Chapter Text
The front door clicked shut behind him.
Lestat stood in the entryway and exhaled slowly, letting the quiet of the house settle around him like something foreign. After the chaos of the morning the lobby, the Lassiter Building, Lily’s Ferrari disappearing into the winter light the stillness felt almost unbearable.
He pressed his back against the door.
Just breathe.
Then he heard footsteps.
Louis came around the corner from the kitchen, phone pressed to his ear, moving with the easy, unhurried confidence of a man entirely comfortable in his own space. He wore gray sweatpants that hung low on his hips and a fitted black long-sleeve shirt that made his shoulders look impossibly broad. His curls were freshly moisturized, defined and soft, falling around his face in dark spirals that caught the afternoon light.
Nothing expensive. Nothing flashy.
And yet somehow Louis looked better than half the people Lestat had spent years photographed beside people who spent thousands trying to manufacture exactly this kind of effortless warmth.
Louis glanced up, saw him, and held up one finger.
“Hold on a second,” he said into the phone.
He covered the mouthpiece and looked at Lestat carefully. Not warmly. Not coldly. The look of a man taking inventory.
“You curled your hair,” Lestat said.
The words came out before he could stop them.
A curious, almost wary look crossed Louis’s face. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Ten years ago.”
Lestat blinked. Right. Apparently he was supposed to know that.
Louis studied him a beat longer, something shifting behind his eyes concern threading through the careful control he was clearly holding onto.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Lestat said immediately. “Fine.”
Louis didn’t look convinced. Not even slightly. He uncovered the phone. “Never mind,” he said into it, voice flat. “He just walked in.”
Then he hung up.
Slowly.
And the second the call ended, something in Louis’s composure cracked open.
“Do you have any idea,” he said, voice low and dangerously controlled, “what you put us through today?”
Lestat opened his mouth.
“Don’t.” Louis pointed at him. “Don’t you dare say fine again.”
He crossed the room, and up close, Lestat could see it the tight set of his jaw, the faint shadows beneath his eyes, the careful way he was holding himself together.
“You walked out of this house at seven-thirty in the morning. No note. No call. Nothing.” His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. “I had state troopers looking for you.”
“Louis—”
“I called hospitals.” He gestured toward the phone on the counter. “I was literally talking to the morgue five minutes ago.”
The word hit the room like a stone dropped in still water.
Morgue.
For a moment Louis didn’t look angry at all. He looked exhausted. Hollowed out by hours of fear that had finally found somewhere to land.
“What kind of man,” Louis said quietly, “leaves his family on Christmas morning without a word?”
“I don’t know!” The words burst out of Lestat before he could shape them into anything more dignified. “I don’t know, Louis. I don’t please. Please stop yelling at me.”
Silence fell between them.
Louis stared, chest rising and falling, the anger draining slowly from his face like color from a wound.
“Where were you?” he asked at last.
“The city.”
“New York City?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Lestat met his eyes. And because he had no armor left, no charm left, nothing left to hide behind, the truth came out raw and unpolished.
“Because that’s where I live.”
Louis went very still.
“This isn’t my house,” Lestat continued, his voice quieter now but no less certain. He gestured around them the crayon drawings, the toys, the soft domestic warmth of everything. “I’m not a father. And Louis—” His voice broke on the name. “You’re not my husband.”
The silence that followed was the worst kind.
Louis’s expression didn’t shatter. It hardened. The sympathy pulled back behind something careful and guarded, the way a person retreats when they’ve heard the same thing one too many times and finally decided to stop being surprised by it.
“It’s not funny,” Louis said quietly. “Not this time.”
“I’m not—”
“I mean it, Lestat.”
Neither of them moved.
The house hummed softly around them. Somewhere upstairs, a child laughed.
Then Lestat remembered.
He shoved his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out the small plastic bicycle bell Lily’s stupid, maddening, inexplicable bicycle bell and began ringing it frantically.
Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
Louis stared at him like a man watching something very beautiful have a complete breakdown.
“What are you—”
“WHAT’S THAT?!”
Claudia came flying into the room at full speed on her brand-new bicycle, dark curls streaming behind her, Christmas pajamas still on, face blazing with joy and territorial energy. She screeched to a halt beside Lestat, nearly taking out his ankle, and snatched the bell from his hand before he could react.
Her eyes went wide.
“I like this.”
Then she stood on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his cheek warm, quick, completely certain of her welcome.
“Thanks, Daddy!”
She was gone again before he could breathe, wheels squeaking against the hardwood as she disappeared around the corner, already shouting for Victor.
The room went quiet.
Louis watched him.
Lestat touched his cheek where she’d kissed him.
“You missed all of it.” Louis’s voice had changed. The sharpness was gone, replaced by something that cut deeper something tired and honest and sad. “The pancakes. The presents.” He paused. “You spent six hours putting that bike together last night.”
Lestat lowered his hand.
“And you didn’t even get to see her face when she opened it.”
Something in Louis’s eyes didn’t accuse. It just hurt. Which was so much worse.
“You missed Christmas, Lestat.”
