SPOILERS: IWTV and TVL

DISCLAIMER: this is non-profit fanfiction, not intended to intrude on the rights of Ann Rice & Co.

This is just a little "slice of life", as it were (slice of death? slice of immortality? Bygones.) Basically it's Lestat rumintating on his evolving relationship with your friend and mine, the lovely Louis de Pointe du Lac. It has absolutely no point, I was just hoping someone might get a kick out of it.

Oh, and the scene describing the plantation fire is taken from the movie IWTV and not the book (I like the book better...however I also like Louis collapsing into Lestat's arms in a sea of flames. Call me a romantic.)

Comments would be appreciated!

Of course I was wild about Shakespeare. And I was a masterfull Shakesperian actor, I don't mind admitting, playing his lovers, his heros and villains with such fire that passing ladies would swoon as I shouted lines in the streets and alleys near the theater. Even Louis had to admire my passion a bit, although he favored the Opera to Shakespeare and when it came to the Bard himself preffered the sonnets to the plays. But he could not help but be drawn in, when I was in one of my moods: and how Claudia delighted then, as we recited and acted out whole scenes for her amusement. Louis' melancholy grace and striking physique made up for his lack of any stage prescence or flair for the dramatic. It was always thrilling to watch him act, to respond to his heartfelt, if uninspired, interpretations. He was always the confidant, the side-kick. He played quite a good Horatio, touching me with his earnestness. But I outshone him always as Ceasar, Romeo, Macbeth . . . although after a six-month run of Hamlet at one of the great theaters he astonished Claudia and I both by proving himself quite an able Prince of Denmark. He captured, with his charecteristic noble fatalism and piercing indecisive despair, the very essence of that famed Dane. My Louis. These things he neglected to mention in his memoirs.

Ours was a secret intimacy, even to ourselves, but in the lines of his misguided narrative Louis could not help but inadvertantly allude to it. Few words, if any, of affection were ever spoken between us, nor can I recall a single embrace or warm gesture — and yet it was there, all the same, when our eyes met with understanding over Claudia's head of tousled gold, or when we walked down past the old riverfront taverns, Louis with his arm drawn through mine and his eyes on my face, only vaguely attentive to my conversation. He would fall to staring at me, at times, losing all sense of place in his open and incredulous appraisal, until I wanted to shake him or pull him into my arms. But always at these times I would shout or laugh at him to rouse him, pulling my cape from its corner and fleeing the apartment which he haunted like a phantom. Too much had already passed between us by the time of Claudia's arrival for us to speak of it: she served as a welcome distraction, a release for the intensity of our emotion, and when I loved them both with a hot, jealous selfishness it was Claudia whom I could scoop into my arms and kiss, and confess myself her slave, while Louis I scowled at from afar.

The night he burned down the Pointe du lac Plantation I found him near dawn, stumbling in a sea of flames, his eyes mad as he cursed me in a hoarse voice. And as he collapsed, the fire licking hungrily at his sleeves and hair, I gathered him up, nearly insane with fury and with terror for him. Of course this had subsided to dull anger by the time he woke the next night to my accusing glare, anger and a secret and enourmous relief that he hadn't destroyed himself in the fire. But in the hour or so I waited before morning, lying beside his unconscious body in the silent crypt, my fingers trembled as I laid them upon his soot-streaked face, and I cursed myself for my dependance upon such a self-destructive and helpless creature even as I smothed his singed collar and his fine dark hair.

So when we reunited after my century under the earth there was nothing for me to do but embrace him as I had never done. It was a relief, finally, to feel his arms around me, his lips cool against my cheek, a silent affirmation of what he had denied even to himself all those years ago. We fell into a pattern of intimacy that now seems natural to us both: I yield to my compuncture to embrace or touch him freely, as I did with Claudia, and he responds in the same way. When we quarrel now it is never for very long: he knows I find him too irresistable to shun him with any measure of success — and when insults and accusations arise like remnants from an unforgiven past they are softened by the acknowledgment of the love between us. He has other friends, I suppose, but it is for my company he lives for, as dependant in his fascination with me as he was in the old days, yet without the old need to push me away. I own him now completely — and, selfish creature that I am, I'm glad of it, although it would be much better for Louis, I think, were he not so infatuated. I shudder to think what would become of him if I ever lost interest, although I recognize that as an impossibility. One does not simply "lose interest" in what is an exquisite personification of a lifetime of one's existence.

Armand once asked me if I did not find Louis much changed from how he was before the debacle with the Theater of the Vampires. Louis, Armand confessed, had never really seemed to recover: there was nothing he, Armand, could do. Armand seemed genuienly vexed by this, which was unlike him. I think he felt that he had misjudged the fragility of Louis' seemingly indestructable spirit, and, unwittingly, had shattered it beyond hope of recovery in his desperate attempts to win him over. He and Louis have since renewed their relationship, and with a respectable amount of affection, but there is no hint of the closeness I assume they must have once felt for each other. I acknowledged the change: for indeed, the torment and the morbid fascination I used to see in Louis' eyes when he gazed on me or on Claudia is gone, as is the urgent and touching soulfullness of his questions, the painfull depths of his disbeliefs. But this change has brought me his acceptance of the love he feels for me, and has given him the ability to comfort me as no other being could, where before he could only demand, question, and deny.