had finally managed to find himself again and look down at Louis, he was there keeling, half slumped against the wall he’d found him glowing, drenched in a sheen of sweat with a blissful smile on his lips and a hand frantically pulling on his cock inside his still buttoned up trousers. 

“Mon cher, let me, let me…”

But it was too late, Louis had reached over with his free hand and blinding searched for Lestat’s wrist and brought it to his lips, not to bite, god not even that, just to smell it, only to inhale the scent of Lestat’s skin as he came with a small, wrecked sound like his pleasure had been ripped from him. 

“Oh, Louis,”

There Lestat stood, looking. Drinking in the sight of Louis like this, with his beautiful nose pressed to the inside of Lestat’s wrist, dozing off already, his otherworldly face blissed out, a butterfly-soft expression like a dazzling darkness taking over the world. 

At some point during the day, as they laid asleep in their coffin, Lestat woke up to a hand around his throat, urgently shaking him awake. 

“You hear that, huh?” 

All was quiet, he could hear only Louis’ breathing, and the sound of their united heartbeat, and the gentle tapping of rain on the ceiling, and—

“I told you it would rain,” Louis whispered, smug and soft and impossibly tender. 

“You did tell me, yes,” Lestat replied and pulled him closer by the back of his neck, anchoring his chin to the naked dip of Louis’ shoulder and went back to sleep. 

–

The next night found them, as it had grown to be their routine, at the breakfast table, where Louis had fallen into the habit of reading his newspapers and magazines mostly in search of clues of the girl’s whereabouts —although Lestat suspected he’d always been nosy when it came to public mortal affairs— while Lestat attempted to busy himself with each day’s correspondence, when he could be bothered to do so. 

They did not speak of what had happened even if Lestat could, often and unmistakably, feel Louis’ heated gaze following him about as if something had changed in the hours following their heated encounter against the front door. 

Now, fresh faced and clear eyed, one could have mistaken Louis’ mood for just any other day’s preoccupation, and yet there was the fidgeting as he played with the corner of his paper. On the other side of the table, Lestat’s cigarette was dropping ash all over one of the innumerable ashtrays their housekeeper had begun to place around the place since the search for the girl had commenced. 

“Listen to this one: ‘Dear Miss March, a young man who wants to marry me has the following qualities. Bad: spends too much money, smokes and eats excessively, drinks moderately, swears rather frequently, quick tempered and easy to anger but not difficult on the whole. Too blunt when it comes to— “

Taking a long drag of his cigarette, Lestat announced quite crossly, “Louis, I am reading my letters.”

But Louis would not be silenced, “Listen: ‘Good: Fun-loving, seemingly devoted, generous with his affections. Occasionally intelligent when the situation requires it. Moderately educated. Good hair. What do you make of such a man? Would he make for a desirable husband? Jane.’ What’s your opinion on the matter? Let’s see if you and Dear Miss March are in agreement.”

“Is that truly what the paper says or are you mocking me?” 

Louis did not bother to lift his eyes from the paper as he replied, “Why would I be mocking you, love? Now say, should Miss Jane take the man for a husband or not?”

Perhaps it was because their little breakfast parlour was unusually warm on that particular night that Lestat could not help but notice the way Louis’ hands, with his sharp little nails, curved around The Picayune as he waited for an answer. 

It had been only mere hours since he’d had Louis against the door. Hadn’t it?

He was struck suddenly by the certainty of not really knowing what day it was. The date, the very hour. Had it been a week or a month or merely a handful of hours since Louis had first started to spend every minute of every day by his side?

There had been no conversation on the matter, not really, and yet here Louis was and nothing seemed to indicate that he would ever leave. It seemed to be the way when it came to Louis: never a conversation, never a discussion, only the action, the consequences, whatever those might be. 

Vampiric life had come with many vexations, the sluggish, almost murky passing of time being one of the scarier ones.

Time moved in ways weird and frightening at times. A day could feel like a thousand years, all piled up on top of one another as if nothing would ever change at all, as if he’d been on this Earth since the dawn of time, wandering along with the first animals out in the wilderness. And then the feeling would be extinguished by some force, some event, a chance encounter with a smell or a sound, reminiscent of a time where he was alive and he would feel young and new and just as afraid as the moment he had first woken up in that bed on top of a tower overlooking a Paris that no longer existed and he would blink, frozen in the darkness of a second of terrible fear as if getting ready to beg for mercy again. Eventually, that too, would pass, and something else would come, another feeling, a vague nothingness, a sensation of being just barely conscious and it would be winter, again or it would be his first time seeing a tiger or smelling the scent of boiled peanuts or he would feel old and taste the rancid bitterness of moldy bread at the back of his throat and wonder, once again, how long had it been, since he’d first arrived in New Orleans?

He blinked now, here in the breakfast parlor. Louis was here. It was all that mattered. Some time had passed, yes. And yet Louis was here, would continue to be here, for as long as Lestat could make it so. He looked at Louis and as Louis looked at him, awaiting an answer to a question, a joke, an invitation to join him in the now.

“Well, if I were Miss Jane’s friend I would tell her that occasionally intelligent and moderately educated do not sound like stellar qualities. One can hardly believe they made it into the good pile. Also a man with a quick temper is a terror to have in the house; he will constantly find one thing or other to bother him and then make everyone else miserable in return. I guess she did not mention if he has some wealth of his own and if he does he could be of use at least as far as setting up house goes.”

Louis’ head had curled to the left just so by then, his mouth closed quite firmly as he contemplated Lestat with an almost bewildered look on his face. 

“And, ah, yes… She has taken the time to write in so she must like the man; terrible business that. One gets into this sort of—“ He gestured widely with his hand, the one not holding the slim line of his cigarette holder, and looked at the paper, all neatly propped over Louis’ knees. “Perhaps she should say yes, if she can bear him. Set up house and see how she feels about the domestics. Oh, that too, terribly dreadful nasty business, all the cleaning, the dirt, the cooking if she can’t afford the help. Her husband’s easy anger might prove to be less than charming… Well, there are always at least a dozen women in each town with an Aqua Tofana recipe to make her a very respectable widow, non?”

He finished his speech with nothing but a quick nod, determined to go back to his tobacco and his letters and whatever else there was for him to do besides contemplating the impossibility of marriage. 

“Right,” Said Louis, shaking his head, his eyebrows so close together as to reveal a series of perfectly straight lines at the center of his forehead, “Well, that’s certainly… I did mention he was very devoted and—“

“And what is the value in that if he cannot control his moods, mon cher? No use in a very devoted shepherd dog who eats sheep, is it?” Lestat said and quickly found himself too busy to continue looking at Louis’ beautiful face. There were still so many letters on the table. Two at least. Perhaps important ones. 

“Shall I at least read you what Miss March had to say on the matter before you bury the body?” Louis shot back, short and plain rude.

One letter was from a J. G. Hawford, the tailor. Pretty important, surely, he’d ordered some spring shirts for Louis and he was eager to see them made before the weather grew warm, whenever that may be. Or it could be a bill that would have to be urgently paid, one could never be sure. And one letter from Grace, clearly urgent as well. He took another drag of his cigarette and slid the letter opener over Grace’s neat handwriting. The paper inside turned out to be green and lightly scented.

Well, that was important. He made a point of not responding to Louis’ question, he would do as he pleased, regardless. 

And so Louis did, his voice filling the room with warmth, “Be how you are, here is what Miss March had to say: ’Sounds to me as if you have already made your mind about said man but let me add this: there is no such a thing as a perfect man; and if there were, no woman would ever fall in love with him, much less marry him, dear. Imagine being married to a man who never made a mistake, who never did anything silly and foolish, but who was invariably right! What a bore, what a miserable worm of dust he would make you seem!’”

“A miserable worm! My god, is this what they are teaching young girls these days? To settle for just anything? A worm!” Lestat replied in an involuntary shrill voice, eyes obstinately glued to Grace’s letter.

He focused on the neat rows of words, the girlish curve of her dots and commas. And yet he could hear Louis chuckling and he could sense him sliding his foot closer and soon he could feel him touching his ankle with said foot, a quick, playful nudge, as he added, “Oh, shut it, ‘No, dear, if you want to be happy though married, pick a man with good qualities who is to you an equal where it matters, an ally where you need it so, and a rival where it pleases you.’ Now there, isn’t that pretty? And you wanted her to kill the man!”

Whatever had Lestat been thinking when it first occurred to him that he could possibly be prepared to live with Louis every single day in his house and not just take him against a table or a wall or that waist-length banister—

Suddenly compelled to interrupt his own thoughts, he stated, loudly, “Here I have a letter from your sister. Now, that’s important. Do you want to know what she says?” And, because this was Louis, he added, “She asks me not to tell you about it.”

Under the small table, Louis’ foot was back on his ankle, nudging him, “Yes, please.”

It never occurred to Lestat that tables could be a dangerous business, and yet here they were again. 

“She starts by calling me Les. Isn’t that funny?”

“Does she really? She must be so angry at you. Or me. Possibly both of us. Possibly even at Paul.”

“Then she asks me if I’d be so kind as to escort her to that little antique shop where I got her… You know, the portrait,” And just to be difficult, Lestat whispered that last part, as if he was still under the impression that Louis might get offended at the mention of it. Louis only hummed, waiting for the rest of the letter to be read to him. “And then she finishes it off by saying, quite prettily, ‘I seem to be surrounded by lies and intrigue and no one deems me worthy of a piece of the pie. Please be so kind as to take me out on a walk, I am like a dog in this house and if they keep me in the dark for much longer I shall get into the cellar and piss on the rice.’ She is a good writer, isn’t she? A family trait, surely.”

“Ignore her, she wants to know what you know about Father and I— our disagreement.” Louis cut in, putting down his newspaper. “You cannot tell her about it, she will tell Mother and—“

“Right. You think I can’t keep a secret, dear?” Lestat replied, more annoyed than he was ready to admit. Louis’ foot was still nudging his own. 

“Not from Grace, not if she is determined to know.”

So there was no hope for Lestat, after all. He couldn’t even be properly angry at Louis for thinking him gullible enough to be tricked by his sister. And he hadn’t managed, a few days ago, to be adequately angry at Paul, for ordering him about. And he could hardly, even now, find the courage to be enraged by Louis’ father requesting he put his bastard daughter in his basement for safekeeping as if he were a lackey. 

“Lestat,” Came Louis’ warning, “I mean it, she’s very smart,”

Perhaps he was becoming a puppet, after all. He was becoming spineless and completely dependent on the attentions of, not only Louis, and, by consequence, equally dependent on the whims and inclinations of all the other vampires who were now in the race for Louis’ time and affection.  but any of these other vampires. He who had been, not that terribly long ago as for anyone, not even himself, to have truly forgotten, the one being coveted and chased and wanted. Creatures had died over him. Fighting each other, over him; his attention, his affection. He who had been the centre of it all, so wanted it made him both giddy and scared of the fierceness of their stares. Like a prince on his throne. 

And yet now, suddenly, he was here in this little wet corner of the Earth and he felt as if he’d been for some time truly scared, personally threatened by the possibility of being locked out of a room where everyone else was having a great time, without him. He could not bear the thought. Could not stand it, being left out, ignored. He did not wish to be unwanted, did not wish it in a particularly childish way, as if the not wishing were as strong a feeling as any he’d ever experienced, an all-engulfing need that threatened to send him crying and sobbing and kicking his arms and legs whichever way in a fit of rage, belly-up on the carpet. Strange human memories of the house of his childhood loomed over him suddenly, of a time where everyone, even his mother, was in on a secret; everyone except him. 

Lestat stood suddenly, looking down at Louis still sitting there with his elegant, pretty hands around his newspaper and his neck so perfectly straight, just as it had been that first time at his house, so poised and still, however long ago. 

“I am a gentleman and I am taking Grace shopping. I won’t hear anymore on the matter, Louis.” 

Words could not describe how infuriating it was to see Louis shrug, just a small folding of his shoulders, his mouth quirking up at the huffy tone of Lestat’s voice, “Alright then, you’ve been warned,”

And Lestat could only look down at him, sitting down by himself like that and, in lieu of crying or doing something equally ridiculous, could only place his hand on Louis’ cool cheek, pulling Louis’ face up towards his, carelessly caressing the skin under his mouth with his thumb, with his nail, saying with a voice not unlike his own father’s angry remarks, “I do not need your permission to do anything, Louis.”

Louis nodded, smile growing bigger, like a cat’s. 

“Alright, then,” He repeated, unperturbed by Lestat’s sudden aggression. 

“I do not,” Lestat denied again, stupidly tender in his holding of Louis’ warm cheek when he’d meant it to be intimidating.

“And yet…” Was Louis’ distinctly feline reply, his eyes huge on his face, his smile all crooked. “You have it.”

Lestat bent down, firm and quick and determined, kissing Louis on the mouth. Pressing his lips over his, leisurely, languidly, until he felt Louis melting, his fingers tangled on the collar of Lestat’s shirt. Louis opened his mouth first, made a little sound, hungry, and Lestat pulled away quickly, denying him the satisfaction. 

There, for your impertinence. See how serious I am.

That would show him, surely.

“You will feed from me tonight, mon cher?” Lestat whispered and he’d meant it to come out as an order, but ended up making it something closer to a plea.

Louis shrugged lazily, his tongue quickly licking the corner of his mouth, a flash of sharp teeth revealed in the gesture, his eyes still closed in the aftermath of being kissed. 

“Louis. You will, won’t you?” Another whispered plea, no way he could deny it now, it being a plea.

Finally, Louis nodded, nuzzling his cheek against Lestat’s open palm. That half formed kiss had been a mistake; Lestat thought, but could not make himself regret it. 

“I shall hunt for both of us then. Wait up for me, here. Will you? Wait for—”

Louis kissed his palm and pushed him away in a flash, that cat-like smile back on his lips, “Go, then. I said you could, I’ll be right here, the whole time.”

It was a cruel thing to say. 

I’ll be right here, the whole time, when Lestat had already decided his manhood depended on his capacity to make his own decisions and do things on his own and when he was so determined to teach Louis a lesson. How cruel then, those words when he’d wanted only to stay, to carve Louis’ name under his with a knife on every letter on the table, on every piece of furniture, like some proof that Louis had been here. 

That Louis was indeed his.

At least from that day on, everyone would know that Louis was his . Even when he refused to talk about it. The day he received a bill from the tailor, the day the Picayune had claimed the death toll from last night’s storm might reach the hundreds soon; Louis had been here, with him; Louis was his, truly. A diary, of sorts; a declaration. 

Louis was quiet as he left him in the parlour and yet his warning, that Lestat might not be able to keep a secret from Grace, seemed to follow Lestat all the way out of the house. It followed him so that, when Grace started, very skillfully and carefully, to interrogate him as they strolled arm in arm down the high street, he felt very pointedly like he ought to have either listened to Louis or bought a knife with him, in preemptive self defense. 

“Ah, would you look at this Les!” 

On a shelf, inside Mr Champtois’ neat little store, Grace had soon spotted a delicate still life sculpture made of blown glass. A bunch of colorful bananas and pears and apples all piled up together on top of a bed of molten leaves. It was a dreadful thing, ugly as could be. Colorful, like a child’s drawing, the glass so thick one would think it accidentally half melted from the early spring heat.

“You should get it. For Louis,” Grace said casually, her hands reaching out as if to dust off the sculpture, never quite touching it. “Might cheer him up,”

See, Lestat could have said then ‘Louis does not need cheering up,’ or he could have said, ‘But Grace, why would Louis need cheering up,’ or he could have even said, if bad came to worse, ‘Be kind to me, I am a man who has never had a sister.’

Instead he found himself saying, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,”

Which, of course, was the entirely wrong thing to say. Belly up, like a toothless puppy.

“Yes, of course, a man like you… What could you know about Louis’ feelings,” She replied with a mock-sad tilt of the head, almost patting him now, carefully, her hand hovering over the air near his wrist, never quite touching him.

Lestat ought to be better prepared by now. And yet.

He knew something of Grace’s character. The ruthlessness of the mother passed directly to the only daughter, as was often the case when girls were raised to be obedient and silent. He thought he knew her, and yet the words stung, as Grace knew they would. Bullseye. And he almost wished he had Louis here, his steady presence the essential buffer between his family’s uncooperative half-acceptance and his unrelenting need to be liked. 

In truth, it was only Paul he could handle. Paul he understood. He and Paul, they managed to mirror one another in their shared incompleteness. Only Paul, truly, for he could hardly handle Louis on the best of days.

Louis he craved, felt him like a missing limb, a closed book he’d never be able to read. Louis he wanted and longed for and needed in all his close-lipped nature. And Grace was right, yes. She was so right. Lestat knew nothing of Louis’ feelings. His softness, his anger, the quiet cruelty. You are mine, he’d said, demanded, and then promptly refused to make eye contact, to talk to him. Refused to hold his hand when he’d reached for it on the breakfast table that very same night.

Grace was right. 

Lestat did not know, might never know, if Louis truly enjoyed even just something as simple as his company. Did Louis long for him in any other way than what was convenient, what had been delivered to his doorsteps when nothing else was really available?

You are mine.  

And yet, what did mine mean to Louis?

The question burned in his throat as if he’d swallowed the dying embers of a coal fire. Louis, leaving him outside to wait. Louis, ignoring his letters. Louis, dreaming of a life in Paris where he could be free. Louis, his hand clasped on the newspaper, his eyes on the page.

If either of them had been mortal when they met, would Louis have looked at him? Chosen him? Would Louis, with his almost complete isolation from mortal affairs —as he were scared to even look, except through books and newspapers, at what he and his family could no longer be— ever consider him worthy of the Dark Gift? 

And what to say of the possibility of a mortal Louis. It had been so very long since Lestat had ever spared even a handful of thoughts for a mortal, and yet the tenderness of a wholly mortal Louis threatened to be enough to unravel him. 

What would he have been like? His Louis, mortal, scared, hopeful; like a bird, heart beating a mile an hour, ready to flee. 

A melancholic man, surely. Dazzlingly so. Unburdened by the killer’s existence. He would have fought the Dark Gift. He would have resented Lestat for it. He would have blinked his rich brown eyes to the monster and feared damnation. And yet there was no fate in which Lestat would have met a human Louis and not taken him for himself. That Louis might as well have been born cursed with this fate for Lestat would have chosen him in every lifetime, in every sunlit or moon-bathed version of themselves. 

Grace was right and Lestat ought to lie, to lash out at her for her cruelty, and yet, what would be the point of it?

“You know him better than I do, Grace. I would never claim otherwise.” He said quietly, touching the delicate wing of a pinned butterfly, small and dark against its thin glass case. A very pretty thing, so pretty one could almost forget its dark origins. 

His answer somehow gave her pause and Lestat could see her flinch, unaccustomed to cruelty not easily returned, “I did not mean—“

“It does not signify. I’ll get you something, anything you wish for,” Lestat demanded, instead of letting her finish her sentence. An apology would be an embarrassment for them both. 

Behind them, the murmured thoughts of the shopkeeper grew more excited. He thought in French, something a bit more modern than what Lestat had grown up with. He thought, politely, of a nice ring he’d been meaning to sell to the right customer. Rubies, ladies loved rubies. 

“No rings,” Lestat warned him out loud, ignoring the man’s startled face. Turning to the sister he added, gently, “But anything else you want,” 

He shouldn’t have left Louis alone at home, it felt suddenly like, no matter his promises, he might be gone by the time Lestat managed to make his way back home. That would serve Lestat right, after all, for not listening. 

But then, looking down at his wrist, he found that Grace was touching it with a delicate gloved hand, “Forgive me,” She paused, unsure, perhaps of what to say. Maybe she was simply recalculating her strategy; Lestat thought it better not to invade her thoughts to find this out. “But I did warn you, I have been spending too much time alone in the house. Louis and I used to read together in the evenings, before everyone else woke up. It’s only me now.”

Silence stretched between them, her hand still on his wrist. He was not sorry for taking Louis. He would never be sorry. Her loss was his biggest gain. He had never pretended to be selfless. He could not feel bad about this fact. 

But he was not cruel, not with her, “I have two choices for you: I can purchase something pretty for you today or I can buy something ugly and ridiculous for either Louis or Paul. What do you say, Grace dear?” 

He stood closer, tilting his head, trying to convey a sense of playfulness. Grace truly was a pretty girl, he could imagine her married to a man who knew how to listen, how to follow directions well.  He could imagine her as a mother, as a grandmother; her mother’s coldness turned protective when it came to her own children. Grace would have made a good mortal. She smiled then, gently, that soft, girlish expression on her face anyone rarely got to see. 

“No point in wasting any money on them. I shall pick something for myself.” But quietly, she added, “You’ll tell me this at least: Louis is living with you now, is he not?”

“He is.” Lestat replied, as neutral as he could.

A stormy, almost rebellious look crossed her face and she narrowed her eyes into two thin, feline lines, “He always gets away with it, you know? Louis. Rules do not apply to him, no. He acts like they do, like his life is so very difficult, and yet he never seems to face any consequences. Not for him, the son.”

Something Louis had said, not long ago, made him stop and stare at the woman in front of him. My sister hates me for sport. But to Lestat this wasn’t hate as much as it was rivalry and the only reason there was a rivalry at all was because they had both been raised so… biblically. Denied, under the watchful eye of their parents, any semblance of freedom– they now believed anything good to be a scarce, precious thing they would have to either share or kill each other for. 

And Grace didn’t even know about the girl.

“This might surprise you, Grace, but I don’t think anything has come easily to Louis. He has fought against himself and against others for what he has. It might not seem that way to you, and I will not get between you two, but it would be a mistake to assume it hasn’t cost him. Whatever he now has, every little freedom, every pleasure; he has been made to pay the price.”