The words settled into the room like snow soft, quiet, and impossible to ignore.
For the first time all day, Lestat felt ashamed. Not confused, not panicked, not desperate. Just ashamed. Deeply and simply ashamed in a way that had nothing to do with his career or his identity or whatever cosmic joke was being played on him.
He had hurt this man. He could see it plainly.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The words came out quietly. Naturally.
“I’m sorry, mon cœur.”
The endearment surprised even him rising up from somewhere below thought, below performance, below everything he’d built himself into.
Louis looked at him for a long moment.
Then he exhaled. “We’ll talk about this later.” He pointed down the hall. “Go get dressed.”
Lestat looked down at himself.
Yellow cardigan. Pajama pants. Rubber boots.
Fair.
“You’re not wearing that to the Brown party.”
“A party?” Lestat said blankly.
Louis closed his eyes.
“Here we go.”
“No. Absolutely not. I cannot go to a party right now.”
“You love this party.”
“I assure you I do not.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
Louis pinched the bridge of his nose with extraordinary patience. “Fine.” He reached for the phone. “I’ll call my mother. She won’t have to watch the kids tonight.”
Lestat frowned. “Why not?”
Louis turned and gave him a look long, level, and deeply unimpressed that communicated an entire paragraph without a single word.
Because you’ll be here.
“Oh,” Lestat said.
A pause.
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
The corner of Louis’s mouth twitched.
“Thought so.”
Lestat turned and opened the nearest door.
A coat closet.
He closed it.
Opened the next one.
A vacuum cleaner stared back at him.
He closed that too.
“Where,” he said carefully, “is the bathroom?”
Louis stared at him.
“Funny, Lestat.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m laughing on the inside.”
And despite everything despite the morning and the fear and the argument still warm in the air between them Louis smiled. Small. Real. Reluctant.
Lestat filed it away like something precious.
The bathroom was small.
Not penthouse-small, not designer-Italian-fixtures-small just genuinely, unapologetically small. A lived-in bathroom that smelled of lavender and cocoa butter, crowded with Louis’s skin creams and hair products and two toothbrushes in a chipped ceramic cup. Children’s bath toys sat around the rim of the tub. A bottle of bubble bath leaned at a precarious angle on the edge.
Lestat stood before the mirror for a long time.
The man staring back looked exhausted.
Hair disheveled. Eyes bloodshot. The borrowed cardigan hanging from his shoulders like a flag of surrender.
He looked ordinary.
The word landed in his chest like a stone.
For so long he had been something more than ordinary. The Rockstar. The Icon. The Golden Boy. The man whose face appeared on magazine covers, whose name headlined tours, who could walk into any room in the world and own it before he’d said a word.
But this man in the mirror?
He looked like somebody’s husband.
Somebody’s father.
Somebody who forgot to pick up milk.
The anger rose fast and hot irrational, desperate, the only emotion that still felt familiar. He grabbed a bottle of lotion from the sink and hurled it at the towel rack.
It bounced harmlessly into a pile of folded laundry.
Which somehow made it worse.
He gripped the edge of the sink, knuckles pale, breathing hard.
And then without warning, without permission his eyes burned.
Not for the career. Not for the Ferrari. Not for the penthouse or the platinum records or any of it.
But because standing here in this small, warm, lavender-scented bathroom, with the wedding ring on his finger that wouldn’t come off no matter how he twisted it he was beginning to understand something.
Whatever he had lost in this life, it wasn’t small.
That realization frightened him more than anything else had all day.
He turned on the cold tap. Splashed water over his face. Stood there breathing until his hands steadied.
Then he looked at the ring again.
Gold. Simple. Worn smooth at the edges from years of daily life.
He twisted it carefully.
It didn’t move.
The closet was, by any reasonable measure, a crime scene.
Khakis. Dockers. Button-down shirts in safe, sensible colors. A navy sweater. Another navy sweater. Somehow three identical navy sweaters.
Lestat stood before it with the expression of a man identifying a body.
“This fabric,” he said to no one, “is an insult.”
“Daddy?”
He spun around.
Claudia stood in the doorway in her Christmas pajamas, stuffed reindeer tucked under one arm, big brown eyes studying him with the patient curiosity of someone who had seen their father do strange things before but remained open to new evidence.
“What are you doing?”
Lestat gestured at the closet. “Your father apparently dressed himself exclusively from the clearance rack.”
Claudia giggled and the sound caught him completely off guard. It was Louis’s laugh. The shape of it, the warmth of it, unmistakably borrowed from the man down the hall.
Something ached in his chest before he could stop it.
“Daddy’s being weird today,” Claudia announced.
“I agree completely.”
She laughed again, delighted to be agreed with, then spun on her heel. “Daddy’s talking to the clothes!” she announced at full volume to whoever might be listening in the rest of the house.
A moment later Louis appeared in the doorway, Victor balanced on his hip. His curls were tied back now, loose strands framing his face, and Victor was already pointing at Lestat with an expression of profound toddler judgment.
“Dada.”
“I cannot wear these,” Lestat said immediately, gesturing at the closet.
