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I held fast against him. Instinctively. I felt my eyes becoming opaque as if a wall had gone up to seal off the windows of my thoughts. And yet I felt such a longing for him, such a longing to fall into him and follow him and be led by him, that all my longings of the past seemed nothing at all. He was all mystery to me as Magnus had been. Only he was beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and there seemed in him an infinite complexity and depth which Magnus had not possessed.
—The Vampire Lestat
“You haven’t heard from him, have you?” Lestat asked so casually, with such strange brevity that it almost passed Louis by entirely.
“From who?”
It took Louis, who was deep in an article in The Picayune (or The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate, though Louis would never call it that), a moment to figure out who Lestat meant. But who else did they have in common? Lestat hadn’t met or even learned about Daniel yet (Louis was nervous enough about that) and all of the people they’d once known in their life together were long since dead. So it took a moment, but no longer than that. There was really only one person Lestat could be asking about, but perhaps if Louis pretended he didn’t know that, Lestat might—
“It is only I am curious as to the state of him.”
Curious. As to the state of him. A careful choice of words from a man who was not particularly skilled at taking a less direct verbal route. Louis just stared Lestat down and waited for what he really meant by that. As expected, it didn’t take long. Lestat gave a long-suffering sigh and shrugged:
“I worry about him.”
“About Armand?!” Louis failed to keep the disbelief from his voice. Disbelief that made him feel as though he was suddenly surrounded by painted set pieces, falsity all around him, with a spotlight of very real horror that threatened to melt his bones.
“Ouais.” Lestat said and returned to tuning his… was that a sitar? Did he even know how to play that? “I don’t know that he’s been on his own since the 1790s. At least not without someone to return to.”
God, Lestat couldn’t keep his opinions on the bastard straight for more than two or three days, it was insufferable. It was different for Louis, Louis who’d lived with the man for eighty years, only now going through the… well, Daniel called it a ‘divorce,’ but Louis wasn’t sure the term was sufficient. Amputation, more like. Of course there’d be some complicated feelings for him. But he could not fathom the reason that Lestat, of all people, would care.
“I know that,” Louis sighed. “Look, you shouldn’t worry about him.”
“But of course I do,” Lestat intoned as though it were that simple, as though it were obvious and plain as the nose on his face. “You worry about him too.”
“And I shouldn’t either! I wish I fuckin’ didn’t! I shouldn’t have to worry about the man who killed my…”
Lestat didn’t flinch but Louis felt it anyway. Like all the air between them had disappeared, leaving a fathomless expanse of dead space. An impassable vacuum.
Armand had explained that particular phenomenon to him decades ago: there was no atmosphere in outer space, but that didn’t mean a slow death by suffocation. No, the lack of atmosphere meant there was no warmth, no sound, and a startling absence of pressure that Louis hadn’t ever considered might be necessary. You were more dense than the surrounding space, and so space tried to pull you out of yourself and into it. Tried to pull you apart. Into itself, into everything, tissue expanding to fill the void, to make full what was once empty in the deadliest of ways.
Yeah. Of course Armand would know all about that…
“I’m sorry,” said Louis.
“Don’t be.” Lestat kept his eyes on his task. “You are right to say it.”
A sentiment he’d heard a few times from Lestat, and always a jarring one. It was often enough that Louis held onto the knowledge of the role Lestat played in their daughter’s death—reluctant, certainly, but only reluctant in Paris after failing to butcher her in New Orleans where he tried to trade the life of his child for a white mistress. On other occasions, Louis looked at Lestat and saw only the weeping mess he’d found in that run-down cottage, and who could hold a man to account when he so clearly was tearing his own heart from his chest each night for that same crime? Armand used to do the same thing, or at least act like it. And just as he did then, most days Louis found himself hovering somewhere in between forgiveness and fury, balanced on the tines of a picket fence, waiting to see which way he’d fall.
Louis knew he was prone to swing to extremes. But he kept trying to impale himself on that fence between instead. Claudia would have hated it.
“But still,” Lestat continued, startling Louis from his thoughts. “In the brief time after the coven broke apart, Armand reacted… poorly. And I don’t believe he’d been alone before that since he was a child, if that even counts.”
“That does not count, no.”
“I suppose not.” Lestat set aside the instrument and moved to some papers strewn on a piano bench, chicken-scratch lyrics scribbled all over.
“Like I said,” Louis continued, trying to redirect his attention back to his newspaper. “We don’t gotta worry about Armand. He certainly never worried over our well-being, not in any way that helped.”
Even as Louis’ eyes were on the page he was trying to read, he could feel Lestat’s furrowed brow and his twisting mouth as though they were on his own face. Some local hotel was in the red and might be looking to sell, which Louis would really have liked to know more about except he couldn’t even make it through the damn article with Lestat staring like that.
“What,” he asked, barely bothering to keep the annoyance from his voice.
“He did worry for you.”
“Yeah, sure he did.”
“He did. I saw it, heard it, even in… when he called to me…” Lestat trailed off awkwardly, waving his hand. So strange, the way Lestat would dance around subjects now. Did he used to do that? When obliquely alluding to that horrific night when he dropped Louis from the sky, maybe: it was always ‘that night,’ just as what happened in San Francisco was now seemingly an uncomfortable wave of the hand.