Grace blinked, angry now past the point of politeness, her hand still on his wrist, less gentle now, “And you think I haven’t fought enough? That Louis, a man, a son, doesn’t enjoy privileges I couldn’t even dream of—“

“He is a man, yes. But let us not pretend he enjoys all the privileges of the title.” Lestat replied, equally angry, and thought to take his hand away from under Grace’s but, once again, she was faster, holding on to him with sharp nails, “I beg you won’t speak ill of Louis in front of me again, Grace; or you will find exactly where my kindness ends.”

Accosted, again and again, he felt faint under the weight of those unimaginable images of Louis’ vulnerability. Louis talking about going to Paris. About writing a book and finding a lover. Louis and his little sweetheart, his young, tremulous dreams of being whole for his family, of being someone else entirely. The memory of Louis’ long, wet eyelashes in their coffin, on that settee in the de Pointe du Lac’s sitting room, in his makeshift resting place under his human bed, pink blood tears often wetting his face as he slept, deep in some unreachable tumultuous trance. Louis who was, even now, barely a boy. Louis who carried everyone and everything so close to his heart he might soon run out of space to fit it all. 

Who was Grace to speak of Louis’ transgressions? What could she pretend to know about the sort of man Louis was?

He would hurt Grace, right here, for that Louis. For any version of Louis there was or would be.

Several inches down, Grace was staring up at him with enormous, reddening eyes as he loomed over her, his face something no longer pleasant, no longer playful, “Oh, I… I see,”

She nodded then, her hand still determinedly closed around his wrist. Lestat did not try to pull away, instead he leaned closer and saw at once all the little things from Louis’ face that were also Grace’s. The curve of her brow and the mole on his cheek that he so loved and the coiling strands of hair that made up their hairlines. 

She was Louis’ sister; his and, by extension, also, Lestat’s. He would not harm her. Louis wouldn’t allow it.

You are mine.

“Now, about that gift.” 

It was almost another hour before he could make his excuses and walk Grace home but, in truth, the whole outing had turned sour in his mind and he longed only to be back. To see Louis again, just as he’d left him on the breakfast table, reading his newspaper with a quirk of his mouth and a foot pressed against his. Even if Louis did not wish to speak on the matter of what they were, he would still want him. 

He fed in a rush, from a mortal who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ran home like a madman as fast as his legs could carry him, risking discovery and whatever else might happen in his carelessness. Whatever his promise, Louis was not on the breakfast table, he was upstairs in the small sitting room near the landing, nose buried in a neat stack of papers, his pinky finger curled around the creased cuff of his rumpled shirt, right hand covered in ink. 

“You’re home early,” Louis said, looking up at him as if he’d never left.

Propped against the back of a chair, his ankles on display, there was nothing Lestat wanted more than to kiss him again as he’d done at the beginning of the night. He would go on his knees, right there, and he would kiss every inch of Louis’ body, starting with his feet.

You’re still here. I feared you might have left. Was the wild thought, he did not dare confess. 

Instead he said, “Promise me, right this moment, that you won’t let me do that ever again.”

“Do what?” Louis was frowning, hands quickly putting away the stack of paper he’d been working on.

Putting away the paper?

Lestat advanced further into the room and tried hopelessly to catch a glimpse of what had so occupied Louis’ mind before his arrival, “Think I can best your sister at anything, she is cruel and ruthless and way beyond anything I can handle on my own.” 

Louis responded only with a smile while Lestat could not help but add, “What were you doing?”

“Writing. I guess, documenting. Our search, mostly. Keeping notes, where, when, how. Trying to keep track of everything we’ve found so far about the girl.”

Louis' back appeared stiff as a rod as he gave his answer. A lie, maybe, it was hard for Lestat to tell when he was this tired. And he was tired, so tired, in fact, that he found himself incapable of facing another front against the de Pointe du Lacs that night, instead willing himself to let his curiosity go. He would not push, would not risk another fight. His determination was so that hearing himself saying what followed seemed almost surreal, “I want you to feed from me out here tonight. Not in the coffin. Here.”

If he’d thought Louis’ back was stiff before it was nothing against the almost painful line of his spine as he looked straight at Lestat’s face as he processed the words, the demand delivered almost petulantly, selfishly, the way a child calls for his mother’s attention. 

“Absolutely not,”

Lestat looked at the small crumpled figure now rising from his writing spot. The decorative table, hidden under a messy pile of papers and writing supplies, looked dainty now that Louis was up on his feet, all long legs and narrow angles. Ink-stains and anger and a shirt so crumpled one might think Louis had been sitting on it instead of wearing it, made of Louis a vision of sheer domesticity. 

“I will drag you by the back of your neck if I have to but you will feed from me in the light tonight, Louis. I mean it.”

Louis huffed but the tips of his ears were turning red and Lestat knew, just by that small detail alone, the battle had been lost for Louis. Louis would not flush unless he were imagining the act occurring and Louis would not go through the trouble of imagining it if he wasn’t, at the very least, considering it. And if he were considering it, then it could be done. Easy as that.

Could one be hungry and despondent and beautiful and impossibly difficult all at the same time without having to stop to catch one’s breath from the effort of such Herculean a task?

One would only have to look at Louis to know the answer. 

“What’s gotten into you today?” Louis demanded, standing a little closer, a few feet away now, each step on the carpet delivered quietly, lazily, as if he were a jaguar trapped in the castle of some king intent on taming the beast for his own amusement. “Grace? That joke in the newspaper this morning?”

“I don’t want to argue, I want you to feed.” Lestat replied, reasonable, direct. 

“Hmm.” Louis replied, closer still. His hand came up, ahead of him, dark, dried ink, had sunk into the creases of his palm, and he guided Lestat with it, a solid, determined press of warmth against his chest, until they were by the small sofa with the pink and yellow flowers. “I did warn you, about Grace.”

Louis pushed him back and Lestat went and there was suddenly the weight of Louis over him on the sofa, over his open lap and the widening pace between his knees. Tall and solid, qualities that made him heavy, the weight of a man, his thighs so firm, trapping Lestat against his body. 

“Did you buy something useless today, then?” Louis said, settling over him as if they’d done this a million times before. Intimate and soft. His fingers were fast, light, soon at Lestat’s throat and down his collarbones, like fluttering butterflies trapped in a glass case. 

“No,” Lestat lied, avoiding the mental image of the silver mirror he’d purchased for Grace, the gold pencil holder with the body of a mermaid on its head for Louis. Well, it had had to be left at the store, he’d wanted it to be polished before giving it to Louis. He pulled Louis closer by the ribs, his weight shifting forward. 

“Sure that’s true,” Louis’ breath on his neck, close and startlingly warm from the unwavering heat of the house, felt dangerous. “Not like you at all to try and buy your way out of a difficult situation,” 

Lestat had wanted this. He reminded himself. He’d demanded it. In here, with the lights on, it had meant something to him. Louis' nose touched the pulsing nook under his ear, his palms still pressed to Lestat’s collarbone, trapping him against the sofa’s stiff back. 

“Buying my— I do no such thing—“

The tip of Louis’ fang touched his skin then and it was cold, so cold it made him shiver. Trapped, under Louis, his palms all corded strength, his body startlingly big and yet narrow over his. 

“Sure, you can lie to yourself all you want, love.”

He’d been about to protest but Louis’ teeth were inside him, the paralysing pleasure of it making him quiet, subdued. He’d stuffed himself for Louis and here he was now, humming, a soft whisper of pleasure in his throat as he fed what he was due. Shifting, the solidness of his lap, of his hardening cock, pressing against Lestat’s. 

Yes, Lestat reminded himself, this had been the point, to do this and look at Louis, to be allowed to look at Louis with his eyes closed and his face half buried against Lestat’s neck. His long fingers twitching, his palms, dark and wide as the wings of a hawk on his breastbone.

“Missed me?” Lestat whispered, half measured words, looser than he wished them to be. I missed you. It was a foolish thing I did, leaving. “Louis, did you—“

Louis dragged his tongue over the two little holes in Lestat’s neck, nosing down, biting again, unnecessarily cruel. Beastly.

“Quiet now, I’m doing what you told me to do.” He mumbled, biting, again, a third time. Breaking the skin like it was gossamer-thin, a maiden’s night-shift on her wedding night. 

God, Lestat wanted him. Closer still, a thousand bites would not ever be enough. He felt the pleasure of the feeding inside his old bones. It was the most erotic thing, feeding someone. Lestat felt as if he were a woman, a wife in her clean kitchen, preparing the food for everyone in the house. Making sure it was good, succulent and spiced, drenched in butter until it glistened in the light of an oven’s yellowing lightbulb. Barefoot with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, sweating, with fingers knuckle deep in milk and flour and eggs until he’d made a dough, until the sugar had spilled all over the counter and someone had come into the room, hungry for him, and licked his fingers clean. Humming their pleasure, each finger and knuckle, licked clean. Savoring him, what he had to offer.

But it was not just someone he was feeding, it was Louis. Shaking on his lap, with his knees parted and his back arched. Louis who’d never let anyone else see him like this. 

“I hope it is good—“ A whisper, in this cavernous kitchen of his fantasies. Louis hungrily sucking on his skin, on the blood that was as much his as it was Lestat’s. “I wanted it to be good, for you— My—my—“

Louis ignored him. Or maybe he didn’t, as a hand soon came to rest over the hardness in his trousers. Just the back of his knuckles, almost careless, cocky. Louis thought that would be enough to get Lestat off. Just some rutting on the sofa and the hard, unyielding back of his hand. And it was, of course it was. By the time it was over he felt as if he had floated away on the back of Louis hawk-like hands, lost somewhere above the ceiling, above the little house and the busy streets and the huge moon in the sky. 

He had no memory of getting into coffin that night, but he must have, as he was there, the next night when the moon came back up, his half hard cock nestled in between Louis clothed thighs, his thumb buried in the wet heat of Louis’ mouth. Wet, crudely so, spit all the way down his wrist, his hips shifting forward into Louis’ body as if on instinct. 

“Again?” He heard Louis’ voice, rough and deep, heavy with sleep, “‘Thought you said I was the one starved for it—“

Half-asleep himself rutting into the space between Louis clothed thighs, grunting into him, fever-mad for another release, for the dark pleasure of making Louis submit and—

“Alright, I—“ Louis, again, more awake then, pressing back, his ass against Lestat’s body, and then his feet, naked, all soft skin, the fine hair on the arches soft against Lestat’s toes. And the intimacy of it, of knowing the shape of someone’s feet, his toes and ankles, so privately, pushed Lestat from simple lust to hunger, his fingers marching down Louis’ body until he found the hair at the base of his cock, the half hard shape of the thing, plumping up in his fist. “Ah, alright, yes, I—“

Louis, half incoherent with lust too. Lestat licked him then, like an animal, down the side of his neck and as far as his pajamas would allow his tongue to reach, “You are hard because of me. Here,” He pumped Louis crudely, the skin yielding under his hand. “My blood filling your cock, thanks to me—“

“God, the things you say, shut u—“

A grunt, Lestat pushing him, like a brute, forward into the hard wood of the coffin, Louis’ startled moan answer enough. Lestat could not stop talking, voice deep, lost in the darkness, “Made for me, this body, remember? I told you, last time—”

“As if I could, ah, as if you’d let me forget,” Was Louis’ answering huff, but his cock was so hard in Lestat’s fist he feared Louis had liked the manhandling more than he’d ever admit, even to himself.

“That’s right. I won’t let you forget,” And he dragged his own teeth down the back of Louis’ neck, leaving red, angry welts behind and fisted Louis’ cock so tightly Louis’ body shook with it.

It would be some time, hours, surely, maybe a whole night, before Louis spoke again, lost in the haze of lust he so pretended to fight but by then his eyes had turned black as night, half lidded, his feet twisted with Lestat’s and twitching slightly, reduced to some primal, desperate version of himself as he increasingly was, when it came to this. 

“Louis, look at me,” Lestat whispered then, and did not wait for a sign of approval before he was grabbing his shoulder, twisting Louis’ lax torso around until they were facing each other in the small space. Louis, boneless, just went, his neck so loose his face made a flat noise as he hit a new side of the small pillow, “Look at me,”

And as Louis finally looked Lestat reached down, over the wet curve of Louis’ naked belly, wet with his spend and the evidence of the three, no, four times, Lestat had brought him to completion during the day, at some point in their slumber, things he was barely aware of doing, woozy with dehydration. Remembered Louis had shook wildly that last time, shoulders going in, curved like he was in pain, his thighs spread apart around Lestat’s hips. It had left him a little unwell, tired, perhaps, lost somewhere inside himself, concerned for Lestat’s stamina, even when he’d drunk so much from him, Louis had drunk so much and yet— 

He was looking now, Louis, as Lestat had asked him to. So Lestat touched him gently, that wet belly, and his sticky palm came up to his mouth. It took Louis a second or two to process it, what Lestat meant to do with the evidence of his pleasure, and then his lips parted or a ragged exhale and Lestat proceeded to lick it. His whole tongue leaving his mouth, savoring it, watching Louis’ eyes screw shut as his cock gifted him a valiant twitch. 

He licked his palm clean until every drop of Louis’ had been tasted and only then stopped to press his mouth to Louis’. 

“Now we’re even,” He whispered in a voice that sounded nothing like his own, “A feed for a feed, mon cher.”

Mine, yes. 

Louis gave no answer, loose as a doll in its box, his mind so quiet as if he were asleep, and yet he still blinked, nosing closer on the coffin floor, stubbornly tangled like a thread around Lestat’s body. Lestat feared he was witnessing something so special and improbable, Louis might never allow him to see it ever again. By the time they managed to get themselves up, washed and dressed, there remained a distinctly bright sort of loosened look on Louis’ face. It remained there when he suggested they delay their excursion another night, on account of the late hour. 

“What would you like to do instead, mon cher?” Lestat asked, trying not to stare at Louis for fear he might lose it, that little spark in his eyes. 

“I thought we might stay in.” He said, with his back turned to him and his hands deep in his pockets. “Put on some music, read.”

He had Louis again that night, just a quick press of his hand over Louis’ cock on the sofa. The prideful joy of knowing that now, how to make it good, how to reduce Louis to a mess of limbs on the setee, book forgotten on his chest, mouth panting like he’d need this really badly and could not care less about his book or the music or the world outside those walls. 

“How old are you again? A man your age, you should be— Over this by now, don’t— Don’t stop, Lestat, don’t—“

Things were escalating rapidly and there was still the possibility of Louis getting scared, of him lashing out and running for the hills. But the look, the fucked out gaze, remained there all night and well into the next night, as they finally set out for the marshes to find the girl.

—

“I did tell you to wear the brown trousers,” Louis shouted over the roar of the engine as Lestat kneeled on the muddy road, cranking the hell-forsaken beast they called an automobile. 

“Merde, Louis. Not now,”

If the automobile was a beast, the roads were its legs. Hell was not a pit of fire but miles and miles of wet, sloppy road, its surface thick with mud and leaves and all sorts of debris, left behind by the storm. They hardly managed to travel a few miles into their destination before the car gave up completely, the wheels sloshing back and forth with no grip to propel the machine forward. They abandoned the automobile soon after and made it a few miles deeper into the swamp by foot. 

There was the hope that they might hear her, her thoughts stark and loud here far away from the road where no other people were to be found, only perhaps the rare hunter, a few smugglers or fools who thoughts they could survive, here, where nature was so wild that even two full grown vampires struggled to find way. 

No such luck. There were no thoughts, only the savage sounds of animals, the loud cheering of birds among the roaring of frogs and toads, the insufferable tittering of a thousand mosquitoes. Every animal here felt foreign to Lestat, as strange as if he’d been dropped on the surface of the moon to hunt for blood. 

“Claudia! Claudia, are you there?” Louis had resorted to shouting, begging for her to make an appearance. They did not even know if she’d ever stepped foot in the marsh, there were only theories. Louis’ wild theories and nothing else.

The night went on and so did they but it appeared to be only them, and the animals and the crushing rush of the river, somewhere miles away and still so loud one could hardly hear his own thoughts. Crushing as the invisible current must have been, returning home empty handed proved much worse on the spirit.

“It was only a theory, Louis. We’ll try again,” Lestat said, exhausted, when they’d finally found their way back to their vehicle. 

Still, Louis was not deterred, exhibiting a determination that, while handsome and charming, annoyed Lestat for it meant they might be stuck looking for the girl out there in that wet hell for as long as Louis decided they ought to. 

“Tomorrow we’ll travel deeper, follow scent instead of sound.” 

It was at the tip of Lestat’s tongue to be rude. He was the hunter, or he’d been, once upon a time, yet a single look from Louis made it clear the younger man would not bear argument, nor denial. And so they set out again the next night, just as Louis had ordered it, and the next and the next and even the next. 

It was during their fifth miserable night out with the animals and the crushing river when, soaked to the bone and covered in mud and animal manure and the miasmatic stench of still water left to fester in enough filth and disease to kill even to strongest mortal, that Louis' theory proved, after all, right. 

They found, ahead of them in a small clearing in between water and solid ground, the mangled body of three alligators, brown scaled creatures piled neatly on top of one another until they formed a strange figure, like a bizarre sculpture of flesh and moss and, strangely, strangest of it all, the animal corpses seemed to be half buried under dozens of wilted chrysanthemums. Where anyone could even find funeral flowers in this wasteland went unasked and yet they couldn’t help but stop and look and smell the sweet-rotten scent of the little display, the putrid blood mixed with the distinctly dramatic quality of the formation. The animal limbs, their big gaping mouths parted in a silent, deadly roar. 

A sign, you think? For us? Asked Louis, far too eager for someone who Lestat considered still, quite sane. 

A sign we should turn around, you mean.

Louis hummed, quietly, eyes trained to the shiny yellow fang protruding from one of the creatures’ mouths. 

“How strange, three of them. The small ones tolerate each other, they aren’t as territorial as the big ones, but still, for someone to have killed them all together like this…” Louis said, coming closer to touch, with his bare hands, the creature’s flank, revealing thus the unmistakable shape of a bite mark hidden in the underside of its long neck. “These ones… I can’t tell if they’re fresh, they’re sort of cold all the time, I believe.” 

“Met many crocodiles in your time, mon cher?” Lestat replied, pressing his ruined shoe to the open belly of one of the corpses, hearing the squish of its entrails as they sloshed out of its body. 

“Alligators. See? The mouth is big and shaped like a shoe.” Louis, too, kicked lightly at one of the bodies, sending the thing slowly down the wet shoreline and into the water. “I doubt an animal did this, the flowers are… Well. And a hunter would have taken the skin and the teeth, and possibly the feet.”

Lestat wondered if this was Louis being hopeful. If they’ve reached the point in their adventure when one found hope in a pyramid of dead alligators dumped by the riverside with all their precious little limbs intact and a bed of flowers to go with it. 

“At last, if she’s eating this she can’t be too unhappy to be found,” Lestat remarked, trying not to sound as stupidly hopeful as he felt. “One could even say we are rescuing her,”

“Don’t underestimate her, she’s a young girl, for all we know she might think alligators are easier to handle than grown men who were foolish enough to come all the way here to look for her.”

A memory came to mind, he had been told that once. Most women are weak, be it mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable. He had not agreed with the first part of the statement, not even then, but he found that it was the second part that had proved more true than he’d ever dared to consider. 

They soldiered on, leaving the pile of bodies to the mosquitoes. Even as immortals, the search was tiring, both on the body and the mind. Everything around them unfathomably difficult. Their shoes would get stuck, once and twice again in the mud and the trees would catch on their clothes and their hair, their faces would become victims of thorns and jagged plants intent on making it as hard as possible to advance forth, wherever forth might have been by that point. 

And then, eventually, again, just like the alligators, a big, red circle of fresh blood, painted with bare hands over the trunk of a tree greeted them where they could not have missed it even if they wished for it. A sign, as if she were mocking them. Her thoughts still silent, no other choice but to follow her lead forth. 

“In my long life, I should have been more grateful that I did not have a sister.” Lestat declared nonsensically at some point in their excursion when the scent of rancid blood had reached the deepest crevices of his sinuses and he knew, with all certainty, that they were being made fools of. “I did not know it was a blessing, at the time.”

“Stop it. You really are old,” Was all Louis said for a while, and then, quietly, “Can one really survive like that? From animal blood alone?” 

“Survive, yes. In a manner. But she would not be whole, the hunger would not abide. It’s simply not enough, mon cher. Half an existence.”

Louis only hummed and for an eternity it felt like the only sound in the whole swamp until they reached a clearing of trees, if not of water, never of water, water was everywhere here, creeping up the longer ahead they walked until it was up to their thighs and there, finally, they encountered true silence. It came all in a rush as if the sounds around them had been coming from a radio and the radio had been suddenly turned off, smashed off the mantel in a violent rage. Gone, all that. The mosquitoes and the birds and the mysterious sounds of some wrecked version of the natural world far off in the distance.  

The silence was eerie, scary to the point of compelling Lestat to fill it with anything that crossed his mind, “Can you imagine the sort of men… Those first Frenchmen who set foot in here and thought they could tame all this? They must have been mad, truly mad. And mortal they were, too. Mad mortals looking at this… Wet, nasty grave-like darkness and thinking ‘we must continue ahead, we must build a city here among the alligators and the water snakes.’ Mad creatures. The mosquitoes alone should have been enough to send them back running to where they came from, and yet they did not, they-“

“They thought they could enslave whole human beings, Lestat; their understanding of what was tamable was certainly skewed.” Louis replied, a clipped edge to his voice, “But staying here, I see the appeal. The ones who survived would have felt like gods, more immortal than you or I will ever feel. Once you’ve walked and swam, and dug your heels into the shaky mud and still made it with your delicate life intact and enough limbs attached to your body, why would you want to leave? You’d feel as if it belonged to you, this terrible corner of the world. Made for those few who could survive it.” 

As he spoke, Louis pushed relentlessly forward, sloshing water around his body until a circle of dead leaves up ahead shook and something, small and slippery made its escape away from him as fast as its little legs could carry it. For an instant, the moonlight shone on the creature’s back, like a scaly mirror on the run. 