Louis looked at the closet. Looked at Lestat. Looked back at the closet.
And then the laugh came. Real, unguarded, the kind that bent him slightly forward and made Victor start giggling in sympathetic confusion.
“They’re your clothes.”
“They are not.”
“They are.”
“No reasonable version of me purchased Dockers.”
“You bought every single one. On sale. You were very proud of yourself.”
Lestat looked genuinely betrayed.
Louis turned to Victor with a conspiratorial smile. “See, baby? Daddy’s being silly today.”
Victor immediately copied him with the solemnity only toddlers could manage. “Siwwy.”
Louis kissed his cheek and walked away, still laughing, voice drifting back down the hallway. “Try the navy sweater!”
A French curse echoed through the house.
The Brown house looked like Christmas had made a series of increasingly bold decisions and refused to apologize for any of them.
Lights covered every surface. Plastic reindeer stood at attention across the snow-covered lawn. An inflatable Santa waved frantically in the wind above the garage. A full nativity scene glowed from one corner of the yard, flanked on both sides by what appeared to be fiber-optic candy canes.
Lestat stood on the sidewalk and stared.
Louis adjusted the casserole dish in his arms. “Don’t.”
“They have enough electricity here,” Lestat said slowly, “to power Belgium.”
“They’re nice people.”
“They’re clearly unhinged.”
Louis rang the doorbell.
The door burst open.
Antoinette Brown stood in the frame wearing a red dress that was having a serious conversation with the laws of physics. Her smile was enormous. Her energy was enormous. Everything about her was enormous and unapologetic and immediately overwhelming.
“LOUIS! LESTAT!”
Her voice carried through the entire house like a joyful natural disaster.
She turned back toward the packed living room, one hand raised like she was conducting an orchestra.
“Everybody! They’re here!”
A roar erupted from inside fifty voices, warm and overlapping, glasses raised, faces turning toward the door.
Lestat peered in.
His soul quietly left his body.
Louis pressed a hand briefly to his back light, automatic, the touch of someone who had steadied this particular person through this particular experience many times before.
“Try not to embarrass me,” he murmured.
Lestat squared his shoulders.
“No promises.”
And together, they stepped inside.
Antoinette took Lestat’s arm the moment he stepped through the door, steering him smoothly away from Louis like she’d been practicing the move.
“Like the dress?” she asked, her voice dropping just enough to be suggestive. As she pushed up her boobs.
Lestat glanced at it. “It’s lovely.” Clearly disinterested.
She smiled, satisfied and slow. “I thought I saw you notice it at the kids’ recital.”
Lestat shot her a confused look when he has absolutely no memory of the event being referenced and no safe way to admit it then gently extracted his arm and moved into the party, scanning the room for Louis leaving a pouting Antoinette.
The Brown house was loud and warm and completely alive.
Christmas music drifted through the rooms beneath layers of conversation and laughter. Guests moved in clusters eggnog in hand, cheeks flushed, voices overlapping in the easy, comfortable way of people who had known each other long enough to stop performing. The Browns’ kids tore through the living room at intervals, brandishing new toys, completely indifferent to the adults stepping around them.
Nobody was wearing anything imported from Europe.
Nobody was eating anything that was fancy enough to pronounce.
And everyone without apparent effort was having an extraordinary time.
Everyone except Lestat.
He stood near the far wall between Armand and a cluster of men he was rapidly categorizing as The Guys, nursing a drink he didn’t recognize while Nick Carelli talked directly into his face with the focused energy of a man who had been waiting all evening for this specific conversation.
Nick was a walking advertisement for sensible casualwear. Dockers. A holiday sweater that had been washed too many times. The expression of a man who considered the New Jersey Nets a legitimate topic of passion.
“Did you see Van Horn last night?” Nick said, gesturing with his eggnog. “This kid is going to single-handedly save basketball in the state of New Jersey.”
Lestat stared at him. “The Nets?” He couldn’t stop himself. “You’re kidding, right.”
Nick looked at him like he’d suggested the earth was flat.
“Well,” Lestat said, recovering with visible effort, “they’re certainly… due.”
Nick nodded, apparently satisfied, and launched back into his analysis.
Lestat took a long sip of his drink.
Before he could surface for air, Bill Kramer materialized at his elbow. Bill was a large man carrying a plate loaded with what appeared to be an architectural achievement in fried chicken wings. He tugged at Lestat’s sleeve with the casualness of old friendship.
“So tomorrow’s the big day, Les.”
Lestat blinked. “Okay. Why?”
“Triple bypass.” Bill said it the way someone might say car wash. “Going under the knife. I told you, didn’t I?”
Lestat looked at the plate. Then at Bill. Then back at the plate.
“Triple bypass,” he repeated carefully. “And you’re eating… all of that?”
Bill waved a wing. “I figure I’m going in for a cleaning tomorrow. Might as well load up on the fried stuff tonight.”
Armand leaned in from Lestat’s other side, drink raised. “Good thinking, Bill. Have another.” Then, dropping his voice to a murmur only Lestat could catch “He’ll be lucky if he lives through the night.”
