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Consciousness was a knife drawing against his throat in endless repetition, the pattern of pain carving itself into Lestat as he drifted closer and further away from it, as his body tried desperately to heal and forced him back and forth into consciousness. The body wanted blood. Hunger scorched his throat as badly as the pain. The body needed blood. The body demanded blood, hauling him into consciousness as he tried to fight it off. He wanted void. He wanted sleep as his body attempted to heal. The hunger had him by the throat, awake, awake, awake.
Lestat reached up a withered hand to his neck, each movement causing lacing pain like his nerves were exposed to the air, feeling the thirst in a throat that wouldn’t hold blood, the deep laceration still severing skin and cartilage. The body didn’t care, awake, awake, awake. The laceration was his parting gift from Louis, his lover, his companion heart.
It had been the fucking cane knife. Of course, it had been the cane knife.
Lestat laughed. A simulacrum of a laugh, his ripped throat muscles spasming, the air from his lungs setting his severed larynx on fire, and the sound. Unnatural. It made Lestat laugh unbearably harder, manically and hysterically, unable to stop the convulsion and paroxysms of it.
The cane knife.
Blessed Louis.
Louis pressing the knife up against his brother’s breastbone, his human mind a deep well of sorrow, love, and inward rage. Louis driving the knife into Lestat’s back in the candlelit gore of the church, his mind filled with fury and terror. Louis drawing the knife across Lestat’s throat as Louis cradled him tenderly, his mind a closed vault. His Judith to his Holofernes.
Lestat ran his fingers gently over the cut across his neck, soft as a lovers’ touch, and felt the parting of the skin where Louis had sliced it open.
Louis had cut deep, he’d cut well, like he meant it. Lestat’s fingers pressed into the laceration, feeling past the broken skin, cartilage, and muscle through to the empty space of trachea.
Louis.
Louis had killed Lestat with his own hands, in his own arms, with the very token from the moment that had caused Lestat to fall in love with him. Louis’s mind had radiated across the street in aching clarity and depth of feeling. To hold such love for his brother while still brandishing the knife. The grim determination of the facade, the simmering rage at having to take this action to maintain it, and the bone-deep sorrow of it all. Beautiful, that capacity, and Lestat couldn’t look away from it.
It all mirrored, didn’t it? It had to mirror or Lestat had truly lost him. Lestat pictured his murder, drawing in the memory of Louis on the street as he tried to transpose it:
Love while holding the knife. The grim determination of the Mardi Gras facade. Rage at Lestat for having to do this (had Lestat pushed too far?). Sorrow because he loved Lestat. It mirrored, it mirrored. Louis had to still love him. Had to still have that beautiful capacity for love within him that could hold it alongside the rage. Lestat wouldn’t consider any other possibility.
Lestat drew his fingers out of his throat, ignoring the pain that made his whole body shake and his mind blank into white-hot oblivion for a moment, and stroked his finger thoughtfully across the surface of the wound.
It was his parting gift from Louis.
Lestat shouldn’t be alive.
Claudia and Louis knew to burn him, surely they had to know. It followed then, that his continued existence was also a gift.
And not from Claudia. Not his arrogant fledgling-child, darling daughter, evil of his evil, digging her ink pen into his neck for her list of kills.
A gift from Louis.
It could have worked. The plan had been a beautiful exercise in symmetry. Claudia was a mistake, too young and too uncontrollable. Antoinette was a mistake, a balm and a tool that was fast losing its appeal. Louis and Lestat were bracketed by them when it should be them alone, companion hearts bound in blood and love, and Lestat was going to solve it. Lestat had been so close.
Antoinette would erase Claudia. Louis would erase Antoinette, released upon her as soon as the deed was done, and they would be even. Lestat killing someone of Louis’s, Louis killing someone of Lestat’s. Symmetry. Even ground. It would have taken time to rebuild what they had, what Antoinette and Claudia had taken from them, but it would have been worth it. Lestat and Louis would be restored to themselves, alone together again, as they had been in those first five good years. Lestat wanted those years back so intensely that he could taste them in his dry bloodless throat.
Claudia, the vicious little viper, had seen it all coming. Lestat was faintly proud. She was a mistake, she should never have been made, but she had outmanoeuvred him. His strange woman-child, daughter-death grown in years but not in form, travelling with his Louis. Maybe she could protect Louis. Maybe Louis could protect her. His fledglings were somewhere out there in the world, without the protection of their Maker, vulnerable and weak. They should never have left him. They would see that in time and Lestat would welcome his prodigal children back. Graciously.
Lestat heard scurrying outside the trunk, little paw sounds and the tell-tale irritating snuffle. Lestat painfully undid the lock, his hand aching with each small movement. Lestat gritted his teeth, fangs digging into his decayed lip, as he thrust his hand out. His hand sizzled in the sun, the light burning away the already withered and shrivelled skin, as Lestat grabbed the gorged rat, bringing it back into the safety of the dark.
Lestat bit into the rat. The blood was hot and thin, the taste watery and bitter, the dirty rat fur getting stuck in his teeth as he drank. Another gift, then, a taste of Louis’s life in those malnourished years. If I can do it, you can do it. Mirrors. Symmetry. Even ground.
Lestat touched the laceration at his throat, prodding the wound as the severed muscles of his larynx started to weave together imperceptibly.