Chapter Text
The motel room they found themselves in was utterly devoid of the luxury Louis had grown so accustomed to. To him, time was a concept vacant of all the importance that came with the fragility of mortality. Still, decades had passed since his vacation in war-torn Eastern Europe, and a lifetime of flagrant wealth in Dubai painted the picture before him unfamiliar and exotic. Absent were the window walls and high ceilings, replaced by the welcome privacy of a narrow, curtained window and a less-than-welcome, suspiciously dark spot in the ceiling paint, peeling in its antiquity.
The motel, however, served as an adequate makeshift sanctuary from the onslaught of glass and debris outside and, in the case of Lestat’s dwelling, inside. It was located only a block from Lestat’s house of penance—in foresight, an endlessly valuable discovery product of Louis’ scouting of the dilapidated building. He imagined Lestat did not share in his humbling—the place was a discernible promotion of his housing situation.
They sat a pace away from one another now—Louis gracefully reclined onto a particularly mildewy armchair (complimentary to the rest of the motel room), arm slung atop the mustard velvet backrest, contemplating the Lestat seated on the bed in front of him. He rolled a finger around the pad of his thumb in absentminded self-comfort.
Lestat was all sharp edges: Raw, barbed tension poking through every joint in his body. The springs of the worn mattress creaked beneath him with every spasmodic bounce of a leg, cocking as if to launch him out of the room and into the tempest outside. His body was restless—a grinding cog in constant motion— yet his eyes remained steady and locked on Louis’. Panic and solace bounced around in the violet in equal measure. Louis wondered if Lestat shared in his own fear of the man in front of him disappearing as swiftly as one mistimed blink; that he could morph from flesh into nothing but air and a burnt-in silhouette in the back of his retinas, as if he had been staring at a blazing lightbulb. Louis’ unyielding gaze was like a green rope wrapped around Lestat, keeping him tangible, corporal. He cherished the divot in the mattress carved by Lestat’s weight with religious wander.
A dusty bedside table lamp illuminated Lestat’s skin in warm hues. It made for an unwelcome spotlight. The pale vampire finally settled his hands into two grips on his knees, as if bracing himself for the descending guillotine. His lips smacked wetly as he began to say something, but the words withered away and blew into the humid air before making their exit. He closed his mouth and allowed the ceaseless ticking of raindrops barraging the motel windows to fill the silence instead.
There was simply too much to be said, too much for this dingy motel room, a lifetime's worth. How many lives had Louis lived since Paris? How many lives had Lestat let slip away as he decayed in his self-made dungeon? Louis watched Lestat’s face contort as countless questions all clashed and fought for his voice, and then watched as they fizzled out into a stalemate of silence and a bland look of defeat. This is new, Louis noted privately. A damp blonde lock uncurled from behind Lestat’s ear and brushed onto his face—a curtain closed in front of the struggling scriptless actor.
Louis was more than content with the silence, utterly consumed by the mirage which, for once, was looking right back at him.
Until it wasn’t. Thunder rattled the motel windows—a cue for Lestat’s blue-violet eyes to dart to the arid space between his knees. They settled there. The spell had broken. He was a shipwreck washed up on shore; once opulent woodwork now disgraced into rubble gnawed away by a relentless whirlpool of wave and sand, bleached by salt and the scorching sun. Was Louis then the captain who jumped ship? A sole survivor, now returned to that accursed shore, contemplating the ruin splayed before him.
The newborn bliss of their reunion now matured into grief. Dread coiled around Louis' lungs. The dissonance before him was heartbreaking. He had known that man wholly once, instinctively, he had known him like he knew how to breathe. He had known every golden eyelash, calculating gaze, every alluring and deliberate word—it all accrued into someone larger than life once: a god amongst men and monsters. Now that same god sat across from him, stripped bare and small, stripped of all that once made him. He looked unsettlingly human in the crude, meager light; exhausted and worn, capable of death. Louis suddenly wanted to let his head hang low and look at the carpet between his feet, too.
Yet, as he leaned forward, Louis saw the glimmer of those golden lashes, graceful and ever so lovely. Perhaps it was a trick of the warm light haloing Lestat’s profile, but Louis saw the blonde hairs glow divinely. He clung to the familiarity echoing within the halls of his heart like a lifeline. It was his beacon back home. The coil began to release.
“Where do we go from here?” Louis’ voice cut through the stagnant silence like a bell. He watched the bows of muscle lining Lestat’s jaw work. Lestat raised his head, redirecting it from the floor to the equally dull velvet-patterned drapes curtaining the windows. They were offensively tacky. Lestat only contemplated them for a moment.
“Nowhere.” Lestat’s intonation of the last syllable raised an octave as if it were a question itself as if Louis had just said something incredibly silly. “It is Armageddon out there.” He had rebuffed the question, speaking yet un-answering.
