August (Vignette One)

First in a series of stand-alone vignettes.
By Imogen
July 29, 2000

Disclaimer: This is a work of non-profit amateur fiction and is not meant to infringe on the copyright of Anne Rice, her publishers, or anyone else with Heaven-knows-what-kind of legal stake in all this. I am not looking to get dragged into court, thank you.

Spoilers: IwtV only.
Rated: R.
Comments: This is my first spec (and my first post) on Rotoli – thanks to all who take the time to read. Any responses would be wonderful – don’t hesitate to tear it up if you want! Critical or otherwise comments are absolutely welcome.


Lestat could not remember a hotter August he’d ever spent in New Orleans. Perched on his little balcony overlooking the street, he watched as solitary walkers here and there struggled up and down the humid, empty distances of Rue Royale, swimming listlessly through the thick, wet air.
The heat caught and held him in a seemingly inescapable grip; he felt as if his will was being slowly squeezed out of him, one droplet of sweat at a time. He rested his arms limply on the railing, then recoiled abruptly at the touch of the warm metal.

Inside, the portable electric fan hummed, turning its head back and forth, back and forth, in a kind of exhausting mechanical motion of negation. Lestat turned his own head, away from the baked street’s vista. Through a slit in the window’s sheer curtains he glimpsed the bed’s corner; the edge of a rumpled sheet, a very white ankle attached to an outstretched foot, hanging off the side.

The fan hummed and hummed, languidly rotating, shaking its head at him. A rather insolent motion for a fan to make, Lestat decided peevishly. He swatted at an insect, missed, swatted again. Even the thin, light cotton shorts he’d pulled on to step outside seemed to be sticking already to his skin. It seemed useless to pray for rain, though if he had believed it would make one wit of difference, he’d have dropped to his knees then and there. Across the heat-oppressed silence of the street, a streetlight buzzed sluggishly on and off, illuminating the swarm of night-flying creatures gathered to beat their wings against the hot, dirty glass.

The tall man sighed and rubbed spiritlessly at the back of his neck, feeling inexpressibly sick of the warm, wet, sticky prickling of sweat that had collected there sometime in the middle of June and, irregardless of how many showers he took, refused to be cleansed away. After months of this, he must be forming a nigh-impenetrable film of slick sweat over his entire body, he calculated fussily, wrinkling his nose. He prowled the little balcony like a sulky hunting cat, swatting at the offending bugs, thinking a little feverishly that he loathed weather like this, positively reviled it, and what in God’s name made him stay in New Orleans each summer anyway…?

He wandered over to the balcony’s far edge, towards the large magnolia whose branches thrust themselves through the bars of the railings, unfurling its rich scent through the windows of the flat. As if in answer to his question, the wide thick leaves of the tree gleamed languidly at him in the dark. In the winking orange light of the streetlight, their green hue was so deep it was nearly black. Suddenly Lestat grinned wolfishly, fangs and all. He touched a finger to one of the leaves. Its gloss was so inky, the lustre of it transparent, reflective, yet unyieldingly attractive. He lifted it up to the light, still smiling, thinking of the owner of the outstretched foot who lay inside.

Noiselessly he reached for the magnolia’s crown – its creamy flower, open so wide and so luxuriantly as to seem almost indecent. Slowly, slowly he pulled the flower from the branch, two shining leaves attached, framing its glowing silkiness. Staring at the confection of vital perfume and loveliness in his hand, Lestat felt vaguely ashamed. He glanced again at the open curtains of the bedroom, then at the bloom he held. The magnolia’s fragility was not disguised by its sumptuous style of beauty; yet it yawned open with a cool sensuality in the crushing heat – untouched, brazen somehow in its delicacy.

With a rippling motion Lestat rose to his feet, carrying the flower inside. Pausing he lifted the curtains slowly aside, his anticipation gently swelling as the view grew – from the careless hanging foot, its pale ankle, to a slender calf, the dimpled back of knee – he was standing there grinning stupidly, he knew, smiling like a fool. He raised the flower to his face, inhaled, and stepped inside the room. The curtains fell behind him.

Some time later, Lestat lay in an exhausted yet certifiably contented sprawl on the bed. The remaining bedclothes (of which there were very few, now hopelessly rumpled) had been relegated to the very edge of the mattress, and he amused himself with sleepily winding his toes in the wrinkles and hollows of the sheets. The fan still hummed and nodded back and forth, though not quite with such a vexatious manner, Lestat had decided, after all. (During lovemaking, he had heard its rhythmic murmur as the being not so unlike the purring of his lover’s pleasure – and in a burst of generosity had pardoned the noisy machine.)

