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Lestat was like this sometimes.
Years of loneliness and starvation have made it notably worse, but he always had moments of nerves, episodes of fearful anxiety that made him a shell of his normal, outgoing self. Louis doesn’t know why he didn’t remember that until now. He certainly didn’t tell Daniel about it.
“You are very kind, Louis,” Lestat says, his voice thin, his wooden piano clasped to his chest like a child’s comfort object. “And I am sure you do a great many wonderful things in your new, exciting life, but I do not think myself capable of sleeping on a bed.” His accent has changed since the last time they were together. Louis wonders if he’s been talking to anyone other than the ratcatcher, or if the American slide of his voice is down to decades of listening to American radio, American TV, American podcasts. He can imagine Lestat has opinions on podcasts.
“It’s not so scary,” Louis assures him. Outside, the storm has died down a little, but the rain still batters against the windows. He took Lestat out of his falling down house because he thought it was the safest option, but maybe he was a little hasty. A hurricane wouldn’t have killed Lestat. Looking at him looking at the king-sized hotel bed, it feels like this might.
“Come here.” Louis sits on the bed, holding out an arm. Lestat hesitates, but lays the plank on the floor and climbs onto the mattress gingerly, as if he’s stepping into a minefield.
He’s showered since they arrived. Louis helped him with that, and with changing into a pair of Louis’ black silk pyjamas. Lestat’s hair is still damp, wetting the pillowcase where he lies, stiff as his bizarre piano. “Here,” Louis repeats. He sits up, his back against the plus headboard, and manoeuvres Lestat until his head is on Louis’ lap. “What do you think about that?”
Lestat still looks unsure, but enough bravado returns to say, “If this is the reward I get, then perhaps I will develop many irrational fears.”
“It’s not irrational.” Louis pushes a hand gently through Lestat’s hair. He tried to fix it with a thin hotel comb, but snapped two teeth. Louis will have to get him something better to use. “No shame in being worried about something new.” Louis is. All of this feels new, and simultaneously as old as time itself.
Louis keeps stroking Lestat’s hair until he seems to fall asleep. After waiting another long moment, he bends and gently presses a soft kiss to Lestat’s forehead.
“If I’d known you had a hard-on for pathetic cunts,” a deep voice says from the other side of the room, “I wouldn't have endeavored to comport myself so manfully.”
Louis doesn’t look. He doesn’t have to. “He’s not pathetic.” Louis’s eyes trace the contours of Lestat’s sleeping face.
The other Lestat, the imagined one who has dogged Louis off-and-on since the Second World War, scoffs. The bed doesn't dip as he sits at the end of it, casting a scornful glare on his living counterpart. Maybe Louis should find it a mind fuck to see this Lestat when the real one is right there, but while it's unexpected, he’s so used to this particular brand of weirdness nothing about it fazes him anymore.
The imaginary Lestat looks as beautiful as always. Perfect hair, perfect body, cocky smile on his perfect face. “So is this it, then?” He demands, in an accent much stronger than the real Lestat’s. Louis is intrigued by that, but not surprised. As has been recently established, Louis’ memory is not exactly infallible. “You are back with my pitiful Doppelgänger, and once again, you have no need for me?”
“We’re not back together.” Louis meant it when he said he’s companion enough for himself at the moment. He has to be.
“But you love him.”
It’s undeniable. Louis doesn’t bother trying. “Yes.”
“And he loves you.”
“Maybe.”
“Please. He didn’t drive himself mad because he lost his favourite chess partner.”
“Claudia–”
“Claudia was a symptom. You are the painfully eviscerating disease.”
“Thanks.”
The real Lestat shifts a little. Louis puts a comforting hand on his shoulder, and he stills.
“Why didn’t you let him sleep in the coffin?” The fake Lestat asks. The edge has gone from his voice; he sounds genuinely curious.
“Because I wanted to be with him.”
“And getting into your coffin with him?”
“Is what we used to do. I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea.” I didn’t want to give myself the wrong idea, Louis adds, then remembers this other Lestat, his longtime invisible companion, knows all of his thoughts.
“I hate to tell you this, mon amour, but you’ve already got it.”
