Work Text:
This is how Lestat finds out about the book:
Louis doesn’t tell him. Of course not. He sets Lestat up in a modern day flat and leaves him, after a night of burning touches, murmured words and shared grief. Leaves him to make the way on his own into the modern world, so bright and loud and ever moving. Lestat ventures outside, skittish to begin with, but soon surer and surer. He chats with strangers on bus stops and in gas stations and elegant bars. He reads. He becomes a part of the world again.
And one night, he hears music unlike anything he’s heard before. It’s like a spell that hooks into him, leading him through New Orleans until he finds himself knocking on the door of an attic studio. Inside are the three mortals responsible for the sound that has drawn him out. He falls in love with them easily – their youth, their talent, and the way they welcome his voice when he sings with them – the brothers Alex and Larry and beautifully androgynous Tough Cookie. The studio fills with the smell of their sweat and their blood and the roar of their voices together. It’s clear that together, they have something magical. Something that can bring the world on its knees.
They take his promises of fame with a healthy dose of cynical scepticism, but it’s their reaction to the name Lestat de Lioncourt that surprises him. The fact that they recognise the name and think that he’s pretending to be a vampire from a book. It disturbs him, knocks him off balance, and he asks to see the book. Interview with the Vampire, written by one Daniel Molloy. The author’s name is unfamiliar, but the shock of realising that it’s Louis, his Louis, who has told his story to a human journalist is enough to knock him on his arse again. His newfound companions must find it strange that this book, with its garish red cover, could make him grow even paler. They shrug when he asks if he can borrow the book.
He hurries back to the flat – not home, too strangely sleek and devoid of life to be called home – with the book cradled against his chest. With the door closed behind him, he hesitates for a moment. But Louis has offered up these words, his story, to the world – there can’t be any harm in Lestat reading them, can it? And he’s hungry for a glimpse into the mind that’s been maddeningly closed to him for over a century now. Hungry for any insight into Louis’ thoughts and feelings. He’s missed opening up the pages of Louis’ fascinating mind, to understand him as completely as he did in those early days. Nowadays he doesn’t think he understands Louis at all.
He begins to read. It’s clear that this Daniel Molloy has a way with words, an ability to suck to reader into the story, but the more he reads, the greater the discomfort grows. It’s strange to see himself from Louis’ point of view. Uncomfortable. He sloughs through the discomfort until the words themselves bring him to a stop.
I was being hunted.
For a moment, he sees a face in the crowd. Pale, so pale that it seems to glow deep in the shadows, with deep lines etched into the planes of his face. Dark, hungry eyes nailing him in place. A voice – “Wolfkiller” – in his head, making him fumble his lines and lose where he is on the stage. Was that what he’d been to Louis – a haunting face, the presence of something supernatural prowling on the edges of Louis’ world, waiting for a chance to grab him? Lestat doesn’t remember it as hunting – he remembers it as courting, as a dance between them. Long nights spent talking and wandering through New Orleans. Shared heated glance. Constant, small touches as often as they could get away with. If he’s been wrong about this, what else has he got wrong?
He considers putting the book down for a moment, but his curiosity wins out. He turns the page. And the next. The years he considers their happiest – when they were hungry for each other’s skin, each other’s blood, and could barely stand to be apart – are reduced to one single sentence: From 1912 to 1917, I made a mountain of money. It feels like somebody has punched him. He blinks away tears. So that’s what those years had meant to Louis. A bark of laughter escapes him, before he wipes away the tears that have stubbornly escaped.
He should stop reading. He knows he should. Nothing good will come out of him reading the rest. But he can’t. He finishes the book. Even the turn at the end – Louis’ unreliability as a narrator, the reveal of Armand as the villain – doesn’t evoke much emotion in him. Shame already squirms in his gut. He can forgive the lies and the omissions, the gross exaggerations and the tragic misunderstandings, but he can’t forgive all that the book has revealed to him. The way it makes him feel small and stupid. He knows Louis have never said it, but he thought that he didn’t need to – their hearts beat in sync, the way they seemed so attuned to each other – but the book has revealed to him what should have been obvious from the start: Louis never loved him. Had tolerated him, lusted after him, sure, but whatever love there had been had been on Lestat’s part. One-sided. He’d been as alone as he’d ever been, but too stupid to realise it.
He sits in the silence, book clutched tightly. For a moment, his thoughts are blank. Shame and embarrassment all he can feel. But there’s a smoulder of anger growing inside of him. He’s always dealt better with anger than with shame, so when he opens to book again, he lets his anger take him.