At length Lestat spoke, though it was with a sudden grimace of displeasure. "Merde…I had hoped to rent a boat tomorrow and take it out on the river to escape the heat – "

"Mmm?" Murmured Louis, the owner of the foot, the ankle (and the owner of a great deal more besides, as Lestat well knew).

"- But I’ve remembered now I must meet with Christine. Not only her, but her little army of investing consultants, legal associates, and accountants! It will surely take all night…"

He sighed loudly and looked to his companion for the customary sympathetic gesture. But he saw, as Louis turned his head again towards him to settle it in the crook of his neck, the suspicious curve of a smile touching his lips.

"What are you smiling at, then?" Lestat demanded good-humoredly, the hint of defensiveness in the rise of his tone.

"Nothing." Came the quick reply. But Lestat knew all too well the hasty signs of contained mirth, just as he knew something always lay at the root of Louis’ certain evasive smiles.

"Tell me."

"Non." His face still nestled against Lestat’s neck, hidden in a mingled curtain of their hair. Lestat tickled him gently.

"Oui. Dis-moi!"

Louis rolled away, lightly, still smiling. "Alors. You make such a fuss over the drudgery of consulting with your lawyers! You have no stomach for the management of your money or affairs. You would rather spend it all than sacrifice one hour to account for any of it."

"Ah! Such a reproach from you, the pitiless plantation owner! Tell me, how well did you enjoy your wealth, in your mortal life, with your nose forever cemented between the pages of the logs and ledgers?" He tweaked his sleepy companion’s nose for emphasis before proclaiming, "My satisfaction in wealth comes in what I can see and touch – such creatures of luxury as Armand and I are not so cheaply provided for as you, living in threadbare conditions but placated by the knowledge of an abstract sum, safely rotting in a bank vault!"

Louis only smiled again at Lestat’s robustly careless confidence. He came closer, winding his arms around his lover’s neck, his long fingers sliding through the light silky hair. Lestat felt the tingle of electric pleasure, felt it prickle over his scalp and race down his arms to his fingertips. He stretched his arms forward; felt for and found the groves and ridges of Louis’s spine, tracing its progress downwards with unhurried appreciation. He heard the sigh that came from Louis’ lips, tiny and tremulous, and felt its imprint on his cheek. Louis moved to his touch, felt the gentle ministrations of Lestat’s fingers with heat growing in their wake. Lestat felt the return of the slow burn of excitement also – he loved to caress his Louis in this state, when he seemed caught in the delicious slowness of a sleepy languor.

When he heard Louis speak again, the low playfulness of it surprised him.

"You are mistaken, cher, in your diagnosis of the enjoyment of money you and Armand share," Louis corrected. "Armand desires only to advance his schemes towards unrivalled profit. For him, the ruthless fruition of his designs is the ultimate goal in and of itself – the empire he has fashioned out of his money is but a fortress to protect it. Armand seeks to make money, while you want to play with it."

Lestat, matching Louis’ playful turn, replied, "Et vous monsieur? How came you, with the cream of the Creole aristocratic blood running through your veins, to your present distaste for the tending of your wealth?"

But Louis did not rejoin his sally. He turned his head away, and looked upwards, sober.

"You have to ask? I was born into the cold self-interest of the conservative rich, of course. This is the time-honored attitude of the aristocracy, as you well know. There was the duty to attend to of appearing lavish and even reckless with the sumptuous expressions of our wealth – but beneath it all we lived in the tense secret fear of losing it, frightened by the unpredictable landscape of scandalous profiteering and giddy risk-taking of the wild new territories. Fortunes were made every month, but they were also lost, and badly." Louis spoke in a low, unbroken tone. "What guarantee could we have of our continued security, our unthreatened position in the accustomed society? What, in the end, separated us from the animalistic slaves, the dull common chambermaids, or the market’s crude tradesmen?"

He paused, seemingly caught up in his thoughtful recollections. His eyes, half-closed, gazed upwards towards the ceiling. His breath very quiet. Lestat, caught, watched his profile.