Nevermind the creature, Lestat could only look at him, Louis, who had indeed swam and walked and dug his heels here as a child, made of something sturdier than I could ever be.

“If you ever think of leaving me in a place like this alone my ghost will haunt you, Louis.”

At last, Louis turned to face him, only a few feet away from Lestat, a huge smile plastered on his dirty, moonlit face.

“I never imagined you would be such a coward. It’s quite off putting, this side of you,”

Violently crushed by the sheer flirtation in Louis’ voice, Lestat reached for Louis, through the water, the stillness, a fist, soon tightly coiled around Louis’ small waist and there was his body again, as he’d been in the coffin, on the sofa, a solid, familiar length across Lestat’s front, “You’re being cruel now, Louis. This is the swamp, getting to you, making you as ruthless as she is.”

And Louis laughed and shook, even in the frigid water, in the tenuous light of a shadowy moon; here he was, laughing and reaching back to playfully push Lestat away. An answered prayer, even the worst of places worth more than a thousand nights at the opera as long as one had Louis at their side. 

As long as one had Louis. What a thought. 

To have Louis. Like planting a rose garden in this swamp.

“You look a mess, your hair—“ Louis laughed wetly, still pretending to shake Lestat off of him, water sloshing around them as Lestat found his wrists and pinned him, searching blindingly with his mouth for the wet gap of Louis’ own mouth, “Lestat,”

It suddenly occurred to him, almost as if by sheer chance, that this was the very first time since that first angry kiss on Louis’ porch that he’d attempted to really kiss Louis outside the walls of the home they now shared. How cleverly punishing then that, as fate would have it, it would be precisely on this first great imprudence that someone would ever witness them kissing, mouth to hungry mouth; and how perfectly ridiculous that said kiss would immediately turn into something so voraciously desperate that not even a child could ever think of it as anything but pure immorality, this adult lust; and how supremely stupid then, that, after all, a child would indeed see them kiss and ask with no small amount of giddiness in her voice, “What are you two doing?” 

All came to a close around them, the swamp, the water, the muted sounds around their bodies, the disorienting quality of Louis’ hand tightening around a belt loop near his hip, and yet his immoral instincts did no fail him as he searched for the voice, the high, lyrical voice, soft, round vocals, a thing half grown. 

Perched atop a thin, high branch of a nearby cypress was the girl. The girl. The girl who was Louis’ sister who was immortal and lost and real and here. 

Just looking at her, god she really was Louis’ sister. 

And Louis had been right, after all. About the victims carelessly tossed by the side of the road, about the flight instinct of a child driven away from civilisation and right into the wilderness. 

She looked like a bird, the girl, fine boned among the bright green, pointed leaves of the tree, covered in mud and muck and with the face of a small robin, those bright big eyes like centerpiece of a face almost sketched in charcoal, all soft, smudged lines. And she was so small, so delicate and yet so grown for a single branch of a tree to hold her weight, and yet so young for the Dark Gift, and so very dirty for someone brand new to the world, just born, really, in the big scheme of things, of what it meant to exist. So confusing was the sight of her, her very existence, that Lestat forgot how to speak. 

“Claudia,” Said Louis, his voice having gone high with emotion, his fingers still tangled on Lestat’s belt-loop, “I’m Louis—“

“I know who you are,” Claudia replied from her delicate branch, an angry, stubborn tilt to her mouth so like Louis’ that Lestat could almost laugh if the situation weren’t as tragic as it was, “Is that your sweetheart?”

She laughed a little as he said it, mean in a way only girls her age were capable of.

“This is my friend Lestat, we were—“

“What a lie, Louis de Pointe du Lac,”  

She was barefoot, her little toes curled around the bark of the tree like she really was a bird, liable to be pushed off her height by a strong wind or a light shove. In truth, it had not actually occurred to Lestat to really consider that the girl they were searching for would eventually turn up and be real. That she would have toes. That she would look so lost. 

One quick look at Louis’ face and Lestat could almost imagine his own thoughts mirrored in his face, sharp as he’d never seen it. 

“We came here… Well, we thought you might be out here, on your own and we thought… We thought you might want to come home, with us. Not like— Not like before. But with us.” Louis said, careful and hopeful, and waited.

There was no response. One could see on her face that she did not care to give Louis one. She did not trust him, this muddy creature, but she was curious, it was visible in the way her neck tilted and her toes shifted on the branch, as if considering the jump. 

“He sent you to find me and put me back in that basement.” She said finally, her voice firm and grown up as if she had grown a dozen years in the time it had taken for Louis to offer her a way back to New Orleans. 

Louis, accustomed to talking to children like they were indeed little innocent creatures in need of protection, was about to lie and Lestat suddenly felt seized by the terror of losing her, of having her run off deeper into the marsh, sinking into the water, flying off into the night, never to be seen again. 

“He did, but I told Louis we should kill him instead,” Lestat replied and felt his heart swell at the sudden excitement in her face, in the way her eyelashes trembled as she blinked down at him, her toes pointed, “But Louis said we should ask you first, that it would be rude, not to ask first.”

It was Louis who yanked on his belt loop then, chastising him for the lie, but it was the girl who laughed, full of glee at the transgression, the suggestion of violence and retaliation for the sins of a father she’d probably wanted to love once. Louis would never understand it, not like he and the girl could. 

“Alright,” A sharp nod, her hair moving so wet and tangled as to make a sound, like peeling something off a wall, “But I won’t go into the basement. I’ll kill you both first,”

Still, she did not move from her branch, as if waiting for something, some secret word or code or—

Louis’ voice rose then, over the trees and the water and the thick distrust in the air between them, “We have a room for you. In our… home. It’s upstairs and it doesn’t have a lock on the door but it has a window to the back garden. It ain’t too big, the garden, I mean, more like a patio; but the neighborhood cats have their little fights there sometimes, right over the blue hibiscus, and they make a big old mess of the petals, and there’s no better spot in the whole house to watch them. And it has a bed, and a bookshelf and a rug and a huge mirror with little gold leaves painted on it. The furniture came with the house, but we could look for prettier pieces if you want. And it—“ Louis’ voice cracked then, wet like an egg, and he blinked furiously up into the trees, searching and full-body shaking, with his fist rattling Lestat’s right hip, as he found the words, “It’s next to our room, and you can come over whenever you want and just be with us, or we could all go downstairs and listen to music or you could help us decide where the piano should go because I don’t think we’ll ever agree on it. It will— It will not be like before. It won’t, Claudia. Not with us. Do you— do you understand? What I’m trying to say?”

She must have. 

She must, because soon there was no girl on top of a tree and instead there was a girl barely waddling through too deep water towards them. It was a curious thing, the fear. She was immortal, she would not drown. Could not. And yet, the fear. Shared, between him and Louis, this sudden protectiveness as they reached out, a hand, an arm, trying to catch her slippery, fine shoulders. 

She did not reach back for Louis, turning instead to face Lestat, that little quirk of her mouth that could be fear or it could not. Louis did not react, and yet it must have stung, this small rejection. 

“Hi,” She said to Lestat, her chin almost submerged, only a head, then, barely a whole person, “Carry me?”

And then her voice, low, like a whisper, in his mind: Will he be angry? Will he be very very angry at me? 

Louis was her brother and yet she did not trust him, could not, because of it, perhaps.

No, that’s not Louis.

Are you a liar?

Yes, often; but not today. I’m entirely too wet. 

And she giggled, high and happy, her teeth taking over her face and making her look younger still. 

“I like you,” 

Lestat carried her, carried her small body all the way back to the automobile and sat her in between them on the long seat and then watched her in quick stolen glances as she looked intently out into the world and the fast approaching lights of a town she had only recently fled. Watched her still as Louis guided her home, careful not to touch her, careful, so very careful that Lestat could see her mind twist and turn and plan and conjure all the possible reasons they could have to bring her here. No matter what Louis had said, she did not believe them yet.

In the foyer, Louis grabbed his hand and Lestat suddenly realised, after a single look at Louis’ pinched face, that Louis meant to leave them.

“I need to speak to my father,” 

“No,” Lestat said and wasn’t particularly proud of the panic in his voice, Claudia still a few feet away, looking at them with her crooked little neck and her filthy face. “Louis. Louis, you cannot. You will not leave,”

“I need to speak to my father and make sure he isn’t planning on showing up here and scaring her away— I’ll be back in an hour, I’ll be—“

There was no way around it, Lestat had learned, whenever Louis was determined as he was then, to leave. He felt the piercing, hot rage of abandonment again, as if it were the first time. How could Louis not understand that Lestat was useless? That Lestat might just ruin everything while he was gone and Louis would hate him, forever, for this mistake.

“I will be back, Lestat. I will. You have your battle and I have mine,” And he placed his soft hand over his, cold, colder than he usually was, and from the pocket of his jacket he retrieved a letter and offered it to him, “I wrote this for Claudia, give it to her later, when she’s—“

The words died and Louis licked his lips nervously, as if he’d just realised the task he’d entrusted to Lestat in his absence. 

Me, who is useless. I can't do it, Louis.

“You are capable of this, you are a grown man. She is only a child.” And his hand squeezed Lestat's as he said it. To Claudia, he repeated his intention to return soon, in less than an hour, very very soon and, before Lestat knew how to stop him, he was gone. 

Only a child. As if that made anything easier. What did children like? How did they speak and could they smell fear, he wondered. 

Claudia only stared at him, filthy toes tippy-tapping on the Persian rug. He stared back. 

“Hmm,” Was all Lestat managed to say and, as words failed him, he could only motion widely for Claudia to head upstairs. 

A bath was in order. A great many things were. Lestat was seized by panic again, by the enormity of them all. Somehow, she was the third de Pointe du Lac sibling he’d brought home and kept for the night and he almost felt as if he ought to call Grace over and make it a whole set. Ah, Grace, what would Grace do if she were here?

Claudia, of her own volition, walked upstairs and looked curiously at all the doors, at the lamps and the green wallpaper and the painting of the woman in white on top of the little table by the stairs. Her big eyes scanned every small thing, eagerly so in that voyeuristic way one has when confronted with someone else’s private space. Every door and what laid behind them was yet unknown to her, as it had once been to him and to Louis. 

How strange. Everything was new to her and yet it was already hers as she was his and would be for eternity. Their immortal child. The thought weighed heavily on the back of his throat. The enormity of it as far and wide as the distance from this house to his childhood home. And yet she was his. His like a fledgling would be but chosen freely, for the first time in his long life, a fledgling chosen out of life and not death. 

And he’d chosen her, chosen to bring her here. Louis thought it done as a favour to him, and maybe in a way it was, but in truth it was not. She felt more his than she felt Louis’.  He suspected she might be more like him than she would ever be like the de Pointe du Lacs. Wild and stubborn and defiant and selfishly committed to her own survival. 

He led her to the bath where she immediately proved just as stubborn as he’d suspected. She would not bathe herself and insisted instead on being helped. It took more water than he’d ever imagined was possible until soap stopped looking like mud on her skin. He worked carefully, almost afraid to do something wrong, to scratch her skin or bend her thin arms in a way that would send her crying. She let him work and watched him carefully as he, in turn, watched her, her big pink eyes and those eyebrows like two little arrows pointed downwards fixed on his face as she looked for a sign of a lie, a threat, impending doom. 

“I know you can do this yourself,” He said at some point, when she’d laid down on the bath with her eyes half closed, her small chin bobbing on the water the way it had been on the frigid waters of the swamp.

“But I’m really tired,” She replied in her high voice, “And cold, and hungry,”

It was only because he knew she was not a spoiled child that he felt it all the more, this need to care for her. She would exploit it, he feared; the way Louis exploited his need to be with him.

He ran a hand down her hair, felt the curls plump up and spring back to their original shape as he rinsed the cleanser from her hair. “And here I was thinking you were some great survivalist, out there in the jungle on your own,”

She laughed again, a little nervous this time, her eyes darting to the wide open door, “I know the way back, you know, I memorised it. So don’t think you can put me back out there, I will come back and— Eat you both,”

“A lone predator you are,” He replied and motioned for her to lean forward so he could rub more soap down the back of her neck where two pale puncture wounds had left a mark on her delicate, girlish skin. 

She was quiet for a few seconds and then she asked, soft as butter, “Is he? Your sweetheart, I mean. I asked Louis, you know. He is you sweetheart, right? He didn’t give me no answer before.”

“He is,” Lestat said, and watched the smile spread on her face as if she’d gained something from that confession. 

“Pretty sure God don’t like two men doing that together. Can’t even get married.” 

“We eat people, Claudia. If there was a god the least of his concerns would be with who we kiss or f—“ He stopped himself from saying too much but it was too late, her fist was shaking at the edge of the tub, her filthy fingernails digging excitedly into the copper surface. 

“Or what? What else do you do? Do you sleep together-together? In the same bed? Do you—“ 

He splashed her then, drenched her face with water until she was laughing and sputtering and laughing again, the sound so young and alive as it reverberated off the walls. He felt young too, and as ancient as the sun itself and watched as she squirmed, naked and small on the big tub, giddy to ask again, to know more about every yet unknown truth of the universe. 

He finally let go of the soap and made it so she turned her face towards him. Her face and her skin, plump and soft like warm fruit under his hand. His immortal child. He offered his wrist to her. 

"Hungry, you said?"

She did not need teaching, she was instinctually superior to any of the other vampires he’d ever met. She could, for example, tighten her fingers just above his elbow so the blood pooled thicker and stronger around his wrist. Could use her fangs to widen the wound and she could suck gently as to not disturb the flow, as to not let anything escape the suction of her mouth. All these things had not come naturally to him or Louis, but they did to her. 

The lone predator. 

It was nothing like feeding Louis, that was all he could think about for some time. In truth, he thought, too, of touching her hair, or running his fingers comfortingly through her curls; but he wasn’t brave enough to do a thing like that. He was a stranger to her. And a man. Both bad bad qualities to have, he'd always found. She fed for ages and Lestat let her be indulged.

She was more subdued after that. Clean and wrapped in a sleeping robe, she was easily led into the secret room behind the wall, her feet no longer filthy, her eyes no longer darting about as if she were ready to run off at any sign of trouble. 

“I don’t like that,” Was all she said about the coffin but still she went in and he thought: what would Louis do? What would he do for her, to make her happy at this moment? He found her a blanket she did not need but might comfort her and when he turned to close the lid with her inside her little hand shot out for him, taking hold of the nasty fabric of his trousers where the smell of the repugnant water of the swamp was still strong and tugged, “You come in here with me, I don’t want to be alone.”

Lowering his eyes, he saw her there, under a heavy blanket and had the sudden, irrational idea of them having actually made her. Him and Louis. They could have, surely, made her, this creature now lying on the coffin they’d shared. Her nose, her mouth, so like Louis; her stubbornness, the challenging tilt of her chin, so like him. And for a second it almost seemed possible, that she’d been born from them, just as likely as it could be that she’d been born of anything or anyone else. There were vampires in this world, and there were creatures and ghosts and there were times, alone in his coffin, where he’d imagined it, what it would be like, to make a natural child and have the world be a better place for it. 

Perhaps not better for the world, but certainly better for him. 

“Alright, cherie.”

He had forgotten to give her the letter Louis had written for her and he pulled it out of his pocket after some time of hearing the soft sounds of her dreaming. Louis’ handwriting was so perfectly neat as it opened with a simple, ‘Dear Claudia,' 

We have been waiting for you. I wish you to know this, that even if you came to us accidentally, that it was no accident, no obligation, that you were wanted. That this will never change and—

He had to put the letter back as if burned. Louis had written it for Claudia only and, in truth, he could not bear to know more or he might start crying. 

Several hours passed until he finally slept, and badly at that. Louis had not come back, as Lestat had known he wouldn’t; the sun would have come up by the time Louis might have wished to make the trip back. But he did show up just as soon as the sun had set and Lestat was pulled from sleep by the sound of his familiar steps on the stairs. He looked haggard, there on the doorstep of their room and there were lines on his face and his eyes looked tired, defeated in ways Lestat could hardly begin to understand. 

He carried a bag with him and his hands shook as he held it, “She fell asleep alright?”

“She did after she fed.” 

The light of the lamps played with the curves of Louis’ face, his hand came up to rest over Lestat’s chest, near his heart. He had the countenance of a man who’d come back home after some distant war.

“I found some of Grace’s old dresses and shoes.” He said in a hushed voice. Louis had never looked this young or this lost before. For this Louis to have found his way here on his own was nothing short of miraculous. “My father will not be around so we shouldn’t be too worried of him scaring her off. My mother knows now. I suspect she’s known for a while but she knows now.”

And Lestat could have said a million things, tired as he was. He could have said, for example, that the three of them should leave New Orleans and find a new place to live. He could say that he was angry, that he’d felt like Louis was always only one inconvenience away from disappearing into the night. He could say that he felt so terribly cursed, as if destined to break this great thing, one way or another. Instead he found himself whispering, “She told me he’d memorised the way here. In case we were planning on sending her back. Louis, she memorised it,”

He felt himself start to cry then, finally, and felt Louis as he held him, his presence so solid as to make him doubt that he’d ever left. They slept on the master bed that had never been used for the first time that day as they waited for Claudia to wake up from her long slumber. 

-

Life with Claudia made the world burst into focus as if someone had at once thrown a log into the half-dying fireplace causing it to spark back to life in a blaze. She proved to be immediately and unmitigatedly difficult. It was only thanks to Louis’ natural buoyancy, that capacity in him for adaptation, for rising above rough waters not by swimming against the current but by letting the water wash over him, to lead him to shore, that they managed to even get anything beyond rage from Claudia during that first week.

It was all Louis, unwaveringly patient, only in sweetness he responded when she broke a frame, a window, when she screamed at him or demanded they feed her for the fourth time in a night. Louis would take it, would wash the words and the rage off of him and nod and settle with her and offer her a compromise. He was immediately a father to her and he was a brother and he was, occasionally, even a mother. He seemed to know what she needed better than Lestat or even Claudia seemed capable of understanding and he managed to keep peace even when the impossibility of it seemed as heavy as the early spring humidity. 

“Okay, you wanna tussle? Let’s tussle,” Louis would say to a restless Claudia, chasing her around the living room until she was tired and he was exhausted. 

She could not resist him, could hardly stay mad at him even during the worst of her tempers. She became fond of him fast. In the first few hours of that first day together Lestat could see her eyes looking for Louis, in the light and even in shadows, following him even as she pretended to hate his words and the way he spoke to her in reverence and hopefulness. She loved him by the end of the night. Louis was faster still, loved her so deeply one could see the startled expression on his face each time he jolted himself out of his own thoughts by the strength of it.

The seductive quality of this version of Louis came to make itself known to Lestat’s awareness as suddenly and precisely as if he’d been burned with it, a sun wound that could kill an immortal. The image of Louis on Claudia’s bedroom floor, his shoulders squared and his hands gentle as if working with some delicate Chinese silk, slowly braiding Claudia’s hair, his feet firmly planted on the pink rug. Humming to himself, happy, content.  

Soon after she’d moved in, Louis arranged for them to go and pick a coffin for Claudia and she relished this privilege, as Louis had yet to really get his own after the old one Lestat had picked for him had ended up belonging to Paul. But Claudia would not sleep alone in her new coffin, not at all for the first few weeks and still rarely in the ones that followed.  She was therefore in possession of the immense privilege of picking who the chosen sharer of said coffin would be every sunrise. 

She would choose Louis if he’d allowed her to run ahead of him as they hunted, if he’d laughed instead of lecturing her when she snuck into the neighbour’s house two doors down and stole his cat and made it wear one of Lestat’s neckties as a dress. She would choose Lestat on nights where he’d answer her endless barrage of questions about their kind, about Paris, about Egypt and the theatre. She chose Louis the night he gifted her a silk lined copy of The Modern Prometheus, and again, the night he gave her what would become her first journal. More-so she chose Louis after nights spent sitting together, writing side by side with their heads bowed over their work like two sides of a mirror.

She chose Lestat the first night he sang for her and she demanded again, later in the day, shoulder to hip in her pink lined coffin, that he sang again, this time in French, something else, please, a different song, please, one he loved. 

Claudia had arrived so abruptly as to be, by all accounts, a rude and sudden penetration into a life he and Louis had only just started to build. But as sudden as it had been, it had also felt oddly fitting. Louis was used, by then, to living with his family, used to sharing nights and meals and games and Lestat had grown weary of loneliness, and not even Louis’ magnetic presence could fill in every second of every night. Besides, neither of them were so set on their ways as to not be able to get used to her, and, for all the ways she was difficult, she was, too, deeply curious and endlessly entertaining. 

They were besotted by Claudia’s presence, by her sheer willingness to be loved. 

Claudia could tell a story in a way that would have Louis crying pretty pink tears of laughter, the back of his hand pressed over his fluttering eyelids. She was good at games and cards and bad at losing and she demanded their full focus at all times of the night and day. This characteristic, so alike that of an army general, had the effect of often pushing him and Louis into silent allyship. Their eyes would meet, as Claudia asked, for the hundredth time or so, for Lestat to allow her to read his fate on the tarot cards Louis had bought for her at her own insistence—an increasingly dire affair, as she had already predicted his death in a number of gruesome, painful ways, and it only seemed to be getting worse the more her ‘powers’ developed— and as they continued to look at each other for a handful of heartbeats Louis would sigh, his shoulders coming up in a shrug that seemed to say only ‘look at this child we have made, look at what she’s made of us in return’. 

The glowing, tender intimacy of such a stare, of the way they had been forced to touch one another now, only when she was distracted, fleetingly, longingly, with a hunger so obscene and helpless as that of two secret lovers meeting in the darkness of a back alley. No wonder, mortals could often be seen with half a dozen children at their side. No wonder.

All their visits to the de Pointe du Lacs had been paused, perhaps forever, if one were to trust Louis’ reports of his mother’s anger. It was just the thing to solidify their private bubble as the whole focus of their social life.

