I don't know what to call this, but I wrote something small about Nicolas and Lestat because I'm emotional over them...
He could not say when it had changed, when he had begun to look upon his dearest friend with something heavier than the easy warmth of friendship. Perhaps it had been the fireplace, the way the amber light pulled at the hollows of Nicolas’s face and gilded the sharp angles of his features. Perhaps it was the music, the bow drawing across the strings as Nicolas played only to him, filling the cold Paris room with a melody so achingly human it made Lestat’s chest feel too small to hold what was inside. Or it was simply the moment Nicolas lowered his violin and looked at him.
That look. Still and knowing, as though he had already read every secret Lestat had not yet admitted to himself.
Something in the air shifted irrevocably, and Lestat found he could hardly breathe.
His heart strained toward Nicolas with a want that was almost violent in its tenderness. To press his hand to that beautiful face, to trace every line of it, to bring his mouth against his and learn the taste of him entirely. He needed Nicolas. He had always needed him, in the quiet, inevitable way he needed warmth in the depths of winter.
This was no longer quiet. This was a hunger that brooked no half measures. He wanted Nicolas wholly, completely, every breath and shadow of him pressed close until the rest of the world dissolved into nothing.
“Are you alright?” Nicolas asked, reaching idly for his glass of wine.
The wine sloshed dangerously close to the rim before he tipped it to his mouth, and a few dark droplets escaped, tracing slow paths down his chin.
Lestat went very still.
He wanted to lean forward. He wanted to– he shook the thought loose before it could fully form, dragging his gaze away to the fireplace.
“Yes,” he answered. “Why do you ask, mon cher?”
“I don’t know.” Nicolas turned his glass lazily between his fingers, studying it with the mild, ironic attention he gave to most things. “Something is different about you.” A pause. “Something good.”
He smiled.
Lestat caught it at the very edge of his vision and did not dare look directly at it. It hollowed him out, that smile, rare as it was, and all the more devastating. It was the one thing in all of Paris he had found himself seeking again from the very moment they’d arrived.
“I am quite alright, Nicki.” Lestat said, still facing the fire, but eyes searching for something else.
“You know,” Nicolas began, and then stopped, as though he was reconsidering whether the thought deserved the effort. He tried again. “Even though we have very little here.” He gestured vaguely at the room they shared, with its peeling plaster and its one good candle. “I find I am glad to have come. With you, specifically.”
The words were slurred at the edges, softened by the wine into something more honest than Nicolas typically permitted himself in the daylight hours.
“We came on a whim.” He laughed a little at that, a short, self-depricating sound. “Two absolute fools. But we’ll make something of it. I believe that.” His dark eyes caught the firelight. “I genuinely believe that.”
And then his hand found Lestat’s thigh.
It was not a dramatic gesture. It was easy, absent almost, but Lestat’s breath left him entirely.
You impossible man, he thought, but said nothing.
“Yes.” He managed at last, turning to look at Nicolas fully. To stop denying himself even that small mercy. Up close, in the low amber light, Nicolas was harrowing in the quiet way he had always been. “So am I.” Lestat paused. “I wouldn’t want this with anyone else.”
He brought his hand down over Nicolas’s where it rested on his leg, covering it fully, and held his gaze a beat longer than he should have. A beat longer than friendship asked for. He did not look away, and Nicolas did not either, and for a moment, the fire was the only sound in the world.
Nicolas’s smile widened slowly, that unguarded smile that Lestat had catalogued without meaning to. His face was flushed, cheeks touched with rose from the wine. Lestat chose to believe, needed to believe, it was not wine alone.
He leaned in, and pressed a kiss to Nicolas’s cheek, but was met instead with something he had not allowed himself to imagine.
Nicolas turned his head.
Deliberately. The way he did everything when he had made up his mind and was done pretending otherwise.
Their mouths met, and the breath went out of Lestat entirely. Nicolas kissed him with the same quiet intensity that Lestat had been suffering under since the night began. All of it culminating now in something so simple and so complete that Lestat could not for a moment process that it was real.
He froze.
One heartbeat. Two.
Bu-bump. Bu-bump.