"How well I can recall those long, sweltering nights spent sitting in inarticulate anxiety in the flimsy protection of our extravagant salon, my mother, my sister – even Paul and I – frozen into listening silently to the distant sound of the slaves’ drums and songs. Unable to speak, to read, for the women to pick up their embroidery-making or play the spinet or harp – all of us so terrified by what that sound represented!"

There was no regret, no disgust or irony in Louis’ voice, merely a kind of mild wonder.

Lestat watched him silently. "And yet you saw the precarious nature of your wealth, you knew the danger your privilege placed you in," he observed. Louis continued to stare upwards, not stirring, not hearing him perhaps. Lestat again wished in vain for a breeze, a cool breath of air to relieve the stillness and heat of the room.

Finally he asked, as if he did not know, "And what happened to you?"
He touched his index finger to the center of Louis’ chest. Louis exhaled slowly, returning to him once more. His voice continued as if apart from his will, a trance-like murmur.

"What happened to me? I lost everything. My plantation was gone in a terrible blaze such as I had never beheld. Whatever fear I had by then - but it didn’t matter. My heart wasn’t burned inside along with it – it had already been taken by a rogue, a thief," Louis turned his face again to his maker, and his voice (Lestat could not help thinking) was as slow as honey in its progression down the spoon towards the mouth.

Lestat felt the painful twin surges of desire and wonder, as Louis’ voice coated his senses, blanketing his heart. So old, and so familiar, these feeling Louis always aroused in him; but still they shocked him, made him dizzy.

"So you see, now," Louis concluded, only murmuring now, eyes closing, "I have little interest in money."

Lestat looked at Louis’ calm face. Only his fledgling had the ability to make his pulse race with a few words; a look; a touch. The night’s oppressive heat held him fast as he struggled to think clearly. The force of his desire shook him, made him feel a wave of vertigo even as he held Louis in the perfect stillness of their embrace. Suddenly it broke from him:

"But you – you were not afraid when I found you," Lestat said, almost doggedly, as though he were losing an argument, "You were not afraid to die."

As soon as he spoke, he wondered why he’d said it. What was provoking him to speak of these things again?

To speak of the danger of the old past, why, everything was dangerous! Lestat thought. Afraid to die! Those nights of heat and madness, knowing with a helpless certainty that he’d lost his sanity to Louis as surely as he’d lost his heart. There could have been no going back he knew this – and how he’d slogged along in his fatal course like a man in a fever dream, who sees his own sense and logic perverted by his sickness, yet obeys its call! Madness, all of it, and a senseless desire for the mortal he wanted beyond anything in his immortal life.

Louis did not open his eyes. Lestat had the vague, voiceless desire to seize him tight, to force out of him the secret – but what secret? He checked himself suddenly. This strange mood had overcome him, brought on by Louis’ talk of the past, and this heat. This wretched suffocating heat. Lestat studied his lover’s face. Somehow, even in the sweet blankness of repose, his mouth had a witchy look; his long white neck, slightly veiled by the blackness of his hair, had the feeling of a secret almost uncovered. Those eyes, were they green or black? He could never tell, somehow.

"When I – found you - you had not yet lost your wealth, though you were afraid of losing it," Lestat hurried on, feeling unable to stop, and praying that Louis would not demand to know why he was bringing any of this up, "But you were not afraid of dying…"

It was as if he had just discovered the perplexity of this incongruity and could not help but remark upon it. Had he learned nothing from the blunderings of all those years? They were but blunderings in the dark.

But Louis had opened his eyes; had fixed his eyes upon him. His jumbled thoughts came to a halt.

"No, Lestat," he said. "No."

Lestat said nothing, for the simple reason that he was unable to.

Louis sighed.

"When you found me, I was in search of that – that very fear. Things had dissolved almost completely on my estate…Paul’s madness, everything – it had destroyed the semblance of order in all our lives. I no longer knew if Paul had been mad – or had it been me, instead, all along? The plantation ran itself, and through the cloud of my alcoholic oblivion I had the certainty that it would not continue long in such a way, without its figurehead of authority I represented. Before, it had been so important always to appear in control – semblance was more important than fact. Gradually, semblance replaced fact."

Louis paused with his eyes downcast, pursing his lips together with a slight pressure. Lestat still did not trust himself to speak. Outside, the leaves of the giant magnolia slid against each other in a stirring movement, producing a hissing noise.

"Losing it would have been a welcome pain, a return to feeling," Louis said. "Even concern for the petty insecurities of my family’s position. But I had busied myself with wallowing in a much larger mire of self-interest – the egotistical pity that I told myself was suicidal apathy."

