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It is two in the morning when Louis is woken by the powerful, unholy scent combination of watermelon and bubblegum. He lurches out of sleep confused, not with any theories about the smell, which defies all explanation, but with a definite sense that no right and natural event could have brought it to his bedroom in the middle of the night.
The cause, Louis realizes when he blinks into full awareness, is his husband, vaping in bed. That’s new. Lestat hasn’t turned his bedside lamp on, but Louis can see, by the dim light filtering through from the street outside and the slow arc of the vape’s LED as Lestat brings it to his mouth for another puff, that Lestat is sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at the wall. And just like that, sleep and rest are gone, and Louis is plunged back into the all too familiar cocktail of intense irritation and profound concern that Lestat specialises in producing. Particularly lately.
While Lestat’s disgusting choice of vape juice would give Louis pause under any circumstance, a wakeful night or two wouldn’t especially trouble him. Everyone has trouble sleeping sometimes. Unfortunately, this is only the latest bump in weeks of emotional turbulence, all of which Lestat has refused to talk about. And if Louis has learned anything from eighteen years of knowing and loving and occasionally despairing over Lestat, it’s that such emotional turbulence will not dissipate harmlessly by itself. They’ll either talk about it, or it will explode messily in all their faces.
Recently, insomnia has become the norm. Night after night, Louis has rolled over to snuggle his husband only to find an empty bed. Or, somehow worse, a tense thigh or shoulder, and Lestat awake, not tossing and turning and fussing, but staring sightlessly into the night. It got bad enough that Lestat took up smoking again, breaking nearly a decade of clean breathing, seemingly entirely so he had something to do at night with his hands. At first, it was almost nostalgic to wake up and see him standing on their balcony, wreathed in smoke like one of his early music videos. The sight and the lingering smell took Louis back to their twenties, when they’d pass a single cigarette back and forth between them, to save money and to revel in the intimacy of sharing breath. When the habit crept into daytime hours, Louis had had to ask Lestat to have his crisis in a way that wouldn't give him and everyone passively smoking his cigarettes lung cancer. Of course Lestat had denied he was having a crisis, but apparently he’d dug his head out of the sand, or his ass, or wherever he was sticking it, long enough to buy a vape.
It’s not just the nights that are blighted by this crisis that isn’t a crisis. Unsurprisingly, insomnia has made Lestat, who wears his feelings loudly and openly for good and ill, ratty and irritable during the day. Given that they already have one ratty, irritable creature living in their house, one with the excuse of burgeoning teenage hormones for her behaviour, a certain level of tension is inevitable, especially when it almost seems like Lestat has been trying to pick fights with Claudia.
Cutting up the expensive new bikini her grandmother had sent her in a fit of pique, for example. The screaming match had been epic. It wasn’t that Louis minded about the suit—it was trashy and not appropriate for his barely teenage daughter, whatever the hell they’re wearing on the French Riviera—but he’d been planning a more subtle loss of the item in the laundry that would have preserved household peace as well as their daughter’s last couple of years of childhood. Hell, if things had been normal, he’d have had to navigate around both Claudia and Lestat to do it, since usually anything Lestat’s mother picks out is automatically good, and any sign of attention she shows Claudia is a boon from on high to be treasured. Louis knew when even Gabrielle’s stock sunk that Lestat had to be more badly off than he’d realized.
Less explicably and even more explosively, Lestat had refused, on nothing but the most spurious grounds, to let Claudia go on a skiing trip with a friend from school. Yes it’s pretentious and unbearable rich person behaviour to go on a skiing trip to Chamonix when they have snow right here in America, but they are pretentious and unbearable rich people, and Claudia is too determined by nature and has had too rough a start in life for spoiling her now to be a real danger. She deserves to be indulged. Backed into a corner by the sacred agreement at the core of their parenting to always present a united front, Louis had been forced to ratify the ban, but he wasn’t happy about it. They’d also agreed to discuss their Claudia related decisions in advance wherever possible, and Lestat had definitely not done that.
Louis would worry that the core conflict was between his husband and his daughter, a horrible regression to their first year with Claudia, before he and Lestat went to co-parenting counselling, but Lestat’s unusual behaviour hasn’t been limited to their home. He’s been withdrawing in lots of ways. Events they’d arranged months ago are suddenly boring and unnecessary. Their friends and acquaintances haven’t seen or heard from Lestat in so long that Daniel was delegated to ask if they’d separated. Louis even saw Lestat reject one of Gabrielle’s rare and highly prized phone calls, unthinkable in the regular course of things; Lestat once called a half hour halt to a recording session with a twenty piece orchestra when she rang, making it the most expensive phone call Louis’ ever heard of.
Whatever the hell ‘it’ is has even edged into the kind of lies they haven’t told each other in a decade. Blaming nebulous work commitments, Lestat insisted that they couldn't finalise their plans to go abroad over the summer, but when Louis rang Christine to get the straight story, she had no idea what Louis was talking about.
Most unusual of all, they haven’t had sex in weeks, not because of a fight or practical impediments, but because Lestat has been shying away from Louis, something that has literally never happened before. Louis is the one that sometimes can't stand the sight, sound or touch of Lestat when they’re at odds. Lestat is open to Louis and whatever mood he’s in, always. If anything, an argument makes him more keen.
Increasingly worried and irritated himself, Louis has made dozens of attempts to find out what is bothering Lestat. He’s asked gently, he’s asked firmly, he’s demanded. He’s asked indirectly, and in clear terms. He’s brought it up in the immediate aftermath of some strange outburst, and afterwards, when emotions have cooled. None of it has gotten him so much as acknowledgement that anything is going on.
So when Louis wakes up to Lestat awake, again, it’s with the full weight of every rejected query and concern that he asks, “Lestat, what the fuck is going on?”
“My apologies, I did not realise the smell would be so obnoxious. I will go outside.” Lestat begins to slide out of bed, but Louis puts out a hand to stop him.
“I don’t mean the vape! I mean, why aren’t you sleeping, again? Why have you reverted back to the high-handed, tantrum throwing bullshit I thought we got over years ago? Why won’t you talk to me?”
