Okay, so this isn't exactly the masterpiece I planned it to be, but then I *knew* if I didn't finish and post it today, I'd never get it done. So, like, here it is.

BASIC PLOT THING: Detailing what's going on in Louis's pretty head the night he fives Daniel the interview.

DISCLAIMER:

For British readers: I want Brian to win! And don't vote Narinder out-- she's so argumentative, it's great!

Oh yeah, some woman owns these characters. And she'll sue me if she finds out I played with them because I am not a fucking big movie company with lots of money that waives artistic value.


The freedom that you wanted back
Is yours for good; I hope you’re glad
- The Beautiful South, ‘A Little Time’

Do I dare / disturb the universe?
- T.S Eliot, The Waste Land

__________


The bar was dark, clouded by smoke while in the next booth a couple were fondling each other with utter disdain for the other patrons. He wrinkled his nose in distaste and turned to gaze at the mortal once more. Unconsciously, he raised the bottle of lukewarm beer to his lips, letting the bitter liquid touch his lips as if he could actually drink it.

Once more, he attempted to start up his narrative. This is how it would go, he decided:

*I, Louis de Pointe du Lac, have a story to tell—* The literary snob in him dismissed it almost immediately. Far too formulaic.

**I suppose you all think that you know the limits of your little world, don’t you? And there is nothing to fear in the night; there are no ghosts or goblins or…**

Too melodramatic.

As he mulled this over, he glanced at the young man once more. He was handsome, in that dishevelled modern child sort-of-way; all haste and ambition. He had decided that this man would do as the listener, the interpreter who would bridge the world to his Otherside. He told himself that when he had first seen the boy three nights ago at this very bar, talking people into giving out anecdotes, interrogating with journalistic ruthlessness, that the idea had been borne with the appearance of the boy.

Somehow, though, after a little reflection, he realised that he had been moving towards this for some time.

The boy was talking to some old drunkard, recounting in a slurred voice over the strains of **Heart of Glass**, but was casting hesitant glances at Louis, knowing with that infallible journalistic instinct, that there was something hidden deep within him. Louis cocked his head and gave the barest hint of a smile. If nothing else, he at least now knew how to charm. Predictably, the boy gave him a flustered look and returned to his conversation.

The vampire started as he felt a sting of pain at the tip of his thumb. He looked down and saw that he had crushed part of the glass at the top of the bottle and it had splintered into his hand. Frowning, he picked out the shard of glass and hastily threw it under the table, watching in morbid fascination as his hand healed within seconds.

No matter. He needed this diversion; he needed to think things through, properly. Suddenly, he had to be out of the bar. He had to get out. He wanted to think, he wanted to—

Abruptly, he got up and left, brushing past the journalist, moving too quickly for him to follow, and then he was out into the night.

Within seconds, he was lost in the crowd. He slunk off down a side alley and then he was climbing up a side-building, was over the rooftops and moving as swiftly and as inhumanely possible as it was for him through the San Francisco darkness. He was silent and predator-like as he ran, though he had already killed, it had been some hours ago and he felt unsatisfied.

He did not stop until he reached the port, walking along the bay front, occasionally glancing at the great Golden Gate bridge and then to the stars overhead and back again. It felt good, being here, the roar of the waves crashing against the rocks in the harbour, the tangy night air and the ability to block out the sights and sounds of the world until he was Louis, walking here, silent and alone but free.

Everything seemed so vast out here. To think, when he had been a child, this place had been nothing but savage wilderness, unpopulated by settlers. He was out of place here, but such a thing suited him fine.

New Orleans has too many memories.

He had an urge, suddenly, to clamber up one of the buildings, even to see how far he could climb that monstrous bridge. Ah, but then, the mortals would see. And a vampire must never let mortals know of their kind. One must keep to the shadows, flitting in and amongst these largely good people and remain in the darkness like the pale nightmare one was.