Louis did not push, he only acknowledged Lestat’s feigned ignorance with a knowing smile and a nod. Lestat did not turn to see it, there was no humor about him. Entrapped in their motel room bunker, there was plenty of time for Louis to chisel away at those fragile, cracking walls. He was confident.
He drummed the tips of his fingers against the weathered fabric of the armrest as he watched Lestat’s performance of absence. His talents in theater leaked through the cracks, melted by decades of unuse. Louis saw it, saw the truth seeping through in rhythmic drops; in the way Lestat’s Adam's apple bobbed when he swallowed, the subtle, almost undetectable flutter of the eyelids that never quite closed, an involuntary shiver as the wet fabric of Lestat’s robe made contact with the back of his neck.
Louis patted the flat of his palm on the yellow velvet twice conclusively—a crescendo to his stimming. The armchair creaked anciently as he got up. Louis walked across the carpeted bedroom floor and left Lestat on the bed to contemplate the distasteful curtains.
The distant sound of rushing water only reached Lestat’s consciousness when he heard the muted squeal of a turning faucet handle. He turned his head towards the source of the now absent sound, somewhere beyond the bedroom’s open door.
There was a moment of silence, a splash, dripping, then rustling, then footsteps. Green eyes met his.
Louis stood at the precipice of the room, bare. He leaned a hand on the paneling. Lestat observed with restrained desire the elegant curve of his long neck as he tipped his head to the side. The hallway behind him was pitch black; Lestat had nowhere else to look. Louis was a Caravaggio in flesh framed by the wooden architraves bracketing him. The shoddy framework was an insult to the masterpiece it held. The ambient light of the bedside table lamp next to Lestat illuminated his beloved’s figure so softly, sweetly, it left Lestat utterly dazed.
Louis smiled at him with mystifying affection. “Come. Before the water chills.” He did not linger for Lestat to answer, turning on his heel with unconscious grace and disappearing into the dark hall.
Lestat forced his gaping mouth shut, sat up from the rain-damp spot he had left in the bed covers, and obeyed.
When he entered the bathroom he was at once reunited with a long-forgotten fragment of a memory: Ribbons of steam coiled around Louis, caressing his skin like an eager lover, water lapping at his chest. The threshold of the bathroom doorway was a portal. Lestat was transported back to a time when the dust of automobile-busy New Orleans settled on their skin and the halls of 1132 Rue Royale buzzed with warm domesticity. Only it was Lestat Louis found lounging in rose-oil-laced water and it was Lestat’s voice that pulled him across the foyer and up the stairs as he arrived home from the Azalea, work-worn and longing for Lestat’s affections.
Now, in this foggy motel bathroom, Louis’ elbows hung lazily over the rust-stained porcelain of the bathtub rim. He gazed at Lestat—a siren beckoning.
Lestat’s robe pooled around his ankles with a wet plop. The rest followed. Slowly, wearily, he descended into the tub. The water was scorching—a compliment to his personal preference. Lestat’s heart swelled with the sweet intimacy of the gesture and the admission of remembrance it carried.
At last, they faced each other as equals. Gone were all the material symbols of their disparity, disarmed as they entered their own private Versailles. The water burned them both in symmetry. Time melted away, its passing reduced to nothing but the distant ticking of an analog clock on the wall as they reveled in the matrimony of sensation. Lestat surrendered to the way it overwhelmed him, welcomed the mindlessness of it as his brain struggled to keep up with the sudden change of pace Louis’ encore triggered in his stagnant life.
“We should talk, Lestat.” The sudden words startled Lestat out of some distant, isolated corner of his mind. When he recovered, he found himself more acutely aware of his surroundings than ever. The water had chilled but warmth kept pouring into him through the two points where his and Louis’ knees connected—Louis who was real and warm and with whom he currently shared lukewarm bath water in a motel in New Orleans. Lestat composed himself and nodded with strained effort. He agreed. They had to talk, had to employ this explicitly human mode of communication. The vibration of its urgency could not be dismissed any longer. They were masters of that art, practiced with resolution for a century, but not tonight. Tonight they had to come together and reinvent the wheel.
Louis nodded back.
A pact signed.
With a nudge of his chin, Louis wordlessly commanded Lestat to turn around. It was done, the water sloshing around in the porcelain as Lestat sat up and repositioned. Two hands appeared at his peripherals and pulled the strands of blonde hair pooled in the nooks of his collarbones back. His hair, its luminescence dulled by rainwater and dust, splayed out across his pale back in a curtain of damp curling locks. He felt Louis’ nails scrape gently along the divots of his spine as he raked his long fingers through the strands, brushing the wind-knit knots out.
