Watch the Bed Burn. Lestat x Louis. Interview with the Vampire. Explicit. 21k words.
It’s the feeling of it, or - - no.
Not the feeling, not right away, not first.
The crackle of the record, the swell of the strings, the purr of her treacly voice, oozing through the humid air to drip down the sides of his skull, and then - - more. His unmistakable hand on the piano keys, the violin’s bow, the vibraphone’s mallet. A century of skill in the flick of a wrist and the press of a finger, an artistry born from decades of practice that eclipsed the fleeting fancy of any mortal existence. His words, his voice, his baritone the wind beneath her mezzo-soprano, carrying her across those climbing catguts to ricochet off his ear drums, and it’s that that stirs the tempest of Louis’ long-forgotten temper.
Weather to waves that push the sunken seas to stir, build, crash against the unmoving shore of his head, and it was Claudia – no, Grace – who had whiled away the afternoons of their childhood with books of Greece and its Apollo, it’s Aphrodite, but it’s Louis who feels himself suddenly Poseidon, the earth shaking beneath his feet as he yanks the record free of its needle to stride out into the hungry dark. Louis – two legs and a leading hand on the hard edge of that vinyl – who would render his body a trident as he cuts a path through the night, crossing corners, streets, traffic (and oh, are the cars different from when he last went out? In shape and sound and color? He’s been trying to hunt more, he has, but time ever blurs without - - fuck) only to plunge into the Mississippi, and as the water slides around his body, he thinks ain’t that something?
His suddenly soaked shirt and the pungent putrefaction that fills his mouth, his form cutting, pushing, penetrating. The water, cold despite the hot breath of the New Orleans fall, cascading over him and under him, the silt rising to find him as the rot teases his lips, his nostrils, his damned and uncloseable eyes, because for once he’s single-minded, single-tasked. Lestat can play siren tonight, but Louis won’t play sailor for him – knows nothing but that as he battles the current to shove the record inside his waterlogged shirt.
He won’t fumble his way to the rocks for a song and a piece of ass only to be swallowed whole, for he felt himself Poseidon for a moment in his house, a moment out of it, didn’t he? Still feels him in his bones, and if he’s him (and let him be, God. Let him be that instead of the siren’s mark, let him be that instead of himself), he needs Demeter’s ankle in his hand, his Amphitrite back beneath him. Needs to control the roaring sea inside him so he stands a chance of controlling himself at all, and the thought has his legs kicking and his arms scooping, the water billowing around him, and like this it’s almost something close to fly––
He knows what that had felt like.
Lets the air escape him like it had that night, but it ain’t smoke and dust and sky that would choke him on the inhale, not now. Now it’s the viscid sawdust and the silt and the sewage of his hometown’s river, and the feeling, the familiarity, it buoys him. Lets him kick off the cloak of despondency and feel his way back into this odyssey, record tight against his chest as his arms work to pull him through the water, and he feels it then too. The anticipation, the dread, the heat, because he knows that at the end of this night (the end of every night to come), there can be and is only Lestat
The obligatory 1.06 fic. Louis brings Lestat home. He doesn't feel good about it.