Just the three of them, a happy trio. 

Nevertheless, there were at that time some people who came to know Claudia, and, of course, love Claudia, for to know her and love her were one and the same thing. 

There was their housekeeper who had shed not one but a few tears when Claudia had told her she was Lestat’s long lost daughter who had come now to stay and care for him and wouldn’t Mrs Freniere be so kind as to put fresh flowers in her new room since she so loved flowers and her daddy had said she could have them? And there was Mrs Walker, the seamstress who made for her every dress and every blouse and every beautiful skirt Claudia could ever want or need and who believed her when she said that she would one day, once she’d grown up, ask her to make her either a wedding dress or a pirate uniform. There was the peddler who sang for Claudia when he spotted her on her balcony, looking down at the vehicles passing by. There were booksellers and neighborhood boys and streetcar conductors. Claudia’s effervescence and her open disposition made a life that should have remained that of two isolated immortals something more akin to a real family. 

Yet there was little, by little, the growing danger of such openness. There was in Claudia a recklessness so dark that one might miss it amongst all the bright lights that made her who she was. There was, too, a void, elusive but that, when finally glimpsed, made one want to hide, to distance the eye from its depth. He and Louis did the best they could to pretend it wasn’t there, that love and gifts and a home might be enough to keep it away.

“She needs discipline,” Lestat had argued on a night when Claudia had insisted on taking a souvenir from a victim, a foot, a woman’s foot with its severe matronly shoe still attached to it, “If she is left to make her own rules it will soon be too late and she will—“

“Rules, yes, Lestat. But not—“ Louis turned, suddenly quiet, waiting to hear her in the garden, following the cats, watching them as she often did. Cats she had now renamed and claimed as her own, like everything else in Rue Royale and beyond. “Not the way you spoke to her, not with… She needs to know that there are degrees of discipline, that your displeasure won’t lead to abandonment. You cannot speak to her like she is a monster,”

“Her life is at stake! Our lives here are at stake! She must understand that there are rules, that she must follow these rules or prepare to be—“

That gave Louis pause, a dangerous, dark cloud shifting through his features, “Prepare to what? To be punished? To be beaten?”

“I— I-“ Lestat had felt it then, his own void, the familiar darkness in memories of his own upbringing, “I am not speaking of feeble cruelty, I am speaking of her survival. A child must learn the fire will burn them before they’re burned.”

“All parents think that pain is a necessity to obedience, Lestat.” Louis replied, eerily gentle one second and savagely determined the next, “Violence is not discipline, it’s cruelty. She chose us over the marsh, I won’t have her regret that choice.”

Claudia would come to exploit this weakness of theirs, the way Lestat himself had exploited his own father’s weakness. Lestat could see it often in the wicked glimmer in her eyes, in the secrets she was starting to learn how to keep. She might as well had been his natural child in those moments when her face turned to Louis’ and one could tell how much she wished to keep his attention only on her. 

In the strangeness of this new unbalanced family act was how the de Pointe du Lac siblings came to find them as they slowly started to make their way back into Louis’ life. Paul, first, rang the doorbell on a misty and wet Monday in mid May and, upon first taking a long, cautious look at Claudia declared her to be ‘just as strange as a rattling fish inside a shoe’. This did not set their acquaintance for the best of beginnings and yet something in Paul’s strange curiosity and impolite brashness charmed Claudia immediately. 

“Are you baptised, child?” Paul had asked her as she sat very close to Lestat on the settee, not quite holding his hand.

“How would I know? Can’t you tell? By looking at me, I mean.”

What Paul had been told about the girl was something Lestat would have been bothered to enquire about if Paul’s visit hadn’t been as unexpected as it was. But this was Paul, in all his unpredictable glory, coming to interrupt their tenuous peace with his oddness. It would have been an annoyance if not for the strange realisation that Lestat had somehow missed him. 

“She ought to be baptised,” Paul said, looking quite pointedly at Lestat and only after a long, uncomfortable pause, at Louis. 

“Why? What, if anything, really, would be in it for me?” Said Claudia, intentionally riling him up. 

“Why?” Paul had almost jumped out of his seat, looking now at Louis as if he were to blame for the crucifixion of the son of god himself, “Louis, she asks why. Louis, what have you and him been teaching this young girl?” 

He’s funny. We should invite him over again.

Claudia whispered conspiratorially into his and Louis’ mind then, a huge joyful smile on her fiery face.  On his next visit, only a handful of days after the first one, it was Claudia who brought up the matter of her baptism. 

“Well, I’ve been thinking about this Uncle Paul, and I think I better wait until I’ve sinned some more. I want to make sure I’ve really done it, before I get a clean slate.”

“You ain’t a girl, you are a demon,” Was all Paul could say for some time after that, and yet he stayed and they played cards and Claudia, as he was leaving, went on her tiptoes and called him Uncle Paul again and everyone, including Paul himself could not ignore the tenderness in the room as she said those words. 

Grace arrived to meet her on a Thursday and Lestat feared that at least two of the Great Laws might be broken before the night was to be over.

Immediately, there was between the quasi-sisters an animosity so intense and violent Lestat was soon hastily instructed by Louis to take Claudia outside to feed the cats while he spoke with his sister. Grace was gone from the house by the time they came back inside but she was back the next night and the one following and soon it was not only her at their door but Paul too and Louis started to bring down a couple of extra chairs into the living room so they could all sit by the open window even as this distraction started to become as unnecessary as the wine and the tobacco. 

Claudia never called Grace Aunt Grace. Instead, she referred to her as Louis’ sister, as Paul’s sister, as that woman. And yet one could often find her looking at Grace, staring at the cut of her dresses or the delicate curve of her hats, a hot almost calculating thoughtfulness in the way she would respond to Grace’s skilled prodding. It was during these meetings that Lestat started to first understand all the ways beyond the macabre in which Claudia was growing to resemble him.

She would, for example, refuse to let anything go in the demure way the de Pointe du Lacs had been raised to do. Claudia was not in the habit of losing with grace, of agreeing with someone when they were so clearly wrong. She was, in fact, in the habit of screaming her lungs out, of toppling over the table when a game had been lost, when Louis would not take her side in a silly disagreement with Paul.

And these were maddening to the siblings, these outbursts; more maddening still, the way Lestat would just laugh, devilishly happy in the aftermath of Claudia’s rage. 

“You who talked of discipline," Was Louis’ huffed retort on one such occasion, the curve of his back so very enticing as he bent over to retrieve the chess pieces Claudia had thrown against the wall. 

“Oh, if only I had known then how good it would feel to not be the only one in histrionics, mon cher.”

So it came to be that their home had turned into a meeting place for the siblings, away from the severe eye of their parents. Louis sat transformed, during these reunions, head of his own home, comfortable and loose and happy. Indeed this was the sort of thing Lestat had managed to give him, a place of his own. 

A home.

“I’m taking Claudia shopping tonight,” These were the words announced by Grace to the group, sans Paul, one early night; and, quietly to Lestat, she added, “You and Louis can do as you please with your time,”

“She’s trying to be nice to us, in her own way.” Louis said when the girls had made their exit, “She is, I believe, under the impression that you miss spending time with me.”

This startled Lestat not only because it was true but because Louis had said it in that way of his somewhere between annoyed and coquettish and the combination of both made Lestat suspect that perhaps it was Louis, after all, who was missing spending time with him alone.

“And what shall we do with this rare night of privacy, mon cher?” Lestat replied feigning aloofness to the best of his ability. Louis' gaslit profile was at that very moment making wonderful shadows of the wallpaper over the stairs. “The theatre? Storyville for some drinks? A walk along the—“

Louis removed his tie and they both watched as it turned into a pitiful puddle of silk on the floor. 

“A walk? You think, love?” Louis' mouth was curved into the most wicked of smiles, all his white teeth shining in the yellow light and his hands reaching out, sharp nails on the move, the languid curve of his torso coming forward towards Lestat’s body until they were touching again and wasn’t that something? After being limited to a handful of touches stolen during brief and rare moments of privacy while Claudia slept or played or read on her own. What a wonder to now discover that the hunger had remained, that the simple touch of Louis' hand over his neck was enough to send him to his knees. 

“Mon cher,” Lestat did not cry, although he wished it very much at that moment. 

It was Louis who kissed him then, making space for his hunger inside Lestat’s open mouth. Like two animals, they kissed and held one another against the wall, against the bannister, against the bedpost of the bed that had yet to ever be used as a bed should be used when people felt about one  another the way he felt about Louis. They could do that now, the bed was there.

“You’ve missed me?” Was all Lestat could say with Louis’ teeth scraping the skin of his chest all the way down to the fastening of his trousers. 

He would have liked to know this. Because he’d missed Louis; his private smiles, the jokes they had shared, the way he would rest his foot against Lestat’s at the breakfast table before Claudia had joined them. The way he would, before they were three, occasionally look with his lips around the ring Lestat had gotten him and the way Lestat had wondered, every time, if the action was done intentionally or if it was just a thing that gave Louis comfort. And the hunger now, it was good. But what about tenderness? What about affection? The gnawing anxiety of still not knowing what, if anything, any of it meant was torture. 

They had a home, yes. And they had Claudia, and yet, no words had been spoken and shouldn't there be words? Certain and heavy words, promises. Some kind of acknowledgement of what they were doing; living together, raising a child together. And what was it, truly, that Louis wanted? Here and now, in this moment: a kiss? A quick fuck against the wall like two strangers? But also, what would he want, ever? Lestat’s presence? A roof over his head? A quick release where no one could see them?

Louis spoke, kissing the words against Lestat’s belly, “Miss you, love? When would I find the time to miss you,” And it was said so playfully but how was Lestat to know what was so funny about that statement. Louis then added, mumbling distractedly, “You are everywhere; in my dreams, can’t even sleep without you there…”

Lestat’s questions died as quickly as they had spurted. There was the possibility that this was all a big joke to Louis. That he did not care much, that he was making fun of Lestat.

By then, both of them on the bed, Louis had managed to get his trousers open and soon his fist was around Lestat’s cock and, as perfect as that felt, it was still not what Lestat wanted. 

“I did,” Lestat whispered, unblinking wet eyes trapped in the vision of Louis’ broad tongue touching his neck, lavishing in the taste, the heat of Lestat’s body. Yes, yes, a body, but what else? He pulled Louis closer, touched his knuckles to the base of his nape for a second and went quickly to his knees.

“You what?”  Louis whispered, looking down at him with a puzzled, delirious expression on his face.

With the back of his palm he caressed Louis’ hip, his trembling belly, he felt the human imperfections that must once have been there, felt the softness, the heat of his skin, the beating of blood inside Louis’ veins, “Missed you all the time, Louis. Missed you like a limb that was removed from me by force, miss you like a—“

Louis shuddered and his fist found its way inside Lestat’s hair, pulling quite savagely at the roots. “Q-quiet with you now, love. We don’t— don’t have much time,”

Well, a body, yes. Alright. He could be one.

Lestat had no choice then but to align his swollen lips with the tip of Louis’ cock through his trousers, taking it into his mouth, petting it with his tongue. His hand, firm and not particularly gentle, pressed Louis’ heaving chest down into the mattress and there was no time by then, not when Louis was so eager and so flushed, hardly any time left to ask Louis if he would ever love him, if he would ever care for him, if they would ever take their clothes off and if Lestat would be allowed to touch him again, there, the warmth inside his body where he’d once been so bold as to press two of his fingers and watch Louis melt and beg and want him—

“Keep your eyes on me, Lestat,” Louis grunted, “Keep thinking of me, do you hear me?” And then, cruel as a kiss on a tender bruise, “You’re so good when you let yourself be used like this, your big cock, your hands, that tongue of yours. You’d do whatever I ask you to do, wouldn’t you? Anything to please me,”

It was perfectly true, the whole thing. He would do anything to please Louis and the look on Louis’ face and the scent of his hair in the fresh dew of a night just being born made for a terrible reminder that it wasn’t good or sane to hinge your whole existence on the whims of someone who joked about marriage on the breakfast table, who refused to touch your hand when others were in the room, who, even know, could find humor in the reckless hunger Lestat felt for him every second of every day.

I miss you, Louis. I miss you when you’re still in the room but too close to the door.

Soon, his mouth was properly around Louis’ cock and the quietly wrecked sounds coming from Louis’ mouth were drowned by the noise of the mortal streets beyond their window; the racket of a tambourine and the neighborhood children laughing on the square and the streetcar chugging along the road. Louis came with his hand pressed to the back of Lestat’s neck with his eyes screwed shut and the most painful expression on his face. His eyelids were shaking and yet he would not let go of Lestat, would not let even his foot move from the place where it was touching Lestat’s thigh.

You are mine, mon cher. Remember?

Louis only hummed, refusing to move. 

Lestat was about to put his fist to the side of Louis’ neck, when the unmistakable sound of Claudia’s return came, a loud banging of a door downstairs and the sound of her feet stomping up the steps two at a time as she screamed, “No money! You sent me out with no money and Grace wouldn’t buy me a single ribbon!”

A ridiculous thing like that, and they were soon laughing, Lestat’s forehead pressed to Louis’ knee as he laughed and hiccuped and scrambled to do up his trousers. Fingers, hands, shaking all over the place, an impossibly fond expression on their faces.

“This is your fault, she thinks money grows on trees,” Louis was saying and the sheer softness in his voice was enough to make the words sound like a caress. 

-

Eventually, as all things came to be in this strange time in his life, another invitation came to disturb their tranquility. He’d suspected it had been only a matter of time since the re-introduction of Paul and Grace into their routine before the first invitation was to come. It arrived much as Lestat’s first invitation had, requesting his presence at the de Pointe du Lac residence at his earliest convenience, except, this time, a reference to Claudia’s presence in their lives appeared next to his. 

Monsieur and Mademoiselle de Lioncourt 

“It’s my mother’s handwriting, you know?” Was all Louis said on the matter. His name was pointedly absent from the note, perhaps a clear sign that he was, still, as far as the old lady was concerned, part of her family and not theirs. 

“Claudia is far from ready,” Lestat said but knew, just as he said it, that there would be no rejection of the invitation. 

Surprisingly, when asked, Claudia seemed almost giddy to attend. 

“Oh, I’ll wear my green dress and my red shoes and the pearls Les got me and white ribbons in my hair like the girl in the magazine. Lou will braid my hair the way I like it and I will tell Uncle Paul about the ribbons, about Grace saying I couldn’t have them, and Louis buying them anyway—“ 

There was, perhaps, something unsettling about this sudden burst of excitement in Claudia, and yet neither of them could deny her the relief that accompanied it. 

The first dinner began in a manner so unusual Lestat had to contain his own nervous laughter with all his will. First, they were welcomed into the house by Madame de Pointe du Lac, who turned her face to the side to receive a kiss from Louis and, upon making eye contact with Claudia, announced, quite firmly, “You have the same dark presence, the two of you. Like a damp sunflower at night,”

Startled, Lestat realised she was talking to him as if she had decided Claudia was indeed his child.

Claudia only replied with a simple, “And you look like an egg,” and strode away, deep into the cavernous hallway that led to the sitting room. 

They did not dine, they did not talk, Louis’ father stayed quiet and so did Louis and it was only thanks to Grace’s polite questioning and Lestat’s undying commitment to filling in the silence that the hands on the clock managed to move at all. 

“Someone came for you Louis,” Madame de Pointe du Lac said suddenly at some point, refusing to look at her son. “Jonah Macon came here.”

There was silence then. True silence. Louis had stopped breathing but soon found his own voice as he replied, “Did he? He— he came here?”

“Where else would he go looking for you, Louis? Is this not your home?” His mother replied, stiff as a board as she sat on her settee. “Should we have given him a forwarding address? You should have left us more clear instructions when you stole into the night like a wh—“ She stood then, elegant and tense as a rubber band about to snap, and left the room without finishing her sentence. 

No one spoke and yet they all remained in their proper places like actors on a play, waiting for their cue.

“Alright, if I must,” Grace said, voice firm and determined, and she, too, stood and walked to the corner of the room where a beautiful harpsichord laid closed and opened it, gesturing for Claudia to follow her to the instrument, “It’s too lovely a night to deny ourselves some music. I’ll play something and then you’ll follow, so pay attention,”

Grace played then, light and airy, her back, and Claudia’s too, to the open French windows and the clean sounds of the instrument filled the room where the insupportable tenseness of everyone’s grievances with one another had been only seconds before. Claudia was slow and untrained where Grace was proficient but they soon found a way to make their hands work in tandem on a simple, playful melody Lestat remembered from his childhood. 

“You should sing for them,” Louis whispered into the curve of his ear, aloof and distant and yet his fist had found its way around the loose fabric of Lestat’s jacket where he was distractedly playing with the lining. 

I’ll sing for you.

And indeed he stood and sang for the girls, first in French and soon in English and French again until the night was quite over and even Paul and Monsieur de Pointe du Lac had politely clapped and said their praises for their private performance. 

Lestat kissed Claudia on the cheek as they retreated to their home and found that she looked tired and that she would not let go of Louis’ hand. Her fingers so small, curled frighteningly tight against Louis’.

“I want my own harpsichord,” She said, as if her words were law. 

The following night they ordered the finest instrument they could find with barely a thought being spared for the extravagance of the gesture. 

They did not speak of the man who had come to ask for Louis but that did not mean it was forgotten. Lestat could not forget about it, as much as he tried; whereas Louis attempted to conceal the sudden oddness in his behaviour.  A second invitation for dinner came a few days later and Louis, under the guise of having to speak to his father about some private issue, went ahead and said he would meet them at the de Pointe du Lac residence at the agreed time. Somehow, it looked as if he, too, had just arrived by the time Lestat and Claudia made it to the house. 

Again, there was to be no dinner. Again, Louis’ mother was not in the mood to be pleasant. Why she chose to argue with her children, with Lestat, with Claudia, with the entire world except for the useless lump of a man she called her husband, was a mystery yet to be solved. 

“And how exactly did you manage your journey here, Monsieur de Lioncourt?” Asked the big man in his big chair in that judgemental tone of his after they had all taken their places around the sitting room, “I am curious. How is one to put a coffin on a ship? How is one to feed under such circumstances?”

Lestat was stupidly happy to provide a detailed explanation, so detailed in fact that it did not occur to him that there could be any real interest in his response until they had made their way back home and he was alone with Louis. 

“Do you think he’s truly considering… He cannot be thinking of going somewhere, can he?” Lestat demanded, fighting the sudden rush of panic in his chest. “What did you talk to him about tonight? Before we arrived?”

Louis did not give a straight answer, instead turning his back on him, leisurely walking to his wardrobe, carefully opening it and staring, vacant eyed at the rows of clothes lining its interior. 

It was not like Louis, was all, to be taking an inordinate amount of time preparing for coffin. 

“Hmm, nothing, we talked of— I’m sure he meant nothing of it, Lestat.” 

The liar. The clumsy, useless liar that he was, he could not even pretend to look at Lestat as he said it. 

Maybe it truly meant nothing. These were old questions, back to the night he’d first met them all, they had asked about Paris. They had asked about the Old World and vampiric life amongst the ancient vampires of Europe. It didn’t mean anything, it was just a thing said. Nothing would come of it.

He wished so ardently to believe it, no wonder it couldn’t be true at all. 

Another dinner, if one could call these family meetings dinners at this point, only days after the last, did nothing to dissipate Lestat’s earlier suspicions. This time the questions about Paris, about France, about his life there, came not only from the father, but the mother too. Lestat, weak kneed and forced to give his expected answers, tried to meet Louis’ eyes and found that he seemed to be quite determined to stare at his own shoes. 

“I—I had my reasons to leave. And there is something here, in this city.” Lestat pleaded quietly and looked at Claudia, at Louis. At Paul, sitting there by the bookshelf thinking, even now, of dead dogs and birds and the Virgin herself coming down to kiss him while he slept, “It is a wonderful place to make one’s own rules, as there are so many rules in the old continent, so many rules,” 

It was a horrid night, made only worse by the sudden heat of a very early summer, the mosquitoes buzzing against the nets over the open windows like predators desperate for a taste of their blood. 

“Can I smoke too?” Claudia asked curious eyes trained to the lit end of a cigarette dangling off Louis’ mouth as he listened to Paul speak about the remodeling of Saint Agustine. 

They ought to have said no. 

But what was the point, really, in denying her anything when the man who had trapped her in a basement sat only a step away from her small body?

Without much fuss, Lestat offered her a lit cigarette, handing her the small elegant holder Louis had gifted him. It was an indulgence, a thing so ridiculous, this child in her white trimmed dress with the red polka dots and her girlish shoes sitting there, knees open in unladylike presentation, smoking a cigarette. 

“She mustn’t—!” Was all Madame de Pointe du Lac could say, shocked into silence by that defiant glare of Claudia’s. Her thin eyebrows, the fierce turn of her nose indeed so like Lestat’s that the old woman faltered for a second, all of them did, too spineless to say a word. Quiet, instead looking only at Claudia as she sucked on her cigarette. When it finally came, that protestation, it was only weak, defeated, “She is a child—“

“Ma’am I have a daddy. Hell, even two, leave me be now, alright?” Claudia said then, dropping ash everywhere, unrepentant and rude as the spoiled child Lestat and Louis had quickly made of her. Even then, Louis refused to correct her, not even when his mother was looking at him like he had become not a son but a monstrous creature did he speak to his daughter to chastise her. 

It put an end to the night, that episode. It put an end to many things. 

Lestat could hardly feel guilty about the matter. They weren’t to be invited back for dinner for quite some time. It suited him, after all; he did not wish to think about France, about travels, about Great Laws and that man who had come to enquire after Louis. They went back to being mostly alone, the three of them. And Louis went back to writing next to Claudia on the parlour desk, and reading his newspapers and even decided, soon after a letter had come addressed to him by name and enquiring about his personal thoughts on the matter, to subsidise several revolutionaries intent on going through the federal courts to pass laws in what they were calling the New Negro Movement. Lestat went back to writing music, to paying obscene amounts of money for useless things: a mural of a magical forest for Claudia’s room, clothes for the summer and finally, in something that felt not unlike a defeat of sorts, an American-made piano. 