“We can’t just go back to the way things were between us. It’s not healthy.”
“Sweetheart.” The hallucination reaches out to put a hand on Louis’ shoulder. Louis feels it, the warm strength of him, the way he had in his darkest moments in Paris and Dubai. Not his hand, but not not his hand. “I wish I was not the one to break it to you, but you are both deeply unhealthy individuals.”
“Fuck off.”
Surprisingly, he does. The false Lestat disappears, leaving Louis and the real one alone in the dimly lit hotel room.
The sound of two synchronised heartbeats fill Louis’s ears. He shifts slightly, bending to rest his cheek against the damp curl of Lestat’s hair.
Hours pass in a kind of suspended silence. Louis drifts into half-sleep, still stroking Lestat’s hair, feeling the warmth of him. Every now and then, Lestat moves, stretches, and murmurs. As evening approaches, the hallucination returns, not fully, not vividly, just the echo of that perfect, arrogant Lestat standing at the edge of Louis’s awareness.
“So you really are choosing this mess over me?”
Louis doesn’t answer immediately, so the hallucination makes itself obvious, perching in the armchair, chin propped on his fist, eyes sharp. Wearing the waistcoat, shirt and trousers Lestat wore over a hundred years ago, the first night they made love.
“How far we’ve fallen.” He laughs. “You, tender nursemaid; him, pitiful invalid. What a grand romance.”
Louis doesn’t look up. “Why are you here?”
The phantom arches a brow. “Because you need me. You always have.”
“I don’t.”
A laugh, low and cruel. “Liar. When you were alone, who stood at your side? When Armand was a disappointment, who warmed your bed? When Cl–” He chokes. “When Claudia left you behind, who stayed?”
Louis’s jaw tightens. “You’re what I needed when he was gone,” Louis admits. “But he isn’t gone anymore.”
The imagined Lestat leans forward, his smile brittle. “For how long, Louis? He’ll run again. Or you will. That’s what you do.”
“Then I’ll deal with it when it happens.”
Lestat's ghost says nothing, but his smirk doesn’t reach his
eyes.
*****
That evening, Louis convinces Lestat to drink a bag of blood sourced from a local farm and poured into a hotel glass. Lestat grimaces when the taste coats his tongue.
“I hate that it feels foreign to me,” Lestat confesses, setting the glass down with an unsteady hand. “It tastes foul. How could something once so natural terrify me now?”
Louis leans forward. “Because you’ve been starving.” He doesn't comment on the rats. “That isn’t fear. It’s the memory of deprivation.”
Lestat shakes his head. “Imagine me, trembling before a cup of blood.”
“You are allowed to be human,” Louis says. “Even if you’re not.”
The phantom Lestat lounges on the bed, sighing noisily. “He sips like a guilty child caught stealing wine. Where’s the lion who once tore into your throat with glee?”
Louis ignores him. “Keep trying, Lestat.”
The real Lestat obeys reluctantly, then sets the cup down with a faint grimace. His eyes close.
The phantom’s laughter fills the room. “You see? He disgusts even himself. And you—” He slides off the bed, prowling toward Louis. “You deserve more than scraps. You deserve me.”
Louis meets his gaze. “You aren’t him,” he thinks, wary of speaking out loud and frightening the real Lestat. “You aren't anybody. You don't exist.”
The hallucination freezes. He looks suddenly uncertain, like a lover hearing the first whisper of rejection. He masks it quickly, but Louis sees.
*****
The storm has passed. The city smells of wet pavement, jasmine, and lingering electricity. Louis coaxes Lestat onto the balcony.
“Too bright,” Lestat murmurs, shielding his eyes from the neon haze.
“You’ve been in darkness,” Louis replies, guiding him to the railing.
For a while, they stand in silence, listening to the muffled hum of mortal life below. Then Lestat speaks.
“I thought I’d never hear it again. The heartbeat of the city. The chatter. I thought I was gone.”
“You weren’t gone.” Louis turns, resting a hand at the small of his back. “Just lost.”
Lestat glances at him, raw and searching. “And if I am lost again?”
“Then I’ll find you again.”
“You say that like it's easy.”
“Maybe it is.” Maybe it can be.