He looked at Lestat suddenly. "When you found me," he said, "I thought I wanted to die."

"Did you?" he could only whisper.

"I only thought I did." Then, looking up at him with the ghost of an ironic smile: "I was in love with the sordid yet rather grand tragedy my death would make. And at the hand of a brigand or a criminal! What romance!"

One of Louis’ long-fingered hands caught and tangled in Lestat’s hair at the back of his neck; he felt a shiver, against which his whole body reverberated, resisting. The green eyes were watching him, drawing him in again. Yet there was something, something, towards which he had been struggling. The movement of Louis’ fingers in his hair, fingernails scraping the nape of his neck, was soothing him back into drowsiness, yet the slight pain was exciting him. He wanted to make love again, now with his eyes closed; he wanted –

He felt Louis’ cool breath on his face. He opened his eyes.

"Did you feel fear again when I attacked you, when you saw me?" he demanded.

"Yes," Louis’ voice was honey again, smoothing his resistance away. His acquiescence was like a caress as he moved against Lestat.

"No!" Lestat cried quickly, surprising them both with the vehemence of it. Louis was measuring him with a look. He had barely moved at all, yet Lestat felt him recoil. He blundered on ahead: "I saw your face, your eyes then - ! And you say I seduced you!" It sounded like a plea.

"Lestat, you know it was the pleasure of the hunt; it overwhelmed you. You found yourself seduced by my fear, and I could do nothing - "

"You know you did," Lestat whispered, baffled even as he spoke by the accusatory sound of his own voice. "You know you had me completely. You know the instant! – How I seized you, pulled you into the alleyway, fully intending to – "

He broke off. What had he been saying? He groped for his purpose. Louis continued to watch him, unmoving. His hands were still. Lestat rushed on:

"You had me completely! You looked up at me through those long eyelashes and said Exscusez-moi, my good Monsieur, I am quite drunk, you stumbled forward into my arms - !"

Lestat stopped. He forced himself to close his eyes. The heat of the little room was growing suddenly unbearable. What spell, what trick had he succumbed to, what dream of heat and gaslighted streets had covered his eyes then, to make a drunken, foolish mortal to seem so precious, so exotic and rare? He was no more able to account for his feelings for Louis now, after centuries of darkness, than he had been in the silent, paralyzing second their bodies connected in that filthy little alleyway. The love that had grown out of his initial desire for Louis controlled him as surely as his obsessive lust ever had. Like this awful heat, it stole through his limbs, claimed his heart, and drained him of resistance. Was there no room for regret?

Lestat endeavored to master himself before looking at Louis again – tried; and failed.

When Lestat opened his eyes, he immediately felt himself getting lost again. Louis’ dark gaze enveloped him. They regarded each other for a long moment, almost like adversaries. Then Louis looked downwards suddenly, his dark fringe of eyelashes lightly brushing his cheek.

"Lestat…" Louis began. The movement of his mouth was so sensual as Lestat studied it that he had to force himself to listen clearly. "God knows what I was thinking at that moment I saw you. Of course I wanted you somehow – but how could I have known, how could I - "

"You knew," Lestat whispered. "You knew. My heart stopped because you saw me."

He could hear his own heart racing at that very moment. Why him? Lestat wondered hopelessly. Louis seemed forever a creature beyond his ken. His fledgling raised his brilliant gaze to him. He seemed about to tremble.

"I knew," Louis whispered. "Yes, I knew."

Lestat’s breath caught in his throat; he forced himself to take it in. He felt weak as he reached and pulled Louis to him, but as their lips touched he felt again that electric shock that passed between them, and he felt his strength return like a flood.

The cool, beguiling sweetness of Louis’ mouth captured him, intoxicating him, and he surrendered himself to it without reserve. Louis pressed the silkily cool length of his body against his lover in a silent promise as Lestat kissed his lips again, his cheeks and eyelids.

"Yes," he whispered again.

Outdoors, in the hour before dawn, the oppressive night’s wet air, heavy with moisture, thickened and began to resolve itself into rain. A slow curtain of wetness coated everything under its spreading coolness. Water whispered and hissed between the leaves of the magnolia, dampening its scent, water spread itself out under the warm orange glow of the streetlamp, collecting in hollows and running in increasing eddies. Rain fell lightly, and then heavily, as the sky began to lighten.



End.