Lestat stared straight ahead.
Nick had produced a packet of Dutch Masters cigars from somewhere in the depths of his Dockers and was holding them out with the generous enthusiasm of a man presenting fine wine.
Lestat nodded politely.
That was apparently all the encouragement required. Nick pressed a cigar into his hand, produced a lighter with practiced speed, and soon both men were surrounded by a small cloud of Dutch Masters smoke. Nick smiled at him through it, deeply contented, as if this were the natural culmination of a perfect evening.
Lestat took a dutiful puff.
Nodded back.
It was an effort.
Antoinette reappeared.
She moved through the party with a tray of mushroom puffs and the deliberate ease of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and had no intention of stopping.
“Finger food?” She held the tray toward Lestat with a smile that suggested the question meant something slightly different than it appeared.
“I don’t think so, thank you,” he said, the words coming out more harsh than intended.
Antoinette tilted her head. “Come on. As soon as I put them down, you’re gonna grab a couple anyway. You always do.”
Lestat said nothing.
She lifted one of the puffs and held it toward his mouth with a slow, deliberate movement, as if feeding a reluctant but ultimately cooperative animal.
“Let me. They’ll melt in your mouth.”
Something in Lestat’s expression shifted the particular helplessness of a man who had lost control of the situation somewhere three steps back and couldn’t identify exactly where. He opened his mouth.
She pressed the puff inside.
“Good?”
If freezer burn were a facial expression, this would be it.
“They’re great,” Lestat said, smiling with enormous effort. “Thank you.”
Antoinette licked her fingers. Slowly. Then handed him the entire tray with a satisfied smile that carried multiple implications.
“Mushroom puffs aren’t the only thing I do well.”
She took a look at him up in down.
Lestat looked at the tray in his hands. Then at her.
“Well,” he said pleasantly, “whatever it is you do well do it. Somewhere else. Excuse me.”
He handed the tray back without waiting for a response and turned toward the guys desperate to be away from her.
Across the room, Louis watched.
He had been watching for a while now not making a scene about it, not crossing the room, just standing with his eggnog and observing with the particular patience of a man who had seen this particular performance before and had long since decided it wasn’t worth his energy.
He watched Antoinette’s hand hovering over the tray.
The way she leaned in, closer than a mushroom puff required.
The slow lift toward Lestat’s mouth. The licking of her fingers afterward. The smile that specific smile she seemed to keep in reserve for exactly this kind of moment, polished and ready, deployed like a weapon at a Christmas party while her husband stood twelve feet away discussing the Nets with Nick Carelli.
Louis’s expression remained perfectly composed.
“I don’t know how you do it, Louis.”
Daniel appeared at his elbow, eggnog in hand, watching the same scene with the serene detachment of a man enjoying a nature documentary about a particularly unsubtle predator.
“People like Antoinette,” Daniel continued, shaking his head slowly, “deserve a very special place in hell.” He took a sip. “So pathetic.”
Louis exhaled through his nose not quite a laugh, but close.
They stood there together for a moment, watching as Antoinette handed Lestat the entire tray and delivered what was clearly meant to be a devastating parting line. Watching Lestat’s face cycle through several emotions in rapid succession before he surrendered the tray back to her and turned toward the stairs with the composure of a man who had endured enough.
Louis and Daniel looked at each other.
And then quietly, privately, in the way of two people who had been friends long enough to find the same things ridiculous they both started laughing. Not loudly. Not unkindly. Just the small, helpless laughter of shared observation, shoulders shaking slightly, eggnog raised to hide it.
“The finger licking,” Daniel managed.
“Don’t,” Louis said.
“She licked her fingers, Louis.”
“I know.”
“Slowly.”
“Daniel.”
“At a Christmas party.”
Louis pressed his lips together, fighting it. “I am aware.”
Daniel shook his head, still grinning. “That man of yours has the patience of a saint.”
“He has the patience of someone who doesn’t know how to exit a conversation,” Louis corrected. But there was warmth underneath it. Unmistakably.
Daniel caught it. He always did. He glanced sideways at Louis with the look of a man who knew better than to say what he was thinking but was going to say it anyway.
“You still got it bad,” Daniel said simply.
Louis said nothing.
Which was, as far as Daniel was concerned, a complete answer.
The moment dissolved when someone across the room called out loud, cheerful, the particular energy of a party that had reached its comfortable middle stage where inhibitions had loosened and ambitions were rising.
“Lestat! Come on, man the piano!”
A ripple of agreement moved through the room. Heads turning. Glasses raised in encouragement. Someone had clearly been building toward this all evening.
Lestat, who had made it approximately four steps up the staircase, stopped.
He turned slowly.
Twenty-odd faces looked back at him with the bright, expectant warmth of people who loved him or at least loved this version of him, this neighborhood version, this man who showed up to Christmas parties and argued about the Nets and ate mushroom puffs under duress.
The upright piano in the corner of the Browns’ living room sat waiting. A little worn. A little out of tune, probably. The kind of piano that existed not to impress anyone but simply because music was supposed to live in a house.
