Chapter Text
The scent of his burnt flesh was nauseating, suffocating in the closed coffin where Louis lay.
The smell was nothing compared to the pain. Searing, constant pain wracking his body with every minute movement, every unnecessary breath. All Louis could do was try to breathe through the pain, because holding his breath caused the string around his lungs to pull tight. Tighter than it had been in decades, and how was that even possible?
And the pain was nothing compared to the ache.
The ache of hearing Lestat’s words, knowing he was out there and cared enough to entertain Armand’s call. After everything. The soul-deep, gnawing ache of hearing, “Mon cher…”. It was Armand’s voice, but it didn’t matter. The various tones and inflections he’d heard those words in were embedded in Louis’ mind for eternity. Iridescent eyes sparkling with an ocean of emotions at him, that well with no bottom calling for him to sink into it once again.
As if the call had ever ceased.
As if Louis wasn’t haunted by his own personal apparition, glorious and golden and shining in the periphery of his life.
His life, reduced to the walls of this coffin and relying on Armand to help him heal.
The parallel to another time he’d been unable to leave his coffin for months was impossible to ignore, and despite the humiliation of depending on his daughter for care, this was worse.
Two weeks have come and gone since they deposited Daniel in a drug den, healed and whole. All Louis had was time, to stew in his own misery, skin throbbing and pulsing and hot to the touch where it still crumbled off of him.
Armand was still punishing him, allowing him only enough blood to remain aware while his body slowly, excruciatingly healed. The gremlin, pretending to be the good nurse all while enjoying his suffering. Prison of empathy, indeed. Maybe he deserved to suffer.
Maybe he deserved to burn.
Taking up with a man who played a part, however unwillingly, in her death.
His daughter, his spark in the dark, was extinguished and the pain never fucking stopped. Decades later, and despite staying at Armand’s side, he sure as hell still hadn’t forgiven him for his part. Louis was positive that particular forgiveness would never come.
But that didn’t stop him from staying. Didn’t stop him from spitefully spending his existence with Armand, and Louis didn’t like to examine the reason why too deeply.
Louis felt lost, unmoored.
The roots that had been laid within him, the devil that possessed his every thought and stole his heart was out there. Lestat was out there, and it didn’t fucking matter.
It didn’t matter because he killed her, too.
Lestat crossed an ocean for revenge, and still Louis could choke on his yearning. This impossible, parasitic yearning that would shade every moment of his eternal life because endlessly, the cord was tugging. It was pulling, yanking, writhing to pull him back to the other end, and he couldn’t.
He couldn’t.
Louis did not forgive Armand, but the betrayal was incomparable. Armand had no loyalty to Claudia, aside from being her coven master and from Louis himself. Armand never cherished her, was never a family with her.
Armand didn’t know her innocence, didn’t teach her how to drive and hunt. Armand had never loved her, had never known the warmth of her tiny body between theirs, hands entwined and dancing in their courtyard to peals of laughter in three different voices that echoed in Louis’ dreams.
Louis could not forgive Armand’s hand in her death, but the trial would not have happened without Lestat.
Lestat’s betrayal, the disregard for their lives that he made, the fact that the man who was supposed to be her father had thrown her to the wolves burned worse than the sun ever could.
The consuming, deplorable love he felt simmered, despite it all. A coal fire smoldering deep in his veins, cruel in its reminder that Louis could not help but love his maker even after the atrocities he’d committed. It was inescapable, and it was Louis’ burden to bear that he was still helplessly in love with his daughter's murderer. His murderer.
“Oh, but never forget, mon cher, you also murdered me.”
Stained glass eyes clenched shut, but closing them did not block out the voice.
That voice.
Louis swallowed, jaw tensing as he recalled that voice. Against what he knew was best, he’d tried to hear that voice in Armand’s head during his telepathic conversation with Lestat. Louis had been weak, and even had he been at full strength Armand’s mind was locked tight unless he chose to share. He did not want to share with Louis at that moment, and so those words were only relayed with Armand’s controlled softness instead of the intense passion Louis knew they’d been delivered with.
That silky, affection-drenched voice Louis had not heard for almost three decades. Not in reality.
The phantom voice was all he had, and he could not bear to keep from gazing upon his spectre any longer.