“What about it?”
“I felt him—his rage, certainly, that was loud enough, but he was scared. He was so worried for you and so afraid he couldn’t keep you alive anymore. I don’t know which of those was truly why he reached out to me, but I do know he kept you alive…”
“Maybe I wouldn’t need to have been ‘kept alive’ if he hadn’t tried to keep me in the first place,” Louis felt his fingertips digging into the edges of the paper, tiny tears in the newsprint as resentment seeped through the veneer of calm he always had plastered over him. “Maybe if you hadn’t let him.”
“I di… it wasn’t like that, Louis.”
“Oh? What happened to ‘I gave you to Armand’ then? You gimme to him, but now I’m back, you’re worried about him?”
Lestat did not respond right away. He took a deep breath, which Louis reluctantly copied.
“I,” Lestat began and stopped, putting down the instrument and wiping his hands down his face. “I believed he would take care of you.”
“Right. Like he took care of Nicki?”
“Armand did not love Nicki the way—”
“‘Love,’” Louis drawled, putting all his stored up derision into the word, “didn’t stop him from trying to kill me.”
“He didn’t want to do that either.”
“You’re making excuses for that?!”
“No!”
“All that shit about how you didn’t want to do it, how he made you do it, and now you’re making excuses for—”
“I just said I’m not! There’s no excusing that!”
Louis breathed heavy, unnecessary breaths, felt his jaw and upper lip twitch as his fangs begged to come out. Lestat seemed to be breathing heavily too, but his eyes remained away from Louis. It was that detail, so startlingly different from the Lestat of his past, that began to slowly drain Louis of his rage. Lestat had said he wasn’t making excuses for Armand, that he wasn’t making excuses for the trial. But that’s how it had sounded! It was all he could hear, called overboard to drown in his anger by sirens of his past misery…
Fuck. Shit. Hadn’t the night been calm, before? They didn’t need to do this. They didn’t need to fight. Louis didn’t need to bring up the trial, rub Lestat’s involvement in his face after Lestat had just referred to it himself. But Lestat didn’t need to go defending Armand either! Why would he?
“I don’t get it, Lestat. Don’t get you being worried for him like that, not after what he did to both of us.” Or to her, he didn’t say.
“His way is not to fight. We know this,” Lestat said, his tone suddenly professorial even though this was not remotely an answer to Louis’ question. As though he knew more about Armand than Louis did, as if his few months with Armand were anything against Louis’ decades. “His way is to coil like a spring, tighter and tighter until whatever is holding him back finally breaks and he is set off, a trap snapping on everyone around him. It’s not any sustained effort, any continuous battle: I don’t think he knows how.”
Of course Armand didn’t know how: they would have killed him if he’d tried it, growing up. Say please and thank you, yes sir, no sir, keep your head down to keep from getting strung up. But they were vampires now! And things were different these days! Louis had unlearned it, Louis had broken free of it! Why the fuck couldn’t Armand just...
“Yeah,” Louis said, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Oldest, most powerful vampire we know and he plays at being dependent.”
Lestat got a strange look on his face and then nodded. “Yes. He is that. And I’m sure he can look out for himself, but will he? Alone? I may have had my rifle with me in the forest but I was no less afraid.”
The thought stared at Louis from the corner like a ghost. From where he’d had it two days ago, three weeks ago. The thought had even made itself a nightmare on occasion, a child weeping in a storm, one whom Louis had set adrift and would make no move to rescue, brilliant amber eyes piercing the grey surroundings, paired bafflingly with the sound of his nephew wailing over a century ago. Fuck that nightmare. Louis had enough guilt for shit he was responsible for. He was not responsible for Armand.
“So he’ll learn,” Louis concluded, infusing the words with steel to strengthen his spine.
“I hope so.”
The forlorn quality to Lestat’s voice only turned the steel molten, heated his anger anew while he fought to tamp it down.
“Again, Lestat, why do you care? Our daughter’s murderer—”
“He is not just…”
“Man who killed your fuckin’ boyfriend, who tried to kill me—”
“It’s Armand!”
“And what do you care about Armand? Last week you were saying you wanted to rip him limb from limb and feed his entrails to the dogs! Why can’t you just answer me about this, what the fuck is it about him?”
Louis smothered the voices in his mind that answered the question for him while Lestat rubbed the bridge of his nose (as though he was the one who should be frustrated right now).
“Surely he has told you of how we met, of our time together?”
“He certainly did, and that didn’t exactly clarify why he’d be so endeared to you. He was a monster!”
“I… a monster yes, but what did he say?”
“The whole story! How he kidnapped your boy, you came in playing the unholy avenging angel to smite his coven, he fell to pieces and tore the rest of them apart—or most of them, anyway, he admitted that eventually,” cause heaven forbid Armand tell the truth the first time around, “and fell in love with you in the aftermath. Because he’s insane.”
“I mean,” Lestat’s spoke awkwardly, less indignant than uncertain. “That is not wrong, no, but is that truly all?”