“You are the one shouting at me, mon cher. Which one of us exactly is having a tantrum?”
A classic Lestat deflection, but they do have a sleeping child in the house, so Louis moderates his tone as best he can. “Something is obviously going on. Is it the new album?” This is sort of a trick question, since Lestat is meant to be taking an extended break between projects, stepping in as primary parent while Louis expands his art business in Asia.
“You know I am taking a sabbatical. There is no album to worry about yet.”
“And what, you’re bored? If it’s so dull being at home with our daughter, just go back to the studio a couple of days a week, we’ll make it work” He’ll be hurt to think they’re not enough, but Louis would rather have Lestat here less and happy, than home and miserable.
“It is not dull. I love spending the day with Claudia.” Lestat sounds sad and entirely sincere, and most of Louis’ anger drains away. At least Lestat has yet to claim in his most manic tones that everything is fine and he’s fantastic—of course, of course, of course, of COURSE—as he has so frequently of late.
Softened, Louis tries to take Lestat’s free hand, the one that isn’t clutching the obnoxious vape, but Lestat has it clenched so hard in the duvet that Louis can only cover it with his own, like he’s defeating Lestat in a game of rock, paper, scissors.
“Are you not feeling well?” he asks. It would be just like Lestat to be ignoring some pain or illness, hoping it will go away by itself, as if they’re medieval peasants and not wealthy modern people with the best health insurance money can buy. “Do you want to talk to a doctor?”
Lips compressed as tightly as his hand, Lestat shakes his head.
“Or, is someone else sick?” Louis asks. There is only really one person outside their little family circle of three who Lestat cares about enough for this kind of reaction. “Is it Gabrielle?”
Lestat laughs, braying and obnoxious. As ever, it sets Louis’ teeth on edge. He tries, as their therapist recommended all those years ago, to step back from his own instinctive reaction and reframe Lestat’s laugh as the involuntary outburst it is, a sign that Lestat is overwhelmed, not that he’s amused or making fun of Louis. It’s hard.
“Is it drugs?” Louis asks, more to tick it off the list than because he thinks it’s likely. They’d had that phase in their twenties, together and recreationally for the most part, and it petered out for both of them. If Lestat has, against all his natural inability to keep secrets, nursed a secret heroin habit this whole time, Louis will almost be impressed. Still, you never know with musicians. He has to ask.
In response, Lestat only huffs and yanks his hand from Louis’ grasp.
The rejection stings, and by now Louis is out of ideas beyond the worst, and the most ridiculous. “What is it then?” he asks, irritation surging back. “Did you get embroiled in a Ponzi scheme and lose all your money? Did you get a groupie pregnant in the nineties, and now the child wants to meet up? Is Tough Cookie going solo and breaking up the band? Have you got crabs?”
As Louis barrages him with questions, Lestat withdraws, literally, sliding out from under the duvet to stand by the bed. For the first time in the conversation, if it can be called that, he looks Louis in the face. By the dim light of the street outside, Louis sees that instead of the mulish defiance that Lestat has returned to his previous inquiries, he looks purely miserable. Agonised, even. Lestat opens his mouth and Louis is sure that finally, finally, he’s going to fucking explain—he clearly wants to explain!—but he only closes it without saying anything.
“Give me something!” Louis says. Shouts, if he’s honest with himself. “Or are you just sick of our lives not being about you now you’re not on tour?”
Lestat paces to the back of the room, then returns to the bed. “I-” he begins, and Louis’ every nerve lights up in anticipation of answers. Lestat swallows, takes a convulsive breath, as if he might launch into a speech, and says nothing. They stare at each other, each desperate in their own way.
“I cannot,” Lestat chokes out eventually. His eyes are huge and pleading, begging for something, but he’s the one who’s being so fucking weird. What can Louis do, if Lestat won’t talk to him?
If it’s not work, or fatherhood, or illness, or drugs, there is nothing left but the most obvious question, the most technically plausible one that has been top of Louis’ list this whole time. “Is there someone else?” he croaks.
In reply, Lestat whirls round and leaves the room.
It would seem like confirmation, except for how horribly unfamiliar the reaction is. For all the fights they’ve had other the years, and boy howdy they have had some doozies, Lestat has hardly ever walked away. Louis is the one who puts physical distance between them. Lestat only does that when he gets so angry that his fear of what he might do overcomes his need to cleave to Louis all the harder in bad times, which hasn’t happened in years. Again, the therapy helped.
And Lestat hadn’t seemed angry, not in the deep, vibrating way that signals trouble. Not at all. He had barely said anything, which might be even more unusual than Lestat walking away. Lestat talks endlessly. When something is on his mind, he rambles about it. When he’s avoiding something, he talks around it. He distracts, he deflects, he demands attention for some other thing. And while he is boundlessly stubborn in so many ways, he cannot truly deny Louis anything when Louis presses. When things are going wrong between them, it is Louis who tends to be reticent, who has the willpower to stand behind his point, and Lestat who storms and pouts and inevitably crumbles.
Subconsciously, Louis realises he has been waiting for the louder thump of their front door closing, and it hasn’t come. Lestat is still in the house. Of course, Louis realises with relief, he wouldn’t actually leave. He wants Louis to go after him, to make a token sign of conciliation and concern, so that Lestat can feel secure enough to spill whatever is eating away at him.
If Lestat has cheated, Louis is going to have to go nuclear. Realistically, he won’t end it, but his reaction will have to be a misery second only to an actual break-up, to teach Lestat a lesson, and hide the fundamental truth that there is hardly anything Lestat could do that would actually drive Louis away permanently. He accepted that when they didn’t break up right after Claudia came to live with them, that horrible period when all the accumulated years of bad parenting Lestat had endured seemed to manifest in him at once. As he sits there, half planning out his reaction, Louis is actually angrier at the theoretical effort of it all than he is about the theoretical cheating. It’s going to be as bad for him as it is for Lestat, and Louis hasn’t even done anything wrong, how is that fair?