Lestat looked at it.
Something moved across his face complicated and brief, there and gone before anyone could name it.
“Come on, Les!”
“Yeah, come on!”
Armand caught his eye from across the room and raised his glass in a quiet, certain toast. Go on.
Lestat descended the stairs.
The crowd parted for him naturally, easily, the way people make room for someone they trust to fill a space well. He crossed to the piano, pulled out the bench, and sat and for a moment he just looked at the keys. Worn ivory. A few of them slightly yellowed. A small crayon mark on the far end of the lower register that nobody had bothered to clean off.
Slowly, he placed his hands on the keys.
And the room went quiet.
Not the performative quiet of an audience preparing to be impressed. The instinctive quiet of people who could feel, without knowing why, that something real was about to happen.
Lestat played the first note.
Then the next.
Something soft. Unhurried. A melody that didn’t announce itself but simply arrived, the way certain songs did like they’d always been there, waiting for the right room and the right hands and the right quiet December night to finally be heard.
Across the room, Louis stilled.
He recognized it.
He wasn’t sure how he knew whether it was the key, the tempo, the particular tenderness in the way Lestat’s left hand moved beneath the melody but he knew.
Daniel leaned close. “Is that—”
“Yeah,” Louis said softly.
It was the song from the cassette tape. The one Louis had made him, all those years ago, the one Lestat had listened to somewhere over the Atlantic with his eyes closed and his heart full of a certainty that everything was going to work out exactly as planned.
Louis stood very still, eggnog forgotten in his hand, watching his husband’s profile in the lamplight the slope of his nose, the slight furrow of concentration between his brows, the way his shoulders had dropped from wherever they’d been held tight all evening.
He looked, Louis thought, like himself.
Not the version of himself that had been pacing the house this morning, wild-eyed and unmoored. Not the version that had stood in the closet insulting his own sweaters.
Just Lestat.
Quiet and present and entirely, unexpectedly here.
The room listened.
And Louis, without quite deciding to, took a step closer.
The last note faded slowly, dissolving into the warm air of the Browns’ living room like smoke from a candle just blown out.
For a moment nobody moved.
Then the room erupted.
Applause, cheers, someone whistling from the back near the eggnog. Bill Kramer nearly knocked over his plate. Nick Carelli looked genuinely moved in a way that suggested he didn’t fully understand why but had decided to commit to it anyway. Even Antoinette, still holding her mushroom puff tray, had gone briefly, mercifully quiet.
Lestat sat at the piano with his hands still resting on the keys.
He didn’t stand immediately. Didn’t bow. Didn’t perform the moment the way he would have once milking the applause, turning it into something theatrical, feeding on it until there was nothing left.
He just sat there.
Looking at his hands.
The worn ivory keys beneath his fingers. The crayon mark at the far end of the lower register. The small imperfections of a piano that had never been bought to impress anyone.
Something about it felt more real than any stage he could remember.
Armand clapped him on the shoulder as he finally rose, warm and solid. “There he is,” he said quietly, just for Lestat. No joke beneath it. Just that.
Lestat nodded once, not quite trusting his voice.
The party swelled back into itself music resuming, conversations picking up where they’d left off, the children reappearing from wherever they’d been banished to, trailing tinsel and noise. The moment folded back into the evening like it had always been part of it.
Lestat moved through the room slowly, accepting the backslaps and compliments with a distracted grace, his eyes finding Louis almost immediately.
Louis was still standing where he’d been.
He hadn’t moved toward the crowd. Hadn’t joined in the applause with any particular enthusiasm. He stood slightly apart from the noise, one shoulder leaning against the doorframe between the living room and the hall, arms loosely crossed, eggnog finally set aside somewhere.
He was watching Lestat with an expression that was difficult to read from across the room.
He looked happy. Soft.
The particular softness of someone caught off guard by their own feelings undone quietly, privately, in the middle of a Christmas party in New Jersey, by a song played on a slightly out of tune upright piano.
Lestat crossed to him.
The noise of the party fell back around them as he got closer, the two of them settling into a small pocket of relative quiet near the hallway.
For a moment neither spoke.
Louis was the first to find words, and when he did his voice was quiet neutral on the surface, carefully composed. But underneath it something else moved, warm and alive, the unmistakable current of a man trying very hard not to show how much he’d just felt.
“I haven’t seen you play like that in a long time,” Louis said.
Lestat looked at him. “Like what?”
“Like the French boy who had a dream of becoming a rockstar.” Louis’s eyes stayed on his, steady and bright. “You were playing like one. Like you actually were one.”
Lestat held his gaze but said nothing.
There was no performance available for this moment. No charm to reach for. Louis was looking at him like he could see straight through every layer he’d put on today and was somehow inexplicably not disappointed by what was underneath.
Louis glanced briefly toward the piano. Then back.
“That was our song.” His voice dropped slightly, wonder threading through it. “Where did that come from?” A small pause. “I’m surprised you remembered.”
“I don’t know,” Lestat said honestly.
