4/21/03

Disclaimers: The characters in this spec belong to Anne Rice and I cannot take credit for their creation, only for the words I’ve written surrounding them.

Spoilers: IWTV and TVL.

I remember laughing that night, laughter like we hadn’t shared since… Well, ever, really.

He brought me to his room a few hours before we needed to leave for the concert, brought me in and showed me all the things he’d discovered, all the shiny new toys of the twentieth century that he found so fascinating. I remember his kisses that night, kisses that were feverish with excitement, warm from the blood that he’d consumed earlier.

His mortals had been hidden away in a back room when I’d arrived, warming up their instruments and their voices, readying themselves for the great moment that lay only a few hours in the future.

He pulled me into the room that was his and his alone, the room in which he’d plastered the walls with various posters, where he had a stereo that could blast anything from the Rolling Stones to Bach, where he had shelves of books, books that he’d never gotten to read and books that he’d always longed to read; where he had a bed that he’d never slept in.

We sat on his bed, speaking of all the books on his shelves, of the books that he’d envied me so long ago… It seemed as though we would never speak of the only two books that mattered, the ones that had changed everything. But then, after a very quiet moment, when he had ceased his chatter about the rock music that he loved so dearly, he stood from my side and went to the bookshelf, removing a book and handing it to me.

“What did you think?”

He wouldn’t make eye contact with me; his body was hardly opened towards mine at all… His hands were at his sides clasping at the pockets of his tight denim jeans nervously.

I held the book loosely—it wasn’t the book itself that mattered, but the secrets within it, the history that could have changed everything.

“Lestat…”

He looked at me quickly, his eyes doing more than betraying his inner fear—fear that I hadn’t forgiven him, that I still somehow held it all against him… That the knife that had once done so much damage still lie in wait within my arsenal.

“It was all there, everything… Somehow it all seemed so much less than my imagination could come up with.” I had smiled softly. “You cannot even begin to know what I used to dream up, where I guessed you’d come from and who you were.”

“Louis, I—“

I’d taken his hand, pulling him close to me. “But we cannot go back and change it all, we cannot go and undo all that we did, all of the ways we hurt each other.” I laughed softly, pulling him down onto the bed next to me. “Don’t look so contrite, Lestat!” I leaned in and kissed him softly. “I thought you were dead. I thought I would never see you again… I would have taken anything during those years that would have shown me you were alive, even the greatest of our battles. When I saw your face, saw it on the wall of a record store, no less! You don’t know, you can’t imagine… To see you there, with that audacious look, that look you would give me when you wanted to do something particularly horrible to some unsuspecting mortal…”

Lestat had laughed, a nervous laugh that slowly relieved itself of its tension. “I didn’t know what had happened to you,” he said it slowly, his fingers twining themselves into mine. “Armand told me that they’d killed you, that you had died after Claudia. I didn’t want to… I didn’t care about anything after that, after he threw me from that tower.”

I leaned in and kissed him without warning, pushing him back on the bed with a muffled laugh. I was on him, touching his body with every part of mine, touching him in ways I’d only dreamt of during hot Louisiana nights when we’d glare at each other—love disguised as hatred. My tongue slipped into his mouth, just enjoying the <i>feel</i> of him—we don’t feel passion as mortals feel passion. The touching of my mouth to his only made me want the blood that I could hear pounding through his body—the loudest sound I’d ever heard. Mortals think it's a veil that comes down between a vampire and his maker, but really it's a wall of sound. The sound of the shared blood, the roaring of it, drowning out our thoughts from one another for eternity. I wanted to have him in a way I hadn’t since my making, to take the blood from him in a rush and to have it taken back.

He was the one that broke the kiss. I want to have that down on record.

“You forgive me, then?”

I pressed my lips to his throat, feeling his body tense under mine, feeling that vein pulse as his heartbeat become faster. “My darling, there is nothing to forgive.” I think that my voice was rather muffled, yet he wrapped his arms around my back, holding me tightly to him. He didn’t tell me that he loved me then… He didn’t even speak. It wasn’t until I broke the skin with my eye teeth that I knew that he was overcome, that it was all too much at once, and that he prayed that I would not look up and see his tears.

His blood rushed into my mouth in a hot blast and I lost myself in him, swallowing his essence slowly so as to make the moment last longer, so as to <i>feel</i> him as long as was possible, to retain some semblance of control with the situation.

Yet when he pressed his mouth to my own skin, breaking the skin and washing a pleasure over me that I had never known, I could not control my longing. It was almost violent, our blood-taking, the passion with which we came back to each other that night.

I remember sleeping beside him later, a light mortal sleep curled against his side with one of his arms around me and the other curled in my hair. It was comfortable, laying in his arms after so long, the soft sounds of his mortals in the other room and the even softer sound of his gentle breathing near my ear.

The sound of the door opening woke me with a start. I was under the coverlet, my head cradled in Lestat’s chest.

“Lestat, man—“

I peered over the blanket in slight alarm, striking silence into the mortal Lestat called Larry, his eyes growing wide.

Lestat shifted, opening his eyes to slits, looking first to me and the opening them completely to look at Larry. “Did you want something?”

Larry opened his mouth again to speak, but he couldn’t make the sound come out.

The tension broke when I laughed, startling both Larry and Lestat. I sat up in the bed, smiling broadly and extending my hand. “Hello, Larry.”

Larry, for his part, didn’t show as much fear as I knew he felt at seeing my fangs (although he seemed quite relieved to see that I was dressed), and tentatively put out his hand to clasp mine.

“You aren’t…?”

Lestat nodded, his own mouth breaking out into a smile, calming his mortal friend immensely. “Yes, Larry. This is Louis.” I remember how much he enjoyed saying that, enjoyed introducing me to his friend, who was suddenly stunned.

After a long moment, Larry nodded. “So… Is he coming to the concert, too?”

“Oh yes, most assuredly.”

“Yeah, so… Okay… Well… If you want us, we’re almost ready to leave and stuff… So whenever you are…”

Lestat nodded, positively beaming with pride.

Larry nodded, quickly closing the door with a mumbled apology.

We were silent for a moment and then I laughed loudly, falling back onto Lestat, positively collapsing into laughter just as he used to do in the old days, an image from television coming into my head—two teenage lovers caught by a parent.

“We’ve been found out!” I managed to say, choking on laughter while Lestat watched with a bemused smile.

He’d kissed my forehead indulgently, holding me tightly to him until I was finally able to stop laughing. “Hush, Louis, they’ll think you’re mad.”

I kissed him back, loving that we could lie like this together and not have anything lying between us, interrupting this peace.

“I do believe they are expecting us, Lestat.”

“Shall we, then?”