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It's 2029. Louis stands before 1132 Rue Royale for the first time in seven years, which admittedly isn't that long, but it's different this time. He hasn't disguised himself as a curious tourist with a strong interest in true crime. He's here as the once-again legal owner of the property, his own name listed right next to Lestat's on the deed like it was all those decades ago. Only now they aren't the strange brothers, or the "so-called Frenchman" and the "local Creole hustler", or Daddy Lou and Uncle Les, Louis thinks, chest tight as he remembers the first time she'd called him that.
Now they're Louis and Lestat de Pointe du Lac, legally married husbands.
It came as a surprise at first: that Lestat would not just agree to take Louis's last name but be the one to suggest it himself in the first place.
"You sure you don't wanna combine names?" he remembers asking Lestat after he first brought it up.
Lestat's pinched brows and the way his nose scrunched up as he frowned deeply might've shown his disgust but the only thing Louis could think upon seeing that face was that he loved how expressive Lestat had always been.
"Lestat de Lioncourt de Pointe du Lac…they would struggle to fit in on my ID, I think. No, yours alone will do."
"You don't think I'd wanna take yours?"
Lestat raised a brow at him. "Would you?"
"No."
"As I thought, so—"
"But you didn't even bother asking," Louis laughed, pulling Lestat back towards him as he moved to turn away. "It's like you're eager to throw it away."
"And if I am?" Lestat asked, puffing his chest out.
"Nothin' wrong with that. Just…why? Thought you liked your name."
Lestat's shoulders fell as his expression took on a thoughtful quality. "I suppose I realized I have no real connection to the name," he said, looking a little unsure. "My father and brothers never felt like family to me. My mother is…well, you've met my mother."
Louis nodded with a grimace—he was not a fan though he tolerated her presence, rare as it was, for Lestat's sake.
"The only real family I've ever had is you and Claudia." Lestat shrugged like it was nothing, like the admission wasn't revolutionary. Like they weren't both visibly affected by the mere mention of her. "So it's only right I take your name, throw mine away. I don't think my mother will mind being the last, not least of all when she's—"
Louis didn't get to hear the rest of what he had to say—he gave into the urge to drown him in kisses as soon as it made itself known. Even after all the growing and changing they'd both done, Lestat wasn't normally so open with his real feelings. Moments like that one felt like small miracles Louis had to reward Lestat for sharing with him. Nowadays he's a lot more open.
Louis sighs. As easy as the decision to come here was when he made it, he's nearly overcome with nerves now. He knows it looks different inside now. He knows his family isn't there, that there is nothing left from that time, but a quiet part of him still fears her former presence might be overwhelming. That the walls might still hold her scent, that he might be able to see the almost imperceptible dent in the floor where her foot once fell too hard, so excited as she'd been to make it to the front door.
You wanted this, Louis reminds himself. You brought yourself here of your own free will.
After taking a deep breath, Louis unlocks the front door and steps inside.
Empty. Familiar in its basic shape, in the square footage of each room, but utterly unfamiliar otherwise. No trace of anyone having been in here besides the cleaners, and then not recently if the volume of the dust he manages to collect on his finger as he slides it along the bannister is any indication.
Home once, but not anymore. Nothing more than a reminder now.
Louis paces through the rooms. He thought if he could come inside one last time, see how different it was, he could finally let go. That the townhouse would finally stop calling to him every night as he lay in coffin with Lestat in their perfect new home just a twenty-minute drive away. That if he could come here just once more, he could put it out of his mind for good and finally move on.
But as he makes his way through the house, old memories sprout forth like dandelions in the spring. Images of a domestic bliss that never really was, the fantasy of happiness not yet burst. The good times before all the bad.
It's 2029 and it still hurts just as bad as it did when he left the first time.