And he meant it. He didn’t know how it had come to his hands. Didn’t know how, in the middle of all the chaos and confusion of this day the lobby, the Ferrari, the closet full of Dockers, the mushroom puffs, all of it that particular melody had surfaced. As if it had been living in his hands all along, patient and quiet, waiting for a moment when he finally stopped performing long enough to let it through.
Louis looked at him.
The softness hadn’t left his face. If anything it had deepened his dark eyes bright in the lamplight, lips slightly parted, curls falling loose around his face in a way that made him look younger somehow. Closer to the boy in the library. Closer to the man who had pressed a cassette tape into Lestat’s hands at an airport gate and said every song reminded me of us.
He looked starstruck.
Quietly, privately, entirely unwillingly starstruck the way someone looks when they’ve spent a long time being careful and something beautiful has caught them before they could guard against it.
Like falling in love with someone you already loved.
Lestat felt the weight of it settle in his chest, warm and unfamiliar and terrifying in the best possible way.
“Louis,” he said softly.
Louis blinked, coming back to himself, and the expression shifted pulling back slightly behind something more composed, a faint color rising in his cheeks as if he’d been caught.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” Louis said quietly.
But he was smiling.
Small and real and completely his.
And Lestat, for the first time all day, smiled back without thinking about it at all.
The guys had pulled Lestat back into the current of the party before he could protest Nick with another cigar opinion, Bill with a follow-up thought about his bypass that Lestat genuinely did not want to hear, Armand providing a steady, amused presence at his elbow like a man watching a very specific kind of theater.
But Lestat’s eyes kept drifting.
Across the room, Louis stood at the center of a loose circle of guests, a glass of wine held easily in one hand, his whole bearing relaxed and open in a way that the Louis of this morning tense and frightened and calling hospitals had not been. He’d changed at some point in the evening, or maybe the party had simply done what parties occasionally did for Louis, loosened something, let him breathe.
He wore dark jeans and a white blouse, simple and clean, nothing that should have stopped anyone in their tracks.
And yet.
My God, Lestat thought, watching him from across the room, how did this version of me get so lucky.
The thought arrived without irony, without performance. Just the plain, slightly winded truth of a man looking at someone and feeling the ground shift slightly beneath him.
Louis was laughing now head tilting back just slightly, one hand raised to gesture through a story and the people around him were laughing too, pulled along helplessly in the particular current of his warmth. Louis had always been like that. He never commanded a room the way Lestat did, never filled it with presence and volume and spectacle. He drew people in quietly, like gravity. Like something steady and real in the middle of a lot of noise.
Lestat moved through the crowd without quite deciding to, people reaching out as he passed hands on his shoulder, greetings called, someone pressing a fresh drink into his hand and he acknowledged all of it distantly, his attention already somewhere else.
Louis caught his eye as he approached.
A subtle smile. Small and private. Just for him.
Lestat’s chest did something inconvenient.
“So she asks me to put this sweater on,” Louis was saying to the group, voice warm with the particular pleasure of a good story well-timed. “What choice do I have, right?”
The guests leaned in.
“But as I’m slipping it on I notice she’s misspelled the word photographer.”
Laughter beginning to build.
“I had to go through the entire day” Louis paused, letting it breathe, “wearing a hand embroidered sweater that said: Non-Profit Photographer. Do It For Free.”
The group erupted.
Lestat found himself laughing too genuinely, surprised out of it, the image landing somewhere absurd and vivid. Non-profit photographer. Hand embroidered.
And then the laughter snagged on something.
Photographer.
The word sat differently than it should have.
He looked at Louis really looked at him, standing there in his white blouse and dark jeans, charming a room full of New Jersey suburbanites on Christmas Eve with a story about a misspelled sweater and something cold moved through the warmth in his chest.
Louis. Who had sat across from him at a restaurant table in New Orleans, candlelight between them, and said quietly, I want to be a photographer. I’ve always loved capturing moments. Who had said it like a confession, like something he’d never been allowed to say out loud before. Who had looked at Lestat when he said it like he was waiting to be told it was foolish.
And Lestat had told him it wasn’t.
Had told him he saw the world through a lens that turned light into truth.
Had told him a photographer can remind people they are alive.
He’d said all of that. Meant all of it.
And then he’d gotten on a plane to Paris.
“So you’re a photographer?”
The words came out of his mouth before he’d finished the thought. Off-hand, almost casual. But underneath genuine shock. That this version of Louis, this man who was so talented he could have taken on the world.
A chuckle moved through the group.
Louis looked at him, something flickering in his expression. Uncertain.
“A non-profit photographer,” Lestat continued, the shape of it still landing wrong in his mouth, still not making sense.
People were starting to laugh now, reading it as a joke, as Lestat being Lestat the funny husband, the dry wit.
“Pro bono,” Lestat said. The laughter building around them. “You don’t get paid at all. Nobody makes a dime.”
He wasn’t performing it.
He genuinely couldn’t understand it.
Louis had been brilliant. Had seen the world in a way nobody else did. Had deserved galleries, exhibitions, his name on something real and lasting.
“Well,” Lestat said, the word falling out flat and unguarded. “Bravo.”