When he thinks he’s found the right balance of calm and anger—he can’t go in too hot, it might still be drugs, or a bad investment, or some secret third thing—Louis goes after Lestat. He expects to find him in the living room, and when he isn’t there, his tiny home studio, and when he isn’t there, the kitchen. Nothing. Louis even peeps into Claudia’s room—they both check on her when they’re anxious—but she’s sleeping peacefully, no trace of her other father. Eventually, Louis locates a light on in the downstairs bathroom.
After waiting five minutes, because sure, even in the middle of a nighttime domestic, a man might need to pee, Louis presses his ear to the door. He’s definitely in there. Louis can hear movement, and muttering, a slosh of liquid. Is he having a bath? The pipes haven’t groaned, so it doesn’t seem possible.
Louis raps on the door. “Lestat?”
No answer. Louis tries the door. It’s locked. He knocks harder.
“Are you okay?” he asks, both because he knows concern will get him further than anger, and because he is actually concerned.
No answer.
“If you don’t let me know if you’re okay, I will break this door down.” It’s an expensive sturdy door. “Or I’ll call the fire department and have them do it, wake the whole neighbourhood up.”
“No need for heroics, I am fine,” Lestat says.
“Then come out.”
“No.”
“This is absurd.”
“No!”
Like an idiot, Louis tries the door handle again, harder, rattling the door. He can feel the desire to escalate rising inside him, and abruptly, he feels ridiculous. Is he really having this stupid, childish argument, in the middle of the night, through a door? How does Lestat make him do this kind of shit?
“Fine,” Louis hisses. “Come and talk to me when you’re ready to be a grown up.” And he walks away.
Back in their bedroom, Louis makes a concerted effort to go to sleep. The best punishment for this bizarre behaviour will be if Lestat finds Louis blissfully, unconcernedly asleep in their bed. Unfortunately, his mind won’t stop racing, spiralling down into deeper potential catastrophes. There’s a different flavor to this fight, not quite like any they’ve had before. Therefore, there must be a problem they’ve never had before.
It can’t be the kind of someone else who Lestat would actually leave him for. It can’t be. If there is one thing Louis is sure of in this world, it’s that Lestat loves him, loves him more than anyone. Yes, Lestat has terrible judgement and worse impulse control. Yes, there’s a deep well of insecurity in him that makes him lose his head and try to prove his validity with sex, makes him test the people he loves by acting out. But he is obsessed with Louis, as completely as Louis is obsessed with him. That’s his core. That’s their core.
If Lestat is going to leave them, Louis can only pray he has the self-control not to beg and rage like… well, like Lestat. If Lestat is going to leave, he’ll come back, he will, and Louis will want to have kept some dignity when he does. But it won’t be that.
Almost an hour later, when Louis has tossed and turned the sheets into a chaotic, clammy nest, Lestat comes back. Any plans Louis had to feign sleep evaporate as soon as he hears the door creak open. He sits bolt upright, turns on his bedside light, and pins Lestat with his glare.
His husband shuffles in, head down, a half empty bottle of clear liquid in his hand. Is that…
“Are you drunk?” Louis asks, incredulous. Did Lestat truly lock himself in their bathroom with a bottle of vodka—which he hates neat—and get drunk in the middle of the night? Maybe it is drugs.
Carelessly, Lestat drops the bottle onto the dresser. “A little liquid courage to loosen my lips, that is all.”
Louis’ sense of foreboding deepens. There are few things that Lestat shies away from saying: shocking, sentimental, scandalous, hurtful, flowery, rude, ridiculous. He says too much, that’s his thing.
“You’re scaring me,” Louis admits.
At this crack in Louis’ shell, Lestat’s eyes fill with tears. It’s the first predictable thing he’s done in this whole nightmare conversation, and riding the perverse feeling of safety and familiarity it gives him—there’s his raw nerve of a husband—Louis holds a hand out to Lestat. A small mercy, his husband takes it, and Louis tugs him closer and shimmies himself until they’re sitting next to each other on the edge of their bed, Lestat still holding Louis’ hand.
“I do not mean to scare you, mon cher,” Lestat says. His voice is loose and a little slurred, sloppy with the effects of alcohol and the threat of tears. He holds Louis’ hand on his lap, cradled in both of his, and strokes it delicately.
“Then talk to me,” Louis urges.
Lestat shakes his head. “I shouldn’t.”
“Well then what do you suggest? We can’t go on like this. You’re making yourself ill, and Claudia isn’t going to stand for much more of your bad mood.”
Not to mention that Louis can’t bear to see Lestat so miserable. He leans forward to try and catch Lestat’s eye, but Lestat keeps his face tilted down, and his eyes fixed on Louis’ hand.
“Once I say it, it cannot be taken back. You will wish you did not know,” Lestat says hoarsely.
Since Louis already wishes this whole conversation wasn’t happening, it’s not hard to imagine Lestat being right. Unfortunately, USS Ignorance is Bliss has sailed, for better or worse.
“You will hate me,” Lestat continues. “You will curse the day that we met.”
Impossible. Surely nothing could be that bad?
“It’s already too late to pretend nothing is wrong,” Louis says. “Just, talk to me, please. We’ll figure it out.” Louis prays that he’s telling the truth.
With no warning, Lestat turns and tries to put his arms around Louis. Already tense, mistaking the touch for an attempt to distract him with sex, Louis puts up a hand to block him. Too late, he realises that Lestat’s attempted embrace was more a request for comfort than a come on. Lestat is already recoiling, pulling back from Louis so quickly that in his inebriated state he slips off the edge of the bed. Louis tries to grab for him, but satin sheets are slippery, and Lestat lands on his ass with a thump.
“Are you okay?” Louis reaches down to help Lestat up, but instead of taking his hands, Lestat jerks back. Louis freezes and Lestat stays where he is, sprawled on the carpet, staring up at Louis.
Drained of the bravado and energy he shields himself with during the day, Lestat looks terrible. Weeks of insomnia have left dark circles under his eyes, and his hair is greasy and tangled. Louis pictures him, locked alone in their bathroom, clenching his hair in hands and trying to work up the courage to talk to his own husband. Worst of all is the blank, hollow look in his eyes. He looks as empty and wretched as Louis has ever seen him, and they have been through some shit.