Was that all? Did he not hear the whole torture and kidnapping and murder part? Had he forgotten that?
“That you were,” Louis waved a hand, seeking for whatever it was that Lestat was clearly looking for in his answer, “together for a while, before you left. Talked sweet to him, got him to teach you some of his gifts, you two fucked around, and once you had what you needed, you ditched him with the coven.”
“Hah, of course that is what he said.”
“And your version?”
Lestat sneered and looked utterly imperious, and for a moment Louis was transported. Simultaneously drawn in and repelled, hateful and hopelessly attracted at the obnoxious, superior, condescending goddamn look on Lestat’s face, like it was still 1915 and he was toying with some human that had annoyed or slighted him in some way. Like he was about to eviscerate them slowly, methodically, with the knowledge that there was no way they could return the hurt…
And then the look on Lestat’s face slowly melted away. His posture changed. His mouth that had opened itself to launch into one tirade or another only twitched helplessly and nothing came out of it.
Lestat closed his eyes, sighed, and looked back to his instruments, his hands on his hips.
“S’complicated.”
“I’m listening.”
“I don’t know that I can,” Lestat started, still casting his eyes downward. “I can’t go into all of it. Not right now. Later. But he… it was a lot. He was a lot.”
Sounded like the way Louis used to talk—or not talk—about Lestat. Something in Louis’ stomach went sour at that thought. That Armand was Lestat’s Lestat.
(Maybe that Armand was Lestat’s at all.)
“And we hurt each other a lot. I think that much of him… the way he is… I think some of it’s my fault?”
“Lestat, he was fucked up long before he ever met you, you didn’t mess him up the way the rest of that did.”
“Maybe. But I think I made an impact on him that I did not intend.”
Louis couldn’t fathom Lestat not intending to make an impact. He might be thoughtless about it, sure, but with the way the man oozed theatricality, every line and stage direction was intended to create maximum effect on his audience.
“And I know I was shaped by him as well. He was… I was… we were not kind to each other. Not as we should have been. We had our moments, yes, but we hurt each other very much. Though I didn’t think I’d hurt him too badly, to be honest; I didn’t even realize it until the performance.”
“Performance?”
“The trial. Or not at it, but before it, rather. Something he said to me. Something I’d said to him.”
“What did he say?”
Lestat’s wide mouth opened and then turned to a small ‘o’ shape as he searched for words.
“You have to understand, Louis, the context in which—” Lestat cut himself off with a thumb and forefinger tapping the air in front of him, as though still tapping out a rhythm for one of his songs. “It’s a mess. It was a mess, okay? Armand and me. It couldn’t be anything but a mess.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Louis started before Lestat forced his words back in:
“But I do,” Lestat groaned in exasperation.
“Okay, okay, no one’s twisting your arm about it, but okay.”
Lestat collapsed into a loveseat against the wall, instruments forgotten. Sheet music forgotten. Louis took his place in a large armchair cornerwise to that, crossed his legs (trying not to tap his foot in agitation) and waited as Lestat collected himself. In silence.
Twenty-eight seconds of silence, in fact. Which, from Lestat, was impressive: Louis never thought he’d experienced more than ten without Lestat being occupied by a periodical or a piece of music or some other sort of entertainment. It was unnerving. Louis clenched his jaw and readied himself for whatever nonsense would come next.
“He made, of course, the worst possible impression. Between what he did to Nicki and,” Lestat’s face twisted into something between rage and revulsion. “Twisting my mind, forcing it open until he could take my blood without so much as asking. Not that he understood, I think: he knew it was unkind, but it was the way of things, to him. It was just how it was done, and the fact that he was at all gentle about it, that he actually made me want… That made it right, to him. It was… ‘really messed up’ is the technical term, I think.”
His methodology, it’s never violent, Louis remembered assuring Daniel. Like honey on your tongue, came the faint echo of Armand’s voice in the next room.
His worshipful mercy…
Louis felt sick to think of it.
“I beat him quite soundly for that, you know.”
“As you goddamn well should.” Armand doing... that. It was sickening. Louis should have killed him back in Dubai. Should have killed him back in Paris. “Why would you ever talk to him after that? How could you not...”
“Hate him? Oh, I hated him. But he...”
Lestat sighed. Louis tried not to anticipate the obvious thing to be said next:
“He was so beautiful.” There it was. “And so alone, after that shambolic little coven of his broke apart. He was so ancient, to me, and I had no maker to love or to hate. And he… He just looked so pathetic.”
“He’s good at that.”
“I almost killed him.”
“I doubt that.”
“I don’t.”
“You were a fledgling and he was a 300 year old coven master.”
“Be that as it may, I almost… maybe he was letting me. Not like he had much of anything left.”
Louis had never seen Armand as someone who would let himself die. Of all the things Armand would let happen to him, death seemed the one thing he would never allow. Constantly straining to survive. His endless capacity for enduring at the cost of everything and everyone.
Had Armand been suicidal after leaving the catacombs? He’d never mentioned that. Not in those words.
He also never said that he assaulted Lestat. Sank his teeth in and drank deep without consent.
Bastard. Liar.