Opening his eyes, Louis saw his apparition lying in the coffin beside him. Those iridescent eyes were gray, dimmed with sadness and concern.
“Why are you ill? What’s happened to you?”
Was the voice accurate? Did he even remember it correctly? Lestat was seared into his being, but sometimes he doubted the validity of his own memory.
“Don’t.” Louis croaked, turning his head as far as he could with how much it hurt to do so. The apparition noticed, and leaned over him so he didn’t have to strain himself. It did not hurt, pressing against his charred flesh, and Louis was grateful. “You’re in my head, you know why.”
The apparition smiled sadly, a hand rising to stroke the unburnt side of his face. It soothed so deeply Louis wanted to cry. “Indeed. Drug-laced blood and echoes of the past, commingling in your poor, beautiful mind to taunt you. Guilt over things beyond your control. A saint, suffering for his perceived sins.”
Louis didn’t have the energy to dispute that he was a saint; ain't never been a saint. He hardly had the energy to nuzzle into the hand pressed against his cheekbone. “Shh. Can you… Can you just be with me?”
The apparition’s eyes crinkled, and he leaned down to kiss the tip of Louis’ nose. Louis chose not to examine why the weight of the spectre’s body did not hurt him, and yet he felt the warmth from its palm sinking into his cheek. “Of course, mon amour. I am always with you, every moment of every day. There is nowhere else I’d rather be.”
A splinter through his sluggish heart, blood tears in churchglass eyes. Small, pitiful voice of a boy turned hardened man turned soft monster. Weighed down by a half-life before the tragedy of his unlife, and now lacking half of his heart. “I wish that were true.”
“But of course it’s true, Louis. Never doubt my devotion.”
Louis squeezed his eyes closed again, pressing his forehead against the apparition's. How could he not? He had betrayed Lestat; the apparition's first words this evening rang true. He and Claudia had conspired, committed vampire patricide to escape their gilded cage. To escape their monstrous maker, taking themselves out of the pot right into the fire.
“I did try to warn you, cheri.”
“I know.” Louis gasped, the shaking mess of flesh that was his hand lifting to clutch strands that shone like the sun. Feeling emotionally raw in a way he detested, terrible vulnerability toiling away inside him. "We…I should have believed you. Maybe she’d-it was so hard to believe you. You hurt me so bad, you hurt her. I…I didn’t want to do it, Les. It was the only way out-”
“Shhh, shh. Je sais, je sais. Je suis tellement désolé.” The apparition murmured, kissing the corner of Louis’ eye. “It matters no longer, what’s done is done. And my love for you remains.”
A single tear leaked out of the corner of Louis’ eye after those lips parted from the tender skin as he choked out, “You’re not real. You’re not actually here. You hate me, you tried to kill me- you killed her-”
Another soft, sad smile. Long fingers stroked what remained of Louis' hair as the apparition simply said, “I love you, Louis.”
Lips trembling, Louis opened his mouth to answer his beautiful apparition, to plead for the spectre’s words to be true in reality. To tell him that Louis loved him too because he never had. He never told him, and now he never would and it burned but before the words could leave his lips that scorching sensation materialized within his flesh. It flamed through his nerve endings, entwining with the phantom of the sun still throbbing within him and through to his heart, across his torso and into his groin.
Louis’ heart suddenly started to pound, unbearable heat pulsing through his entire being. His body felt hot, hotter than it felt these past two weeks, nearly as hot as the sun reducing him to ashes. He cried out in agony, arching and writhing in his coffin before collapsing back and gasping for breath.
The sound of measured footsteps gradually grew closer outside of the coffin, no urgency to the pace at all.
The apparition began to fade, and Louis wanted to beg him to stay, the only balm to his soul in this anguish, but then the coffin lid lifted. Apocalyptic amber glowed down at him. “Louis, what is happening?”
“I don’t know! I’m burnin’ again- oh God, it hurts-”
A condescending little smile. “Louis, it’s been weeks. It is all in your head, as many things are.”
Ignoring the pointed remark and its implications, Louis stared desperately at Armand as he tried to explain. Armand was his only link, his only chance of help. “It’s…not like it was, it’s…it’s inside, like fire in my blood, in my organs -god-”
The heat inside of him was morphing, evolving. Louis didn’t understand, didn’t comprehend what was happening at all. Pain was blending into arousal, desire pumping through him and rushing the little blood in his body to his groin. To his mortification, he realized he was somehow hard. His hips jerked up, charred hand falling to rest on his impossible arousal and squeeze.