So often, conflict between them spins out of control because neither of them can step back and let things go. They always have to one up each other. Louis lowers his hands and sits back on the bed, waiting to see what his husband will do, giving him space. Lestat doesn’t join him on the bed, but eventually he sits up and turns to lean his back against its side, so they are both facing the window. If he looks down, Louis can see half Lestat’s face in profile, the slumped line of his shoulders, the hopeless slackness of his arms and legs, like all his strings have been cut.
“You are right,” Lestat admits, quietly. “Will you turn the light off? I do not want to see your disgust.”
Wordlessly, Louis turns off the light, and once again the room is illuminated only by the glow of the streetlights outside. He tries to project calm and acceptance, but his heart is pounding. It must be something genuinely awful. Lestat made a secret sex tape of them and it has leaked online. He got so drunk or high on tour that he hurt someone. He’s done something so bad that Claudia might get taken away from them if they stay together, and Louis will actually have to leave him.
Lestat gives a wet little laugh and, finally, begins. “I do not know why I am acting like this, after all this time.”
Some historical crime or sexual transgression then, Louis thinks numbly, returned to haunt them in the Internet age.
“Nothing has truly happened, nothing has changed,” Lestat whispers into the darkness. Louis doesn’t have to see his face to know that there are tears running down it. “It is only that suddenly, I cannot stop thinking about it. I cannot. I cannot push it aside, I cannot forget it, no matter how hard I try.”
Is it Magnus? Louis feels stupid for not having thought of it earlier. Lestat claims to have dealt with emotional fallout of his relationship with the older record producer—the toxic cocktail of personal and professional that gave Lestat his start in the music industry when he was just eighteen—through therapy, living well, and the satisfaction of seeing Magnus’ numerous transgressions with others eventually aired in French court and international newspapers. Still, it had taken him years to admit that the relationship had been, at best, coercive, and Louis has always suspected that there were horrors there that Lestat has not admitted to.
“You can tell me,” Louis says, and it takes no effort to keep his tone soft this time. He wants to reach out and touch Lestat, but he fears disrupting the calm they seem to have found. It was a mistake, accidentally made but still impactful, to push Lestat away when he reached out physically earlier. After a rejection like that he’ll be wound as tightly as a spring, and the lightest disturbance could trigger an outburst that will end any chance of them finally talking about whatever the hell there is to talk about.
At first, the only sound in the room is Lestat’s breathing, slightly too fast and shallow. Slowly, he brings it back under control. Louis recognises the pattern as one of the exercises he sometimes does before shows: four seconds breathing in, seven seconds waiting, and seven seconds breathing out. When Lestat eventually speaks, he is calm and detached. “Do you remember what I told you about my first time?”
Your first time what, Louis nearly asks, before it clicks. Oh no.
“I do.” It’s hardly a recurring topic of discussion—they’re both the jealous type—but they had discussed their sexual histories when they first got together. Louis racks his brain for the fragments of the story. “It was with an older woman. You were sixteen.”
A little young, by Louis’ cultural standards, but legal in France, where the age of consent is fifteen. He is sure that Lestat wove that fact in. He also recalls that Lestat had made the whole thing sound like a brag, yet another example of his relaxed and superior sensibilities, his eternal, universal allure. Louis, more of a late blooming Catholic cliche who was still held back at times by shame, had been irritated and a little jealous. Not of the woman, obviously, but of how lightly Lestat spoke of the encounter. So he got to live one of the classic teenage boy fantasies and be introduced to the world of sex by a sultry and experienced guide. Good for him! They couldn’t all be bi and European, born with no sexual hang ups.
At the time, Louis had wanted to snap at him, to rebalance the karmic scales in some small way. He probably had. They played those kinds of games in the old days. Now, Louis feels a little sick. Things clearly weren’t as simple as Lestat had made them out to be. Louis let Lestat misdirect him and missed something, something even deeper and older than Magnus.
“A small deception. I was fourteen,” Lestat says, quietly, and Louis’ stomach sinks. Even if Lestat had told him that when they were both twenty two, he might not have realized just how young it truly is. But Claudia is turning fourteen this year. No matter how grown up she thinks she is, she’s a baby still, in Louis’ eyes.
“That’s young,” Louis observes, in what he hopes in a neutral voice that won’t make Lestat clam up. Internally, his emotions are roiling. What does “older” mean in the context of being fourteen? He wants to pretend to himself that they might just be talking about a difference of a few years, but the emotional landmine the encounter seems to have planted doesn’t give him much hope.
“I didn’t think so at the time. I thought I was all grown up.” Lestat’s breath catches for a moment, before he wrestles it back under control. Four seconds in, seven seconds wait, seven seconds out. “She told me that she knew what I wanted, that she had felt my lustful gaze. That I had been patient, waiting for her, and now she would reward me.”
On some other day, Louis could imagine Lestat delivering these lines with a touch of ironic humour, perhaps even in a seductive tone, pushed into parody by his self-awareness. Yes, the lady in question did speak like she was in a bad porno movie. Isn’t it ridiculous? We are all in on the joke, even my younger self was in on it, that is why we can laugh. Tonight, in the dark, they sound more like a confession. Like Lestat actually believes them.
Aching for his husband as he recounts this sick litany, Louis risks a gentle touch to Lestat’s shoulder. He flinches, and Louis withdraws immediately, recognising the delicacy of the moment.
“I thought she was beautiful,” Lestat continues, “but still, I would never have presumed to think of such a thing. She is the one who came to my room. I did not know that I was. That I was doing what she said.”
Louis can’t keep it inside anymore. “Baby, you weren’t-”
“No!” Lestat cuts him off, sharply. “No, in the end, she was right. I enjoyed it. I, I wanted her, once we had started.”
The steady rhythm of Lestat’s breathing exercise is breaking down, his breaths growing ragged at the edges and hollow in the middle.
“I was so lonely.” This much, Lestat has told Louis before. How small and empty his world was. The isolation of their crumbling family chateau. The father and brothers who bullied him. The mother who for so long, didn't appear to care. “It seemed like a gift. Something special, just for us. She had been through so much, suffered so much, and finally, here was a way I could do something, for her. A way to prove myself, to alleviate her loneliness, and in doing so cure mine.”