**And I’m sick unto death of this secrecy. Modern children dressed up as the aristocrat that he was. Whisperings and coven gatherings and the occasional hunt by those who could remember for a murderous Franco-American by the name of Louis.**

God, sometimes he hated these times. He hated how lost he was, not because he could not handle the change, he rather liked seeing the progress of the modern world, but because he got lonely and the ache for a familiar face sometimes made him want to cry out in frustration.

He closed his eyes and inhaled softly. Even then, in his confusion and fear, he had possessed more than **this**.

**Lestat came marching through the door, tapping the ground rhythmatically with his walking stick. Claudia flounced in after him, giggling. Such sport, the kill!

"Ah, Louis," he announced, "if you had seen their faces! If you had only been there!"

"What is it?" he had asked.

"A certain Mme. De Montfort, stopping to help a poor, defenceless-"

"…and beautiful," Claudia cut in.

"Ah, oui, beautiful," Lestat agreed, giving her an affectionate nod, "…child, crying out for her mother, no less. And how she was led on a merry dance, down through the darkened streets, assured by her little friend’s tale, that, yes, this was where she lived, she was certain—"

"And then-" Claudia said.

"And then?" Louis had asked, feeling suddenly apprehensive. His stomach was churning. She watched him with glee, smiling like a crocodile.

"…And then we took her," said Lestat merrily, but Louis saw that his eyes were unsmiling. He was watching him carefully. "But two gentlemen happened to be passing by—and how their faces fell!"

"They looked a sight worse when we finished them off," laughed Claudia, as if it were all a game.

Lestat doubled over in laughter. "How excellently contrived it all is! How ironic- we three wandering through society and our victims throwing themselves at us—merely because we are well-dressed and remember to bow to ladies."

"When we are nothing but monsters," Louis said, before he could bite the words back, before he stopped for Claudia’s sake, "when we are loathsome killers, preying on a poor woman and crowing about it as if we were angels sent to cleanse the world!"

Claudia stared at him, amazed. Lestat watched him with a cold fury. Louis imagined he saw something approaching understanding flit across his maker’s face. But then there came the fury, the anger, the sharp words, the same old song.

Louis winced visibly at the memory, unsure of what he was wincing at. He remembered that he had not talked to another soul, mortal or immortal, for two weeks until the waitress in that bar had asked him if he had wanted a drink. Two weeks, and not a word spoken. Two weeks, and nobody had responded to his voice and spoken in reply; words of love, hatred, anger… he found he was forgetting, more and more as time went on, to even acknowledge the world around him.

But, then, who needed the world? Not him, he mused, as he leapt onto a wall at least a foot higher than him with ease, before making his way stealthily up to the rooftop of a nearby house. He lay down on the flat roof, clasped his hands on his chest and drifted with the stars. Sometimes, it was just so easy to let oneself be carried along through time until everything else could be forgotten.


And oh, it was so quiet up here. He could hear his heart beating in his chest. The stars were white-hot and bright above, and it brought fierce tears to his eyes. He gritted his teeth and held them back. What would it be like, he wondered, to drift amongst them? To feel his soul go whooshing whirling upwards and leave his hideously beautiful body of alabastar behind, so that he was Louis, fierce and compassionate and stubborn, Louis alone amongst the stars? Louis drifting through the night like a bird, and basking in the sunlit daytime until God called him back Home.

Ah, fanciful and romantic fool! How ridiculous, to think he could cast off his damnation, the countless wrongs he had done! Maybe some day, he would be called to God, if He existed, and then he would be cast into hell like the monster he was. He hoped *he* had not suffered a fate like that, if he were even still in existence. Somehow, it did not seem right.

*I wish you were here, with me.*

He wondered, vaguely, if Lestat might be proud of him, finally taking the world into his own hands. He doubted it. Nothing, and here he ran his hands across his chest, *nothing*, about him had ever been able to satisfy Lestat.

He sat up miserably, forcing himself out of this maudlin way of thinking.

Someone was arguing in a street nearby. A car swerved to avoid something and the driver sounded the horn angrily. Across the river, a little trawler boat cut through the water with a dull sloshing intonation.