Louis wipes at his face with his sleeve as he takes the stairs. Disappointed as he is that it seems he's only made himself feel worse, he refuses to leave so soon. He makes it onto the landing and though there is no real sound but that of his own ragged breathing and the fall of his footsteps, the memory of Lestat playing the piano here is so strong he can almost hear the notes. The skylight is closed now but he can almost hear her all the same.
The screaming he woke to early one evening, the panic he felt as he came around the corner and found the two of them on the ground, blood all over the floor. The bleeding wrist Lestat had shoved into her face, Claudia too angry and in pain to accept it. Lestat's shouting, first in desperation, then in anger as the distraction Louis's entrance provided gave Claudia a chance to escape, nails raking down Lestat's face before she fled.
What had Lestat said then? Louis can't remember now. He remembers being shouted at, remembers Lestat covering his mangled eye with one hand. He remembers Lestat slapping his hand away when he reached out to him, but the words…it's all a mystery now. Lost to the past. If he asked, would Lestat remember? And if he did, would he answer truthfully?
Louis shakes the thought away. No point now in digging at old wounds now.
He saves the bedroom for last. No guarantee it'll work after all this time without any use nor any maintenance in so long, but he tries the handle. The sound it makes has him cringing but the door opens and reveals the empty coffin room. He steps inside, stopping in the middle of the room. What was once a place of comfort and respite feels cursed now. There are still faint bloodstains visible on the floor under his feet. Lestat's blood, and the blood of the partygoers. A little of Antoinette's as well.
The memories came easily before now, but here he can't manage to summon anything positive in this room. There's only those last few moments before they left: Lestat on his knees, Lestat's back to his chest, Lestat bleeding out on the floor. That's all this room is to him now. All the warm memories they shared in this room might as well be no more than a part of his imagination at this point.
Louis sighs, turning as he prepares to leave, but the floor makes a strange sound under his right foot as he does. He lifts that foot carefully before pressing down again, eyeing the floorboard as he does, and it makes that sound again. Now that he's actually looking at it, the edges look a little strange. Hard to notice at first with the bloodstains but there looks to be extra space on the edges between it and the surrounding floorboards. How odd.
He could just leave. He makes it to the doorway intent on doing just that, but the odd floorboard calls to him in a way he can't describe. He goes back to it and crouches, fingers feeling around the edges carefully until he understands why it's different from the rest.
It's a secret compartment.
Louis wrenches it open with far more force than is necessary, nearly breaking the floorboard in half. He tosses it to the side as he reaches inside the compartment and pulls out what he only understands to be a pile of letters adressed to none other than himself after he's stared at it for nearly two full minutes.
Letters written to him by Lestat, as is obvious by the handwriting, hidden under a floorboard in the coffin room of their old townhouse. Why? What could be the reason? They're married now. As Louis was just thinking before he came inside, Lestat is more open with him now than he's ever been. How could he keep something like this from him? Did he just forget?
No, that can't be. Surely not. So why? Why didn't he want Louis to see these? Because there's keeping something out of sight and there's putting it in a place no one would ever think to look in a million years.
He could confront Lestat—decide whether it's worth invading his privacy based on the reaction he gets. He could simply hand them all over and let Lestat know he hasn't read any, prove how much he trusts him, and maybe get him to explain why they were hidden. Maybe even get his permission to read some.
Even as Louis considers these options, he slides his pointer finger under the seal flap of the one envelope he hasn't dropped absentmindedly. The seal is broken easily by his sharp nail, the envelope's contents practically screaming to be freed.
He'll just have to keep this a secret, Louis decides, before he gently removes the letter inside.
"My Dearest Louis,
If you are reading this, if you have come back to find me and have not found me as you last knew me, know that I still love you. Even if I am not here with you now in the flesh, I will always wait for you. I am sorry I was not so patient with you before. I am sorry you had to find me in such a state. I am sorry if it brings you pain, but please do not chase after me. Please be strong and carry on with your living. You are stronger than you give yourself credit for. You can endure. I wish you nothing but happiness in this life and, if there is more, the next as well.