As Lestat talks, a horrible suspicion begins to gather in Louis’ mind. He tries to ignore or dismiss it, but he can’t. He tries not to look at it fully, but still, he senses the hidden weight of it: a further awful truth, the truth that Lestat says he will never unhear. It’s in the way he is talking about this mysterious woman, something behind it that is worse than him being groomed by a bored local housewife when he was only a teenager. There is a familiar ring to his words, a tone Louis recognises but cannot quite define. ‘She’ has been through so much. ‘She’ is someone Lestat needs to prove himself to. ‘Her’ loneliness is paramount.
With dread like a physical ache, Louis asks, “What was her name?”
Please, let Lestat say a name he doesn’t know, some local girl, or his big brother’s girlfriend, or a friend of his parents who visited for the summer, no matter the grim age difference. That must be it. It’s Louis who’s sick, to even fleetingly, semi-consciously consider a worse possibility. Lestat will say the name, some random French name, and Louis will let the half-formed fear go before it solidifies, which is as good as it never existing at all.
“Gabrielle.” Lestat's voice is so quiet Louis almost mistakes it for his own, deeply buried thought.
“Your mother?” Louis is amazed at how calm he sounds. He has to be sure. France is probably full of Gabrielles. He hopes and prays there was another in their neighbourhood.
In answer, Lestat can only nod his head. Louis watches the outline of his head bob in the dark, his hand come up to cover his mouth, like he’s trying to stifle a gasp or a sob, and feels his husband’s pain like a rent in his own heart.
His poor Lestat. It’s inconceivable. It’s unconscionable. It explains so much. A picture Louis hadn’t even realised he’d been squinting at for nearly twenty years snaps into sharp, clear focus.
The way that Lestat is with Gabrielle. Adoring, deferential, volatile, watchful. Anything Lestat does for her he has to do perfectly, and the smallest smile from her makes Lestat glow in a way that normally only Louis can achieve. A frown, a withdrawal, even the absence of a reaction, are the end of the world and can send him into a funk for days. He pulls her chair out when she sits, he opens the door for her, he drifts to stand close to her wherever she is. When she touches him unexpectedly, he skitters away like a startled spider.
The way Gabrielle is with Lestat. Proprietary but distant, always offering just enough to keep him on the hook. Months of no contact, and then extravagant gifts that are never quite right, and extravagant demands that seem designed to test the rapidity and depth of Lestat’s devotion. Inappropriate stories and comments that make Louis uncomfortable, but which Lestat assures him are normal outside of the puritanical continent they live on, and what is wrong with a woman making a passing reference to her sexual fantasies anyway? An impenetrable wall around her that repels all contact but the mandatory two cheek kisses on greeting, except when she reaches out with an intimacy that unsettles something in Louis' gut: a hand too tight and lingering on Lestat’s bicep, an unnecessary and overly thorough neatening of his hair.
The way Lestat is with the world. So hungry for love and affirmation that he sees rejection in even the most gentle, temporary denial. So unable to believe that someone might love him that any genuine declaration sends him into floods of tears. Desperate to prove his worth through sex and devastated when he isn’t allowed.
“Was that the only time?” Louis asks.
Lestat, a hand still pressed tightly over his mouth, shakes his head.
A large part of Louis doesn’t want to know more, wants to just assure Lestat that he did nothing wrong, that he was taken advantage of, and move on. But he has the sense that this is a unique chance—an alignment of darkness and exhaustion and vodka and desperation to feel better that may never be replicated—and if he doesn’t understand the shape of this wound now, the chance will be gone, and all the secrets and shame that have festered in Lestat for years will sink back inside, maybe forever.
“How long did it go on for?” Louis asks.
At first, Louis isn’t sure Lestat will be able to answer him. After several long moments, he lowers his hand and admits, in a hoarse whisper, “It didn’t stop. Not until I went to Paris, with Nicki.”
Until Lestat ran away at seventeen then. Bored of home and burning to be with his first boyfriend Nicolas, he had always said, but Louis has never been able to understand exactly what it was about Nicolas made Lestat so ready to abandon everything, when they both would have been able to leave far more legitimately for a practically free university education in just a year or two. Until now, he hadn’t understood how much Lestat had to escape.
“And even then…” Lestat trails off, his voice smaller than Louis has ever heard it.
Of course it couldn’t be that simple, if four years of abuse can be called simple. “And even then what?” Louis prompts, as gently as he can.
“Once we had a place, she would visit me in Paris every few months. To have a break from my father. And we...” He doesn't finish the sentence.
“So you were,” Louis gropes for calm and a word that won’t either make him sick right there, or drive Lestat away, “together while you were with Nicolas as well.”
“Yes,” Lestat admits, and then, in a rush, “I could never say no to her! Not after I abandoned her. We were so much to each other, she had done so much for me, given me so much, and I left her all alone. I ran like a thief in the night with no warning. I owed her.”
Yes, I’m sure she made it clear how much you owed her, Louis thinks, darkly. I’m sure she used every ounce of love and guilt you had to break you. “What about when you were with Magnus?”
“No. She stayed away then. They did not get on.”
Of course. Gabrielle hates Magnus, everyone knows that. The depth of her disdain had been one of Louis’ first solid clues that there was more going on with his so-called mentor than Lestat would admit to. Even before Magnus’ public fall from grace, no reference to the man could get past Gabrielle without a cutting remark. Louis had always thought that the consistently vicious way she spoke about him was one of the signs that, underneath her frequently detached exterior, she did care about her son.
Now, it seems more like jealousy and resentment of a figure powerful enough to keep Lestat for himself. Now, Louis wonders if Magnus was another way that Lestat tried, consciously or unconsciously, to escape his mother. A deal with the devil to keep a worse devil at bay. Except, the new devil had also been too much to bear, and Lestat had broken with him and returned to Nicolas, only for Nicolas to kill himself a few months later. That’s when Lestat had put an ocean between himself and Gabrielle instead of a devil, and come to America. To Louis, though neither of them knew that yet.