“He hadn’t yet told me his story, of course. More... stuff. Happened.” God, those modernisms still sounded so strange in his voice. “But he did, eventually. Told me his tale—what he remembered of it, or was coming to remember, after leaving the catacombs. Barely used words, relied on these fractured images cobbled together from three hundred years before. And after seeing it myself, I could not speak either: I felt that I might drown, so deep was the sorrow he had shown me. This well of sadness—melancholy so heavy that no bucket or rope could raise it to the top. It was terrifying.”
Lestat did look genuinely upset to speak of this. Not something Louis often saw when Lestat spoke of others’ experiences—and more than a small part of him wanted to make some comment about Lestat making Armand’s fucked up childhood all about himself—but he supposed seeing it had been different. Louis himself had only caught glimpses of Armand’s life, though was told even more. It was that upsetting.
“I see better, now,” Lestat continued in awkward starts. “How it must’ve felt to him. He exposed the story of his life, his horrors, his losses, and to then leave him… after his confession… Yes, I understand that it must have felt like abandonment. Even if it wasn’t.”
“What was it, then?”
Lestat waved his hand, grasping for words like one might seek out a candle in the dark. “I had to leave. He drew me in even as he disgusted me, as he terrified me, but I knew that he would have destroyed me had I stayed. Or perhaps we would have destroyed each other. I would be consumed by him, I could feel it every moment we spent together—from the moment I met him I could tell: he clings and drains the life from you, makes himself the center of the world until there’s no escape. Worse, I might have killed him if he allowed it, and that would have destroyed me as well. But in the process of leaving, I may have said things to him that... I did not realize the scope or scale of the cruelty in the words at the time. How lucky I was, and how…”
Lestat paused there, his face twisting into an awkward moue, somewhere between shame, frustration, and disgust. One of those rare expressions Louis was, of late, startled to find more frequently gracing Lestat’s features.
“I’m not, you know, always the most considerate,” Lestat offered with a small shrug.
“Wow, really.”
Louis managed to keep a mostly straight face as Lestat glared, deeply unamused.
“Yeah. Really. May I continue?”
“I’m not stopping you.” Even though he kind of had. Louis watched Lestat settle back into himself with a sheepish expression ill-suited to his face.
“I said things to Armand that I regretted not long after, but did not really come to realize how…” Lestat gestured uselessly. “I know I can be a little oblivious—no more funny comments, please—but I was also a gentleman of my station from 18th century France. And of the corresponding complexion. Even after the revolution, even after many hungry nights in Paris with Nicholas, I’d never been… through quite what he’d been through. I couldn’t understand.”
Of course, that was obvious, it didn’t even need to be said. The fact that Lestat was saying it anyway suggested a relevance that made Louis’ teeth hurt. Complexion and station and all of it.
“What exactly did you say to him?”
“Many things. Nothing like you’re thinking—”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I lived with you during Jim Crow, Louis, I have a pretty good idea what you’re thinking.”
“So it was about that.”
“No!”
“You sure? Cause you’re really making it sound like—”
“It had nothing to do with him being from…” Lestat’s mouth opened and closed like a fish as he stared at the wall before covering his eyes with his hands. “Fuck, where is he from?”
“Oh my God.”
“He never told me, Louis, that’s not my fault!”
As easy as it was to take umbrage at this, Louis had to admit that there was very little certainty to be had about Armand’s origins beyond the obvious. Better not to harp on this one point. Much as he was tempted to.
“India. His maker said something about Delhi, but Armand was never certain of the specifics.”
“Right. Good. Well. It wasn’t about that.”
“Okay. So, what did you say?”
“Many things. But this in particular,” Lestat trailed off, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “He’d shared his life, I think, in some desperate bid to play on my sympathies and come with me as I left Paris. And it did. Play on my sympathies, I mean. But I still wouldn’t take him. I wished I could, I told him so: ‘with all my heart,’ I told him. I said I—’respected,’ I think, is the term I used—that it was impossible not to respect his pain, what he’d been through. But I couldn’t understand him. I said I related more to Marius in his story than to him.”
“To,” Louis began but the words failed him beyond the single syllable. The thought was too wretched and repulsive for him to have heard correctly. He rose from his seat and took a few steps away, blinking rapidly. After a moment he managed to stammer out: “To Marius?”
“Yes?” Lestat seemed somehow both defensive and confused at Louis’ own astonishment even as heat started to build throughout Louis’ skull. “I don’t know how much Armand told you, but he presented to me an image of a god! A golden figure, an aesthete and scholar who captivated those around him, imposed his will upon the world and carved out his own path.”
“You related more to a child-fucking slave owner just cause he was powerful—”
“Woah, woah,” Lestat held hands out and stood as well. “That’s not what Marius—”
“Yes he good and goddamn was! By definition!”
“That’s... not how Armand described him to me,” Lestat retorted, sounding oddly disturbed by the description.
“Cause he’s fucked in the head, Lestat! Still half a’ the way in love with the sick bastard who bought a starving, mute sex slave, called him his son, and then fucked him anyway! I mean did he even tell you about the first...”
Louis cut himself off.
