Chapter Text
I confess that waking after being beheaded had not ranked among my more lucid expectations. Honestly, if one can expect anything in the limbo between flesh and nothingness, I had imagined opening my eyes once more—yes—but only to find Hell. Perhaps to be greeted by the Devil himself, or by some lesser demon who deemed me worthy of his dreadful attention. Who knows? In any case, I was convinced death would finally embrace me. But, as nothing good ever lasts long enough in this world—and I should know that better than any living or dead soul—instead of eternal darkness, I awoke in a place whose very name I had not dared utter even in my most melancholy reveries.
It all began when my eyes opened, and the first thing that pierced my vision was sunlight streaming through my window...
Louis felt his consciousness return like a submarine slowly rising from the ocean depths—disoriented, dazed, submerged in a confusion so profound that it preceded even the act of opening his eyes.
His skin was warm.
Not with the pale, artificial warmth he had grown accustomed to in his pitiful indoor garden, that miserable imitation of the sun which only mocked what he had once been. No. Louis felt truly warm, as though blood—that cursed crimson liquid to which he had once been hopelessly addicted—flowed through his veins again. As though the sun, in all its merciless glory, rested upon his flesh without bringing the agonizing fire that had accompanied its touch for so many years.
No.
The thought whispered through his mind like the first breath of panic. Even the idea of parting his eyelids felt like an act of unimaginable courage.
Yet another fear emerged.
Older.
Deeper.
Far more venomous than any terror that had ever pierced his heart before.
Where was Lestat?
That single question, carved into his soul like a wound that had never truly healed, was enough to make him throw his eyes open and tumble from the bed in one clumsy movement.
The window stood open. Not merely cracked, but thrown wide, allowing sunlight—that light he had learned to fear as the very face of annihilation—to pour into the room in relentless waves of gold.
His body reacted before his mind.
Like a cornered rat—the very creatures that had once sustained him during his most desperate nights—he scrambled behind the bed, seeking refuge beneath the feather mattress, burying himself in the dusty darkness. The instinct was so deeply rooted within him that it existed long before reason could intervene.
Dust invaded his nostrils, and for several long minutes he did nothing but breathe the stale, musty air, hiding like a shameful creature beneath the bed.
Then something stirred.
A spark of clarity.
Wait.
Something was terribly wrong.
Not merely with the room around him, but with his own body. His own flesh.
Something his instincts, blinded by decades of terror, had completely overlooked.
Slowly—with the caution of a man approaching the edge of an abyss—Louis lifted the blanket hanging from the side of the bed, fashioning a makeshift canopy to shield himself from the light. His hand trembled. He stretched it forward, finger by finger, as though offering a sacrifice to the unknown.
He allowed the sunlight to caress his skin.
Nothing happened.
...What the hell?
Carefully, he crawled out from beneath the bed, and the light embraced him completely.
There was no burning.
No smoke.
No sickening scent of flesh charring.
Only his eyes watered beneath the brilliance of the morning, and clear, crystalline tears slipped down his cheeks.
Water.
How many years had passed since Louis had cried real tears instead of those thick crimson streams that stained his face like spilled wine?
The question lingered in the silence, nearly as strange as the overwhelming sensation now flooding his body—a sensation so painfully alive that it frightened him almost more than the sunlight itself.
And then...
Was that...
Bread?
His nose, which for decades had known little besides the metallic scent of blood and the suffocating perfume of decaying corpses, caught something unmistakably earthly: the aroma of fresh bread being pulled from the oven. Warm yeast. Toasted flour. A fragrance that did not itch at his senses as every smell once had, but instead awakened something long buried within him.
His stomach growled.
The sound was so startling, so undeniably human, that Louis froze.
That should not have happened.
He had not needed solid food in years—perhaps centuries—and yet his stomach, that forgotten organ, roared like a caged beast demanding to be fed.
What was wrong with him?
His eyes, now adjusted to the light, slowly wandered around the room with an attention he had not possessed since the days when he had still been a man of flesh and bone.
Then reality struck him like the edge of a frozen blade.
It was his bedroom.
Not the hotel room from his modern pilgrimage.
Not the apartment in Dubai, with its dark glass and gilded loneliness.
His childhood bedroom.
The one his father had furnished after earning his first respectable wage, replacing the old straw mattress with a bed stuffed with genuine feathers.
The room whose white linen curtains had been lovingly embroidered by his dear grandmother, Madame du Lac, in the years before a cruel fever claimed her life.
Even the wooden floor was exactly as he remembered it, with its narrow gaps between the planks where he and Paul used to hide the coins they earned tap dancing outside the church—performances that collected donations which rarely found their way into the parish priest's pocket, but instead nourished the dreams of two young boys.
"What's happening?"
Even his own voice startled him.
It sounded so young.
So clear.
Nothing like the deep, weathered voice that years of rage and suffering had carved into him.
Lestat.
The name rang through his mind like a church bell on a storm-ridden night.
Yes.
He had to find Lestat.
He had to discover where they had taken him...
What they had done to the man who was at once his tormentor and the love of his life.
The door behind him creaked open.
Louis rose abruptly, slower than the reflexes his vampiric body had taught him, heavier, painfully human—and that sluggishness haunted him for only a fleeting moment before the figure stepping into the room erased every other thought from his mind.
It was not Gabrielle.
Nor one of that vile vampire woman's idiotic lackeys.
It was a Black man.
Tall.
Broad-shouldered.
His face bore the marks of time and honest labor.
The very same face Louis had glimpsed only in fading memories and aging portraits he had managed to recover over the years. A face he had tried to bury beneath layers of blood and oblivion.
"Father?"
The word escaped his lips as the fragile whisper of a little boy.