Still. An ocean isn’t that far anymore.
“When was the last time you were together that way?” Louis asks. So far he has thought of this as a historical atrocity, lingering only in that Gabrielle has lingered in Lestat’s life, her claws dug so deep Lestat doesn’t even realize he’s bleeding. But why should that be the case? Why would she stop?
Lestat’s shoulders slump even further. “When we went to Berlin.”
Berlin. The holiday from hell, early in their relationship. They had been involved for almost two years, but it was the first time that they’d left the country together, and the first time that Louis had met Gabrielle in real life. She came up to Germany on the sleeper train, just for the day, one of the sweet gestures she made intermittently that kept Louis totally writing her off as a mother. He’d been touched that she’d go to so much trouble to see her son and meet his partner in person, and relieved she was tactful enough only to stay for brunch and one afternoon tourist activity, rather than taking over their whole holiday. It should have been a lovely introduction.
Except, the night before she arrived Lestat had got so drunk—wilfully ignoring all Louis’ requests, futile orders and eventually desperate pleas to slow down—that he was still vomiting bile into the hotel toilet when their appointed brunch time arrived. Louis had gone alone, so Lestat’s mother wouldn’t just be sitting in the restaurant by herself, and experienced one of the most awkward meals of his life. Gabrielle had been cold and icy, a state that Louis hadn’t yet realised was only five degrees frostier than her usual demeanour, and Lestat hadn’t arrived until the waiters were clearing away their plates.
What was it that she’d said, when Louis had stumblingly explained that Lestat was running late, and then, when he still hadn’t shown up after half an hour, that he had been feeling ill? “My son has always been prone to tantrums.” In that detached, ironic tone that made Louis bristle on Lestat’s behalf, even in the midst of being as furious with him as he’d ever been.
After brunch, Gabrielle had swept haughtily away, and Louis had marched Lestat back to their hotel to make clear in no uncertain terms how unacceptable his behaviour was. Then, he'd let Lestat go and apologise to Gabrielle. Or… had Louis told Lestat to go? God, he hopes he hadn’t made him go. Louis has the vague sense that Lestat had been reluctant and Louis had wanted some goddamn space from him, but he can’t remember for sure. If Louis had sent him to her, it was only because he knew—or thought he knew—how much Gabrielle meant to Lestat, and he didn’t want to risk them falling out just because Lestat was acting up with him. And because apparently Louis was so damn self-centered he hadn’t considered that Lestat’s crisis was about anything other than Louis and their relationship.
Whatever the impetus, Lestat had gone. And then he had stayed out till five am, when he came back drunk, again, smelling of perfume, with a bright smear of lipstick behind his ear, marked as someone else’s territory. Louis had been convinced that Lestat had made up with his mother, seen her off as planned, and then, instead of coming back to Louis, spent the evening in a bar and the night in some bar floozy’s bedroom, looking to punish Louis for a transgression he couldn’t fathom. They’d had one of their worst ever fights and Louis had declared it was over, flown home three days early, and spent six months dating Armand. Armand. That was how bad it had been.
For over a decade, Berlin has remained an outlying bit of self-sabotaging madness, even in the storied history of Lestat’s frequently unpredictable and over the top behaviour. However much Louis turned the incident round and round in his head in their six months apart, it had been completely inexplicable, and he’d had to settle for forgetting rather than understanding. Some kind of late onset commitment freakout had been Louis’ working theory at the time, despite the fact that it made absolutely no sense in the context of Lestat’s instant, naked, unwavering devotion up to and after the trip.
“What happened between you in Berlin?” Louis asks, heart aching before he’s even heard. Why hadn’t Lestat told him? Why had he let Louis assume he knew what was going on? All the time Louis had been punishing him, Lestat had already been going through hell, and Louis had had no idea.
“I told her we couldn't do that anymore. That I loved you.”
There was no way Gabrielle would have let things end that cleanly. “What did she say?” Louis asks.
“She said that she understood, that it was natural that our time might come to an end,” Lestat replies. Then, reluctantly, “And that we must have one last night together or she would not be able to let me go.”
Extortion and a threat, lovely.
“I know it is worth nothing,” Lestat says, voice thick with emotion, “but I promise it was the only time it happened while we were together. I swear it.”
He truly seems to think that one of Louis’ primary concerns will be him cheating, like any of the horror he’s endured can be set on that scale. Still, it seems unlikely it ended that easily. They’ve seen Gabrielle in person dozens of times over the years. They’ll meet up, even if only for a meal, almost every time they fly to Europe. She loves to travel, and she works a visit to New Orleans in whenever she’s on their side of the Atlantic. Since Gabrielle was widowed, they stay in her goddamn house in the Auvergne for a few weeks every other summer. They’re meant to go sometime this summer, would have booked their tickets already, if Lestat hadn’t been putting it off. Can she really have left her son alone, all through that?
“What about when we've visited her?” Louis asks.
Lestat shakes his head in denial, but even before he answers, Louis is reconsidering and rearranging his whole perspective on their trips. Actually, it’s not that absurd a claim. Lestat is never so clingy as when they go back to his place of birth. Louis has always taken it as a reaction to his bad memories, a lingering of the teenage loneliness and insecurity Lestat experienced there. He has been both endeared and exasperated by the way that Lestat won't spend a single afternoon, evening or night away from him, and in recent years from Claudia, while they’re there. They have to do everything en famille.
Even when Louis goes on the kind of boring, negotiation-heavy art buying day-trip that Lestat would normally turn his nose up. Even when Louis has actively tried to arrange things so that Lestat can bond with his precious mother. Even when Claudia has begged for her and Lestat to stay and play in the vineyard, or for her to be left with Gabrielle alone, rather than be dragged unwillingly to Lyon again because Louis has to sign a contract before they leave. Lestat has been so consistently insistent that last time they went Louis and Claudia stopped fighting it, exchanging long suffering looks and trooping out the door together on every outing.
All that time, even in the depths of his denial about Gabrielle, Lestat was trying to protect himself from her. To protect Claudia, and their little family.