Again, as if nothing had ever happened, as if the borders of their world had never left New Orleans, as if they never emerged from that rose-scented water thousands of nights ago, Lestat ran his hands along the length of Louis’ shins as his lover rinsed the troubles of yesterday out of his hair.
Something broken and throbbing within Louis’ chest was healing. He felt the warm, crackling mending of it as he watched the amorously simple image of Lestat leaning against the wooden bedframe, squeezing the moisture out of his hair with a towel. Fondness warmed him to the bone.
Lestat had wordlessly claimed the side of the bed closest to the door and now settled under the stiff covers, the damp towel carelessly discarded onto the floor. Louis secured the corners of the thick curtains flush to the walls en route to his own half of the bed, and turned to see Lestat tracing his path with a steady gaze, profoundly interested in every movement. His thin fingers clutched the pillow under his head. Louis pulled on the thin string hanging off the lamp atop the bedside table and the room clicked into darkness. He nestled a respectful distance away from Lestat, facing him, and smiled involuntarily. Lestat’s lips did not curve back, but his eyes filmed over with his own complex expression of feeling. Louis was endlessly grateful for his keen night vision then; it was a sight most charming.
“I can’t believe you’re really here.” Lestat’s initiation caught Louis by surprise. He had expected a night of mostly one-sided monologue, a prediction sourced by Lestat’s thus-challenged verbalization. With pleasure, he discarded the opening words he had been assembling himself.
“I can. I’ve wanted to believe it for too long.” A wave of shameless candor washed over Louis. “I’ve entertained countless estimated versions of tonight in my head through the empty nights.”
“I see,” was Lestat’s only response to the blunt honesty. A moment passed. For the first time, Lestat’s face betrayed little, his stretching quietness the only indicator of his turbulent thoughts. “New Orleans has been terribly dull with your absence. I fear there's a black hole in your fashion down the street sucking the color out of this place. I pity those born and buried here having never seen these streets in all of their romance.”
“I can’t say my private piece of Dubai was much more interesting.” The apartment was in fact a laughable speck, a soulless cadaver next to their vivacious, grand New Orleans in antiquity. Louis discarded the passing thought of one day inviting Lestat to his penthouse; he imagined the minimalism of its interior would be lethal to a man of his opulent taste. Silence prevailed, once again.
They did this back and forth for a while; their conversation a long rhythmic dance made up of intense spurts of raw openness followed by languid pauses, just long enough for their synchronized hearts, invigorated by their passionate dance, to settle before returning to their waltz. The ringing of rain against the glass was their only music.
A complete recounting of the lives they lived apart from one another was impossible within the limits imposed by the impending dawn. Yet, in the private haven of the motel bed, they scratched the most demanding fragments, together. The vacant space between them remained undisturbed—a silently acknowledged and palpable border, mutually respected in its inflexibility. It was a necessary element, for it was there, in the air between the hard pillows, where their words united.
Hours must have passed. The beating rain slowed into silence and the triumphant chirping of morning birds greeted the rising sun outside. Something akin to mortal exhaustion wrung Louis and ladened his eyelids. He suspected the hours of talking and the intensity of the night’s emotions had a similar effect on Lestat, betrayed by his slowing and increasingly sporadic speech.
Louis was not prepared to see those pale lids flutter shut and was at once utterly conquered by his clenching heart. Lestat was asleep, his soft lips ever so slightly parted in tranquility. The overwhelming desire for closeness was torturous; yet he resisted, battling in both flanks of the conflicting mind and body. But, in the end, as all battles go, one had to prevail. Louis’ hand stretched across the distance as if moving by its own authority, his knuckles tracing the ancient scar carved into the edge of Lestat’s lips. He meant for it to be a most delicate touch lacking in any weight or disturbance, a private gesture solely designed to satiate his own selfish indulgence.
Alas, his caution was mismeasured, and Lestat, in his anxious alertness, opened his eyes at the contact. He seemed disoriented by the touch as if Louis had dealt him a blow hard enough to daze him. Oppressive guilt strangled Louis. He moved to pull back in his shame, but his retreat was halted by an agile hand wrapped around his. Lestat pressed the retreating palm back atop his cheek, slotted it flush against his skin like a puzzle piece.
“You’re so cruel to me, mon amour.” A whisper. Louis rummaged for words to contend, to defend himself, and was at last rendered mute as he watched Lestat shut his eyes in capitulation. A realization dawned on him: He was never going to find those words. He had no argument, all that was available to him was baseless self-preserving denial that he himself failed to believe.
As he dozed off, he prayed his tired eyes were betraying him, prayed the sliver of red that trickled from the corner of Lestat’s eye and over the bridge of his nose was an illusion painted by the darkness.
They slept through the day, Louis’ hand cradling Lestat’s face—a crescent moon cradling the stars.