Veritas
Artemesia
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Disclaimer: This is a work of non-profit speculative fan-fiction, and is not meant to infringe on any rights held by Anne Rice, her publishers or any other affiliations. The characters belong solely to Anne Rice, as well as the quotes from the Tale of the Body Thief.
Spoilers: The Tale of the Body Thief : This is Louis' point of view of Lestat's homecoming to Rue Royale in the last part of the Body Thief, and the conversation between them after Lestat talks to David, and plans to go to Rio.
Dedication: To the one whose voice is within these words, always, whether or not I say.
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If there is a reason to get hurt, and that is for me,
that will be the love for Louis
which formed inside Lestat"
"I wanted to hear it from you…
and then I could have answered - that I felt the same."
- from Sine, by Endymia
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He came back, as I knew that he would eventually. It was always the same, old dream that I had been having for years: the familiar figure, dressed impeccably, the golden hair wonderfully kept, but casually 'just-so'. The thing that unnerved me the most was always his eyes - the way that they drew you in, even more than the others, even more reflective that the eyes of the older ones. They were eyes, that danced in the smallest light, and were forever laughing. He flashed in and out of my sight as he peered into each room from the hall, while I stood there waiting in the doorway.
Oh, he knew I was there. He was counting on it.
"Don't ask me where I've been or what I've done" he said, walking towards me, and brushing past.
I did not blink. Didn't turn around. I sent a message to him in my mind, You should know me better than that, Lestat but of course, that way of communication is closed to us. I had to allow him this small triumph, when I had denied him my blood and his immortality. So instead I closed my eyes.
"I know where you've been." I said, " and I know what you've done." I watched him looking at my old desk, the spinet against the wall, wondering if he knew where I had found them. A little frown was on his face, his brows knit a fraction.
"Oh? And what's to follow? Some stultifying and endless lecture? Tell me now. So I can go to sleep."
His reply was jarring, but I didn't say anything. It was more than enough that he was here, now. I slipped behind David, who walked up to meet Lestat. We looked at him at the same time, watching him without expression. That much was owed. He was vaguely startled, but that would not have been noticed without eyes like ours. The glance was transitory, fleeting as soon as it came.
"The carnival starts tomorrow in Rio," David said, watching Lestat carefully, while sending me a silent message. "I thought we might go."
I replied David, I will leave him to talk to you. And judging the effort that made him keep up the calm visage that hid the emotions he had hidden, telling me the story, Don't let him get too excited. Or we will never travel to Rio, we will have to convince him that it was his idea.
David sent me an invisible smile that followed me as I went up the stairs, into my old room. I shut the door after me, and shielded my mind from David's. It was his turn to speak to Lestat, to confess what was between them. A glowing light filled the room, my candles softly flickering against the moonlight, the night air coming through the window. It could have been the old days again, I could almost imagine Claudia's playing on the spinet, and the sound of carriages outside on the Rue Royale.
Had it been so hard for me to talk to Lestat in Carmel Valley, as David was talking to him now?
I had understood it from the first time that David had sought me, the same wringing sadness that had filled me at Claudia's deathbed. David had sent me those images, as he was dying. The crashing waves upon his head, the flash of Lestat's golden hair, the breaking of the spray as it caught the locket and swallowed it hungrily. The blood leaving David as his new, young body struggled. I had doubled up in the street and staggered into the house, unable to cry out as the visions shattered my brain. Ah, David, David, Lestat - what have you done? Was it the same madness that infused Lestat then, as it was when we had made Claudia?
The same spasms that filled me with the pain, of being able to do nothing.
And despite it, I could feel David's pain. I felt him fading, and then as he grew weaker, the vision paled and left me., But he had come in the space of two nights. I played with Claudia's locket as I thought, not opening it. It was so much a part of my memories that it fitted my hand naturally, the curve of the oval fitting into the palm and tucking under the thumb. One of David's elementals had retrieved the locket, catching the chain as it fell from his hands, holding it out for Lestat in exchange for his life. He should have known that Lestat had always wanted more than that.
David had been vaguely surprised when I had opened the door, his hand poised to knock, as those of our custom are wont to do. But he had recovered quickly, and stepped inside from my invitation.
"Louis." he said to me, politely. "Thank you for letting me in."
"But of course, David." I said softly. "What else could I do?"
He had looked at me, and was about to speak. But then he closed his mouth and glanced into my eyes instead. Then he knew that I had understood.
"I know." That was all I had to say to him.
"You saw everything."
"I did."
"And still you do not make me your enemy?"
I sighed. "I could not, David. I understand it too well." I had made a little gesture that he was to follow, and led him into one of the bedrooms.
"You must rest." I had told him, seeing the words formed in the air between us. Although the blood in him was strong, more than that which flowed in my veins, he was still young. The sun in Barbados had given him a glowing tan that had not left him with the Dark Gift, but it was his eyes that glittered preternaturally.