“I swear to you Louis, it never happened again, never. After what happened with Nicki, I knew that it would corrupt us if it did.”
“With Nicki?” Louis asks, confused. “Did he know?” Instinctively, Louis is certain that Lestat has never admitted any of this out loud to another person before, but it would all have been fresh in Nicolas’ time. He might have figured it out, would have seen them together when Lestat was still young, and vulnerable, and even more completely under Gabrielle’s thrall.
“I never told him.” A ‘but’ hangs silently in Lestat’s cadence, and Louis leaves him the space to find his words, “... but he nearly caught us once. It was after I left Magnus. I fled his house with nothing but the clothes I had on, and Nicki let me stay in his apartment while I got back on my feet. Gabrielle came to see me, and it had been much longer than usual. She. She could not wait.”
Uncontrollably, Louis’ hands clench into fists. Couldn’t wait. When her son had just escaped an abusive, controlling relationship. When he was vulnerable, and in pieces. Well, that is how she likes it.
“I did not think he understood what he interrupted,” Lestat says. “We never spoke of it. But I knew later that he must have realized. He realized, and he was so disgusted that, that he-” He covers his face with his hands, unable to go on.
It’s the most Lestat has ever said beyond the bare facts that his first boyfriend had struggled with depression and committed suicide, and another facet of this ordeal slides horribly, neatly into place. Louis doesn’t know if Nicolas knew. Hell, Louis doesn’t care if he knew. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Nicolas is gone, and if he did know, if he found out that his partner had been sexually abused and decided to add bereavement on top of that, then fuck him, depression and all.
What Louis does care about is that all this time Lestat has thought that it’s his fault, not because of the formless guilt and regret that anyone would feel after such a tragedy, the eternal question of if there is more they could have done, but because he thinks his specific actions drove Nicki to do what he did. Louis knows that pain, intimately, from what happened with Paul. He knows how it worms its way inside you, how it turns all the good things backwards, so that your love is poison, and happiness is a privilege you no longer deserve.
“Can I touch you?” Louis asks. He can’t bear, he can’t, to see Lestat suffering alone on the floor for another second.
Finally, Lestat turns around to look up at Louis. “You would still-” His whole body is trembling. “You don't want me to leave?”
“Of course not. Baby, it's not your fault.”
With a small cry, Lestat flings himself at Louis. He’s too desperate and frantic for anything as coordinated as getting up, and ends up with his arms around Louis’ calves and his face pressed into Louis’ thighs. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,” Lestat sobs, and Louis' own eyes fill with tears in sympathetic response.
“You don’t need to be sorry.” Louis strokes Lestat’s hair, his back, folds his body over to embrace his husband as best he can from this strange position. “You were fourteen, she was your parent, it’s not on you.”
“She never loved me before that night,” Lestat says, choking the words out between sharp, shuddering heaves for breath. “And I thought. I thought. It was because this is how we should have always been. That it was always what she’d needed from me, and only convention kept us apart. That they made the rules for bad people, and perverts, not for us.”
“I’m sorry,” Louis says through the tears. He slides down onto the floor to hold Lestat properly, pulling Lestat into his body as he shakes apart. “I’m sorry she did that to you. She shouldn’t have done it.”
Somehow, Louis’ tall, broad-shouldered husband feels small and painfully fragile in his arms. Lestat twines his arms around Louis’ waist, buries his wet face in Louis’ neck, and presses so close he’s sitting in Louis’ lap. Louis squeezes him tightly, possessively.
“All this time, I thought it must have been okay, because we loved each other. That I must have been a man, that I must have been ready, or she would not have come to me. That it shouldn’t matter, now it has been over for so many years.” Lestat’s breath comes faster. “But I can’t get it out of my head anymore. I can’t. Not since, not since-” Lestat’s body convulses, gasps coming too quickly for him to get the words out. Louis holds Lestat to him with all the strength in his body. He pets his hair, and presses firm kisses to his cheek, and lets Lestat ride out the emotional storm in the shelter of his body.
“Not since what, baby?” he asks, when Lestat has calmed a little. Surely there can’t be anything else? It’s too much, too much for anyone to bear, if there’s more.
“Claudia will be fourteen soon,” Lestat whispers. Louis understands him instantly, but he waits for Lestat to finish forcing out the words. “And she is just a child. Our child. I would. I would slaughter anyone who touched her.” Lestat's fists clench in the back of Louis’ t-shirt. Louis presses him, somehow, even closer.
“You were a child,” Louis says.
“I was her child.” Lestat erupts into fresh sobs. “How could she do that? How could she?”
Isn’t that just the central question. Louis wishes he could give Lestat an answer. Give him any answer beyond one of the people his husband loves most in the world being that wicked, that selfish, that twisted, right down to their core. He rocks them both side to side, trying to soothe Lestat any way he can. “I don’t know, baby. I can’t understand that kind of evil.”
“There must be something about me. I’m the evil.”
“No,” Louis says, horrified, “don’t be ridiculous”.
Abruptly, Lestat pulls away. Louis lets him sit up, but keeps a hold on each of Lestat’s arms, so he can’t go too far.
“It's something in me. I make people do things,” he says. “Magnus. Nicki. Armand. I corrupted them. I ruined them.”
“You didn’t-” Louis begins, but Lestat cuts him off.
“If you let me stay, I will corrupt you too, I'll corrupt Claudia.” Lestat’s body tenses and his weight shifts, like he really thinks Louis will let him stand up and walk away, with that poison still in him.
“No,” Louis repeats, firmly this time. “None of that is on you. Magnus had been taking advantage of his power for years before you came along, and he kept doing it for years afterwards. They’ve literally written books about it, he went to prison. Nicki-”
At Nicki’s name, Lestat does try to get up, but Louis doesn’t let go.
“Nicki,” Louis says, “was depressed. It’s a tragedy, and I wish it hadn’t happened, but he had a medical condition. It’s not on you.”
“How can you say that? I cheated on him. I lied to him. I left him, for Magnus, for a rich old man who could help me with my career, and I never explained why. That it wasn’t the money.”