Silence.
The laughter stopped.
Blank stares from the circle of guests.
Louis stood very still.
His expression had not shattered. It had closed quietly, precisely, the way a door closes when someone has chosen to shut it rather than slam it. The warmth that had been there moments ago pulled back behind something careful and controlled.
He was not going to make a scene.
Louis never made scenes.
Which meant the look he gave Lestat brief, level, absolutely clear was somehow worse than any scene could have been.
Don’t, it said. Not here. Not in front of everyone.
Lestat heard it.
A beat too late.
“I—” he started.
But Louis had already turned back to the group with a smile that cost him something, smooth and practiced and utterly convincing to anyone who didn’t know what his real smile looked like.
“He’s very supportive,” Louis said pleasantly.
Polite laughter, cautious, the group recalibrating.
Lestat stood in the middle of it, the word still wrong in his mouth, the look on Louis’s face already lodged somewhere it was going to stay for a while.
He had done that.
He had taken a room full of warmth and Louis’s easy laughter and a good story about a misspelled sweater and he had made it small.
Not on purpose.
But that wasn’t the point, was it.
The group dissolved naturally around them, guests drifting back toward the eggnog and the food and the safer conversational territory of people who hadn’t just watched something slightly painful happen at a Christmas party.
Lestat stood where he was.
Louis set his wine glass down on the nearest surface with a care that suggested he was using the action to collect himself. Then he turned and walked toward the hallway with the particular unhurried precision of a man who was not running away but was absolutely done standing in that spot.
Lestat followed.
He knew he was supposed to. Louis hadn’t looked back to check.
The hallway was quieter the party noise muffled behind them, the Christmas lights from the front window casting soft red and gold across the walls. Louis stopped near the foot of the stairs, arms crossing loosely over his chest, and turned to face him.
He didn’t yell.
Of course he didn’t yell.
“What was that?” Louis asked.
His voice was low. Even. The voice of someone who had decided to spend their words carefully rather than all at once.
“I didn’t mean—”
“In front of everyone, Lestat.”
“I know.”
“You stood there and made me feel—” Louis stopped. Pressed his lips together briefly. “Small,” he said. “In front of our friends.”
The word landed exactly as hard as it deserved to.
Lestat opened his mouth. Closed it. Because the defense he wanted to reach for I wasn’t trying to, I was just surprised, I didn’t think all of it was true and none of it was the point and he was smart enough to know it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Louis looked at him steadily. “Are you going to tell me what’s actually going on with you today?”
“I told you—”
“You told me something,” Louis said. “I’m asking for the truth.”
Lestat exhaled. Ran a hand through his hair.
How did he explain this. How did he explain any of it the German Shepherd and the Timex, the lobby and Mrs. Peterson’s pity, Lily in his Ferrari wearing his watch, the piano, the cassette tape, all of it without sounding like a man who had genuinely lost his mind on Christmas morning.
“I know it doesn’t make sense,” Lestat said carefully.
“Try me.”
“Louis.” He looked at him. “You were going to be extraordinary.”
Louis blinked.
“You told me once,” Lestat continued, the words coming slowly, each one chosen with a care he wasn’t used to, “that you wanted to capture moments. People. The things that don’t last long enough unless you freeze them.” He paused. “You said it like it was a secret you’d never told anyone.”
Something shifted in Louis’s expression. A flicker of something old and private moving across his face before he could stop it.
“You said photography didn’t feel responsible,” Lestat went on. “And I told you I told you that a photographer can remind people they are alive.”
The hallway was very quiet.
Louis stared at him. “When did I tell you that?”
“A long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
Lestat held his gaze. “The first time we had dinner.”
The silence stretched between them, thin and charged.
Louis’s arms had uncrossed without him seeming to notice. He stood slightly differently now less defended, more uncertain, the careful composure from moments ago replaced by something that didn’t quite have a name yet.
“You remember that,” Louis said softly.
“I remember everything,” Lestat said. And then, quieter: “I just forgot what it meant for a while.”
Louis looked at him for a long moment.
The party continued its warm indifferent noise behind the walls. Somewhere a child shrieked with laughter. Someone’s glass clinked. Nick Carelli’s voice carried over everything briefly, saying something with great conviction about the Nets.
“I didn’t give up my dream,” Louis said finally. “I want you to know that.” His voice was steady but not defensive. Just true. “Non-profit photography is still photography. I still do what I love.”
“I see,” Lestat said.
“I document families. Communities. People who can’t afford to have their stories told professionally.” A pause. “I chose it. Nobody made me.”
“Then why did you say it like it was something to be ashamed of?”
Lestat held his gaze. “Because I was shocked,” he said honestly. “You were made to shine, Louis.”
Louis stared at him.
The words landed somewhere unexpected — Lestat could see it, the way they moved across Louis’s face before he could organize his expression around them. Something old and unguarded flickering through, just for a second, before Louis pulled it back behind composure.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
For once, Louis de Pointe du Lac had nothing to say.
The front door swung open and the warmth of the house rushed out to meet them.