-Lestat de Lioncourt"
This…this can't be what it looks like. It just can't. It might be eerily similar to the letter Lestat left for him with Roget but there's no sense in hiding such a thing here with no reason to believe Louis would ever find it. It must be something else, he tells himself. Louis reads it again, lingering on each word like it'll make more sense the slower he reads, like he'll find the real reason for its existence somewhere between the lines, but it doesn't do him any good.
He drops the letter like it's burned him and reaches for another envelope, quickly removing the second letter.
"My Dear Louis,
In case you've stumbled upon them out of order, this is my fourth letter to you. Rather fitting as it follows my fourth attempt at joining you in the afterlife, should one exist. Funny that I insisted for so long that such a thing could not possibly exist only to change my mind now that I am more alone than I ever thought I could be.
Truthfully I did not think I would be writing more than one letter. I did not think my first attempt would fail, eager as I was. I still do not know what it is that keeps me here on this Earth, refusing to let me leave. A small, desperate part of me hopes that it is because the cord that binds us is still strong, that you are still part of this world despite what Armand has insisted. Or perhaps I have simply become fireproof.
I wish you were here with me now. Even if it was with him, even if the only thing you have to offer me is disdain. It would be infinitely better than the quiet and the not knowing.
I love you, Louis. Nothing will ever change that.
-Lestat"
The second letter is the exact opposite of what Louis was hoping for. It only proves his fear that the first was more of a suicide note than a letter—and this one fits the bill even more so.
What exactly was going on in that dilapidated little house all those years? Because Louis knows now these letters were not stashed here originally. Was Armand talking to Lestat all that time? Was he climbing into bed with Louis in Dubai while Lestat was right there on the other end of the psychic line, in the middle of trying to kill himself? Telling him that Louis was dead while in reality he slept soundly and unharmed at his side?
Did you hurt yourself?
Lestat didn't know what actually happened until the book came out, Louis now realizes. No wonder he'd looked so surprised for a moment when Louis first came to find him.
It didn't seem so important at first but now Louis begins to count the letters, sliding the envelopes around and peeling a couple away from each other since they'd gotten stuck together somehow.
Seventy-six. Counting the collection of envelopes and the scattered loose letters folded up there are seventy-six in total. The second letter—the fourth Lestat had written—mentioned three prior attempts. Surely the rest are not the same? Because there's desperation and then there's trying and failing to end one's own life over seventy times…
Louis snatches one of the loose letters. Immediately he notices that this one is not addressed to him—is not addressed to anyone at all, in fact.
"I saw them again today: the nameless bodies which kept me company in the tower. They didn't say anything this time, just stared at me lifelessly from the other side of the room. The last time they insisted I join them but I suppose they too have realized how pointless the endeavor is. Now they only keep me company, however much company a silent pile of rotting, maggot-infested corpses can provide. I only knew that they were conscious because their eyes—the ones who still had eyes—they would follow me about the room whenever I moved. I would not see the eyes rolling in their sockets but I would see them turned towards me when I turned back around. They were always watching me no matter where I moved to.
I wonder what they think of me now. If their opinion on my continued existence has changed in any way, or if they still envy me my immortal life, miserable loneliness aside. Perhaps they judge me for my inability to make up my mind one way or another. Probably they still think me to be wasting the gift Magnus shared with me. The gift I did not want.
Now I begin to wonder what I would think of me now, had I some way to see into the future back when I was still cold and helpless in that tower. Back further, even. Had the human Lestat seen in his final moments what he would become centuries after his transformation, would he have kept on after it was complete? Would he have chosen to endure as I would, or would he have followed in Magnus's footsteps soon after? Would he have stood by and watched or would he have leapt into the flames to join his maker?