Lestat looks at him, his eyes shining on the half-light. “Louis, please remind me who I was to you.”
Louis swallows. Lestat doesn't say it like an amnesiac, like someone who has truly forgotten, but like someone who needs to hear it spoken aloud. Louis indulges him. “You were infuriating. Loud. Relentless. A storm that never ceased.”
“How pleasant.”
“And you were the only one who ever made me feel alive.”
Lestat’s breath catches. His hand finds Louis’s on the rail, tentative, shaking. They stand there for a long moment.
“I think,” Lestat says at last, “I want to take a shower and go to sleep.”
It’s not exactly what Louis expected. It's barely three o’clock.
Dawn is hours away. “Okay. Do you want help?”
“No, thank you.”
Quelling his urge to follow anyway, Louis stays on the balcony. A moment later, the other Lestat appears.
“You’d tire of me if I were real,” he says, as if he's been thinking about it. As if he can think about anything. “No fragility, no tragedy. Just me, dazzling and insufferable, forever. You’d run from me as you’ve run from him.”
“I’d never have tired of you. I never did.”
The phantom blinks, evidently startled. Clearly, he wasn't expecting honesty.
Louis continues, “But you’re memory and need stitched together. I loved you because I had nothing else.”
The hallucination’s smirk cracks. For the first time, his voice trembles. “You loved me.”
“Yes.” Louis isn't ashamed to say it. “And I love him more.” It's not a shock or a revelation, not to Louis.
The false Lestat turns his face away, as though struck. He says nothing for a long while. Louis goes back inside, leaving him on the balcony.
When the real Lestat emerges from the shower, he climbs into the bed without hesitation.
“You can have the coffin if you want,” Louis offers. It was cruel to deny him yesterday. Selfish.
Lestat shakes his head. “Thank you, mon am–mon ami. I am quite willing to adapt to this new world.” His smile is shaky, brave. Louis longs to kiss him; instead, he says “sleep well” as Lestat settles beneath the covers.
The hallucination stands at the foot of the bed. His brightness seems dimmer, like he’s burning through his last reserves.
“It's really the end this time, isn’t it?” he says, finally, his voice steady but his eyes searching Louis’s face.
Louis doesn’t turn away from the real man beside him. “Yes.”
He laughs softly, bitterly. “You’ll miss me.”
“I already do.” It's true. “You’ve been with me longer than anyone.” Confidant, tormentor, companion. “But I don’t need you anymore.”
“You can’t just dismiss me, Louis! I’ve been everything he wasn’t. I was strong when he was weak. I was brave when he was a coward. I was the Lestat you wanted.”
“You were the Lestat I invented,” Louis says, “Because I couldn’t forgive the real one. Because I couldn’t stop loving him.”
The imagined Lestat's eyes flash with hurt. “So what was I, then? A crutch? A puppet you pulled from memory when you were lonely?”
Louis meets his gaze at last. “No. I was wrong before, you were real to me.”
The hallucination’s breath hitches. His perfect mask fractures.
“Say it again.”
Louis’s voice is quiet, but steady. “You were real. I loved you.”
A silence falls. The imagined Lestat looks down at his hands as if they might dissolve. When he speaks, his tone is stripped of any arrogance. “And now you love him. He’ll hurt you again, Louis. He always does. And when it happens—” His voice cracks. “You’ll want me back. And I won’t be here.”
Louis closes his eyes. “I’ll bear it.”
The vision’s mouth twists into something halfway between a smile and a sob. “You’re crueler than me, mon amour.”
Louis shakes his head. “I’m setting us both free.”
The phantom takes a single step back. The light in him flickers, falters further. His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t want to go.”
Louis whispers back, “You have to.”
The false Lestat holds his gaze for a long, trembling moment. Then he smirks, tenderly, as if offering a final kiss.
“Goodbye, Louis.”
And he’s gone. No sound, no flash, just absence.
Only the real Lestat remains, fragile-looking in the big bed, murmuring something soft in French before drifting deeper into sleep.
Louis slides into place beside him, presses his lips to Lestat's hair. “Only you now.” It's a promise, a vow, a commitment, and this time, Louis knows he's going to keep it.