“You did the best you could," Louis says, "when you were so young, and so many people had tried to hurt you.” Lestat turns his face away, but Louis continues, implacable. “Whether Nicki knew or not, you being abused by your parent isn’t about him, and if it was a factor in what he did, it only goes to show how bad off he was, that he was ill, not rational. It doesn’t make it your fault.”
“I,” Lestat starts to cry again, but quietly this time, tears spilling silently down his face. “I made him party to something sordid and disgusting.”
“Gabrielle did that. She’s the disgusting one. You were just trying to survive.”
“No,” Lestat says, shaking his head, but almost imperceptibly, his body relaxes, and Louis stops worrying that he’ll bolt with no warning.
“And Armand…” as usual, Louis struggles to explain their mutual ex and current frenemy. “He’s got his own demons, you know that. Whatever he might say to get a rise out of you, I don’t think you even crack the top five.”
“If I had not-” Lestat begins.
“You were shitty to each other,” Louis interrupts. Personally, he lays a lot more blame at Armand’s feet. While Louis has come to understand why Armand is the way he is better with time, he is a manipulator par extraordinaire, and impetuous Lestat had been more than a little outmatched. “Am I an irredeemable corrupting force, because I dated him for six months, just to get back at you?” Louis asks.
“Non,” says Lestat. He often gets a little more French when they discuss Armand. “He took advantage of your vulnerability.”
They are getting side-tracked. Louis takes Lestat’s face in both his hands.
“You are not evil,” he says. Again, Lestat tries to look away, but Louis guides him gently back and waits until Lestat returns his eye contact. “You’re not corrupt, or disgusting. Evil tried to get hold of you and keep you, again and again, powerful evil, and you fought back, you escaped. You did that.”
Convulsively, Lestat grabs at one of Louis’ wrists, and grips it tight. “I was weak. I ruined so many things.”
“You were brave,” Louis insists. Lestat shakes his head in denial, but Louis will not be deterred. “Yes, brave. Stubborn and brave and irrepressible. You were betrayed by the person who should have loved and protected you the most, you were betrayed over and over again, by her and by others, and somehow, you made it out. You didn’t let it crush you, or make you bitter.”
As he speaks, Louis pulls his pajama sleeve down over his hand and uses it to gently dab Lestat’s face dry, feeling an almost painful tenderness well up inside him as he does, for the Lestat of today, and all the versions of Lestat he's known through the years.
“After everything you’d been through,” Louis says, “you still came to me, open and full of love, unashamed to be yourself. You prised me out of my shell, when I was too scared to face who I was.”
“I- I nearly ruined us. Many times. I have been a bad partner, and a terrible father.”
“It’s been hard work sometimes,” Louis admits, and they both laugh. “But for every failure, there have been a hundred successes. You’ve worked so hard, to be a better partner and a better father. Even before tonight, that’s what I thought. I knew how much you loved us, because you worked that hard to be better for us. The only thing that’s changed is now I understand what you had to face a little better.”
Lestat looks stunned, knocked into silence.
“If I could, I would save you the pain of what she did, and the burden of keeping it secret all these years, but when it comes to us,” Louis leans in even closer and speaks slowly, making sure Lestat catches every word, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“You cannot mean that,” Lestat says, but he doesn’t try to look away this time. He looks pleadingly at Louis. He wants to believe it. Louis will make him see how true it is.
“Maybe I’d drag us to therapy sooner. But baby, it’s been wonderful. We’ve been wonderful. Even when things have been bad, or we’ve been apart, we’ve been the best part of my life. It’s all been worth it, every bit of it, for the joy of the journey, to be here with you now, raising our daughter, and to have another fifty years with you to look forward to.”
And of course, Lestat is crying again, but this time he’s smiling too, just a little. “You are very optimistic about our lifespan, cherie. We should both have eaten more vegetables and gone to fewer parties if immortality was your goal.”
“Remind me which one of us recently took up smoking again?”
“An aberration. From now on my body will be a temple to you. I will venerate you daily through ascetic living.”
It’s such a Lestat thing to say—romance and humour and devastating sincerity all wrapped up together—that Louis feels a fresh wave of fond tears welling up. “I expect that will last until you want a glass of Burgundy with dinner,” he says.
“Then I will worship you with wine and exaltation, is that not what Catholics prefer?”
He’s a miracle, his ridiculous, beautiful, deceptively resilient husband. “However long we get together, I know it will be incredible,” Louis says. “I know I’ll never be bored, and I’ll never feel unloved.”
“Never, Saint Louis.” Lestat reaches up to touch the side of Louis’ face, reverently, like Louis really is his god. The way he always touches Louis. “You will always be loved by me.”
“I love you too.” Louis has never been so grateful that he can say those words easily now, that he’s worked on himself too, so he can give Lestat the certainty and love he deserves. “So much.”
Cradling Lestat’s tear stained face in his hand, Louis is reminded of the night he first knew he loved Lestat, though he wouldn’t admit it out loud for several years. The speech Lestat had given him two weeks after the one night stand that Lestat would not let him limit to one night. How effortlessly he’d reached into Louis’ soul and drawn out what Louis thought were his deepest, most hidden secrets, and how vividly he’d made Louis see the life he could have, if he was brave enough to reach out for it.
Louis echoes a version of Lestat's words from that night back to him. “It’s the greatest gift in the world, to get to be all the beautiful things we are, together.”
It’s the kind of heartfelt, purple sentiment, steeped in their own history as a bonus, that Louis hardly ever says out loud, and Lestat’s face crumples even as he pulls Louis in for a deep, tender kiss. When the kiss gets too wet with tears even for them, Louis pulls Lestat back into a hug. He resumes stroking Lestat’s hair and back as he cries, less soul wrenchingly than before, but with a hysteria born of relief and exhaustion.
A wound this deep can’t be drained in one night, and no doubt there’ll be crises and setbacks and blowouts to come—for one thing, they’ll have to explain to Claudia why none of them are seeing her grandmother ever again unless by some miracle Lestat wants to press charges—but with this new honestly between them, with so many things explained, Louis feels as hopeful for the future as he ever has.