There were yet so many uncertainties but he found himself alive in the sweet smells of their courtyard, in the quiet simplicity of nights spent around these vampires he’d grown to love. All was alive with Louis and Claudia at his side, with the sounds of all the nights spent together and all the ones still to be shared. Alive in the promise of plans of a future, of talking Grace to a performance of Shakespeare, of walking to the newly reopened Saint Augustine with Paul. 

Delusion was a sweet thing then. 

—

One last time, they were invited back for dinner. It was to be the worst yet. They didn’t even get to sit this time, they walked in, were invited into the dining room where Lestat had once first noticed the elegant curve of Louis’ shoulders and the particular shade of his eyes, and then those long dreaded but inevitable words became a reality.

“We are setting out by summer’s end; we have secured our passages and won’t be waiting any longer. Plenty of time, Louis, for you to get accustomed to taking care of this house, and then the accounts I believe I will manage on my own as soon as we’re settled,“ 

“Father, no.” Louis’ voice, so desperate, still entertaining the thought that he might make his father listen, for once in his life, to just listen. He was a child then, his hands curled instinctively around his own loose tie, desolate, sad, angry. His blood suddenly pumping against his temple, Lestat’s own heartbeat picking up the pace, following his lead, “Father. Lestat is too polite to say it but I will: it is insanity. It is— We know nothing of these people, we are not welcome there. What do we know of their laws? Of the ways in which we will be expected to behave, who we might be asked to follow—?” He paused, fury then, only fury in his tense mouth, ”How will you explain your maker, the way it came about— You paid for this, for us to be— This,“

And suddenly the story splintered, as if Louis had cracked it open by simply acknowledging its existence.

Lestat had suspected, had considered how and why it might have come about but to think that Louis’ father, Louis’ maker, might have paid for the Dark Gift. Not freely given but purchased, like one pays for a bottle of milk or a cut of lamb. Like one pays for a doctor to take away one's pain. And wasn’t that just so very fitting of the first American vampiric family? That the father had gone out in all his capitalist spirit and bought a curse and shared it with all his descendants. 

And despite the long, narrow room and the buzzing silence Louis remained defiant, tall in his panic as if it had long stopped simply paining him and had at once started to enrage him. 

It was his mother who spoke next, her mouth stiff as if disgusted with the taste of the words she was about to speak, “A clean break for our family. You owe us this much, Louis.”

“What do I owe you? What possibly could I ever owe any of you?” Louis spat, red, boiling anger in his face. That control of his, the natural shape of his jaw, unraveling under the pressure. 

“You know. Oh, you know, son. What you’ve done, what you continue to do to this family.” His mother was saying, looking at him with her droopy eyelids like he was a monster, a dog, some ungrateful creature who’d wandered in from the wild. "I can't look at you."

It was maddening, senseless. Grace and Paul and Claudia shocked into silence, flattened, each one of them, to the far wall like it would protect them. Lestat took a step forward, feeling in no way braver than any of them, not braver than Louis, never that, and yet ready for whatever might be needed to be done on his behalf. 

This is how the dog feels, when its owner says to attack and he offers his teeth and his neck in their service. Lestat thought, not unkindly. 

Madame de Pointe du Lac advance closer to Louis, her body tilted towards him, “You were supposed to be there with him. To make sure he was protected. You were supposed to be up there with him in Atlanta, you knew he needed his injections, he needed to be kept away from charlatans, from promises that would not be kept, from witches and liars. But you didn’t go. Some boy came asking for you and you… And you went with him. You fed your father to the wolves. You in your selfishness, left your family and cursed us and turned us into—“

“How could I have stopped him, Mother? He had travelled everywhere looking for a cure, he was determined and it was only one more trip, one more useless trip, another magical tincture—“ His big green eyes filled with stubborn tears, hands curled around nothing but air. If only Lestat could touch him, if only he could—

“Your sister could have been married by now. Grandchildren running in the yard. Your brother could have been cured. We could be hosting a wedding, a birthday, this very day in the yard with all the good people who knew us to be good people. With food and drinks and beautiful flowers like my mother used to host. All that, lost to your selfishness. Never to happen now, never to die and be buried in sacred soil. Isn’t that enough for you to lower your head and apologise to your mother? How selfish can a child I gave to this world really be?”

The sound of her voice, like ice water, and Louis only staring at her. Only for a second, he stood still and stiff and his chest went up and down with the strength of his breathing. 

“Me? My selfishness?” He asked then, softly, sweetly almost, “And what about him, then? What is my daddy responsible for? The root of all evil, am I? It can’t really be all me, Mother. He was here first, back when we still made money off the torture of others. When we lashed people and called ourselves pious.”

A long finger extended, far out beyond his pretty wrist, pointing at his own father, the massive figure standing still, as immovable as the pillars of this house. One would have to admire his fortitude, the way he remained unbothered as if the mere idea of being at fault was a laughable matter. He had the countenance of an iron statue, wholly untouchable.

Suddenly there was Louis’ mother, closer to him, her small but mighty figure taking on the space between Louis' extended finger and his father’s unmoving face, “There he is. Finally,” She spat the words, mean and bitter but soft like the moment before a violent blow. She grabbed Louis by the chin, her eldest son, the longest witness to her cruelty, “There he is. The devil in you.”

Lestat, too, stepped closer, pressed the back of his hand to the heated curve of Louis’ back, hot even through the layers of his shirt and jacket. He would, for Louis, do whatever it took. It was nothing but a promise. 

I am a dog, Louis. I will bite whatever hand you wish me to bite. 

A moment so thick with possibilities he could taste copper and rust on the roof of his mouth.

They could have killed them, mother and father. They could have left. They could have burned the house down with everyone still inside. These moments were so very rare, the exact instance in which all comes to an end, one way or another. 

“I guess you could join us, Louis. If that is what you want now. I would never deny you a place at my table, my son.” Louis’ father spoke, suddenly like the voice of god or an angel. Warm and filled with acceptance, with pride as if nothing had been said before that moment, no argument or accusation. As if this were only his son, speaking to him calmly. His beloved son.

This was the danger of the father, the power of the priest. He knew when to deny, when to offer. He knew the maddening hunger of hope. And Louis hoped, even now, for that acceptance, for some version of love that was unconditional and born from respect, from understanding. He wanted to be seen, to be embraced, and his father was extending his hand, touching not where the mother was still grabbing his chin but higher up, over the thick curls at the back of his neck, clamping one meaty hand over the back of it. 

“If you are ready to be with us again, son, then come with us to Paris. All will be forgotten, we won’t speak of it.”

So it came, finally. The choice that was always going to come and it should have been sweet to know that it had not been Lestat who made Louis choose, but naturally it was not. Because Louis was not denying him, he was not saying 'no father, I will not go'. He was moving, one step forward towards his father, dislodging Lestat’s hand from his back. 

“Father,” Pleading, still, as if that were an option, with his eyes downturned and so defeated, “You can’t take Paul there. All the way there, were they might not understand him the way we do, you can’t possibly—“

The heat of their four bodies so close together was repulsive and yet Lestat would not step back. Instead he stared at the fist now firmly closed around Louis’ neck, the face of the father whose eyes had turned as dark a rare bug, his bestial irises brutal and ugly and nothing like Louis'.

“But I can, Louis. I can do anything.” He was saying, not even yelling, not even pulling on Louis’ neck. Hardly hurting him, so calm and steady in his words, “I am your father, Louis. This is my family.”

On the periphery of his vision Lestat saw Claudia, flattened to the wall, her body as thin and small as a sheet of paper. Her neck was bowed down, eyes crinkled closed. 

“And I’m not a child, Father.” Louis replied and while his voice was shaky there was no fear, no weakness but the last embers of hope in his dark pupils. A deep breath, and then his voice, steadier, “I’m not a child. I am a grown man.”

The word rattled, clinking like glasses and cutlery. 

A man. You could have felt the air move in the silence that followed. 

His father laughed, “Are you, Louis?” And he looked then, just for one single second at Lestat, at the hand still hovering where Louis’ back had been before he’d pushed it away. One second was enough, Louis knew what that look meant. What it would always mean. 

With a quick powerful blow, Louis dislodged both their hands from his chin, from his reddened neck. He stood alone for one second and then raised a fist, up where his father’s face was, so close to him, so dangerously close that—

“Fuck you, you—“

Monsieur de Pointe du Lac held his son’s wrist between his palm and that, at last, was something Lestat could not allow. He stepped closer, and in one movement pierced with his long nails the skin in between each finger on that engorged hand he’d long wished to chop off. Blood gurgled out from the wounds, thick and dark, down the old man’s hand and over the inside of his wrist. 

“Monsieur, remove your hand.” Lestat stated plainly, “I won’t have you touch him.”

And to Louis he said only: You say the word, mon cher. I will do it and I will enjoy it and you will pretend you did not choose it and we will never speak of him ever again.

Louis shook his head, turning his face away from Lestat. 

He’d chosen then, to keep the filthy creature alive.

Whatever you wish for, my love.

Thin was the line of Louis’ lips, his face and shoulders curved in exhaustion with nothing to lean on. He didn’t look weak but instead he had the hazy presence of someone on the brink of some devastating break.

“You,” Louis’ mother was soon saying, pointing with her nose at Lestat, her hand tightly pressed to the solid silver cross at her neck. “…and you. Get out of my house. Leave and do not come back here. Take the child, that demon child who has cost us so much with you.”

He would be glad to go, Lestat thought. To leave this damned house behind forever. Then, marching like soldiers, they made their exit. Their last retreat from the house where Louis had once been a beloved child. Where they’d played cards and shared meals. Where they’d all been some semblance of a family once or twice. No one spoke for them, not Paul and not Grace. Their deafening silence inevitable, perhaps, in the face of such anger from their parents. 

Monsieur de Pointe du Lac did speak, once, as Louis was about to close the front door behind himself, “Come with us, son. A fresh start for you too.”

Louis had not denied his father and the gaping hole of that denial followed them all the way home. It was Claudia, then, who clung to Louis’ arm and turned her panicked face to him and asked, very quietly, “What does that mean? Lou— What—?”

Now her face turned to Lestat, with her enormous pink eyes like painted glass. She was a child, from her face to her toes and her young mind. She was their child, worried sick, afraid. And Louis wouldn’t face her, he looked instead at the carpet on the corridor, slightly creased in places, the edges fraying from their shoes rubbing all over the delicate thread.

“Is Lou leaving?” Her small voice then, relentless.

Lestat shook his head, but what could he promise her, really? 

A long unending moment, a minute, an hour. Louis with his back still turned and his eyes trapped on the fraying edges of a much loved rug. Everything around them, the furniture, the rugs, the lights and the pictures. This was their home. This wasn’t Lestat being sentimental, this was true.

“Louis, you are—You are what? Leaving?” Her voice small, buzzing like some insect, so easily ignored. She was just a child. “You— you can’t. Lou, you can’t go, you can’t, you can’t—“

She started sobbing, full, pink tears sprang in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. At last Louis looked at her. It was the first time they’d really faced one another, as themselves. 

“Claudia, my love…” 

“No! Lou, you said… You said—!”

He reached out then, a calming hand towards her pink, wet face, tried to touch her hair, the green end of a silk headband he’d placed on her head himself, only hours before.

“I’m not leaving you, my love. But maybe we could go to Paris together, no one is saying—“ She would not let him touch her, she stepped away from him and the ribbon came loose and fell on the floor and Louis’ hand held nothing but air as he chewed on the words, “We can think about this, together. I won’t leave you, you both—”

But it was all a lie. The offer had been clear. Louis would not be allowed to bring Claudia. Not Claudia, not Lestat. He would come back as the dutiful son or he would stay. 

It is, in truth, usually quite hard to identify the defining moments of one’s life. When the now might have been the only remaining moment of action against some great disaster. In retrospect one thinks, yes it was then that I should have said it. I ought to have stood my ground right then and said, you will not do this. When one ought to have fought for one’s soul, for the things we cherish the most. Here was Louis then, contemplating this madness. And here was Claudia, crying and clinging to him and here was Lestat, doing absolutely nothing. 

Perhaps because he’d learned, once, a thousand million nights ago, that begging was never of any use. 

The cold winter air of the night he’d been turned, of the night he’d met Louis, was in their home now, was inside him, was in his throat and in his head like water being poured from a bucket. Cold, all over. Wet like a rag, Lestat felt as if cursed to perform the same tragedy over and over on the stage. 

The boy abandoned. The man abandoned. Madness, selfishness, pain. 

And then he saw the ring. Louis’ hand bringing that emerald ring to his lips, back and forth. His teeth nibbling for just one second on the gold. His nervous little habit.

Lestat saw the water now, as if it were really there, in front of him, rushing down the streets of New Orleans, inside their coffin and over Louis’ ankles and into the pocket’s of his linen trousers. 

The last thing he wanted to do was perform. 

Grace. I need you to take Claudia. Only for a few hours. 

He made his thoughts so loud then, that Grace could hear them and Louis could hear them and he feared maybe even his old coven, all the way across an ocean, could hear them.

Now, the rain in his mind had stopped and there was no fear, no tears. He touched Claudia’s shoulder and felt her small bones under his palm, “ I need you to let me speak to Louis, baby. You have to trust me now, which I know is a very difficult thing to do, it feels almost impossible, no? But you are capable of it, this trust. Right, love?”

He could see her, with her little bird-like eyes and her small neck. He had failed and failed and failed and yet she did not know that, her faith in him was boundless. One could almost understand why his own maker had chosen to taste the fire, what an impossibly heavy thing to be the recipient of such faith.

He guided her to the door, big hand on her shoulder and she was not afraid, she accepted it and soon there was Grace, there at the door, and he could not care less about the shame in her face. 

“Daddy,” Claudia whispered and it was hard to know if she was talking to him or Louis. 

“You go with Grace now, and I will speak to Louis.”

And she went. Willingly, trustingly. Had anyone ever trusted him so very much?

Him, the clown, man of a thousand failures.

Lestat opened his mouth and felt the hot air flood in. It was summer, after all. There was nothing really cold about this night. Louis was waiting, right where he’d left him. With his neck bowed down like a saint.

“You’re considering this,” Lestat said, plainly.

Louis did not deny it, and yet his mouth twisted and his shoulders were raised close to his ears, “I am thinking of our future and—“ 

“You are not going to France, Louis.” He said it matter-of-factly, cool as the ocean edge.

He could see the discomfort rising in Louis, that trapped animal smell soaking his brow, “It is not your decision to make, it’s my life and I—“

They stood only a few steps apart, Louis with his feet on the rug and Lestat near the window like there was a whole universe between them. He could not have read Louis’ thoughts even if he’d tried.

“I fear you have misunderstood everything, mon cher.” Lestat said, resting his heavy back on the cool glass of the window, “I would have to be dead before you were to go to France, Louis.”

He could see the effort it took for Louis to process this. What could Lestat mean? Lestat who’d been often silly, accommodating. Who’d done as he asked and only pushed when he knew Louis would be pleased. His little pupped, too enamoured to ever say no, to ever deny Louis whatever Louis demanded of him. And yet now it was over, just like that, Lestat’s face slackening around a heavy jaw, the tips of his nails sharp as he touched the fine wallpaper behind him, as he turned his neck and licked with his gaze the fine bones of Louis’ shoulders and refused to look away. 

“Lestat, you can’t tell me what to do.” 

Oh the desperation on Louis’ face then, the fear. Suddenly, like something inside his animal brain had awakened to the danger. 

“I can. I can, and I will.” Silent, he looked at Louis, allowing Louis to look at him. Louis was a fine vampire, a good predator with an intelligent mind and exquisite instincts. More intelligent than Lestat would ever be, surely. But he had not known violence, he had not known pain and torture and terror. He had not been touched or used, he had not been chained to a wall soaked with the blood of the undeserving and been made to look at death as if it were a long lost friend. 

Louis was a boy. He did not know what was out there, what could be done to him. The unfairness and cruelty of all that Lestat had left behind. And he would never know it, not for as long as Lestat lived.

“And if I have to lock you in this house, keep you away from everyone else, seal us in our coffin and have you feed from me until I'm nothing but flesh I will, mon cher. I will be a monster for you, and you will hate me for it, but you will not go.”

It was a terrible silence that followed, all blood had been drained from Louis’ face and he was open with terror, with petulance. He had never considered it, that there was no choice for him, that it was an eternity what he’d unknowingly accepted the first time he’d kissed Lestat. A whole eternal life.

“Beg, cry, beg some more. It is no use. It will be of no use, Louis.” Lestat added, shaking his head and waiting, still as stone for Louis to process what he was saying. 

You have no freedom, alas this is true. 

He saw fear, yes. And yet something else in Louis’ eyes, almost invisible amongst the endless green, a silver dot, an expression like a spinning coin. For an instant, the corners of his lips curled up, fast and pleased and despondent, yet only for a fleeting instant, and then he was back to emptiness.

“You wouldn’t,” Louis said, chin up in the air, for he was a fighter, his Louis. Always a fighter. 

All Lestat had ever wanted was to look at Louis and so he did, watching his eyelashes as they curled into the shadows under Louis’ eyes. 

“You and I both know I would. You know I have nothing else. I care, about nothing else. So I will do whatever it takes to keep you. Here, with me.”

For the first time, he saw Louis’ fangs descend quickly into his mouth as if he were about to attack him. He saw Louis’ hand, reach for his own hair and pull, yanking his hair as if he wished to get rid of it. He saw Louis, bent forward and red faced, some impossibly ugly anger in his face.

“You really must be stupid to want me that badly.” Louis spat and then there was that silence again, as if they were both preparing for a real fight.

When it finally came back, Louis' voice was thickly accented, rude, “My mother is right, about everything. I have no sense of loyalty. I am selfish. I am concerned only with my own wants, with my own comfort. I will sell anyone for it, even you. Even... her. I am a thief. I am a swindler, yes. I am a whore who would do anything for some coin and roof over my head. I am as low as the dirt under these shoes. Of course you won’t believe it. You’re blind to it, can only think with your fucking cock. Listen to me: I was meant to be with my father, when it happened. He was advised by his physician not to travel alone and I was to go with him, up to Atlanta. To buy some magical cure, some secret medicine that would do what no doctor on this Earth could. I did not want to go, I had other plans. I was seeing someone, some faceless boy, and I wanted him to give me some face, to buy me a drink and tell me how unfair it was that my father wouldn’t let me touch our money. I gave my excuses, on the train station, left him there and he went alone and found some pitiful monster strapped for cash willing to sell him the Dark Gift. Paid for it and came back home and gave it to us, one by one. I was the first, that was my punishment; and I could have stopped him, I was strong then. Instead, I helped him get Paul from the hospital and I let him… I watched. I waited and I did absolutely nothing and I accepted it, this cursed fucking existence. Why not? I thought, it's already happened, what can I really do now, huh?”

Louis’ sharp teeth glittered in the golden light and he shook, face and body contorted in something beyond anger, suddenly resolute as he added, “So you see it now, I hope. My mother is right. It’s my fault and it’s my penance and this thing…” That big, long hand reached out, as if it could hold their whole house in its palm, “This thing… You and Claudia. You don’t need me, and I’m— I’m tired, Lestat,”

Empty, suddenly, Louis fell on his knees and the scent of blood, of blood tears, touched the inside of Lestat’s nostrils, “I’m so tired of fearing it. This day, soon, anytime now. The day it will all go to hell. The day you’ll grow bored, the day you’ll find a woman or a man, a mortal, even— The day you’ll see me as I am and you’ll just go. It’s hell, Lestat.”

And suddenly Louis was looking up, pitiful on the rug he so loved with his jaw set and his eyes as wide as the sky, “Maybe... I’d rather you just do it now. Just… just fuck me now, just do it already. Do it and let us be done with it so you can leave and I can…”

Lestat was no longer under water. He was suddenly, startlingly awake as if he’d been pushed off the roof. 

Because Louis was saying… “Excuse me?”

It was as if all the melodrama, the tears, the inflated threat of violence, of unforgivable acts not yet committed had just gone and all the sudden Lestat could see himself, still in one piece in his green suit with the droopy lapels, in his house, here with Louis. There was no abyss, not now. Not unending darkness, no treason or hurt. 

Nothing had been decided.

There was only… “Louis, you think this is about sex?”

Louis was all sharp teeth, still on the floor, on his knees, “You know what I mean, don’t—“

Lestat stepped closer, felt the scent of Louis’ skin inside his throat, “You think… You think sex is going to change everything, that I will leave once I’ve—“

“Well, you’ve been chasing it since we met. Don’t deny it now.” Louis replied, rolling his eyes, all arrogance. If only he didn't look so utterly pathetic.

Lestat, he reminded himself quite firmly that it was entirely the wrong moment for him to laugh.

He could not laugh.

“We’ve been having sex.” He said instead.

“No, don't play dumb now. You know what I mean,”

It was absurd. 

Lestat couldn't properly see Louis' face but by looking down at him in a manner so childish, with his head bent and his chin to his own chest where the green suit felt rough and strange against his neck, which in turn made him feel so small and ridiculous. Like a schoolboy, trying to catch a glimpse of some naughty little thing. He could not take any of this seriously, could not believe Louis had threatened to leave him because he believed—

“Mon cher, I want to fuck you yes. You’ve caught me. My greatest sin, I will admit this to you now in confidence if I must. I will confess,” But a little huff of laughter did escape, small like a snort and Louis’ back stiffened, properly offended by his tone, his unseriousness. 