And what would Magnus think of me now? His beloved Wolfkiller reduced to this, no longer brave nor stubborn. A pathetic waste of space, power and immortality. If he could see what would eventually become of me, surely he would not have made me. I would have become just another lookalike corpse to haunt his next victim. Perhaps he might have found someone truly worthy, someone like Gabrielle or Claudia. Someone who embraced the gift from the start, someone who did not go on to become just like him.
The lonely monster in the dark."
Louis is beginning to become uncomfortably aware of just how much information these letters might have hidden within them. Perhaps he was mistaken about Lestat being more open these days, mistaking the way Lestat would answer his questions truthfully as something it wasn't. The one time Louis asked what Lestat had gotten up to in the time he spent alone after Paris, Lestat had told him he kept mostly indoors, feeding on rats and being horribly lonely, playing the piano until he broke it one evening and eventually teaching himself how to use the internet. Nothing about any suicide attempts or dark hallucinations. No mention of any letters written or notes left behind, and nothing about Armand having spoken to him after San Francisco.
This is a whole other side to Lestat he's never seen before. Dark as it is, Louis's curiosity is immense. He reads through nearly a dozen more before he his phone chimes with a text from Lestat himself asking where he is. Louis sends him an apology, gives him some excuse about an art curator he made up in his head, and then he crams the letters back into the compartment with the ones he's already read at the bottom. The floor plank he tore off is unsalvageable but he places it more or less back with a mental note to come back as soon as he's able with a box or something to carry all the notes in.
Lestat is waiting for him in the bedroom when he returns home.
"How was your evening?" he asks after pecking Louis on the mouth.
"Fine," Louis says. And Lestat looks content with only that, really, but the knowledge of all those notes and letters and his keeping said knowledge a secret from him weighs heavy on Louis's mind. "No, that's…not entirely true," he admits. He steps into Lestat's arms gratefully when invited. "I went to the old townhouse."
If he weren't looking for a reaction to that, he might've missed the way Lestat tenses up for only a fraction of a second before relaxing again.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asks. "I would have gone with you."
Louis shakes his head. "Needed to be alone. Needed to…I don't know. Thought I might get some closure, instead I just made things worse. I miss our daughter, Lestat. I miss her so goddamn much."
Lestat squeezes him tighter, hooking his chin over Louis's shoulder. "I do too, my love. Every moment of every day."
"Felt wrong being there but I couldn't leave either. Got stuck in the memories, I guess you could say. Didn't even realize what time it was until you texted me."
Lestat pulls away but his hands remain on Louis's shoulders. "And your art dealer acquaintance?"
"I lied."
Lestat blinks at him a little awkwardly. "Oh."
"Made sense in the moment but I felt stupid when you asked. Not like it's something to be embarassed about."
"No, it isn't. I'm glad you told me."
"Yeah. Sorry for lying." Louis places his own hand over Lestat's on his shoulder and gives it a squeeze.
"It's okay." Lestat drops his hands and gestures for Louis to follow him. "Come, let's get some rest. We have a busy day tomorrow."
~~~
A whole other month passes before Louis can find an opportunity to go back to the townhouse.
"Are you sure you don't want to come?" Lestat asks him for probably the eighth time this evening. "Emily will miss you."
"Oh, Emily will miss me?"
Lestat huffs. "I will miss you—"
"It's just one party, Lestat. You'll be fine without me."
"Well yes, but I was really looking forward to introducing you to the twins. You have no idea how hard it was with their schedule and the new baby…"
"I'm sorry, just not feeling up to socializing tonight. I'll be here when you get back."
Lestat pouts at him a little longer before relenting with a solemn nod of his head. "Very well. I'll see you tonight, mon cher. I love you."
"See ya, Les."
He waits close to half an hour just in case Lestat realizes he's forgotten something important before he heads off to the townhouse.
This time he doesn't waste time in all the empty rooms, just makes a beeline for the coffin room and the single floorboard sticking up at an awkward angle. He pulls it out of the way and sets it gently aside before opening the first envelope on top of the stack.