He was up and moving again within moments. He was wandering the street like a man lost, staring at people and places with confused terror, though he knew each and every street intimately. The hyperactive old man, standing at the head of one of the alleys, ranting in his rags whilst people crossed the road to avoid him, saw this and grabbed his arm as he walked past.

Louis turned into the face of a mouthful of yellowed and decaying teeth, crackling blue eyes of an intelligent man driven insane by his condition. "You’re looking lost, son," the old man shouted in a frankly embarrassingly loud voice, "you’re as lost as these damned sinners, a sinner amongst sinners!"

Louis stared in consternation at the old man. "Let go of my arm," he whispered.

"And you’ll all be damned!" the man was ranting, shaking his fist at a young woman who squealed in horror and hurried out of his way, holding her hands up defensively. "Yes, you’re all going to hell if you don’t repent for your sins! Repent! It’s not too late!" He attempted to pull Louis closer to him, and in his confusion, the vampire actually allowed himself to be pulled a few steps into the darkness of the alley.

"Oh, yes, I see it in those green eyes of yours," the man moaned, "I see the loneliness. I see you for what you are…"

"And what is that?" asked Louis, despite himself, too easily spooked, too easily dragged into the tramp’s game.

"You’re going straight to hell!" the old man laughed gleefully.

It was nonsense; it was ridiculous, it was something that any other person would have ignored and walked on. It infuriated Louis. Everything infuriated him; the night, the people, the noise, yes, the old man was right, the *lonliness*. He hated it all! How tired he was, of running, of surviving, of mourning! An indignant rage built up in him, turning his blood to acid and his thoughts to malice.

"Get off me!" he snarled, pushing the man away with ease. The old man reeled at his strength, then made for him again, only for his face to take on a confused look as Louis’s fangs flashed in the lamplight, as a white alabaster hand reached out and pulled him into all-consuming darkness.

A few minutes later, a tousled young man emerged from the alleyway back onto the street. His dark hair was dishevelled, and he ran his fingers through it until it was back into some sort of order. His clothes were mussed, and he smoothed them. A little blood still glistened on his lips and he wiped it away instinctively, lost in his thoughts once more as he moved through the throng of people around him.

He was thinking of personal things, words and sounds and thoughts from a time that he had never told Lestat about. Paul, telling him of his visions, **Why won’t you believe me!** And Louis’s laughter; how like Lestat he had been, scornful, dismissing his visions and then sinking into a mire of self-pitying grief when Paul had died.

If he had tears enough, he might cry. But his heart was cold and turned to stone in this weary world and as it was he pushed the thought from his mind. Religion and folklore and where the hell the first vampires came from didn’t interest him much. Nothing interested him, much.

*Outside, the women were singing the Ave Maria. It was a collection for the building of the new cathedral, to be a grand affair, surely. A group of voracious churchgoers, the women were righteous and good and basically untouched by malice. Louis had glanced at them before returning to his reading, and then they had started singing. He had felt his heart lurch as they launched into song, as unwanted memories of the Aves and his brother’s sad and dark coffin open in the parlour.

Claudia was playing with her dolls in the other room, Lestat talking to her of everyday things. Louis was unaware of him as he came into the room, as he called his name curiously. His maker had then glanced at the window, at Louis, then back at the window. He frowned and let out a curse.

Louis started at that and watched as Lestat moved towards the window, pulling it shut and complaining of Louis letting draughts run throughout the flat and the damned noise from the street and he wanted to play some music, so Louis had better stop complaining.

Lestat sat at the piano and began to play a loud and raucous tune, all the while asking Louis why he was so damned stupid that he was reading the book upside down.


Louis forgot his reverie. He could still hear the singing of course, but much fainter, as if cut off from him completely. And besides, Lestat was being a perfect idiot, shouting and launching into some noisy ballad or other.