Sounds of Armand weeping in his ears. Sounds of Claudia whimpering in the dirt next to him as they slept on their travels. Sounds of Claudia’s journal being used to make a point, pages flipped back and forth around the few that were torn out. Quiet, barely-there sounds of Daniel scoffing when Louis told him what Armand had shared in the Louvre while Armand stared silently at the floor. The gut-wrenching feeling of a mistake having been made again.
Armand didn’t deserve his protection.
But neither did Louis have to share those whispered wounds that Armand had offered in confidence. Didn’t need an injury against him on his conscience.
“All of that,” Louis started again, “everything he told you, and you couldn’t show a little—”
“Louis, I literally just said I felt bad for him,” Lestat grumbled, sounding tired and frustrated and horrifically modern in a way Louis wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to. And a little panicked, which was even stranger.
“Empathy, I was gonna say. Empathy, Lestat. You’d been... you’d gone through shit too. You knew what it was like to feel powerless.”
“It wasn’t the same thing.”
“Course not—imagine Magnus took you when you were a kid and kept you chained up there for a whole decade teaching you to like what he did!”
“Marius did not keep him in a miserable, cold—”
“Lestat!”
Both of their voices had raised at this point. Foolishly. Pointlessly. Useless as a screen door on a submarine. What should it matter to him? And shouldn’t it matter even less to Lestat? But it did matter, somehow. For some reason. Louis huffed and tried to calm his voice.
“You couldn’t understand at all?” He asked again, disbelief still lacing the words.
Lestat sighed. “I did not think so. At the time. Perhaps not even now. Though, you know, probably a little better. Perhaps I just didn’t want to believe I could identify with any part of that, I don’t know. But I told him then that... I couldn’t understand him because I had been—hah—I’d always been rebellious.” Lestat gave a sad smirk, as though he knew he spoke a lie, but then stood tall and raised his voice slightly, performing, staging himself to deliver a closing couplet with a strange and almost nervous laugh. “And ‘You,’ I said, ‘You’re the slave of everything that ever claimed you.’“
Silence fell. And Louis left the room.
Louis returned two hours later, full from several extra blood bags stashed in his hotel room fridge, saved for the moment Lestat pissed him off and Louis needed to avoid killing someone. He hadn’t expected that this in particular would be what set him off, but at least he’d been prepared.
He didn’t want to be angry on Armand’s behalf. Fuck Armand. He didn’t want to feel anything on Armand’s behalf.
But God, how could he not? For his own part, it was reminder enough of every slight Lestat had ever dealt him—every trip to the theatre where he was made to play servant, every expression of bafflement when Louis heard a cruelty from white men that Lestat didn’t perceive. And how could he hear such a statement and not also recall every nightmare he’d held Armand through? There had been times when they shared a coffin and Louis found it difficult to sleep, only to feel Armand begin to shake and cry and breathe with panicked rapidity. And more and more often, when they started sleeping in a bed and it became easier to break the hold of their daylight torpor, Louis had found himself jolted awake by the weeping of his companion, and had on a few occasions heard the most terrible sounds leaking from Armand’s mind in his troubled, unconscious state. Rats, chains, creaking wood, declarations of love and the cracking of a whip. So much begging.
There were a few moments in the aftermath of the second interview where Louis, in his bitterness, imagined that all of it had been a manipulation. That even the tragic past, the childhood trauma had been a fraud. But he couldn’t convince himself of it for long. Not with all he’d seen. And, of course, Daniel had eventually admitted that he had even more documentation confirming it all. Goddamn Talamasca and their British Museum creep archives.
Maybe it was alright to be a little angry on Arun’s behalf. If not Armand’s. At least in principle. Even if they were the same damn person.
Which, to be honest, Louis wasn’t always sure they were.
Louis walked up the front steps of Lestat’s camelback house—a far cry from the crumbling cottage Louis once found him in but still nothing like the townhouse—and slowly took in the beaded rail running along the eaves of the porch and the colorfully painted siding. Bright, delightfully jarring colors he wouldn’t have associated with the Lestat of his memory, but that strangely suited him in this new context. He smelled the air, that scent of old broken asphalt from the street, the heat of electricity in the wires above them, the rain that would soon come. He felt the wooden boards beneath his feet and his own unnaturally slow heartbeat.
He’d keep it slow this time. He could do that. He could be calm.
He was really trying to.
“Alright. I’m calmed down a little,” Louis said upon entering and seeing Lestat sulking beautifully against a wall. (Had he posed there when he heard Louis approaching?)
“I am glad to hear it.” Lestat nodded firmly.
“We’re gonna have words about what you said eventually.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“But first you’re gonna tell me what that had to do with the trial.”
“Oh, do I take orders now?”
“Well, according to you, that’s all you ever did, right? Completely helpless against me: ‘you, a vampire, were being hunted.’“
“I did not write that.”
“Then explain.”
Lestat voicelessly trilled his lips in either frustration or tiredness, Louis couldn’t be sure which. Silence held the room in its palm until Lestat somberly moved to a chair by his abandoned instruments.
“It was before the trial,” he began again. “Rehearsals were… I’d rather not say. The script—”
“What, you really wanna talk about the script now?”