"My dear Louis,
If you are reading this, then I was finally successful in my attempt to leave this life. I have decided to leave the other letters I wrote for you as well, so I hope you will read through all of them. At first I thought to burn the older ones but I changed my mind shortly before sitting down to write this one. Many of them are not so eloquent, penned in a hurry and without so much thought as I was not in the right state of mind. In between my planned attempts there have been many spur-of-the-moment ones wherein I suppose I wasn't entirely aware of what I was doing. I once woke with horribly burns all over my body in some poor soul's grave, having no memory of leaving my house in the first place. Another time I suddenly came to in Jackson Square around eight in the morning, in full daylight. Luckily there were only a few passerby, and they did not seem to recognize what was happening. I ran from shadow to shadow until I reached home. The searing pain did not stop until nearly a month later.
I have not read some of these letters. I read one a week prior and it disturbed me, that I could peek through a window I did not know existed and see a version of myself that I did not remember. I admit I am worried you may find them distressing as well, but I would prefer not to leave you in the dark. That is the cause of much strife between us, is it not? Silence and distraction instead of answers given whenever you would ask for them. So many things I have kept from you, much of it I convinced myself was necessary, much of it because I felt safer keeping it to myself. But I see now that is not the case in either circumstance.
I should have told you. I should have told Claudia. I should not have waited until she was poised to take you from me to announce that the European vampire is vicious. I should not have cowered away and thrown barbs, I should have told you both the truth from the beginning. I should have realized that in keeping you to myself and telling you nothing I was not protecting you but following in my own father's footsteps. I should have realized that being better than the European vampire was not enough. Such a low bar to scale and yet I clapped myself on the back anyways, congratulated myself for the bare minimum while I caused further suffering.
I am sorry, Louis. I know it's too late. I know I should have been better, that I should have listened better. To the both of you. If you are still of this world, I hope you will continue to be. I hope that you will… "
The letter cuts off there. Whatever Lestat had been about to say, he was clearly interrupted. If he had to guess Louis would say the interruption was sudden, judging by the smeared ink after the last letter. He'd been in a hurry to stop writing and never came back to finish it.
Louis puts this one back inside its envelope and reaches for another loose paper.
"Nothing works. The sun burns but it doesn't kill me—can't kill me, at least not in the amount of daylight hours available. I remain unconscious for some time before I awake but when I do it is still dark and I find shortly after that I can move again. I thought waiting through another day would do it but that wasn't the case. I fell unconscious quickly from the pain but when I awoke the next night the wounds were much the same, if only a little redder. I could not manage a third day like that.
I have been thinking, and I have begun to wonder if the distance matters. If the amount of cloud cover or the ozone layer in the atmosphere is perhaps weakening the sunlight just to the point that it cannot kill me. I have decided that tomorrow I will go somewhere remote and fly up and into the sun, as high as I can go, where the sunlight is strongest. And I will hold there until I cannot any longer. Hopefully that will do the trick this time.
I don't know why I write these things down. It's been almost thirty years. If Louis was alive, if he'd wanted to talk to me like Armand said he had, he would have come by now. Even if he did not know I was here, where else could he possibly look? This was our home. I have nowhere else to go.
Louis is gone. As for why I leave these notes…perhaps an aspiring archaeologist will decide one day. For now, I see no reason to stop writing. And so I continue."
The letters are difficult to read, but these hastily written notes are so much worse. Before Louis can catch it, a single blood tear drips from his chin onto the note, right onto the word 'continue.' He moves to wipe it away but decides against it, worried he might end up smearing the ink. So he sets the paper down to the side gently, trying not to move it in such a way that the blood smears any further, before reaching for another note.
"Armand has come to visit me again. He seems desperate this time. I continue to write now as he watches my back, ignoring him to the best of my ability. I will not grace his unwanted presence with recognition. I refuse to give him the attention he craves.
