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The lens is open. Moonlight shines a perfect spotlight onto centre stage. The motes dancing in the beam are from the ashes of a burned theatre, not his daughter. Still, the sight seizes Louis by the heart, squeezes him immobile.
Lestat is behind him, and then Lestat is before him, approaching the stage with a steady click of heeled boots. If he’s cowed by the events that transpired here, he doesn’t show it. He vaults neatly up onto its wooden surface and paces right through the spot where Claudia and Madeleine stood. Moonlight and ash and all of Louis’ love swirl around him.
“They would have done it even if I hadn’t come,” Lestat says.
“I know.”
“The only hope I ever had was in saving you. I saw it in Madeleine’s mind. Claudia would not have chosen life after her death.”
“I know.”
It’s not the first time Lestat has said these words. It’s not the first time Louis has brushed them away.
Even with his back turned, Lestat on the stage is an assembly of familiar proportions. Gilded and artfully groomed, maddeningly beautiful, and so far from the wisp he’d been that night they clung to each other in a shack. Here, now, is the show’s star and the pouty lips that haunted Louis all the years he played Armand’s fool.
Louis imagines a hand pressed to his back, propelling him forward over blackened carpet, beside charred seats. All that withstood the fire and the years since. How was Paris content to leave this cursed building alone all these years?
“I say these things to comfort myself,” Lestat says to Louis’ approaching steps. “They are excuses I’ve allowed to fester all these years, but my failure in this theatre was absolute.”
“You saved me.”
Lestat turns, then, allowing Louis to see his face. His grief shows in the scarlet dab on each cheek, the misting in each eye. He puts his hand out and Louis climbs the stage to take it.
“A feat I plan to accomplish many more times.”
Louis never thought it would happen here, in this place entrenched in misery, but it does. He smiles.
“What else will you need to save me from?”
“I’m imagining…” Lestat brings his unclung hand to his temple and rubs it, eyes fluttering shut, a playful smile twisting beneath the mock concentration. “Tigers.”
“Tigers?”
“We will stumble upon a herd of tigers, and I will be forced to protect you.”
“Tigers don’t travel in herds,” Louis says.
“These ones will. And they will be ferocious.”
Lestat’s hand hops from his own head to Louis’. His fingertips drag down Louis’ cheek, hover, settle on his jaw bone. His smile fades into a more sacred joy.
“Let’s say you’ll rescue me from a herd of tigers,” Louis says. “That’s only one time. What trouble do we get into next?”
Lestat’s thumb brushes Louis’ bottom lip, thoughtful, and then a second time, deliberate.
“I will pull you from the path of at least three erratically-driven vehicles,” Lestat says, but his voice has dropped to a murmur. His hand is warm on Louis’ face. They’re finally alone–not travelling, not moving with purpose. Not moving at all.
Still, quiet, standing on their daughter’s grave.
“I could take a hit from a car,” Louis says, little more than whispers caught in an exhale.
“Of course you could,” Lestat says. His hand moves. He pegs Louis, his head and his neck. “Why on earth and in all the levels of hell would I allow you to?”
Louis does not think of the things they went through together, the pain they caused each other. He thinks of the gentleness Lestat is showing. The sincerity in his words. The part of him that loved Claudia, even when he knew her creation doomed them all.
“Do you think Claudia would be angry with me?” Louis asks. His hands tighten on Lestat, the anticipation of hearing an answer he dreads.
“I think she would be … incandescent.”
Louis pulls back, ready to say his first angry words since their reunion. Lestat meets him with a calm smile, a quirked eyebrow.
“What?” Lestat asks. “Am I wrong?”
There’s something about Lestat, and there’s always been something about him. Before and beyond the magic of his immortal form, he’s enchanting. Louis might be wrecked or wretched; under Lestat’s power, he’s biting his lips, trying not to smile.
“I can see it now,” Lestat continues. “The words she would have for you! They would be many horrible and unflattering things about me, I have no doubt. I suppose the next question would be, would her anger turn you from me once more?”
“I don’t know,” Louis says. “I’ll never know.”
“I have a proposition for you,” Lestat says. “I’ll keep you safe from tigers and automobiles and poisoned blood and enemies, and you will keep me safe from Claudia’s memory.”
“Maybe,” Louis says, leaning back, “we keep ourselves safe.”
Lestat’s smile is the brittle, halting smile he wore so often in their early years together, when he loved Louis better than Louis deserved. When everything came between them. When Claudia was everything.
Claudia was everything, and Louis faces that beneath the moonlight. All Claudia was and will ever be is extinguished. Diaries read, minds delved, perspectives refreshed. Louis has learned all he ever can about his daughter.
There’s still so much to learn about Lestat.
“Or maybe,” Louis says, pinning his love for Claudia against the back of his heart, “you’re already safe.”
He’d like to think Claudia would be happy for them, but he has to know it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way Lestat’s face breaks around a grin, the way his eyes flicker with a light born of joy.
The way Lestat kisses him—hungrily, the way he does everything.
“I won’t drink your blood here,” Lestat says against Louis’ throat. “It is a sacrosanct stage.”
Louis has his own hunger, one not satiated by touch or blood. One that sparked likely with his father’s passing, fanned by his mother’s rejection, stoked by his brother’s death. And then came Claudia, the star, to outburn it all.
The hunger will accompany him through Paris, through Dubai, through wherever and whatever lay beyond that. A constant companion but as for that, at least Lestat will be, too.