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Daniel leaned forward on Louis’ couch as he listened to his story, his elbows braced on his knees, gentle tremors shaking his hand where it hung limply between them.
“Lestat was as cruel as he was tender to me in those years,” said the vampire. “I was trying desperately now to subsist on animals alone and he did everything in his power to sabotage my abstinence.
“He started bringing his victims into our home more often than he used to, hoping the scent of their blood in the air would be enough to tempt me. When that didn’t work, he started offering their blood to me as if it were wine, as if I could somehow allow myself to be ignorant of where it had come from, of the life that had been taken in order for me to receive it.
“Once he even kissed me with blood in his mouth and pushed his tongue passed my lips so I would get a taste of it. I hated him for that most of all—for turning an act of love into another manipulation I could no longer trust, for connecting my shame about my desire for blood to the shame I had once felt about my desire for him. My resentment of him burned me from the inside out nearly as much as the thirst did. It was a betrayal that took me a long time to forgive.”
What a sick bastard, Daniel thought.
“He was traumatizing you,” he said aloud.
“Yes,” Louis agreed. “Though, as it often was, that was the effect of his cruelty, not its intention.”
“And what, exactly, did he intend?” Daniel asked skeptically.
“He was convinced he was trying to help me, and in retrospect I must admit I can see why,” he said. “There were not so many rats in New Orleans that I could stay fed indefinitely, and it wasn’t long before my strength and vitality had begun to diminish. My complexion paled. My skin grew colder. I was extremely irritable and plagued by melancholy. I lost nearly all interest in sex and I spent more time sleeping than I ever had before. More than once, I awoke with half the evening already gone and Lestat shaking me frantically by the shoulders, leaning over my coffin with tears in his eyes.”
“How touching,” Daniel replied sardonically.
Louis frowned at the tone of his comment before continuing, “It was… hard for him, to see me like that. We didn’t have the words to talk about it then, but I understand now that what I saw as an addiction I needed to overcome, he saw as an eating disorder that threatened to take me away from him if he didn’t do something to fix me. And for Lestat, of course, that meant doing everything to fix me, even if it made me despise him.”
“What do you mean by ‘take you away’? Would starvation have killed you?” Daniel asked, eager for another glimpse of such a powerful creature’s limitations.
“No,” Louis shook his head, “but, aside from the physical deterioration of my body, which was significant, had I stopped feeding for long enough, the hunger would have driven me insane before I fell into a deep sleep, perhaps for decades or even centuries.”
“Can’t drag you to the opera if you’re in a straight jacket, I guess,” Daniel commented.
“You’re not listening, Daniel,” Louis said, sounding frustrated. “It wasn’t just the opera at stake. Above all, Lestat fears loneliness and rejection. He took my refusal to hunt with him and my waning passion for him very personally, and he was desperately afraid that if he did not intervene that, one way or another, I would leave him.
“At the time, though, I wasn’t interested in the why. All I could see were his increasingly transparent and callous attempts to control me and I did not take kindly to them. Our fights were… explosive. In the wake of them, we left furniture broken, mirrors shattered, our voices hoarse from screaming at each other. I’m surprised the police never paid us a visit, though I imagine a handsome annual donation to the nearest precinct had something to do with that.”
Daniel heard footsteps coming from down the hallway then, but he paid them no mind as they got closer, too focused on what Louis was saying.
Until, that is, he heard the deep voice of a man with an unmistakably French accent as those footsteps entered the room.
“Louis, mon cher, I can’t find my signed copy of Salomé in the library, have you seen it?”
Daniel sat frozen, unable to believe his eyes.
Walking toward Louis with a singleminded purpose, dressed in nothing but a black silk robe and a pair of matching slippers, was a handsome man with shoulder length blonde hair who could only be Lestat de fucking Lioncourt.
Louis opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get the words out Lestat gasped and appeared beside him in the blink of an eye.
“Louis,” Lestat said, voice a mixture of concern and reproach as he grabbed Louis’ wrist, the one he’d held into the sunlight. “What have you done to yourself?”
“I’m fine,” Louis insisted, though his voice had a certain softness to it and he didn’t pull his hand away as Lestat gently inspected his wound.
“You think this is fine?” Lestat asked, incredulous, and when he muttered something indistinctly in French, Louis laughed, his eyes bright, as if he hadn’t just spent the better part of an hour describing the bitter resentment he’d felt for the man.
Louis replied in French, and Daniel glanced at his laptop to make sure it was still recording. It was, and he made a mental note to hire a translator when he got back to New York.
A smile still lingering on his lips, Louis switched to English suddenly. “And I’m in the middle of something,” he said, looking back to Daniel for the first time since Lestat entered the room.
“Oh yes, that’s right,” Lestat said, turning a charming smile Daniel’s way, as if he had only just noticed him sitting on the couch. “Daniel, isn’t it? I assume I need no introduction.”
“Uh,” Daniel said intelligently, still stunned by this sudden turn of events and feeling pinned as a butterfly under the intensity of Lestat’s piercing stare.
“How is your little interview coming along? More faithful to the truth this time, I hope,” Lestat said, giving Louis a meaningful look.
“You’ll find out once Mr. Molloy sends us our advance copy,” Louis replied. “And Salomé is in the bookcase with the rest of the works you’ve inspired, where it’s always been, Lestat.”
“Ah yes, how silly of me,” Lestat laughed again, a manufactured sound this time, and if Daniel had been unsure before whether this had merely been Lestat’s excuse to get into the room with them and make his presence known, he wasn’t now. “I swear I’d lose my head if it wasn’t for you.”
Though he had the answer to his question, Lestat lingered another moment, eyes focused on Louis as he absentmindedly stroked the unblemished skin around his wound. Just as Daniel began to wonder if they were having some telepathic conversation, Louis spoke aloud and whatever spell had seemed to come over them was broken.
“Lestat,” Louis said, some hidden message seemingly contained in just the sound of his name, and Lestat sighed with an almost boyish petulance.
“Alright, alright, I’m going,” Lestat said, releasing Louis’ wrist and leaning down to press a quick kiss to his cheek, the folds of his robe falling open above the belt and revealing more of his pale, well-built chest.
Before Daniel could banish the impure thought that came unbidden to his mind, Lestat met his eyes across the room and winked.
A cold spike of fear and embarrassment ran through Daniel at the thought that the vampire had just read his mind, and Lestat chuckled, a dark, subdued sound, before addressing Louis once more.
“I’ll be in our bedroom if you need me, mon cher,” he said, and with one final, tender kiss, on the lips this time as Louis turned his face to meet him, Lestat turned and walked deeper into the penthouse without another word.
Louis’ eyes clung to Lestat’s back until he disappeared from view, and Daniel simply stared at him in shock, his mind running about a mile a minute after this whole encounter.
“So—“ Louis began again, and that was all Daniel needed to snap himself out of it.
“What the fuck?” Daniel asked, his voice raised with a mixture of alarm and confusion. “He’s here? And you’re living with him?”
“Skipping ahead again, Daniel,” Louis admonished, though his lips curled into an amused smile. “Have patience.”
Daniel sputtered uselessly, and before he could order his spinning thoughts into a coherent response, Louis began to continue his story.
“Now where was I? Ah yes, broken furniture.”