He speaks of how lonely he is now that Louis is gone. Surely he's aware I couldn't care less, but he keeps repeating it like he's waiting for some kind of response. Whatever that might be, he won't be getting it from me. I don't care if he grows angry and starts shouting or threatening to hurt me again. I don't care even if he forces himself on me again. I won't react.
I assume he's reading my mind now as I write this. Maybe he's looking for ideas on how to get a rise out of me. He won't find anything inside my skull but that same loneliness he claims to feel. There is nothing left for him. He made sure of that.
I wish he would get the hint and either leave me alone or kill me already."
So Armand was visiting him. All that complaining he did back in 1973 and yet he was the one who went and sought Lestat out. What a fucking joke.
Wait, hang on.
Louis rereads the note, eyes pausing on his reason for doing so once he gets to it. Hurt him again? Force himself on him again? Just what the fuck else has Armand done that he still doesn't know about? Does he even want to know?
What a pointless question: of course he does. He wouldn't be here reading these notes right now if he didn't. The guilt he feels at going behind Lestat's back to do so has lessened now, almost to the point of being nonexistent, such is the size of his curiosity.
One more, he tells himself. A letter this time.
"My Louis,
I have written so many letters to you, trying time and time again to properly convey just how much I love you, but I always fall short. I have begun to think that there are simply not enough words available to me to do so. What I feel for you is to great, too enormous for any simple word to express the magnitude of it.
I thought I was miserable during those 77 years, but it's only now that I have you back in my life that I understand what misery really is. It's only now that I can see you, hear you, smell you, touch you, that I know with full certainty the weight of all that I've lost. All that I've chased away.
I am glad to see you comfortable in your own skin, finally. I am glad to see that you've finally become all the bautiful things I saw in you, no longer hidden or repressed. I am glad…but the pain is too strong to bear. The remorse is stronger than it's ever been and the loneliness hasn't gone away. It does subside when you're next to me, but it grows worse every time you leave. When I thought you were dead, the pain stayed at a constant. I was delirious with it but it did not grow worse. I knew what to expect when I woke each evening.
Now…now I never know what to expect. I see you once every few months and your smile, your radiant smile, it cuts through me sharper than any blade ever could. The pain is always getting worse.
I can't…I can't keep doing this. I know you said you wanted things to be like how they were in the old days, when we would take a stroll to our favorite bench on Jackson Square and talk for hours, before we were companions, but I can't do it. I can't be near you and pretend like everything that happened between us, like all the love and hatred and memory and turmoil, means nothing. I can't sit by and watch as you move further away from me. I can't be by your side supporting you as a friend when you finally move on and find someone else.
I can't keep living like this, but I can't die either. I've learned my lesson. This letter is not a goodbye in the sense that I'd like it to be, but it is a goodbye nonetheless. Please do not look for me. Forget about me and live your life to the fullest.
I wish you all the happiness in the world, mon cher.
-Lestat"
Louis doesn't know what to think at first. It didn't really set in that this was a letter from this century—hell, this decade—until halfway through, and he's still struggling with the idea of Lestat being so unhappy during that time that he thought about breaking away from him entirely. Obviously he didn't do it in the end, choosing instead to stick around long enough for Louis to end up proposing, but the idea that he thought about it enough to write a letter is…unsettling. Louis knew he wasn't doing well throughout the first half of the tour. That much was obvious just from seeing him at a distance. But he never had even the slightest suspicion things had been this bad! Lestat never turned him away. He would jump at the slightest chance of starting an argument. He would scream and shout until his face was red as a tomato but he never gave even the subtlest of hints that he didn't want Louis around or that being near him was causing him pain.
If he hid even this, what else might Lestat have hidden from him?
~~~
Louis sits with it for another couple months before he makes up his mind. He waits until after Lestat's climbed into coffin with him, the both of them exhausted after a long night spent drinking and socializing at three different parties. Maybe four; Louis isn't entirely sure.