Then he leaned in, and kissed him back, and brought both hands up to cradle Nicolas’s face as though he were something that might disappear if held too carelessly. He needed the warmth of him beneath his palms. Needed the proof of it, the solid, undeniable reality that Nicolas de Lenfent, was choosing this. After spending so long denying himself the one thing he had always thought of when he was alone, he could not yet fully trust it was not just another fantasy. That Nicolas would not dissolve back into his chair and resume talking about music and leave Lestat stranded in the ruins of his own wanting.
But then Nicolas pressed his palm flat against Lestat’s chest.
His fingers curled slowly into the fabric of his shirt, gathering it in his fist. Not pushing him, but holding on. Lestat understood then, with a certainty that settled deep and warm in his bones, that Nicolas was searching for the very same thing. The same anchor. The same proof.
When Lestat pulled away, he did slowly, eyes closed as though he could hold the moment a little longer in the darkness behind them. As though opening his eyes would let it become the past. When his lashes finally parted, he found Nicolas watching him.
Those dark, earthly eyes were bright with tears.
“Oh, no, I didn’t–” Lestat moved instinctively, the old familiar shame rising fast, the impulse to apologize for his own wanting. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to–”
But Nicolas had not let go of his shirt.
His fist was still curled in the fabric, still holding on, and Lestat’s hammering heart slowed by degrees as that fact reached him.
“What is it, Nicki?” He asked more gently. “Tell me.”
Nicolas opened his mouth, closed it. His jaw worked against the emotion for a moment before he could speak. “When morning comes,” he spoke at last, his voice rough and fractured, “this will simply be a night of too much wine. That is what we will tell ourselves. That is what it will become.” A tear broke and traced the line of his cheek. “But it isn’t the wine. My words may be clumsy and my tongue slow, but I am thinking more clearly than I have in years.” He let out a sound that was almost a laugh, almost a sob. “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.”
“No.” Lestat said quietly, but with absolute conviction. He brought his fingers beneath Nicolas’s chin and tilted his face upward until there was nowhere left to look but at each other. The tears had done nothing, not one thing, to diminish him. If anything, Nicolas undone was more devastating than being composed, all careful armor set aside. Lestat found he could not look at him and think of anything in the world more worthy of looking at. “Don’t apologize. And it will not go away with the morning light. I won’t allow it.” He pressed his free hand over Nicolas’s where it still clutched his shirt, and pushed their joined hands flat against his chest, over his heart. Let him feel it. “I breathe for you, Nicki. Every wretched day. That is not the wine speaking, that is simply the truth, and I am tired of carrying it alone.”
“Lestat, you don’t have to–”
“Nicolas.” His voice cracked on the name. “I love you.”
The words fell into the quiet room like stones into still water, and he watched Nicolas go very still.
“I have loved you,” Lestat continued because there was nothing left to protect now, “for longer than I can bring myself to say aloud without feeling the full absurdity of having kept it so long. I did not know if you felt the same. I told myself it did not matter, that I would spend my whole life at your side and call it friendship if that was all you could give me, and count myself fortunate. That to see your face each morning would be enough.” He exhaled slowly. “It would have been enough.”
Nicolas’s tears fell faster now. He leaned forward, closing the last small distance between them, and pressed his forehead to Lestat’s. Their joined hands drew closer, until he could bow his head and bring his lips to the back of Lestat’s hand, a gesture so quiet and so tender it nearly undid him entirely.
“I love you too.” Nicolas said against his skin. “I love you so.”
For a long moment neither of them moved. The fire burned lower, the room darker and warmer for it, and outside Paris went on entirely indifferent to the fact that something irreversible had just happened.
Then, slowly, they both smiled. Tear stricken and helpless and wholly unable to stop.
“Now I know we’ll make it.” Nicolas said softly, something loosening in his voice, years of tension releasing in a single exhaled breath. “If we have each other…well.” He glanced up at Lestat. “That will simply have to be enough, won’t it.”
Lestat answered him the only way that seemed equal to the moment. He leaned in and kissed him again, gently, unhurried, with all the time in the world because now they had it.