“Want it. You’re like a dog for it, Lestat. Always mumbling about having to earn it, about getting me on my back, on my—“

“If it is my dirty talk that offends you so, Louis, I assure you I can be quiet next time we—“

“It is not about your dirty talk!” Louis shouted, red in the face, so red indeed that even the tips of his ears had turned almost purple and he looked—

“You’re such a prude,” Lestat gasped and laughed and laughed again as Louis tried to lift himself off his knees and fell back under the sudden pressure of Lestat’s hand on the back of his neck, “You are more obsessed with it than I could ever be. Obsessed, too, with this divine punishment of your sins. This… fantasy -for this is a fantasy, Louis- that there is a God who cares so much about you that you can’t even get yourself off or he will punish you, swiftly and immediately. And most importantly, personally. So yes, of course, your father took the Dark Gift because you were out somewhere getting sucked by some poor boy who probably came in his trousers just by seeing you. Yes, your whole family is now falling apart, slowly but surely, not because of some real, logical reason, but because you and I once went to the opera alone and now you let me touch you under your clothes when you’re happy with me. This is all so very logical, mon cher. This is god’s fucking will!”

Stunned, Louis said nothing, for what was there to say, really and Lestat, he wasn’t cruel and yet he could not help but say, “Louis, do you really believe Oh God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, would care about where and how and how very often you let yourself be happy? Do you think his grand plan for humanity hinges on me finally deciding to drag you to the bedroom and put my cock in you?” 

The conversation had so derailed to the point of insanity that Lestat was now breathless, red in the face with his hands shaking and the certainty of having taken the stage, after all. Playing the fool or the villain he wasn’t sure. 

“I’m not a prude, so watch your words.” Louis huffed, but made no move to add anything else.

“You’re a virgin, it is your one flaw, Louis. And Jesus himself knows I’ve been trying to save you from it. Well, that and that obsession you hold with keeping things as they are, with keeping order, with setting the rug to rights as soon as you get home and putting all your clothes away as soon as they’re removed. Maddening, that. We live here Louis, let it be shown! But, you know, it is not that important, I can be forgiving, I can accept it, annoying as it can be. I am sure I have my flaws too but I am forgiving, I can live with those qualities of yours; both the first and the second, although one is more of a constant annoyance, I can admit.”

At that, Louis almost managed to rise, and yet Lestat held him, down on his knees with his gaze so heated, so full of vile anger, one could have burned for all eternity under it.

“You know a man came to see me a few weeks ago, came to my parent’s house, remember? A man I have told you about before, the boy I kissed…" Louis was being hurtful now, deep in the throes of his embarrassment, his Louis, merciless in his anger, “And I met with him, after that call. I told you I was busy, I had some errands to run for my father... And you believed me,”

Nails now piercing the soft muscle of Louis’ neck, Lestat nodded and smiled, “Oh, you met with this man, mon cher? Behind my back?”

Stubborn tears of pure anger still coated Louis’ lashes, turning them into little clumps against his wet eyelids, “I did, and I—“

“Still, you didn’t let him fuck you,” Lestat interjected and watched quite closely the anger and shame and shock travel through Louis’ widened pupils. 

“I could have—!“

“Still, you came back to me, Louis. You wore your ring, the whole time I suspect, and came back here with your chin in your collar and your lips bitten red and bloody and a single rose plucked, no, stolen from a flower seller’s cart, smelling of rum and mud…” Lestat stopped, waited for Louis to understand his words, for the memories of that night to sneak back into his mind, “Oh, don’t think I did not know. You are a terrible liar, mon cher. Can’t hide a thing on that beautiful face of yours.”

“You— you knew?” 

“Of course, yes. We have no secrets.”

Louis laughed then, a huge, breathless thing, but at least he’d given up on trying to get out of Lestat’s grasp.

“And you—“

“And I smelled your hair and your back and your neck when you were in coffin and when I was sure, quite sure, that nothing had happened with that mortal boy, pushed your pants down and touched you until you came in your sleep, mon cher.”

He could see in Louis all the signs of a dog who was about to snap. The ears, the canines, the lips curling up into a sneer so deep his gums were bright and pink in the gaslight. Suddenly wondering, this dog-Louis, who the hell was Lestat to so boldly claim to do whatever he pleased with Louis’ body whenever he felt like it? Never once asking for permission, acting like sex, like pleasure was some enjoyable act instead of a sacrilegious, sordid thing that had to be done only out of pure desperation and self-loathing?

“So it means nothing to you, the great, worldly man. You've been with so many, whatever we do or don’t do, it means absolutely nothing,“ Louis demanded, sounding so offended, arching his back as if to pounce, “I could get on my knees and you would not—“

“But you are on your knees, mon cher.” Lestat said, pulling at Louis’ hair until his eyes went glassy, “And it would mean everything. It would— It will be important. Just not important enough to make me change my mind about you, Louis.”

He could see all the little thoughts crowding Louis’ head, the cap of a windmill going round and round and then the eyes, suddenly, like a flash of green, up and focused, aware of the touch, not so gentle, no, of Lestat’s hand on his neck, of the skin there, the pulse of two having become one, quick and excited, their heartbeat, like wind moving the giant hands of the sails. 

“Why then?” Louis asked, quietly, his tongue coming out to touch his lower lip, to wet it, “Why would it be special?”

“Because I love you, Louis. I am in love with you. You know this, don’t you? It is a sure thing, that.”

It all came to that one moment, and one could almost feel sorry for Louis, the shock and horror on his face, his eyelashes all clumped together in the aftermath of his sticky tears. Reeling, feeling the overwhelming truth of the statement, and him so used to taking every side road to reach the finish line. Pretending, avoiding every truth, every confrontation of his own desires. He would have liked for Lestat to have taken so long, complicated way here instead of just blurting it out in the middle of an argument. There was Louis and all his many many considerations, and, on the contrary, here was the truth, simple as that. What a horrid thing, to be confronted with it so plainly. 

“You can’t say—“

"But I do, I love you. I love you today and I'll love you tomorrow and the day after that, and I will continue to love you in the momentum of all that eternity which is yet to come for us. Will love you, no matter what happens, and I think... It will be worth it, having been allowed to be in love with you, whatever else happens then."

Grabbing Louis by his hair Lestat had only to take his face between his open palm and kiss him. It was a testament to how impossibly sweet Louis was that his mouth parted immediately to the kiss, his tongue soft like the opening of a ripe fruit. He was soft like that for some time, up on his hunches by then, being kissed and held with his knees rubbing against the carpet until his right palm came back, clumsy as he pushed against Lestat's chest. 

Shaky and perhaps a little dazed, with his eyelids half closed over his blown-out pupils, Louis whispered, “Okay. I— We can, now. If you still… We could, do that,”

A full body shake passed through Lestat and he tried to get a glimpse of Louis’ flushed chest under his shirt. Louis' voice, so gentle and yet… His knees parted on the rug, and Lestat bowed lower, half draped over Louis, grabbing him again, his hands roaming over the soft cotton of his shirt, the careful stitching on the pocket, undid every button he could reach, which weren’t many, uselessly tangled as he was with Louis’ form. Revealed, quickly and almost in a daze of his own, the dusky brown nipples, the dusting of hair in between his breasts, the firm, elegant line of his breastbone. 

Louis gasped, as if taking in all the air he could into his lungs and let himself fall, slowly and lazily, back, back, back until he was long and open on the carpeted floor, his knees parted and his eyes trained to Lestat’s shaky fingers, now grasping nothing at all. 

A deadly vision, his blouse half opened around a curving belly, all gold skin, open like a flower. And yet his eyes, that little challenge, that absolute security in the strength of his own beauty. Lestat could not even blink, could hardly breathe-

“Are you going to do it? Or just look?” Louis asked tartly, casually slipping out of the sleeves of his wrinkled blouse. 

Dizzy, on his knees, sudden as a blink, Lestat was back on him, back between his open thighs, pressing his nose to the damp dip at the bottom of Louis’ throat. His tongue wide and hot on Louis' flesh, tasting the muscle there, Louis’ scent, feeling his pulse right under his nose like a drum. 

What to do with Louis? He wanted to do everything. Wanted him on his back, on his knees, bent over in half over the back of a sofa, with his tongue and his chin soaked in spit and come and his hands fisted around his own cock, trying to fight off the pleasure. He wanted him crying and laughing and inflamed with the magnitude of his own want, of all the filthy fantasies he’d been taught to hide. He wanted Louis marked, permanently, covered in bite marks and sweat and his own sweet blood.

Louis was magnetic, unaware, to some extent, of the effects his little gasps had on Lestat and yet he was arching up into him, swearing, quietly and using his hands, his nails to push Lestat down, forcefully against his throat, his skin, bowing his back until his cock was a hard pressure against Lestat’s thigh and—

“I thought—“ Lestat started to speak, swimming in the electric pain of Louis’ less than gentle treatment, but had to quickly stop and inhale through the ensuing struggle to form words as Louis dug his nails deep into his lower back, “I thought ladies were taught to be— to be nice on their wedding night,”

“Fuck off,”  He heard Louis huff, curse, gasp, his knee jerking up, hitting Lestat’s ribs in a dull shock. “You can’t say that. ‘M not…”

Lestat relished the response he got from Louis, the way his pulse grew faster, his hips rubbing hot and insistent against Lestat’s thigh. Poor thing wasn’t going to last long, not long enough for everything that needed to be done. Lestat crouched over Louis, tearing open his trousers, parting his knees, licking him, kissing him, licking him again. Down his sternum and over the trembling curve of his belly. He knew this part by now, and yet it had not stopped feeling brand new and illicit. Access to Louis’ body felt like a gift, some precious reward for a life of misdeeds. 

He kissed Louis’ hip, whispered gently, “Maybe that’s the problem, mon cher. You’ve been treated like a lady for so long, you’ve started to forget that you’re a man. That your cock grows hard when I touch you, that there is no cunt but a perfect ass for me to take, that you—“

Louis arched off the floor again, dragging his naked back over the unforgiving fabric, burning himself in the process no doubt. His head shook, side to side and he reached out with a hand and found Lestat’s palm and brought it to his mouth, sinking his teeth into the flesh and mumbling, “Please, God, don’t start—“

But Louis liked it. Liked being reminded of the gaps in his existence, all the little uncertainties. Liked biting into Lestat’s hand and feeling the blood pour down his throat and liked looking up at him in between his lashes and letting the darkness of his eyes speak of the desire, the not-so-secret want in him. 

Most of all, he liked the denial. Feeling like he was being somewhat made to do this. Debased by some perverted beast. 

Lestat pulled on his trousers, undressed Louis until he was only in his underparts and grabbed him roughly around the hips and pressed down into the unforgiving floor, “Yes, you are a man, my love. So get on your belly for me now.”

And Lestat lifted him with his one free hand, light and heavy as he was, willing and resistant at once, and flopped him over his front. The air was heavy, all of the sudden, with the heat of Louis' skin, with the wet gasp of his mouth as Lestat manhandled him. It was better to not wait, to let the moment shock him into submission. Lestat sought the waistband of Louis underpants and yanked them, pulling on the fabric until Louis was truly bare.

“God Louis, and you thought I would leave, that I would have you once and—“

He could not speak, neither could Louis, his teeth still deep in the flesh of Lestat’s bleeding hand. Lestat could not feel the pain. Could not feel any part of his own body but the place where his nose touched the crease between Louis’ cheeks, his ass, the soft, reddening skin there. Louis bucked, wild, scandalised, no doubt. And yet there was no protestation when Lestat's lips found his hole, his tongue then, insistent, undeterred, biting, and sucking and gently scraping his teeth as Louis whimpered, his naked feet slipping on the rug as he tried to press himself more firmly against Lestat’s mouth. 

Lestat kissed him, there, right in between his legs, his hole, that perfect sex made for his own pleasure, where he knew Louis was desperate to be touched, to be played with. Felt the rhythm of Louis’ hips, his wet intakes of breath, the tight knot of his thoughts. What a mess that was, all the guilt and the lust and the impossible desire. There in his mind were Lestat’s eyes, flashing, blue and bright like two wet stones. The curve of his pale hands and the dip of his waist where his trousers ended. Memories, lustful memories stored inside Louis’s psyche. Louis watching him, secretly, as he undressed, his eyes trained to the glinting shadows on the mirror in their secret room. Waking up, half unconscious still, desperate and guilty, touching Lestat over his sleeping trousers, his palm open and selfish over Lestat’s soft cock, his nose buried under Lestat’s arm, drinking in his scent. Louis, winter Louis, so long ago Louis, pulling at his own cock, hard and fast and punishing in the middle of the day under his bed, with his teeth biting on a forgotten handkerchief, still thick with the scent of Lestat’s skin. 

The animal thoughts inside him, these things that he thought so very wrong. 

Three seconds, I’ll let him touch my back for three seconds and then I will move away and it will be enough. I will make it enough.

I could suck him better than those whores. I wouldn’t stop him when he pushed inside my mouth, down my throat. I would be good to him, I would—

His cock, inside me. Maybe once, maybe if he’s drunk and won’t remember. Maybe once won’t hurt, maybe that way he will want more of it. I could be good, I know I could, and maybe I could pretend nothing happened, maybe just once if he is lightheaded from the blood, from my drinking…

I could drain him, until there’s nothing left in him but want for me. He would let me do it.

“My love,” Lestat whispered, wrecked, his wet cheeks rubbing against Louis’ supple flesh. He could have died then, happy. 

“Please, no more talking. You’ve said enough just—“

But Lestat spoke again, whispering against Louis’ skin how sweet he was, how willing, how filthy and how wet. Persisted in licking Louis open, broad tongue against his hole, the tight bundle of skin opening up after some help from his fingers, and soon, deeper, inside Louis where one could almost, almost feel the pressure of the bulging veins inside him, the blood, quickly flowing south and Lestat more insistent, his nose, his chin, the powerful bone of his jaw open and spilling spit all down the space between Louis’ asscheeks and down his thighs. 

Another scent came soon after, that of Louis’ cock, leaking all over the carpet along with the quivering movements of Louis’ thighs, spreading shamelessly, his face rubbing against the rug too, little pants and moans and a desperate call, Lestat’s name, and please, and stop, and more, and love, please—

And Louis came, panting, rubbing himself wildly against the floor, with Lestat’s tongue halfway inside his hole, his mouth wetting him, really wetting him by then. He stayed like that, all spit and sweat, a small, naked mess for a second or two, for an eternity, and then pitifully still, he tried to twist his torso while spread out on his belly, with his fist tight around Lestat’s hand, that hand that remained in his half-open mouth, as if it were his only anchor to reality. 

“I’m going to take you now, Louis. To fuck you, like you asked. So we can be sure that no one is going to leave. Neither of us, yes? You wanted to be sure, my love?” Lestat managed to say in a rough voice that seemed to belong to some other man, desperate and hungry and unpolished. He draped his body high over Louis’ back, searching for his ear, for the scent of his neck and the pulse of his blood there, “You only need to nod your beautiful head for me and ask me for it.”

Disarmed, loose and pliant in that way he so rarely was, Louis did as he was told. He nodded, fully dazed now, and his eyelashes touched the rug under his cheek and Lestat did not wait politely for him to recover, did not let the moment go, fade away from him like some other, more generous man might have. Instead he kissed Louis’ ear, traced with his tongue the path down Louis’ shoulder and searched again with his fingers down that golden curve of his spine like a musician on the keys, tracing Louis’ back until he found his loosened hole.

He did struggle at that, Louis. Thrashing a little, and then his eyes blinked, opened, dark as two huge drops of oil, “It feels so dirty, down there, I feel so—“

“But it’s not, not dirty. It’s romantic, see?” And he kissed Louis’ back, watched his hips as he pressed a finger back inside where his tongue had been only moments before. This hole of Louis that had only one single purpose. One single use.

“Ah,”  Was all Louis could say, glassy eyes focused only on the vicinity of Lestat’s mouth. 

Who could have predicted how languid Louis could get. Made wholly of willingness, open like a doll with one finger inside his ass and then two and almost three, and still only his slow blinks, the shock and the shivers and the strong pulsing of his veins. His tongue, darting out to taste Lestat’s spit and leftover blood on his lips. 

A better man would have fingered Louis for hours, would have ignored the painful pulsing of his own cock in his trousers. And yet he could not, and he was soon mounting him, like a dog, his own skin clammy and flushed red in anticipation. For a second he felt disgusted by the image he must make. Panting, half undressed with his long hair all over the place, red all over like a boiled crab, overexcited and eager, a pathetic man so desperate to finally be with Louis. To have him. Masochistically, he looked into Louis' face, afraid of what he might find there but there was only a  soft, tender smile and the burning desire of his eyes on Lestat’s chest. 

Louis, smiling up at him, his teeth sinking into his lower lip, nodding almost absentmindedly, “Take me, then. Do it, love.”

And then pain. Pain on Louis’ face and impossible heat and pressure around Lestat’s cock as he entered him. The head only, it was too tight for anything else. I wasn’t going to work, impossible. 

“That’s… Kiss me a little, please? It’s—“ Louis’ tremulous smile, the grimace of pain on his brow. 

Lestat kissed him, clumsily, trying to find the right angle. Louis’ open mouth welcomed him full of familiarity, and he felt close to crying. 

It was wrong, the angle, the position, Louis’ face against the floor. It wasn’t romantic. Lestat had said it would be romantic. It wasn’t what Louis deserved.

Lestat took his cock out, turned Louis on his back with shaky hands, bending him, his knees, parted, rug burned, up into his chest and there was Lestat again, pressing his cock in, inch by inch, watching the emotions dance on Louis’ pretty face. Better, then, Louis’ hips opening up, the pressure less dangerous to Lestat’s sanity.

“Oh, that’s—“ His full lips, right there. Those wet eyelids. 

And Lestat was in. Inside Louis’ beautiful body. They were one. Lestat’s hips resting against Louis’ ass, still wet with his spit and Louis was restless, no longer a virgin, no longer the boy he was an hour ago, and Lestat kissed him again, felt his pulse inside his throat and—

“I love you, yes? I still—“ He murmured, crazed against Louis' chest, his forehead sticky with sweat on all that perfect skin, “And after… after we’ve done this, I will still…”

He’d wanted to say ‘it doesn’t change anything’; but that wasn’t true. He was already changed by the feeling of it, of home, of union and, as much as he had tried to put on a front for Louis, he knew this would change everything. And there was a backlash feeling, suddenly like an ambush, a fear that he might never experience this again, might, after all, fail to convince Louis to stay. That he might lose it, the only real family he’d ever had, that he might be found lacking and what then, what would be to live, forever, without feeling Louis’ thighs around his hips, without the soft touch of the hairs there against his own skin, without—

Two slow blinks from Louis and then a question, just as slow, “Is this… is this good for you too? You—“ Like it?

The words, not said but thought, came along with a shared feeling of fullness, Louis' unmistakable enjoyment in being pressed against the floor, of being made small, of being wanted more than anything else.

Lestat pressed his forehead to Louis' chest again, felt his heartbeat inside his own chest. And lower, the feeling of Louis’ body clenching against him, dragging his thoughts away from grand declarations and right into the needs of his own flesh. 

“You were made to be fucked,” He grunted, and pushed into Louis with one long thrust of his hips. 

And how Louis liked it, his hands searching, hips arching.

There was no practice in his conduct now, he was just Louis; and Lestat ground his cock into him and rubbed his palm against the hardened tip of Louis' cock, pushing it against his belly. This was the tricky part, he thought. How to find the balance. Louis was sensitive, both physically and mentally to these sorts of things, and yet Lestat could bend his back and run his nose along the head of his cock and there was nothing Louis could do to stop him. Not even Louis’s nails in his scalp, coming out bloody and the look of surprise in Louis’ face at that fact, the minute hesitation, the slow, deliberate movement of said hand, right against his own lips, his tongue coming out to lap at it, eyelashes fluttering as he moaned, utterly lost in the moment. 

Yes, not even that, not— Louis, tongue, again, running hungrily, noisily against his own wrist, sticky-damp with Lestat’s blood. Yeah, maybe that, that could make Lestat falter. 

“It is very hurtful to a man’s pride to—“ Lestat started but he'd made the mistake of looking right into Louis’ eyes and soon found himself sinking deeper, his hips almost flushed with Louis’, the head of his cock right against something inside of Louis, making him whimper, shake, for only a second, “To know you enjoy my blood more than my cock, poupette.”

It made Louis laugh, a breathless almost whistling thing and his hole clenched, tight and perfect around Lestat’s cock. The next moment he was blinking again, up at him with those impossibly green eyes and saying, “You should— you should try mine, ah, just to— To see if—“

Lestat jolted then, a fist coming up to Louis’ neck as if on instinct. His skin was so warm, blood warm, and Lestat wanted it, but even he couldn’t be expected to last long inside Louis if he got to taste—

But Louis, who could never be denied, Louis who seemed often the perfect immovable object until the very second something came over him and he made up his mind; Louis did not allow him a denial. His eyes pierced Lestat, his shoulders coming forwards, all toned muscle as he arched his back and whispered, tender and dangerous, “Here, take it, my love,”

And, looking at Lestat, he bit his own tongue with his human teeth, a big gush of blood blooming right at the tip, a full glob of it, of Louis’ blood, held for a second in the curved weight of his tongue. His chin tilted up, mouth open and Lestat’s mind left him, everything turning a brown-red-crimson colour as he bent down, this time in a jerk, turned clumsy in his moment of need, as he kissed Louis. As he tasted him for the first time. 

It was the taste of humanity, of crisp apples, of the last morning of being young and alive and innocent in the Paris summer days. He sucked on Louis’ tongue like a man, like a boy, felt himself drinking him inside him, tasting the memories, his own, and Louis’, and, funnily enough, memories yet to come, of a life with Louis, with Claudia, of summers and springs yet to come, autumns thick with humidity and long, dark winters where the piano would be played, where he could learn to be a better man, where Louis would seek him out, touch him, want him, always. 