Armand frowned, head turning sharply towards the direction of the front door. “I will return in a moment, I need to speak with someone.” Without another word, he was gone.
“Speak- what? No, where- fuck - where are you going?”
Chest heaving with the weight of his pants, Louis desperately looked around the room for his apparition. He didn’t want to be alone. He was sweating in fear, the little precious blood in him that wasn’t somehow swelling his fucking cock rising in beads across his skin. “Please, please come back-”
“I’m here, I’m here.” Lestat blinked into existence, concern pulling his brows and that hand stroking his neck as it cupped Louis’ jaw. “I’m always here, even if you can’t see me. I will never leave you, Louis.”
“Touch me-please-”
With a frown, the apparition’s free hand gently cupped his throbbing cock through his soft trousers. Louis wanted to sob, it didn’t help-it didn’t help-
“Désolé- Je suis désolé- I’m trying- I wish to help you, mon cœur.” Alarm shone in those now violet eyes, and the gentle touch left Louis for a moment as the apparition slipped its hand under his trousers to touch his bare skin. A hand wrapped around his cock, wasting no time in gliding along his length in firm strokes.
Louis felt delirious. He rolled his hips up into the phantom touch, slamming his head back into the coffin with a whine. The apparition was incorporeal, Louis knew that. He also knew it never stopped the physical, tangible sensation. It was still there, causing sparks of pleasure and yet the burn persisted.
Before Louis could ask the apparition to try using his mouth, the front door opened and slammed. The apparition began to fade, and more blood tears slid down Louis’ cheeks. “No, no, no don’t-”
Molten eyes appeared before him. “Louis, we are in a bit of a predicament here. It seems the neighbor whom I had to dispatch for witnessing your walk into the sun, his widow, is a witch.”
Louis did his best to listen because Armand's words were clearly important, but found it incredibly difficult to focus when he felt like he was burning alive. He gritted his teeth, unable to stop the small hitches in his hips, seeking friction from thin air. “Armand, I’m burning-”
“She’s placed a curse upon you. The wording was...rather poetic. A curse to bring “the burning of yearning to fruition”. This curse can only be broken by being…satisfied by your true love.”
Louis whined, writhing in agony. His fangs dropped against his will, his torturous arousal reaching new heights with every moment that passed. He squeezed his cock once more to try to alleviate some of the unbearable pressure building inside of him with nowhere to go.
“She has a remarkable sense of irony. Shall I even bother pretending that I am eligible to break the curse?”
Louis flinched at his companion of decades' words, the resigned sadness present there tinted with resentment.
It would only be worse for him to offer empty protests when they both knew the awful truth. So instead he squeezed his eyes shut and bit down on his own lip. Blood slipped down his chin. His free hand clutched Armand’s shoulder, desperate gasps leaving him against his will. “I-I don’t-oh god Armand I’m fucking burning! I can’t…I can’t stand it I don’t understand what do I have to do what do I do -fuckfuckFUCK!”
Armand sighed, reaching forward to brush his fingers against Louis’ cheek. Louis' skin was hot to the touch. “There, there. Just breathe. Rest. You’re going to go to sleep, and it will feel better. Rest.” Stroking Louis’ temple, the gentle use of his powers and Louis’ eyes were fluttering.
“Burns…Hurts…”
“I know. Rest. Rest, now.”
Weakened, feeling figuratively and literally flayed alive by his buried and denied boundless love and endless guilt, Louis didn’t fight the pull and fell into a fitful rest. His consciousness muted, intentionally so.
To his annoyance, Armand was surprised at the magical power that put up a good fight in resisting his own. Clever witch, he would not be able to hold Louis in this induced rest indefinitely, and still not without a struggle.
As he pondered their few options, Armand regretted that there was not more time to find an alternative solution. But the witch had gleefully informed him that the more time passed, the worse it would get for Louis until all he knew was this unfulfilled ache, this burning void pulling him under. He would descend into madness.
Armand did not understand how the witch knew that cursing his companion with this particular magic would enact revenge and spite Armand for killing her husband, but there was no time to waste. Lestat was in New Orleans, he was sure of it. He’d felt weakened, dimmer in his mental presence the last he'd reached out. He would have to gather his wits, strength, and his infinite devotion to Louis and travel to San Francisco.