The irritation crept up over Louis, until he found himself snapping terse responses to Lestat’s taunting, telling him he was rude, and no, it wasn’t music at all… it was simply *noise* and not even good noise at that.*

And why should he tell this part? What did it mean, finally? And what reason would there be to tell the journalist of his pretend love-affair with Lestat, hoping all that while for affection, when in reality Lestat had mocked him for his devotion and used him as a thing to be dominated, called at will and lied to with kisses and the cool touch of his skin? He lowered his eyes miserably and continued up the street. Who was he, anyway, to believe in love in this strange afterlife? What right did he have, pale, passive man who had just killed an innocent a few moments ago, to expect love or devotion from anyone?

He wished he were home right now, on Divisadero street, or even in Rue Royale, listening to the spinet playing, or, most of all, sitting on his mother’s lap, small and innocent child, telling her of what he would like to be when he was grown up. Most of all, he wished he could talk to Paul, tell him that he was right, that the world was indeed strange and dark and he did need somebody to guide him. And if Paul saw him now? Demon, outcast! If his heart were not burnt-out and weary, he’d cry.

That was exactly it. What mattered anymore, really? There was no demon child or ‘family’ to protect. There was only Louis, dressed in scruffy clothing and murdering annoying old tramps.

He glanced down at his feet, imagining the riding boots that he had worn to go out riding through the plantation. No point in such attire these days; horses were generally skittish around him. Lestat had never told him of how animals would fear him; he had learned that in due course by himself. He had learnt a great deal of things.

*"You, who will not even let me know your surname! Tell me, Monsieur, do you even have a surname?"

"Wouldn’t you like to know?" Lestat had snarled, pushing away. He was troubled, confused.

"So you won’t, then. Why is that? Are you an outlaw, a demon," he asked mockingly, "… some misunderstood aristocrat fleeing the revolution-"

He had turned then, and Louis had drawn back, suddenly afraid of the crackling violet anger turned on him. "You and your ridiculous mortal notions, you bourgeois idiot! Why do you trouble yourself over such nonsense?!"

"Lioncourt," Armand had said with a dismissive shrug. "Lestat de Lioncourt was his name."

"Why did he never tell me this? Why did he never tell… either of us this?" he asked, unable to say her name without choking on his grief and anger.

"Maybe he didn’t want you to have any power over him. Maybe he knew it was dangerous to admit ties to the aristocracy at that time. Simply, he did not believe you, as his fledgling, had the right to know. The less anyone knows about us, the better."

And if every vampire knew his tale, what then? And if every mortal could hear his story, if they so wished, what then? Would it change anything? Would it take the loneliness away? Would it even- would it bring the others…the other out of hiding?

"If you’re still alive," he murmured, starting a little when he realised he had voiced that thought out loud. He himself did not know if he believed that. How weary he had looked, spied on as he was through a dusty window! How sick, sick at heart, as Louis was now, feeling the sadness and the loneliness threatening to swallow him whole with rising greed each night that he went on!

"He used to call me…" he began, but he realised, I do not want to share this with Armand. Besides, Lestat had never meant that name, "Beautiful One." Lestat had always thought him dull, stupid, a means to an end and nothing more.

Lestat, picking out every shade of green in silks and velvet and demanding Louis wear this attire, it complimented his beauty, when in all reality he knew it to be simply because it would brighten up his fledgling who looked so dark and drab next to them, with their blue eyes and silken yellow hair. They were beautiful and daring; they plunged into the kill and into their undead life with zeal. How ridiculously mundane he was compared to them, what a disgrace! So unable to shed his… what had Lestat called it?… mortal coil. Fitting, that he was compared to the Prince of Denmark. Weak and passive and ultimately the victim of his own passivity, finally.

Well, he was sick of passivity. He wanted to *do* something, and he knew now that this night was going to be some sort of landmark. Give the interview, and open yourself up to the world. Don’t give it, and float through the darkness like the ghost you are until one night you are just not there. He sighed. Yes, he knew now what he must do.

Stopping outside a boutique where tuxedos and suits lined the walls, and a sign written in delicate italic lettering declared, "Open", he was struck by a rather absurd idea. His reflection in the window grinned back at him even as he found himself withdrawing a bundle of money from his pocket.