“Troublesome,” He whispered, loopy, voice small and wet against Louis’ bleeding mouth, “You are so—“

“Tell me you love me again,” Was all Louis said, using Lestat’s body, fucking himself into him. 

There wasn’t much to say after that, there was instead Louis’ body and the feel of it. The enormity of their desire for each other. There was Louis’ hunger, his eager requests ‘bite me, please, I want it, I want to know how it feels’,  and Lestat fucking into him, as hard as he could, and his teeth inside Louis’ skin, at his throat, on his chest, right over the lower muscles of his belly, of his long wrists. He wished to speak, to say everything to Louis and yet he could not and maybe it was for the best, because in the silence there were only the sounds of Louis’ body, of his wrecked voice, mumbling something. 

“I think I’m going to—“ Louis teeth were biting on the words, his vampire teeth, sharp against his lower lip. His body so willing and warm and then a finger, maybe two, fingertips pressed against Lestat’s heartbeat at his chest, Louis’ eyes finally closed as he colapsed flat onto the floor, coming all over his own chest and the back of Lestat’s hands. 

His come was almost translucent pink in the warm glow of the lamps and his beautiful cock laid almost deflated against his hip. Lestat tongued him clean the best he could, still fucking into Louis, mindless now, feeling lost in it, in this full need to please Louis, to make it good enough to keep him—

“Ah, that’s— Slow down, love, I need you to—“

And Louis touched him, gentle, his hands twitching still but firm, slowing Lestat down, bringing him close until they were chest to chest and Lestat could feel the fear receding, could feel himself slipping back into himself, his own body, too big around Louis and yet—

“I would give you anything,” He grunted, eyes teary, accent as thick as his tongue in his mouth, “A house, a child, anything, all the money in the world. I’d carve— Carve your name on my flesh every day if you—“

“It’s okay, love, it’s okay now—“ Was Louis’ voice, Louis’ warm hole, so tight around him he felt like he might slip off, and wouldn't that be cruel? After he’d worked so hard to have him and would Louis let him rut against his back? Against his leg? Coming over the soles of his feet if it came to that, at least? Would Louis mind that much if he— “You’ve done so good for me, Lestat. It’s time now,”

“—take you to Saint Agustine full of my come and— and marry you there and fuck you in the altar in front of God and you would say yes and you would—“

Lestat could feel his heart, big, huge inside his chest, pumping, in and out. Wanting, always wanting Louis. Wanting this. His heart that he’d tried to forget, to quiet down and yet it was there, still, and even after everything, it wanted what it wanted and hungered for what it hungered and loved what it loved. Still hoping, tremendously so. 

Against his lips, Louis' voice was everything, “It’s okay now, Lestat. I love you, it’s okay,”

Lestat came, quiet, almost fully still inside Louis and then a rush of air, just as powerful, and the pleasure hit him straight through his body, vaguely he heard Louis urging him to breath, laughing, astonished, soft, against Lestat's temple, his hands very careful pulling him to his chest. They were both sticky, wet as blood was, blissfully melting into one another and then Louis was rolling them, side by side on the floor and had he really done that? Taken Louis’ virginity on the hallway of their house, not even the bed, not even a sofa for him to—

“Stop thinking, please, good God— You never shut up, do you?“ 

And soon, Louis urging him to move, kissing his brow, holding him up, Louis wincing as he guided Lestat up the stairs. Lestat had done that to him, that discomfort. And soon the bed, yes, their bed, and Louis, open under him, allowing Lestat to put his hand to his ass, to lick him clean, barely even putting up an affronted front. Soon after than his mouth all over Louis again, properly this time, fucking him again, making love to him again, telling him how much he loved him over and over again. 

They were lovers for a long time then, swimming in that sense of eternity, of never ending seconds leading to hours, to months; but it could not have been more than a few human hours having passed in this manner because they soon heard the front door, heard knocking, insistent and loud. They didn’t have the luxury of human months to spend fucking and kissing on their bed, three fingers deep inside Louis with his nose buried in the crook of Louis' neck. No, they had a child, and a door. The door, more knocking, Claudia and Grace. Claudia, annoyed to be made to wait at her own door, annoyed at having been sent away. Fearful too, quietly afraid of coming in and hearing her parents fighting.

“I’ll go, I’ll greet them, I’ll—“ Lestat said, looking for his clothes, anything to wear, trying to unfocus his gaze from the constellation of marks on Louis' neck and chest. 

“We’ll both go, I owe her an apology,” And then, almost as if laughing to himself, “I can’t believe she called you daddy before me, she’s so—“

“Well, I am.” Lestat replied, still searching and searching. Where were his trousers, where was his shirt, his socks, a ribbon for his hair—?

Suddenly, Louis' mouth was at his neck and that finger, the one wearing his ring with the big green emerald and the ancient gold was at his wrist, “Don’t you two start ganging up on me, I am delicate, I couldn’t handle it.”

And a smile broke, free, full of sharp teeth on Lestat's sharp face, as insistent as the following knock at the door, Claudia’s voice, sneaking up the staircase like a bird’s calling, “What is taking you two so very long? I will break this door, I will…“

Chapter Text

By summer’s end, they were gone. Grace and Monsieur and Madame de Pointe du Lac quit New Orleans on the date they had so chosen; leaving two sons behind, in the case of the couple, and a promise to write at least once a month, in the case of the sister. There had been no tear stained farewells at the harbour, only Claudia with her little pink hat and a fistful of rocks, chasing the seagulls away, and Louis’ green eyes trained to the bow of the ship.

“Don’t be too sad, Louis. They are having to eat mortal food every night and go on walks on the deck and pretend to be human the whole way there. You would have hated it.” Paul had said and, in a moment of startling kindness, had taken Louis’ hand and intertwined his short, stocky fingers with Louis’. “Now, this hat your friend Lestat is wearing, Louis, could you explain this hat to me? Did you know, that he was to wear this? And if you did, could you warn me next time he does? I do have my pride, still—”

As it happened, Paul stayed. Louis would not have allowed otherwise.

The decision had come about after so many arguments as to make someone want to taste the sun, if only for a few seconds of mindless, quiet bliss. How fortunate that, in the end, Louis had been more than sure that everyone, even his parents, had their price.

For Louis’ father, it had been the open promise that the house would be quite safe in Louis’ hands, that he would never sell it, or let it rot. That he would not, as he had hinted, burn it to the ground the moment they set foot on that ship. And, secretly, there had been the added push, an early morning visit, Lestat in the study as Monsieur de Pointe du Lac had walked in, and the earnest promise of a fire, a real fire, the quiet words pronounced very carefully into the silent room, with the man’s wife still in her bed and the old gargoyle frozen still by Lestat’s unbreakable power, and a sweet, quiet sort of question, ‘Do you know, monsieur? All the ways in which our kind can be killed?’

From then on, it was only a matter of making Paul want to stay. 

But Paul was not a man to be made to do something. He was often all too aware of his power over Louis and was, as younger brothers often are, unhappy to be thought a child in need of caring. He refused then, to be moved into the spare bedroom next to Claudia’s, refused to stay at the de Pointe du Lac home if it meant Louis would move back in to watch him, to fuss over him.

“What am I to do with him? Nothing pleases him. He won’t be happy alone, he won’t be happy with us, he won’t have me stay with him—”

“But Louis, you have to admit, he is not fully in the wrong. He is not a child, mon cher, and to be treated as one—”

“Not you too,” said Louis, angry. So very angry all the time. It made him look quite handsomely masculine, the shadowy look on his tawny face and his sudden bad tempers when the occasion called for it and all the little ways in which he had started to perform more as the man of the house as his father’s departure loomed closer. “You talk to him then. Tell him to go, tell him he will love Paris and he will do just the opposite.”

Lestat was nothing, ever, if not obliging and easy so, on a night when Paul had come to play cards and the mood was as right as it could ever be, Lestat had attempted, with all the strange familiarity they now shared, to bring up the topic; only to be quieted with a determined stare and the same angry flaring of the nostrils as Louis was known for. 

“You forget yourself, sir.” Grunted Paul.

“I do, yes. It is Louis’ doing, I swear.” Lestat replied, finding himself quite embarrassed by his clumsy attempt at persuasion. “Will you tell Louis I attempted it?”

Amid so much dissent and the oncoming date when the number of trunks being sent ahead of them to Paris would have to be determined, it was Claudia who eventually managed to settle the matter. 

“And what is your business in Paris, uncle? One would think you have a mistress or a bastard you are fleeing from, you know? I always thought you better than that…”

Her fine face and warm umber skin had been so perfectly luminous in the light of the parlour, bright and unyielding like the flames of a roaring fire.

“I have nothing to run away from. In fact—” Paul’s eyes had stared into hers, uncle to niece, bathed in sudden clarity, “In fact, I am not one to abandon anyone. Every occasion in which I have left New Orleans has been forced upon me. Not my choice. No, not my choice at all,”

“Well, you’re choosing now. Choosing to leave me alone with these two who are constantly in their own world with their own secrets and no room for me or my secrets.” Replied Claudia, schoolgirl voice dropping through the barest hint of real sadness and right up, back into petulance. 

With a thump and a stomp, Paul stood up, marching out of the room and shouting over his shoulder, “Who said! I have not decided! Not decided yet! And it is for me to decide, not her, not Louis, not the ugly French mouse with the impertinent nose—”

Then one night, only a handful of days after their little argument in the parlour, they heard the wailing of mourners and the creaking of doors and stairs, and, through the walls, the unmistakable odour of death and decay and, it being only Claudia and Lestat in the house then, Louis having gone out on some errand or other, they pressed their heads very firmly against the wall and heard it so clearly, the removal of bodies and the sad but eager planning of relatives. The owners, that old couple who had once decided to board up their windows for fear of catching Lestat’s shadow on the patio at night, were dead. 

They wondered, these strangers, what to do with the couple’s house then. How to sell it now that the old couple was dead. It would not be easy, no matter how pretty the property, not when their neighbours were who they were. 

“Can I keep their cat now? Since they’re dead and all. They have no need for it anymore.” Whispered Claudia. 

“Maybe the cat is dead too,” Lestat replied, not too happy at the thought of the white and brown creature and the smell of its street-dust paws on the carpet. 

“Oh, no. Louis would not have killed my cat. He knows how much I love it and how angry I would be if he did.” Claudia replied, her little hand still pressed to the panelled wall. “And besides, he is a very smart cat and knows not to cross Louis when he is in a mood,”

For a second Lestat was caught in the incoherence of the words, for what did Louis have to do with the neighbours deaths and why would he spare the cat, when he knew how much Lestat disliked the creature stepping all over the sofa and the bed and dusting the floor with its fur?

It has been said, but it sometimes bears repeating, how humbling it was for Lestat to share a home and a life with someone like Louis. 

Louis, who, as bad a liar as he was, as little as he cared for deception and intricate plans, had decided, upon hearing Paul and Claudia argue over his leaving New Orleans and glimpsing the smallest avenue for a happy resolution, that he would take matters into his own hands. That same night, he’d later recounted to Lestat’s astonishment, once Paul had returned home, how he’d gone next door and poisoned their neighbours and arranged their bodies so carefully as to make it look like they’d just simply passed in their sleep. 

Peaceful as could be. 

Had made sure to read the deed and look at all the documents pertaining to the house, and had soon returned home and gone peacefully to coffin with Lestat, but not before sending a hurried letter to their solicitor, setting a price and instructing him to keep an eye on the property and secure it by any means necessary. 

His simple plan all set out and him all happiness and sly smiles as Paul had walked into the Rue Royale parlour two days later with the old couple’s obituary in hand, grumbling almost angry but halfway hopeful about how the house would probably sell soon and what sort of reprobates would wish to reside in a neighbourhood such as this one but, oh in truth maybe there was some beauty to the place, and one could still walk to Saint Agustine from there and well, it was a well built house, maybe not for a family, for the stairs were too steep for that and the rooms too narrow and not well lit at all but one could think, perhaps a single gentleman could make good use of it. A shame then, that Louis was now attached as he was, for the investment would have been good for him, and—

“I could still invest in it, if you think it wise, Paul. It had not occurred to me until just now.”

“Invest in it! Only to leave it empty? It will rot within a month. No, it is too nice a place to leave empty…”

And all along Lestat stood, quiet as a mouse, by the piano, watching how, in the course of an hour a compromise was reached. The place next door would be purchased by Louis –on Lestat’s account, which was a detail never mentioned or even thought of by anyone in the room, not even himself– and occupied by Paul, who would care for it as a favour to his brother, who was much much too busy to do it himself.

“You will make sure his sunless room is built on the opposite side of ours, at least. Right?” Was all Lestat could be worried about when it came time to seal the deal. 

Louis, with his hands and his beautiful face buried in the open gap of Lestat’s trousers could only look up then, blinking his dusky eyelids and opening his mouth, knees spread open against the pristine floor of their automobile, there on the lover’s lane where they never hunted, a place only used for sneaking around and kissing and fucking, when the time was sufficient and Claudia was otherwise entertained by either aunt or uncle. 

“You want to talk about this right now, love? With my mouth on your cock?”

“No, no, never—” Lestat protested for it was true, nothing mattered more than Louis’ warm mouth and his tight throat and the beautiful curve of his lips and the little curls coiling around his ears from the heat, and yet— “I am simply— Ah, Louis, Louis, mon cher, listen, I am only—”

Louis’ hand then, all dainty and strong and long like a riding crop, making a fist around Lestat’s cockhead, “You are a perverted, obsessed lustful man. It is never enough for you, is it? You have not fucked me yet and you’re thinking of our coffin, of our sunless room and all the noise you expect me to make in there. On my back, on my knees for you, with your mouth on my ass and, even now, you’re already thinking of it, the next time—”

But his eyes, so bright, so green as to be almost brown, almost the colour of another Louis, the human Louis he sometimes dreamed about. A picture kept hidden inside the pocket of his favourite jacket. His beautiful Louis, his bright, brilliant Louis—

“Tell me, confess it. It will never be enough,” Lights in his eyes, a hundred fireflies and his lips parting so pinkish spit would drip down his mouth and over Lestat’s balls, down his hip. His filthy little Louis, “Never enough for you, right?”

They had once been strangers and then friends and then lovers and, in the changing of seasons, they seemed to have begun a new type of night together. Intimacy becoming deeper, turning greener as grass does when moist, when the soil is rich and often wet from rain and care. How strange, the brightness of knowing someone in ways they did not even know themselves. 

How right, to do it with Louis of all people. 

“Never, never enough of you, poupette.”

And so, as far as the de Pointe du Lacs went, three had left and four had remained and life had transformed anew. Paul was no easy neighbour for he was noisy and terribly nosy and he argued, very often and with little restraint, with Louis. Yet Louis could not have been happier. By his own account, he was, happy. Content. 

Lestat, for his part in the matter, decided Claudia must learn how to play the piano. Peace, after all, was often overrated. 

A season of dryness and wind and heat followed and so the renovations at Paul’s new home took longer than expected and everyone stayed in a terrible mood for some time, up until the time Grace’s first letter arrived to break up the mundanity. 

But first, a little issue had delayed the arrival of Grace’s first letter. Well, not its arrival but mostly its reception, the acknowledgment of its existence, for Louis, having soon gotten bored of the whole mortal revolutionary business, but, having made a number of connections while he was still funding their struggle had, one day, as he was done reading his usual newspapers and gossip rags, said, “I don’t see why this is all we can get down here when there are better magazines for us up north,”

He was referring to ‘The CRISIS’, a little journal from Maryland or some other place up there, which had been sent to him in exchange for his financial support for the civil rights issue a few months past. It was very mortal, very political, and quite didactic; all according to Louis, who, as much as he might appreciate its intent, found it too pedantic, too formal. 

Soon, the idea had startled to circle his mind, of something else. 

A magazine for coloured people, not a political one, not in itself, but something that could be read by the bourgeois population and working masses alike and where local creole business owners would be welcomed to advertise their products without the difficulties faced in the white-dominated market. Some gossip, some cartoons, some social commentary and even the odd short fiction. 

Of course it was a success. Commercial and otherwise. Of course it immediately caused problems. 

To begin with, Louis had rented a little office far from their home and hired a few part-time secretaries and copywriters to work on the spreads but, as the journal’s print-runs grew to surpass the hundreds, some supporters and detractors got hold of Louis’ address, and the letters started pouring in. 

“Dear— Oh! And what is this word here?” Said Claudia, who had grown into the habit of reading some of Louis’ letters, much to his displeasure. 

“Darling, give me that.” 

It was not a good word. Sadly, some of the letters had grown increasingly hateful, a rather annoying affair for Louis, who was not a patient man.

“If I give it back, can I skip my French lessons today?” Replied Claudia, pressing the letter to her collarbones. 

“Non. Go with Lestat, I have business to take care of.” How Louis must have loved the performance of that sentence, the power it held in his mind.

Their housekeeper was instructed to leave all the letters in Louis’ study; and yet the mail would not cease. Piles of them would clutter the front stoop alongside packages and rocks and pieces of wood and feathers and, in some cases, Bibles.

One night, after the journal had been in print for a few months, give or take, a knock came at the door. The night was thick and dark and the air had grown malevolent with distinct wilderness as another sea storm threatened to approach land and flood the pavement.

There were three men, three white red-blooded American men, nicely dressed in distinctly un-New-Orleans fashion. 

There was in these stupid men a peculiar childlike cruelty. They thought to scare Louis. Maybe hurt him. They’ve heard, through vague rumours and fabricated tales, that Louis was a delicate sort of man. A man of letters and social isolation. A weak intellectual. They had imagined him, anticipated his fear. 

Lestat was instructed to leave the house with Claudia; the men were invited in. 

Having pressed their heads to the door from the outside, Lestat only managed to hear the beginning of things, such was his loss. 

“Gentlemen, you are to die tonight. You have found my house. You have found my family. You have seen my sofa and touched with your muddy shoes my good rug and, at some point or other, must have fooled yourselves into believing you people have a monopoly on cruelty. That I cannot forgive. As much as you are to suffer tonight, I want you to know, as each of you takes your last painful breath, that this is not the end. That I know where your wives live, the Devil has given me the power to look into your minds, and there I have seen the little beds where your children sleep and where they eat and the dolls and marbles they play with. That I know where your fathers and mothers keep their spare keys, where the money is hidden and the family relics are kept. None of them are safe. You have made it so and… Oh, don’t cry now, I haven’t even hurt you yet—”

When they returned home, Lestat and Claudia found him in a remarkably good mood, smoking a cigarette as he stared into the incinerator. 

“You have something—” Lestat whispered, staring at the spot of wet blood near Louis’ lip. 

Louis’ cruelty was so pretty, turning his face into a thing of dark clay and bright happiness, “You gonna lick it off me? I know you want to,”

Claudia had pretended to gag. Lestat, as if on instinct, had reached for the damp back of Louis’ neck. Had wanted to kiss him quiet against the incinerator.

After that night, the letters kept coming but no one ever visited the house again. Instead, feeling as if permission had been granted by Louis in that quiet, delicate way of his –the only way Louis knew how to request things, how to allow them to happen–, Lestat set out to make some visits of his own. 

Those were busy days and busy weeks, with Claudia eventually becoming the biggest beneficiary of their violence. She was very happy with all her new gifts, all the little bubbles Lestat stole from the houses he entered, the people he helped find their end. 

And so, in the midst of all that, Grace’s first letter wasn’t read for several weeks after its arrival. In fact, it was only because Claudia had continued to go through everyone’s mail that it wasn’t truly lost in the fray. And what a shame that would have been, losing this first, charming little letter. 

Here’s some of it now:

Dear family, 

There are a great many things to tell of what has occurred since our arrival in Paris. We have settled in a small pavilion with five modest rooms, two baths and a kitchen. It is drafty and it is old and the windows creak all day and night but we have at least found a good place to situate our new coffins. A room, in the very far back of the building where no windows were ever planned for. Quite the lovely spot, believe me. I am happy.

Mother hates it here. Father likes the French, likes the smoking, and is, even as I write these lines, actively fighting with our Landlady, a small mortal woman who believes Americans are the farthest a human being can be from God’s light. 

Now, let me tell you about the shops and the people I have met, there are so many and I—

What followed was a long, entertaining account of their first few weeks in Paris. So entertaining that it was read out loud several times and discussed and read again and again and, in the end, the writing of a suitable reply took as many weeks as it had taken to first notice its arrival. 

“Tell her about my cat. Daddy, you must tell her about my cat. Ah! And my birthday, my birthday is coming up and I would like a nice French perfume like the ones in the magazines.” Was Claudia’s primary demand. 

“I have written about the cat, ducky. Why don’t you send her one, your penmanship is better than mine.” Lestat suggested, and, much to his surprise, Claudia had soon produced pen and paper and had sat down to write her own letter to her aunt. 

The following months folded themselves into the rhythm of countless letters, sent back and forth across an ocean. 

How marvelous, how one can become accustomed to such things. Domesticity and monotony and the sweetness of growing intimacy. The expanding and shrinking of Claudia’s moods, of Paul’s tempers; Louis’ familiar flow of happiness and melancholy. Lestat too, flowing and ebbing, nights spent at the opera house, nights spent quietly in the house when no one, not even Louis, wanted to hear him play the piano. Nights of dancing and games and nights at lover’s lanes, at music houses, touching Louis’ foot with his own under the table. 

When winter ended, when everyone had settled into the routine of longer nights and quieter days, when the heat had lessened and the night smelt like fresh oysters and wet salty ocean water, a new letter from Grace, different from all the many that had come before, arrived at Rue Royale. 

The family, still in Paris, still residing in their drafty pavilion without a toilette, had met the most curious group of vampires. One night, just walking around town, they had found one another. These vampires, they insisted on wearing only black and had declared themselves guardians of the city. The family had been invited then, to join them socially, to be one with their kind. There was a little theatre, a charming place of gathering. 