Lestat stepped inside first, Louis close behind, both of them carrying the particular quiet of a long evening finally ended. The house was still. The kids were in bed. The Christmas tree blinked steadily in the living room, unhurried, indifferent to the hour.
Then Mojo hit Lestat like a small freight train.
The German Shepherd launched herself at him with the full-bodied enthusiasm of a dog who had been waiting for hours and had opinions about it, paws on his chest, tail a blur, tongue appearing dangerously close to his face.
Lestat stumbled back a step, weary resignation written across every feature.
Louis, already moving toward the stairs, reached out without looking and lifted a leash from the hook by the door.
“I’d better go wake my mother,” he said, holding it out.
Lestat looked at the leash.
Then at Mojo.
Then back at the leash.
“You’re kidding me.”
“She’s your dog.”
“She is absolutely not my dog.”
Louis tilted his head. “Fine. She’s the kids’ dog.” A pause, perfectly timed. “Should I go wake Victor? See if he wants to walk her?”
“It is twenty degrees outside.”
Louis arranged his face into an expression of profound sympathy. “You’re having a bad day.” A beat. “I’ll go with you.”
Lestat’s face briefly lit up.
“There is no way in hell,” Louis continued pleasantly, “you’re getting me back out there.”
The light died.
Lestat looked down at Mojo.
Mojo looked up at him ears forward, eyes bright, tail wagging with absolute moral certainty that this walk was happening and that Lestat was the one who was going to take her on it.
Lestat took the leash.
Louis was already heading up the stairs, voice drifting back down behind him.
“Make sure you reward her verbally when she does a number two.”
Lestat stared up after him.
“Verbally,” he repeated, to no one.
The cold was immediate and absolute.
Lestat moved down the sidewalk in a borrowed down jacket, breath condensing in white clouds ahead of him, being pulled at a pace he had not agreed to by a German Shepherd with extremely strong opinions about where she was going.
The street was quiet. Christmas lights blinked from darkened windows. Someone’s inflatable snowman listed slightly to one side in the wind. The sound of Lestat’s boots against the frozen pavement was the loudest thing on the block.
Mojo stopped at a fire hydrant.
Sniffed it with great professional seriousness.
Moved on.
She stopped at two garbage cans, investigated both thoroughly, and rejected them.
Lestat watched her, breathing into the cold. “Come on Mojo figure it out” he muttered. “I’m freezing. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out.”
Mojo trotted onward. Lestat followed, because he had no choice.
She paused at a neatly manicured lawn, nose working overtime.
“It’s as good a place as any,” Lestat offered.
The dog kept moving.
“Obviously not up to your high standards,” he muttered.
He pulled the jacket tighter and fell into step behind her, and somewhere in the cold and the quiet, his mind began to move.
Mojo was investigating someone’s Christmas display now a nativity scene flanked by plastic reindeer nose down, methodical.
Lestat barely noticed.
Mojo had moved on from the nativity scene and was now pulling him around the corner with renewed purpose.
He looked at the dog. “If you could take a dump sometime in this century, we could go home where it’s warm.”
He looked around at the quiet suburban street. The identical house fronts. The sleeping lawns and the softly blinking lights.
“That is,” he added, “if I can even remember how to get home.”
He looked at Mojo.
“You remember, don’t you, girl?”
Mojo ignored him completely and dragged him toward the next block with serene indifference.
Lestat finally made it back home the room was dark and warm and still.
Louis was already asleep.
He lay on his side, one hand curled loosely beneath the pillow, curls spread soft against the white pillowcase, chest rising and falling with the slow, even rhythm of someone who had finally, completely let the day go.
Lestat stood in the doorway for a moment, face still red from the cold, and looked at him.
Just looked.
In sleep, Louis was unguarded in a way that the waking Louis careful, composed, perpetually steady rarely allowed himself to be. No careful distance. No protective composure. Just the man himself, quiet and warm in the dark.
Lestat thought about the hallway at the Browns’ house. The way Louis had straightened his collar. The brief brush of his hand before they walked back into the party.
I still know you. Even when you don’t know yourself.
He moved quietly into the room, setting the leash on the hook behind the door.
He took off the down jacket. The navy sweater. The khakis he had complained about for the entirety of the evening.
He folded them and laid them neatly over the chair.
Then he stood there in the dim room and looked at the dresser.
Flannel pajamas. Folded. Waiting.
Blue plaid. Completely without glamour or ambition of any kind.
Lestat looked at them for a long moment.
Then he sighed the sigh of a man making peace with something he couldn’t change tonight picked them up, put them on, and climbed into bed.
The mattress shifted. Louis didn’t stir.
Lestat lay on his back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet of the house. The tick of something in the hallway. The distant hum of the refrigerator. The soft sound of Louis breathing beside him.
He turned his head.
Louis’s face in profile. Lashes against warm brown skin. The faint rise and fall of his shoulder beneath the quilt.
Lestat watched him breathe.
And for the first time since he’d woken up in this strange, warm, ordinary life he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
He closed his eyes.
The flannel pajamas were, he reluctantly admitted to no one, remarkably comfortable.