“Of course I don’t, but it,” he floundered a moment, as though there were no words to describe words themselves. “I mean, you remember it.”
“I remember a couple uncomfortable truths surrounded by a pack of lies.”
“No, I mean the stuff at the end. Me learning that ‘Louis was now the paramour of the…’ what was it, ‘gremlin?’ ‘Call boy?”
Louis felt something in him snag like a loose string on a sweater. ‘Gremlin.’ Right. That’s where that came from.
“Both. And ‘camp follower,’ if I remember right,” Louis felt his jaw work back and forth in anger as he spoke. “God, you know I held onto those insults for years like they were proof he was forced into it. But he directed the whole damn thing.”
He trailed off.
“Yup,” Lestat returned, popping the ‘p’ in a way that was so painfully modern that Louis had to shake his head a little to shake off the oddity of it.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Louis muttered. “That didn’t make sense for you all to go insulting him onstage when—”
“Right?!” Lestat’s hands raised in the air in agreed frustration. “I said the same: it didn’t suit the narrative being built to bring in an additional unnamed character and then spend several lines insulting them; it was sloppy writing.”
Trust Lestat to criticize sloppy writing and bad storytelling in the plot to murder his own family.
“No, I mean, he directed it,” Louis clarified. “Why leave that in?” Had it been out of that same victim complex he so loved to feed? Or was it something different? Lestat claimed previously that he hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of the coven structure, with Santiago the mouthpiece and Armand the enforcer, but what did this mean? What did this say?
“Well, they got rid of most of it eventually,” Lestat waved off. “That part was quite extensive in the early drafts. But that was actually part of my questioning when I finally got Armand alone for more than a few seconds. It was towards the end of rehearsals—I’m not sure why it hadn’t happened before, whether he was avoiding me or… I dunno.” Lestat shrugged, maintaining his uncharacteristic hangdog posture.
“You never talked?”
“Not beyond the notes he gave as Director. ‘Stand here, Lestat. Move there, Lestat. Change your inflection on this line,’ as though I had not been an actor before he even crawled out of the sewers!” Lestat’s voice didn’t change in the imitation of Armand, but his posture shifted enough to be damned uncanny in a way that almost startled a laugh out of Louis. Almost. “The little gremlin did give good notes, I will admit. At least he learned something with the theatre, if not any kind of decent behavior.”
“Lestat, the point?”
“Sorry, sorry, I… yeah. So we were alone. And I asked why the insults, and he just said he didn’t write it. Objected to my question, all ‘let us not pretend you disagree, no?’ So instead I ask what you could have possibly done that made him hate you so: he said he didn’t hate you. I asked about Claudia: he just shook his head. I kept asking ‘why do this,’ and he said it was out of his hands, it didn’t matter what he wanted. God! It was like seeing him underneath the cemetery again. This creature: ravenously hungry and refusing to eat. Beating himself and whimpering like he was helpless! I called him a liar, and he said ‘think what you want.’ I asked if it was because of me and the miserable cunt goes ‘yes of course because everything is about you.’ But I kept begging, kept demanding to know why he would not stop it, why he would not stop this:
“‘You can kill these vampires as easily as breathing,’ I said to him. And he says: ‘How can I? Why should I? I have nothing but them. I am nothing, yes?’“ Lestat’s face twisted into something between a grimace and a snarl. “‘Nothing but the slave of everything that...’“
Lestat fell silent and the echoed line remained unfinished. His hands flexed and clenched while Louis watched.
“I was furious,” Lestat spoke again, and he sounded it as well. “It felt like he was doing all of this to spite me over a few petty words. So I hit him and he just… he didn’t do anything. Like it was two hundred years ago all over again, him barely crawled out of the muck. He did nothing. I hit him again and again until I bruised my knuckles on his face and he did nothing. He got up and left me alone. And then he returned to me an hour later and beat me within an inch of my life.”
“Jesus,” Louis whispered. The way Lestat so embodied his own fury one moment only to suddenly sound entirely casual when describing Armand beating him—
“Not with his hands, of course: to be honest I cannot imagine Armand simply hitting someone, could you?”
Yes, actually, Louis very much could. It was a rare thing, though. A pedophile in London, some upjumped thug in Beijing, a racist cop (was there any other kind) in Chicago who’d been foolish enough to try something while Louis and Armand were already in the middle of an argument. That one had been kind of funny.
“But with the force of his mind, with his gift, he lifted me. Tossed me into the walls, through the air. Until I heard bones break.”
Lestat grew quiet again, and Louis was left trying not to picture it: Lestat, trapped in a hell of his own making—or of Armand’s making, or the coven’s, Louis was no longer sure. Lestat, helpless. Lestat, beaten. The body, the thing as it had once sat before him, still shaking, still alive, but only just. The vision hadn’t even made sense when Louis’d seen it with his own eyes, slit his throat with his own hands. It was only harder to comprehend like this. Nor could he coalesce the information into a coherent picture of the trial, of what the goal had been, of who had wanted what.