"I found your old notes," he says without preamble after Lestat drapes an arm over his chest.
Lestat seems genuinely confused for a second before Louis clarifies.
"Mixed in with the letters you wrote to me. In the old townhouse."
Lestat's arm goes stiff. Louis can't see him since he's flat on his back staring up at the coffin lid, but he thinks he has a good idea of what kind of face Lestat must be making right now.
"When?"
"A while ago."
It's quiet for an uncomfortable length of time.
"When you visited it that night." Lestat realizes. "When you lied about an art curator."
"Yeah."
Again, a heavy silence settles between the two of them, creating space where there should be none.
"…I'm sorry," Lestat says, voice just above a whisper.
Louis doesn't react immediately. Lestat apologizing to him is so far out of the range of reactions he expected that his brain can't even process it's just happened.
He turns his head to face Lestat finally.
"What? Why would you—what do you have to be sorry for? I'm the one who lied about it all this time!"
"I'm sorry you had to see it," Lestat says. His eyes are red, his smile grim. "That side of me. I never meant for you to see it. Not while I'm still on this Earth, at least. That's why I hid it."
"But you…why didn't you just burn them, if you didn't want me to ever see them?" He chooses not to bring up the letter wherein Lestat expressed an obvious desire for Louis to know him better through his words. "Why go to the trouble to hide them like that?"
Lestat takes a moment to think. There's something else Louis really needs to tell him but he wants to hear Lestat's answer first.
"Because I remembered what Claudia said the evening I brought her Antoinette's severed finger. About leaving the damage so we don't forget the damage. I didn't want you to ever see it, but I didn't want to take the cowardly approach either. Hiding it somewhere it'd likely never be found felt like a healthy middle ground. I never would've expected you'd happen upon it so easily."
Louis sighs, turning over and dislodging Lestat's arm in the process. He pulls it back when Lestat tries to move it away entirely, arranging it to drape over his side now.
"Les, baby. There's no need for you to apologize. Yes, some of that was hard to read, I'll admit, but it helped me to understand you better. I'm sad to learn how much you were hurting only now but I'm glad I did eventually. I don't want there to be secrets between us. Even if we think keeping those secrets will spare us from pain. I want to know everything about you there is to know: even the dark things."
Lestat's eyes search his face before settling on his mouth. If he wants a kiss, Louis is ready to provide, but he doesn't move in for one just yet.
"I was afraid," he says. "I've always been afraid of people seeing in too deep. It's never ended well. Who I am on the outside, people like that. It's easy being the man everyone wants to see. The things I keep buried deep…as much as I've found myself wanting to share them with you, I've been too afraid that I might somehow scare you away if I do. Like you'll think lesser of me."
"I would never think lesser of you for showing weakness, Lestat. Even the strongest among us can't always be strong. That's not how things work in the savage garden."
Lestat smiles at the mention of the term he coined.
"If anything, learning what I have from those notes and letters has only made me love you more."
Lestat's eyes go wide for a fraction of a second before he smashes their mouths together. It's so sudden Louis almost flinches, heart skipping a beat. He returns the kiss with as much curiosity as he does affection until Lestat pulls away.
"That's the closest you've ever gotten," Lestat says.
Louis frowns, about to ask him what he means by that before he suddenly realizes.
"I…"
He still can't quite say it. Not those three words, not in that specific order. Funny how that works, considering he may as well have said it just now anyways.
"I'm sorry," Louis says, shaking his head with an apologetic smile. "Still can't. Not yet."
"That's okay," Lestat says, then closes the distance for another kiss. "It's close enough. I can be satisfied with that for the next hundred years."
Louis really hopes he'll be able to say it before a whole century passes again…
"It feels strange saying this now, after I just apologized, but I think I'm glad you found my hidden notes."
Louis chuckles. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. In fact, I think I'll write another one for you in the morning."
Louis smiles before leaning in to kiss the tip of Lestat's nose.
"I'd like that."