It wasn’t until that very moment that Lestat had begun to understand how much he’d grown to care for Grace. For he’d been truly afraid then as he’d heard about their meeting, the invitation to the theatre. Had felt all the twisting dread of what could happen, what those vicious creatures might easily and without remorse do to someone he’d grown to see as a sister. 

Naturally, he shouldn’t have worried, Grace had the sense and keen eye of a woman raised in between the tyrannies of the world. 

“Listen to this, ‘-and a night or two later we left Paris, for the town had grown tiresome and way too crowded. We are in Amsterdam for the time being, but should be in Prague soon and then perhaps we’ll go south. But not until next fall, once the days grow short down there.’” Louis read out loud in astonishment. “Manman in Amsterdam, now that is hard to believe,”

And Lestat thought only: she is safe. She has been careful where I was reckless. 

“When you write to her, Louis, ask her to find me one of those wooden Christs they have in Spanish Churches. I’ll place it over my coffin in the sunless room. It’s so dreadful in there, now that we have painted it blue.” Said Paul. 

“Paul, you asked to paint it that colour. Wanna paint it again? Be my guest, but I ain’t getting in there again and I ain’t fighting with you over this again,” Was Louis’ quick reply and, in the ensuing quarrel the mention of the Paris coven was diluted and soon lost, truly forgotten like a poisoned berry in the trail, rendered harmless in its unimportance.

In her next letter, Grace announced that she was now on her own, her parents having decided to stay in Prague for some time while she headed south towards Italy instead. The news delivered carelessly and without much emotion, along with a lengthy description of some perfumes she’d encountered during her travels. There was always something to be said about perfumes, about furs and cosmetics and books and pretty places and not much to remark of parents, not when their hold over her was almost fully diluted by then. 

By next autumn, in a letter addressed only to Lestat, Grace confessed to having met a vampire in Greece, a Frenchman from Amiens, young like Grace, barely more than a fledgling himself, who had suggested they travel together for some time. She added coyly, ‘I am sure nothing will come of it, but it is nice, being wanted, being pursued so openly. He is determined, for now, to gain my affection. I can say my heart is not as disengaged as I wish it were. You who are now a brother, Lestat, I ask you, tell me what you think of it all if you will be so kind?’

“My sister, half in love with a white Frenchman. Ha! This has made my day. Look who gets to be smug and mocking now. Let me write to her right now, let me—” And Louis, who had been listening to Lestat’s mind as he read the letter in their coffin, attempted then to push the lid open but was grabbed by the ankle and dragged back into Lestat’s arms instead. 

“You are not writing a letter in the middle of the day, mon cher. Gloating can wait. Get back here,”

In the following months, Grace wrote about how her and this man had travelled together, everywhere, it seemed. To places so remote an atlas had to be retrieved several times to locate the region, the mountain, the odd-sounding sea. The intimacy between them had grown and then… simply fizzled out. Months then, with no mention of this man; only of places and art and beautiful dresses and nature and landscapes so wonderful as to rival the beauty of the open ocean. 

There was for some time, Morocco and the Mediterranean and the Turkey Straits for Grace and letters and family nights and French lessons for them, back in wonderful, safe New Orleans. 

Claudia’s birthday came like an indulgence and she received all the things in her list —a gold pendant and pearl clip earrings, a silk dress in yellow honeysuckle, a new journal, a new pair of stockings, a sand clock like the ones she’d read about in one of her novels, two bottles of French perfume– and no one, not even Paul, dared to say anything about its excess. 

Not when Claudia was so happy, so grateful, and dazzlingly grown. That night they cut and pretended to taste a sticky pink strawberry cake, commissioned for the occasion, and Claudia sang in French and played the piano and, after that, they all walked together to a picture house as the September mist dampened their hair and the cracked pavement under their shoes where the vines and the wayward roots had broken through the dry ground. 

It was one of the best Septembers that had ever been. 

October was less charming, on account of some petty arguments, Paul’s new-found passion for breaking into their neighbours homes while they slept, and Louis’ magazine increasing its reach. From Granada came more news. Grace, no longer on her own, this vampire man of hers popping back into the picture like the stuff of daydreams. 

More time would have been spent discussing the matter, if only there was time. Louis' offices had had to be expanded and his correspondence no longer resembled anything close to being manageable and so interviews had to be held for a secretary. 

An affliction that led to the parading of several simpering little mortals, bringing boxes of honey cakes and jars of lemon curd and flowers, so many flowers, artfully arranged as if Louis were searching for a wife instead of a woman capable of half-decent typing and moderately proficient reading. 

Nobody wanted them in the house, these women. 

“Daddy, it reeks of cheap perfume in here,” was Claudia’s main complaint on one such occasion. 

“She has just left, it will go away soon enough,” replied Louis, head dramatically pressed against the wall. 

Claudia was right, the woman had left behind the most horrible smell. Like gardenias and death. 

“Why can’t he be your secretary and end this terrible invasion of our home? He can type, can’t he?” Demanded Claudia, pointing a long finger at Lestat.

Louis took one look at him, sitting on the little piano stool with his socked feet pressed against the pedals and hiccuped a laugh, “Lestat has absolutely no work ethic, gives up on things before he has even started them. Couldn’t type a whole document if I was begging him on my knees for it, love.”

“Never gave up on either of you, did I? Even when you so cheerfully make jest of any small, insignificant flaws I might or might not possess, Louis—”

Finally, eventually, a secretary was secured. She might have been the least secretary-looking secretary who had ever been called to the profession. A very direct, swift sort of creature with long straight eyebrows and a cynical eye. Like a tigress. Or a lionfish. 

Out of all the job-seekers who had turned up at their door Ms Williams was in possession of the most dubious of credentials but, when faced with the strangeness of Louis’ home life and the hours kept by him, his business partner, daughter, and brother, her thoughts wandered only to the crystal chandelier and the perfect timing to address an increase in her wages. 

“You have the most predatory of gazes, Ms Williams.” Said Claudia, some time after Ms Williams had started attending to Louis’ business matters and, subsequently, visiting the house every other day. 

“You ain’t met enough men to be saying that, honey.”

“And I never met a man I didn’t wish to kill, Ms Williams.” 

“Smart girl, now only don’t go saying it out loud where someone might hear and want to change your mind.”

The getting used to the new secretary allowed for some bonding between all those who sat opposed to her presence in the house; say, everyone except for Louis. For some weeks they all raged and argued and made meals very difficult for Louis, always suggesting Louis might not want to feed from mortals any longer, now that his mortal friend had become so important to him. Louis did not quite see what the fuss was all about and, annoyed at the constant barbs, set out to recruit he whom he knew had no will of his own. 

Naked, with his tongue lapping around a self-inflicted open wound on his wrist, he came to Lestat one night at dawn and suggested in between kisses and trickles of blood, demanded so very sweetly, for Lestat to begin playing nice with the woman. For him to suggest to Claudia some other amusement which did not involve annoying Louis. 

He asked so nicely. So excellently. 

Soon he and Claudia started tormenting an old man who lived two streets down. A man who had lost his wife and son in a fire, who was eventually made to believe ghouls were in his old walls, where Lestat and Claudia would bang and bang and bang, shocking him awake night after night until he soon had a heart attack and died, ruining all the fun.

Their next victim lasted a little longer, but not by much.

Before the winter was over, the most unexpected letter arrived. Grace and her gentleman, who were on a charming cruise across the Nile, had met a vampiress. A vampiress in slouchy trousers and a waterfall of necklaces on her long, pale neck. 

“Lestat, are you—?” Louis asked, finding him staring unblinkingly at the letter. 

“What else does it say? Louis…? What–?”

“Oh, yes. She goes on to say, ‘She introduced herself and I thought it better not to mention the depth of our acquaintance, but I hope you will not hold it against me if I confess how much I admired her immediately. How serendipitous, finding each other in a little boat so far from anything that either of us had ever called home. She is setting out tomorrow. I wonder if we shall ever cross paths again.’” Louis' eyes were narrowed then, deep in suspicion, “And who could this woman–?”

“My… my mother.”

“Your mother?”

It was hard to tell then, if Louis was more shocked than he was intrigued. 

But nevermind that. Nevermind the explanations that followed or the weeks of questions and arguments and finally, Louis’ waking him up in the middle of the day, his nose one with the skin under Lestat’s ear, asking, quite savagely, “But I am your family, right? I am. You can’t refuse that, you—”

“You are the only family— The only family that led me to suspect I have a soul, Louis,” Lestat replied, low and thick with emotion, his hand instinctively tangled into the roots of Louis’ sleep-mussed hair. “You and that terribly difficult girl—”

Louis would not have wanted it said but could not stop Lestat from thinking it. That his soul had awakened, like all the winter flowers do when the sun commands it, for Louis. That Louis must now, forever, suffer his devotion. That he would always be difficult, and selfish and jealous and impossible. Now the sun must take responsibility, for all it had awakened. 

“And you… You are the family I chose,” was Louis’ reply, butter-yellow sunlight in the darkness. 

His breath fell, soft, against the shell of Lestat’s ear for some time.

“Ms Williams just said the most idiotic thing, daddy. Said that you are—”

“Ms Williams did not say that, did she? You listened to her mind—”

“How is it my fault that she thinks so very loudly, all the time—”

“You are a dark horse, always spying and scheming—”

“How am I the dark horse when you’re the one planning to leave us for a whole month, and right as daddy Les has started that stupid little puzzle and he will surely force me participate in its completion—”

Louis, with his elbows on the table stared down at his daughter for so very long until he finally announced, “You talk more and more like him every day it passes, it is becoming so unsettling I have half a mind to take you north with me.”

 At that, Lestat stood, “Absolutely not, Paul will kill me in my sleep if you leave us alone in here, I know he will. Claudia stays,”

Louis had been invited to Boston or Maine or some other strange American city on account of some business, investors, funds, money… That sort of thing of which Lestat knew almost nothing and wished to know even less of in the future. 

“That’s so unfair, I have never been north,”

And so Louis was to leave for a whole month, a thing Lestat was trying to bravely accept. So forceful was, in fact, this attempt at acceptance that he started feeling a pain, like a nail being pushed into his flesh, all across his jaw and neck and down his chest. “I wish I were dead.”

A month, without Louis. 

“Aren’t you a pitiful sight?”

“What if I said you weren’t allowed to go?” Lestat said, flat and sad, back pressed to the locked door of their bedroom. 

Louis, who was in the act of carefully folding some trousers into his travel case, did not even bother to look up, “Go ahead, we’ll find out what happens then.”

A month, without Louis. 

Lestat’s knees gave, and he slid, pathetic, down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. 

“Why not just stay?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Louis replied, “You won’t even notice I’m gone.”

“I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I wish I were dead.” Lestat said, head against his folded knees, “In case you missed it the first time, mon cher.”

Placating, Louis' voice raised, a little sweeter this time, “You know I will be back.”

“Yes,” Lestat whimpered, falling sideways to the floor, “I shall find you and drag you back here if you don’t,”

Louis stepped around some items, discarded on the floor in the midsts of all his packing. Because Louis was leaving, for a month. 

“Yeah? I will be in serious trouble then, won’t I?”

“Yes, Louis, you—”

Lestat grabbed him then, looped his hands around Louis’ slender ankles and scented his skin and kissed the outline of a bone and tried to think very little of him leaving. 

“I love you, you know? I love you so terribly much and I will miss you every day and every night and who will feed from me? Who will kiss me and—”

Irresistible, the room seemed to sizzle with Louis’ sudden energy. His hand came to grip Lestat’s hair and he was long and fine boned, then, as beautiful as that first time Lestat had watched him in the shadow of a streetlamp. He breathed, little clouds of cold air came out of his mouth, hanging in the air between them, “No one, you will have to miss me. Alright?”

Louis, who was a full-blooded vampire, who was like the blue wisteria which climbed the iron facade of a home, breaking the stone and leaving it dependent on his support. There would be no home, no peace without Louis. There would only be waiting.

His cock wouldn’t even get hard if it was denied the scent of Louis’ skin.

“You…” Louis, peeking into his mind, ran a shaky hand down Lestat’s neck, so deeply tender, “Yes, you are so beautiful and sad, now help me pack.”

But Louis would not stop leaning his weight against Lestat’s shoulder as they packed. Louis, whose eyes were a little wet, whose fingers rattled against Lestat’s beltloops until there was nothing left to do but leave.

“I will be good,” Lestat announced, for no reason in particular.

“Me too, I will, too—” Louis arms, stiff against the automobile. Someone would have to crank it for him. Someone would have to make sure Louis’ trousers didn’t get ruined in the mud, someone would— “I will be back, you wait. Wait up for me, here. Will you?”

‘I’ll be right here, the whole time,’ And Louis had kept his promise, a lifetime ago, when Lestat had asked.

Lestat could try to be just as good.

At dawn, the night after Louis’ departure he was awoken from pitiful sleep by a thud and a kick and a shaking of his coffin, “Are you awake?”

Claudia, lifting the coffin door in her purple nightgown, her ankles small and delicate, a frown on her face like a terrifying little ghost, “Well, are you awake?”

“I am now,” Lestat murmured, flattening himself against the back of the coffin, “Come in then,”

A small hesitation, her birdy toes tapping against the wooden floor, “I thought you might be lonely. Here, on your own,”

She slid into the coffin shyly, like that first night ages ago, still damp and rebellious from the swamp. 

And, to tell the truth, she was still damp, crying her little pink tears into his chest, and rebellious and wild like the swamp and she demanded he promise her, swear to her, that Louis would come back to them. That he promised she had done nothing wrong. That Louis loved her. That everything would be as it was. 

“Louis will be back. He is not— He is not the sort to abandon anyone. It’s not who he is. Someday… Someday you might want to leave, to be on your own for a while too. But we’ll find one another. Every time, I will find you. And you will find Louis. And— you will find me. Yes?”

Her breath came softly, right against his skin.

“Yes, I think I will, daddy.”

The day was young and the coffin soft and eerily quiet like a silvered sky. 

He started singing a song. Humming it against her bony shoulder, feeling her heartbeat against his. A crocodile who was going off to war, disait au r’voir à ses petits enfants. He sang, and caressed the curls at the crown of Claudia’s head. 

The song was soon over, and she whispered, pleaded for it again, again and again until the moon came back up. 

Even then, he started the song anew.

And so, as promised, Louis came back. Came back early, in fact, and found the three of them playing the piano, Paul, turning the pages and Claudia complaining loudly about his timing. “Well, isn’t this a sight? Who would have thought all I had to do to get you all to stop fighting was to leave,”

It was a happy reunion. Louis had returned. Louis, who could have gone anywhere, could have anyone or be anyone. Louis, who, soon, alone with Lestat, confessed, quite shyly, how homesick he’d been.

Handsome in his egg-shelled white shirt and his linen trousers, his hair combed back with a few curls touching the honey planes of his face, Louis offered a smile. Curved up in lust and love and devotion, his hand, bright in the lamps of their bedroom as the light reflected off the emerald ring on his finger. 

“I got you something,”

Louis, who loved as though his beloved might vanish at any moment, was offering him something tangible. Sweet, in his palm was a solid-gold locket on a solid-gold chain, thick and heavy and permanent.

“A– a locket?” Lestat whispered, heart thumping wildly in his chest, “Like the one—”

“Better. Chosen very carefully. I paid for it, with my own money.” 

For a few seconds, Lestat was scared to touch it and so Louis placed it on the open palm of his hand, nestled like a delicate, soft thing and held his wrist and rubbed with his thumb the pulsing vein at Lestat’s bone. 

“I missed you, I was homesick, the whole time I longed to—” He hiccuped, and averted his eyes and soon he was pressed against Lestat’s front, warm and familiar and smelling of sweet Louisiana Irises and the green earth of a wet night.  

“I never say it but you are the dearest– I don’t know, how you do this but… To me, dearest that you’ll be for as long as I am here, for all the years and decades and centuries that are to come. And it makes me hopeful, like I could never be, before. But with you I… feel as if I can be hopeful and open and trusting. I did not know, before I met you, that there could be trust like this. I feel it, I— I love you, you understand me?”

His chin, brave and curved like the hills on a dune, was all wet then, pressed against Lestat’s chest, holding the little locket between them. Inside, when opened, were two pictures, Louis and Lestat on one side, Claudia on the other. 

“I can’t be alone,” Louis was saying, sad and open, “I’ve decided I like people too much. I love you all too much. I don’t want to be on my own, Lestat.”

“I won’t let you be alone, my love. I will haunt you forever,”

And what had Lestat thought love would be like? A spring day in the sun? Fighting an army and earning the love of a delicate maiden with his bravery? Flowers on the windowsill and food in the oven and mending and peaceful walks through the fields of yellow grass? 

He’d been so naive. Love was Louis and quarreling and touching each other under tables and in between the fallen leaves of frightening magnolia trees in the dark. Love was fire and it was floating and feeding and blood blooming like thin veins all down his spine. 

He did not love Louis gently, he loved him like a spear. Louis did not love him tenderly, he loved him like a fish hook to the neck. 

He remembered then, so clearly, the glossy tinge of Louis’ skin when Lestat kissed his mouth. A month, unkissed. His poor Louis. And what was Lestat put on this Earth to do but to kiss him?

A year or two or three passed, maybe a decade and yet Louis seemed to have started something. An infection of sorts. Homesickness seemed to spread, far and wide. 

First, Monsieur and Madame de Pointe du Lac wrote. They had grown bored. Had travelled through Africa up and down a few times and were bored, bored of Ethiopia and the Belgian Congo, bored of the Germans and the British and above all, bored of the brewing conflict in Europe. It was time to return home, time to smell the spongy heaviness of the New Orleans air and feel the morbid fickleness of life there. 

They would make their way back to England over the following months. There, they were determined to take the first ship available back west. 

Grace, who was back in France, forced to return on account of the illness which had taken most of her vampire lover’s mortal family. One after the other, consumption had taken them all. All but one, a young niece. Barely a woman. Who was this girl to her? No one, a stranger. And yet, she was dying. She would die. Soon, soon, she would be gone. A mere mortal, that’s all they did. Die, and die, and die. Then the letter stopped. Abruptly. It asked only for Louis; for Louis to write back, to tell her, to explain, clearly and without frill, how he’d known to be certain of Lestat. 

How does one know, brother? What forever is? Tell me, for I fear, I fear—

What she feared was not meant for Lestat’s eyes. Only for Louis’. And so the next morning, right before bed, Louis left a thick envelope, pages and pages stuffed into the little vessel, stamped and ready to be sent by express mail, back to France. Back to his sister. 

And then winter arrived again and there was nothing to do but accept it, an effort in itself, for one was forced to remember how to remain soft when everything was cold and harsh and dead. News from England announced Monsieur and Madame de Pointe du Lac’s departure, just in time to make it home for Christmas. 

“I’ll have to ask Ms Williams to get the house ready and… Paul, are you moving back into the main house?”

“Paul, are you moving back into the main house?” Paul mocked, hands at his hips, “Do you ever listen to yourself, brother? This is my home,”

A little voice joined in, always ready to argue, “Yes, Louis, do you ever—”

“Claudia,” warned Lestat.

All the little pieces falling into place. Astounding, how sometimes nothing happens for years and years and then it all comes together in a matter of weeks. From Paris, Grace revealed she would soon be on her way home too, her and this man she’d chosen to keep and his niece, that sickly girl they’d managed to save, now a fledgling. A sort of sister to Grace, a sort of daughter, a sort of niece. Her fondness of her obvious. My little Maddie, she curses like a sailor. My sweet Madeleine, she hates the sound of trains and old women laughing. Her excitement and her fear palpable in the messy words and the wrinkled paper. And the letter ended, with one last secret, one last family confession, for what are families if not the source of all that is secret?

Lestat. In India, some time ago, we saw her again. We saw her atop a building with her hair short like a halo of light and her leg propped like she was ready to fly. I said hello, again. I could not help it. She asked me about you. Somehow, she’d known all along. I guess there’s something of you in all of us now. She asked where you were, if you were happy. You never told us you were a mama’s boy. I guess you were embarrassed, I can imagine it now, so perfectly, you and her.

She knows now. I hope, by the time I am back in New Orleans, that you will have forgiven me for telling her everything.

Mo renmen toi.

Your sister, 

Grace

The news of Grace’s return, along with her mysterious man and this new addition to the family hit Claudia particularly hard. She was not a sharer of things, a sharer of people. She was selfish and very much spoiled and lovely and entirely unkind when she chose to be. God, if only she would stay just as she was forever. 

“Well, if anyone even cares, I’d like you all to know that, when I marry, I will be making sure there isn’t anything remotely French about the union,”

“I fear you’ve already failed, ducky.” Said Lestat, “What about you? Are you not—”

“I was born in New Orleans. Born and raised. I am a full-blooded creole vampire. The best to ever do it, in fact, and—”

“And where do you think the old Orleans is, baby? The Otommann Empire? England?”

“Now, Lestat, don’t antagonise her,” Louis said, hardly containing a laugh on his beautiful, radiant, impish face. For he loved a fight better than anyone. 

“Daddy” Claudia demanded, glaring at Lestat, “Take it back. I am not—!”

“Sure are.”

“No, absolutely, no, no, no, no, no—”

How it had come to be that Claudia, the bird-like girl lost in the swamp had become the only vampire on Earth with two fathers, two grandmothers and an assortment of relatives to worry about. That she would grow up, if he and Louis had their say, surrounded by the certainty of being wanted. That there wouldn’t be for her any abandonment, any nights alone in the snow, in the terror of sure loneliness. That the world would remain full and alive with the blood that bound them together.

Early December brought one last letter. A short note in white, heavy paper. 

Dear L,

I’ve heard New Orleans has the best of everything. I hope to see you soon. I’m proud of the man you have become.

G

Give me a little time, Lestat thought then, and I might learn to forget all that came before and remember only this. The little house on Rue Royale, the lover in his coffin, the stomping of feet up and down the wooden staircase. 

But there was no time, no time to think or remember; Christmas was almost upon them, and the house would be full by then.