“There was something strange about it all, though. Like I said, as he was in the catacombs. Like he truly believed he had no choice. Like it was breaking his heart,” Lestat murmured and sighed. “…Of course I can’t assume that’s true, scheming little cunt and manipulative whore that he—”
“Lestat.”
God, he couldn’t just keep saying this shit, switching back and forth so fast it made Louis’ damn head spin.
“What?” Lestat returned flatly, sullen indignation in the elongated vowel.
“You got every right to hate him, but Christ alive, Lestat—”
“Here it comes.”
“—You gotta quit doing this.”
“Oh, do I? Do I have to quit things now?”
“I’m just trying to say you gotta watch your mouth sometimes, I swear.”
“Ah, yes, someone might rip me in half and hang me from the church gate with a Whites Only sign on my—”
“There!” Louis shouted, pointing at Lestat, thoughts of keeping calm banging on the door of his mind. “Right there! Why do you do this? It’s like you’re hunting to find the stupidest shit you could possibly say and then you go on ‘yeah, that’s the one!’ and that’s what comes out of your fool mouth!”
“Yes, I forgot, I am speaking to Louis de Pointe du Never Insulted Anyone In His Life, God’s gift to social niceties. You’d think the sun comes up just to hear you crow!”
“That’s not—!”
Louis closed his eyes and breathed in heavy through his nose. He was not gonna indulge this. He was not. Going to fucking. Indulge. This.
“You gotta quit doing this. You say some truly horrific shit about Armand sometimes, bad enough that it makes me feel compelled to defend him and that ain’t fair. I shouldn’t have to do that.”
“Am I not allowed to feel—”
“No, yeah, of course you’re allowed to hate him, but calling him a slave! Calling him a whore! After what he… And then this hot and cold act! The vile shit you say and then you follow it up with these sad little looks all tender-hearted and I don’t get why! I mean, idiot that I was, at least I loved the man—”
“Is it not enough that I loved him too?”
Abrupt silence in his mind like the end of a record. Louis shook his head to clear out whatever was wrong in it.
“What?”
“Is it not enough that I loved him,” Lestat repeated, voice laced with confusion. The sentiment alone rankled Louis.
“Look, I know you told him you did—”
“What?” Lestat’s turn.
“I mean, I gotta take anything he said with a cup of salt but according to him, you told him you loved him, got him to teach—”
“I never said I loved Armand,” Lestat interrupted in that same confused tone. Only... what?
“Wait, what?” Louis’s turn again.
“I never said I loved him.”
“You just said... Lestat, you make no damn sense sometimes.”
“I make perfect sense!”
“How did that make sense? You loved him, you didn’t love him.”
Lestat threw his hands in the air and looked like Louis was the one being impossible. Trust Lestat to confuse everything and get them heated again within one goddamn minute...
“I never said to him I loved him,” Lestat entreated, heaving a great sigh. “I did feel…” he started only to pause again before continuing. “But I never told him. Specifically told him otherwise, actually. Even if it was not true. I had to leave. Telling him that I cared so greatly would have made it impossible.”
Silence held for a moment. Louis could hear a faucet dripping out back where the hose connect was. He could hear the sound of their voices reverberating in the hollow bodies of several instruments, nothing discernible, just vibration in an empty space.
“You loved him?”
“Yes.”
Oh.
A stupid misunderstanding was clarified in the present, but Louis himself was shuttled back through years, through decades of conversation with Armand, of Armand’s version of events, once again proven false. Was it a lie or delusion? Simple misunderstanding? Another case of Armand’s fractured understanding of love, further exacerbated by the catacombs he’d only just crawled out of? Did it matter? Just one more falsehood to pile on top of the others.
“He...”
“Yeah.”
“He said you lied, you told him you loved him and you used him and left—”
“Hah. No. I lied: I told him I didn’t love him and I left. He disgusted me, I despised him, but I,” Lestat huffed, wiping a hand down his face. “You know the little beast. He is very lovable.”
Not easy to love, that was for damn sure. But lovable. Yes. Terribly lovable.
Louis didn’t love that ‘beast’ comment too much, but they both had reason enough to hate the sonofabitch… so much reason to hate him. How could Lestat love Armand?
“You loved him,” Louis repeated almost at a whisper, still baffled by the concept.
“Of course I love him. How could I not?”
Love. Love. Present tense. Love. Louis felt the bagged blood he’d only just taken in begin to boil.
“‘How could you not’?!” Louis heard himself shouting as if from outside of himself. Felt himself move from quiet bafflement to near outrage. Felt like his eyes were gonna pop out of his goddamn head. Felt like he was screaming into a mirror. “He kidnapped and tortured Nicolas. He manipulated you, tried to trap you the way he did me! He— he assaulted you! Fucked with my head for seventy years! Killed our daughter! Why the hell is it so easy for you to just move on and say you love him?”
“We’ll live forever like this, trapped like this, and if you and me and Armand can’t love each other, then what is the point of any of it?”
“So what, you just forgive him?!”
“If I can’t forgive him then how can I…” Lestat choked on his words. Louis could hear his voice change as though a leak had sprung somewhere. “I can’t not be thankful to him: he kept you alive. You were going to leave this world—the last light in the darkness, gone—and he kept you alive!”