The journalist probably won’t get it, he thought, or, more likely, he’ll think me mad.

For one moment, he was again the Louisiana gentleman, wandering through the crowds of immigrants and plantation owners, shopkeepers and slaves. He watched the world go by in silent wonder whilst beside him, on one side, a graceful and deadly figure strode arrogantly through the mass of humanity, and small porcelain figures, like that of a doll, clutched at the hand on his other side.

A motorbike roared past him, startling him out of his reverie. And this was downtown San Francisco on a glittering, neon-lit twentieth-century night. He wove his way through the crowds, trying to lose himself in the illusion once more, but it was too late. He felt calmer than he had then, timid and passive creature that he had been, pulled along by the whims and nuances of his fiercely possessive companions. Now, he could go anywhere and do anything he like, unless, of course, some vampire or another took it upon themselves to pursue him, hunt him down until he fled the city. But he always came back. Something always drew him back.

A hot dog vendor was set up just ahead of him, and the smell, of meat and tomato and onions seemed pleasantly comforting. He liked being in the middle of the crowd at times, listening and learning, and if he didn’t reach out his hand for her fingers, or imagine that his possessive companion strode alongside him, he felt he could manage all right.


But they were gone now, it was all gone. And all that was left now was the sadness, and the Ghost of Louis, and finally the story. Louis mused, with an ironic smile, that this was the only positive aspect of the entire debacle that was his twisted life.

And then he was back at the bar and it was no longer time to think, but time to *do*.

He placed a hand on the door, then stepped back uncertainly. Once he did this, there would be no going back. Most likely, he would be hunted down and killed.

Do I, then, dare disturb the universe?

He brushed back a lock of hair from his eyes, adjusted the tie he was wearing, and then realised how foolish he was being, fussing over all this when he knew full well what the answer was. To use the vernacular:

Hell, yes!


In years to come, Louis found he could not exactly remember how he got around to talking to Daniel. One moment, he had entered the bar and sat down, the next, a defining moment in his life had begun to take shape.

"Is, er… this seat taken?" asked the young man hesitantly, standing over Louis at the table he had chosen.

"You can sit if you like," smiled Louis, "I take it you want something from me?"

"You look kinda interesting. And no, that isn’t a come-on line," he laughed nervously, "I don’t know if you *are,* interesting, that is," he said, "but you’re so… detached, so thoughtful… there has to be something going on in that head of yours, right? Perhaps even a story to dwell on…"

"A story?" asked Louis, casting him an innocent look, and when Molloy told him he was a freelance journalist, Louis supposed he gave a very good rendition of what Molloy took to be surprise.

"Well, I don’t know, um… personal experiences, some anecdote, tragedy—real stuff." The young man took out a packet of cigarettes and, after fumbling with his coat pocket for a while, found a lighter hidden within the depths of his pocket.

"And why would that interest you?" Louis asked, playing along.

"Well, sir, I collect stories. None of this tabloid-celebrity shit, simply tales of ordinary folk. Real lives."

"Like mine, for example?"

"Exactly!" Molloy lit his cigarette, inhaled a deep lungful, then held them in Louis’s direction. "Cigarette?" he asked.

Louis shook his head, "No."

The journalist placed the cigarettes back in his coat pocket. Louis could see the humour in his eyes, as he gazed at this strangely-dressed pale young man. His ability to read minds was limited, to say the least, but he could almost hear Molloy’s thoughts: Weirdo.

Evidently, Molloy thought him some eccentric, an entertaining anecdote to be laughed at and derided by the ‘normal’ people of the San Francisco public. Charting the life of a loony, surely that would be worth one more rung on the career ladder. His naivety made the vampire smile.

The poor mortal, he was a means to an end.

"You will have this broadcast, if it is good enough, yes?"

Molloy nodded. "Yes. But it has to be good. It has to be intriguing- it has to be something I haven’t heard before."

Louis could not resist a wry smile as he stood up, pulling on his coat. "Oh, now that I can guarantee."


das Ende
(So I'm sick of French. *shrugs*)