Chapter Text
“After the shit you gave me about the interview, you want to do what?” Louis hears himself say.
Lestat is sitting on his expensive sofa in his expensive hotel after his first concert. Everything a pristine white. Even the robe Lestat is in. Louis hates this place. It’s not Lestat. This sterile wasteland.
“The interview,” Lestat whispers. He can barely say it. Once Daniel’s book had been released, that was the end of their reunion. Their nightly texts. Their sweet and tentative kisses. Lestat had called him one night and asked if Louis had really given the interview. When Louis had said yes, Lestat had hung up and disappeared for an entire year.
Louis had next seen Lestat on YouTube when the Vampire Lestat had dropped his hit single.
After that, Lestat said they could meet. Talk. But now that Louis is finally here, it’s been mostly arguing.
“I don’t hear from you for a whole year because of the damn interview, and you want to go air all our history on television? I know why Daniel agreed, what the hell do you get out of it?”
Lestat looks up from the sofa where he looks impossibly small. Louis knows it’s an illusion. Lestat is one of the most powerful vampires on Earth.
“I thought I might tell my story,” Lestat says simply. Louis hears ‘my side of the story.’
“Your story?” Louis says. “I lied once, and it was corrected in a later chapter.”
“A lie on every page,” Lestat snarls. He’s still sitting, shoulders hunched. He looks like a cornered animal. “Where were our moonlit strolls? Our skits for Claudia? The work I put into the Azalea?”
“I said you performed when Jelly Roll left—”
“A single sentence,” Lestat says, breathless with hurt. “I wrote twenty songs in two weeks for your customers’ pleasure.”
“With her,” Louis says, and Lestat bares his teeth.
“I wasn’t sleeping with her yet,” Lestat says.
“So that makes it okay?”
Lestat looks back down. “I didn’t say that. I’m only saying—”
“What,” Louis asks. “Did you want a chapter about the time the painters cancelled, and you and I had to do the main floor before opening night? A footnote about us hanging the sign and falling off the ladder?”
“Yes,” Lestat whispers.
“That’s not the story, Lestat, that’s just — the day to day. Did you want me to include us shopping for shoes or trying to wash blood out of the linens?”
Bloody tears gather in the corners of Lestat’s eyes. “Yes.”
“That it? Anything else you needed to not ghost me for a year?”
“Ghost you.” Lestat gives a terrible laugh. He’s not even looking at Louis anymore. Ghosting him while in the same room.
A year, and this is where they are. A century, and they’re still at odds. Louis feels the fight drain out of him. This isn’t how it should be. They’d been — healing. And then the book dropped.
“For the first time in my life,” Lestat says slowly, “I was seen.”
Louis recognizes the words, of course he does. That doesn’t mean he has any idea what to do with them or why Lestat is quoting Louis’s description of the night he was turned.
“I wasn’t lying, if that’s what you mean,” Louis tries.
A short, miserable laugh. It seems to fill the air, distorting it. Lestat won’t look at him. Louis certainly isn’t feeling seen tonight.
“Do you know something, Louis?” Lestat says. “I do not think I have once felt this way in my entire life. I had thought — we had many good years together. Perhaps he sees me for what I am. Perhaps he loves me for all my virtues and vices. I know I am to blame for the way it fell apart, but after all this time, I am starting to think — perhaps he never saw me at all.”
“That’s not tr—”
“I am not in your book. That is a fairytale monster you described.”
“Only part of it—”
“I used to think that all I wanted was for you to love me,” Lestat says, wiping his eyes as though that will stop the blood from falling. There’s a strange energy coming off him. A faint power that seems to be hovering just out of sight. Wait. What’s happening?
Louis is so caught up with the sense he’s getting from Lestat that he doesn’t realize that Lestat has paused as though giving Louis the opportunity to assure him.
“Listen,” Louis says, a beat too late.
Not that it matters, Lestat doesn’t even seem to hear him. The air around him seems to shake now.
“But now all I want is to be seen,” Lestat says. He finally looks up, locking eyes with Louis as the paint starts to peel from the walls. The clock above the gas fireplace crashes to the floor. Louis and Lestat don’t look away from each other. Louis doesn’t think Lestat even notices.
“Lestat—”
“I wish that you could see who I am, Louis,” Lestat says, and the energy suddenly condenses to a laser point, aiming at Louis.
“What,” Louis says, but his voice is cut off. He looks back at Lestat, whose face distorts with sudden alarm.
“Louis.”
Blinding light. Louis cries out, but the sound never reaches his ears. Wind, rushing, Louis can’t breathe until—
He lands on the cold ground, stone scraping under his palms.
Gone is the expensive hotel suite. Gone is even the city, because it’s dark where Louis is. No, he realizes, looking around, not dark, just — candlelit. It’s still a city, though not one Louis knows. European, Louis realizes. All the buildings have that vaguely Parisian air that—
Oh no.
Despite the fact that Louis is lying in the middle of the cobblestone street, no one has taken much notice. The people on the street pass around him like an island in a river of Parisians. Because that’s what they are.
That’s where he is.
Paris.