“Kept me a prisoner!” Louis was unable to keep his voice from rising alongside his anger.
“A living one. A loved one.”
“Love?! That’s not love!”
“If it isn’t then what have any of us done to each other?”
Lestat’s voice rose to a shout like he was pleading with the Devil, like hurling accusations at God. He looked at Louis with the same begging face he used to, with a longing for understanding: that part of your life is over, cher. It has to be. I know it’s hard for you, Louis, but you will endure. You must move past this, mon coeur, you must. But there was none of the superior bitterness he had once remembered. None of the condescension. Simply the pleading. The desperation. Blood red tears in his eyes and his voice as Louis felt the hot humour of rage ebb away within him.
“Love’s not a moral good, Louis,” Lestat cried again, voice breaking on ‘not’ and barely solidifying on his name. “It’s not. It’s not… selfless and kind and beautiful. Or it can be, I believe it, I have to believe it, but it’s just as easy ugly and hungry and- and violent. And no, that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t make it right, it will never make right what I did to you, to Claudia. I know why you did what you did, I know why you had to leave, and you were right to. You were right, love doesn’t justify what I did, but it doesn’t mean there wasn’t love.”
“I know you loved me, Lestat. Both of us, I know you loved us. I know.”
“But it’s the same, Louis. It’s him too.”
“I—” I know, he thought. I know. I know he loved me. I wish I didn’t know it. But the worst part of those thoughts was the isolation of them. That Lestat could not hear what Louis could not say. After years with no privacy, no space to breathe, he’d forgotten the blessing of being heard. Not being alone. That Armand could find the part of him Louis was too scared to voice and hold it safe within himself. I’m not ready, he remembered thinking in Paris. He couldn’t face his love for Lestat, even the figment of him driving Louis to madness. He hadn’t needed to say more, to even think more. Armand hadn’t pressed. He had, Louis thought at the time, simply carried Louis’ love for another man because it was too heavy a burden for Louis himself to bear. He’d been wrong. But he’d been heard.
“I’m not ready,” Louis said now, and hoped Lestat would understand. He heard a thrumming noise between his ears, an overwhelming filter of sound.
Lestat cringed and took a deep breath before he spoke again. Preparing himself for something. Louis felt himself shaking his head in advance.
“I’m sorry, Louis, I,” Lestat wiped his hand down his face. “I’ve gotta tell you: I called him. I know you might feel like it’s a betrayal, but I’ve already called out to him. I just wanted to know he was alright. But...”
Please don’t say it.
“But he didn’t answer. I couldn’t even find him, Louis.”
Please...
“And I know I have no right to ask if you, if you have heard—”
“Lestat.”
“Louis, please, have you—”
“I tried.”
The words left Louis along with any remaining fight he had in him. It felt like they were carried out on the dying breaths he’d lost over a century ago. He knew he was still alive in some way by the blood pooling in his eyes and the tension in the corners of his mouth and the way he could feel his hands not-moving. Where were they supposed to move? What was he supposed to do? Nothing. Lestat looked shocked. Louis didn’t want to see it; looked at Lestat’s shoulder as he spoke, tried to ignore the weakness in his voice.
“I reached out... I called four different times, but he’s not there, Lestat. I can’t find him. He doesn’t want me to find him. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing or what’s happened to...”
“Four times?”
“At least. First I was just mad, but…” Louis felt heavy, as though speaking the words aloud was enough to pull him down beneath the dirt. As though the sun was rising higher with every recounted memory. “Last time was almost a year ago. I asked if he was ever gonna come get his damn boat or if I should sell it, cause leaving it docked in the harbor was costing...”
Louis realized once the words were caught in his throat that they were a lie. The money was negligible, and it wasn’t the principle of the thing either. It had been the uncertainty. The disappearing act, remnants of their life together as the only sign that he’d ever existed at all. Disappeared like a ghost, leaving material goods and memories but no presence. No evidence of life. Like he’d hallucinated Armand those many long decades and just filled his life with things to keep up the illusion. There was no point lying to Lestat about principles, of all things.
“So you can’t find him.”
“No.”
“And I can’t find him.”
Louis shook his head.
“What if he’s—”
“I can’t, Lestat. I can’t. Please don’t make me think about it.”
Visions from his sleeping hours returned to him of a monster bleeding him dry and then starving to death in a corner so miserably that all Louis wanted was to offer it more. Of a child cutting himself open and weeping, weeping, screaming for Louis to make it stop. Of the Armand he’d seen only a few times, in a manic spiral, burning out until he forgot what name to respond to. He couldn’t let himself start worrying when he was awake, too. He couldn’t…
“Don’t make me worry about him,” Louis murmured and only now noticed his voice breaking, the taste of bloody tears edging in at the corners of his lips. “I can’t,” he repeated.
He had not even noticed Lestat moving before his arms were around Louis. His face in his maker’s neck, bloody eyes pressed to cool skin. Safety. Support. You are loved.
“I will hate him again tomorrow,” Lestat whispered, “if that helps.”
Louis almost felt a laugh break through the tears. He nodded, but hoped they wouldn’t speak of him at all.