It felt like handing over his most prized possession; everything he’d precariously clung to for decades was crumbling before his eyes.
However, Louis would not survive this. This, he could prevent, and maybe it would do the slightest to make up for his hand in Paris and Claudia, the depth of which Louis still did not even fully grasp.
Louis started fretting in his induced rest, body twitching and hips making little unconscious thrusts. He was visibly leaking through his sleep pants, the scent of his arousal thick and heady in the air. Armand closed his eyes, steeling himself for what he had to do. He scooped Louis up, carrying him to the bathroom and laying him in the tub. Flipping the taps on to run cold water to try to cool his skin from the outside.
The water shocked him out of his rest, but his vibrant green eyes were half-lidded, hazy and crazed. “Melting…I’m-” Louis cut himself off with a pained whimper, delirious and writhing like an animal in heat. That’s what he felt like, an animal in heat, and he needed- he needed-
“Shhhh. I am seeking him out, Louis. Rest.” Armand kneeled next to the tub to touch Louis’ temple once more, his power was already meeting more magical resistance. It was only a matter of time before there was nothing he could do to put a damper on it.
Louis whined again, eyes slipping closed but body still restless and making unconscious, distressed motions.
His mind conjured up a fever dream, a memory of a loving touch, in a desperate bid to comfort himself. A beautiful, sad apparition lying beside him in the tub. Who traces the very tips of his sharp claws slowly, gently, up and down Louis’ forearm. Caressing the dip of his elbow and swiping the pad of his thumb across Louis’ wrist. Lestat used to do that to lull him to sleep, the soft, consistent touch skirting across his nerve endings and making them sing in contentment. The pale proxy his mind provided him with soothed him into a state of a kind of hoversleep, not quite under but not fully aware. The burning was present, muted for the time being, but it pulsed angrily inside him. Unwilling to be contained.
Amber eyes watching Louis’ expression for a sign of the pain taking over again, Armand searched through the sea of voices until he found the one he’s searching for.
Lestat?
ARMAND! You- You GREMLIN, how dare you- Is Louis alive? Is he alright? TELL ME! TELL ME THIS INSTANT!
He is alive. He is not alright.
A heartwrenching sob reverberated across his consciousness. What’s happened now, what -
Lestat, there is no time for this. Come to San Francisco, with haste. Louis’ life depends on it,
The heavy trepidation and suspicion could be felt clearly across the continent. Armand knew how it must sound. Like a trap. After the last time they had seen each other, everything that happened in Paris.
Why should I trust you? Let us remember what happened the last time I traveled with only your word as assurance.
At that moment, he felt the magic begin to resist his grip, and Louis convulsed, muttering miserably. Sending an impatient mental sigh, Armand allowed what he saw across the mental connection.
Louis, brow scrunched and whimpering in his half-sleep as he scratched his own forearms to ribbons. His head whipping around, cracking the porcelain of the tub under his own skull. Blood sweat beaded all over his visible, charred skin, growing more aware by the moment. The cold water around him turned pink from his blood.
A mental gasp of despair. Armand, what is happening to him?
A witch cursed him. You are the cure, apparently. Come.
I will. I-The sun-
You have the blood of Akasha in you, Lestat. He is hallucinating you as we speak, begging. Do you hear it?
“Les-Les baby, please-” Louis sobbed, delirious and half-conscious, reaching out to clutch onto his apparition's shoulder and press his forehead against his throat. The scorching ache within him grew unbearable, and he thrashed against it. His healing flesh protested, but it hardly mattered now. That pain was secondary to the inferno that was building inside his very bones.
Louis. The sweet, lilting caress that was Lestat pronouncing Louis’ name was instant, followed by a sense of fierce, nearly unbelievable love and determination. I will be there as soon as I can.
Armand cut his wrist, holding it over Louis' trembling mouth. His eyes snapped open fully, one hand still wrapped around his own wrist and scratching it all to hell while the other clutched onto the side of the tub near where his head rested. He bit down, taking a mouthful and swallowing it. Before it traveled through his esophagus, his body forcibly rejected it, and it spewed out of his mouth and in between them.
“Oh, that is unfortunate.”
Feed. Excessively. He will need it.