The second night, he had sat down beside me as I watched the water falling in the fountain, pressing something into my hand.
"Thank you." he said.
I turned it around in my hands, but for some reason, it did not feel right. It was not meant to be mine, there was too much history clinging to that fragile object.
"Why don't you keep it?" I asked him. "It is more yours than it was ever mine."
I offered it to him, that he might take it back.
A look of sadness passed his face. "But now it will be yours." So I closed my fingers around it and put it into my pocket, feeling its weight against me.
"I will keep it for her." I said to him, and he had nodded. "He will come."
There was never anything much to be explained, between David and me. We both knew Lestat, and that was all we had to seek to know each other. He was still the same as the night Lestat and I had flown to Talbot Manor, the same man that Lestat had interrogated and secretly perplexed. I was glad of that, for him.
I stood up and blow out the candles slowly, one by one, counting them in my head. The last one guttered as I closed the door and finally died in my wake. The locket in my hand, I walked into the room and put it down, coiling the links carefully on the desk. The locket was open, so I left it as I drew near them, hearing their voices. I slipped out the door and into the courtyard, where I could not hear them as the water drowned their words.
The dark flowers and the banana trees pleased me. The house had almost been finished by Lestat's hired crew, and I had come in before it had been finished, supplying the last touches. The old furniture, which had been saved from the fire by being in storage as Claudia and I had waited for the ship to Europe. It was a wonder that no one had thought to open the boxes in the warehouse, paid for yearly in account from my old companies. As long as the money had kept the owners happy, the furniture had been safe for so long, as our own lives came into tumult. I wondered if Lestat realised that some of the furniture was well and truly the same, and not the reproductions that he had ordered. It had caused me joy to see that he had wanted to furnish the townhouse as it was when we had lived in it together, even still the preciseness of his memory.
What could not be recovered was replaced by antiques which were so similar, it was difficult to remember that they had not always been there. The only thing I could not bear to see was the canary cage which had hung open on the last night, Claudia's birds long flown so many years ago.
The house stilled inside, and I heard the silence. Then, immeasurably, the familiar, deliberate footsteps.
"Lestat."
"I'm quite determined that you are coming with us to Rio," he said. "No matter what you say."
"Lestat - "
"David and I had decided it, so you can't protest now. We're going." His eyes implored me to forget.
"I wasn't going to protest, Lestat." I told him, finally able to speak. "I agreed all along."
The little frown appeared on his lips again, and played there longer.
"I don't know, Lestat." I said. "We have said to each other everything there is to be said. In the valley, in the church as you were leaving. When you begged for my blood, and I refused you, when you burned my little house. When you came back. When you did not carry out your great revenge and kill me in the cathedral. When you took up my challenge, and then you lit the candle There's nothing more to be said."
He looked at me, and there was sadness in his eyes, as if he could imagine that this was the old time, when we stood out here, underneath the stars. He reached out to touch my cheek and I stayed still. I received his kiss on my cheek, and then, grazing my neck.
I had thrown all my candles into the wind.
"But it wasn't a challenge, was it, Louis?"
I shuddered. "No. Never that"
"And yet you forgive me?"
"There is nothing
for me to forgive. It is completely between you and David."
"Oh? Completely?"
"Yes. Unless you have any regrets. But I doubt that you do, so I have no reason to, either . I have known you too long."
"Ah, Louis." he said, his lips over mine, barely touching. "S o you do. But that was not what I meant in the first place. So I must say it again. Do you forgive me…."
I did not say anything.
"Forgive me, in all honesty." He whispered. "For what I have done, for what passed between us."
"In all honesty, Lestat?" I stepped back away from his kiss. Looking at him, the tiredness emanating from him although of course, he'd tried his best to hide it, and of course he was so strong. I shut my eyes slowly and I could still see him, in perfect detail, the moonlight on my eyelids.
"In all honesty, I always think that there is going to be a last time, one last time that I will be able to reach you." I said, speaking to him in my mind. " There is always a time when you drift away, and I have lost you, I think that I am never going to understand you again."
"But I always come back." he said, quietly.
"Yes, but there is a distance that cannot be denied. I wonder that you are still the same. I wonder, when I will forget you and put you behind me, to let you go."
"You are talking of David," he said.
"No. I am talking about you. What is it that you want to take from me, that you have to have my convictions, my ideals, crumbled at you feet? What do you want of me!"
"I don't want you to let me go." Lestat said, stepping close again. "That's why I always come back. To you."
"To me?" I asked him.
He nodded. "Never let me go. Please, Louis."
"I've tried, Lestat." I said. So many times. I had tried to turn against him, when Claudia had taken out the knife and gashed his throat. When I had closed the sack around him, when I had thrown the lamp at his feet. When he had sat in the Theatre des Vampires, clutching the scrap of the yellow dress, and then the ruin of him as he begged me to teach him how to live in the new century. He knew.
"But I can't. No matter what I do, I cannot ever let go of you. I don't know how."
"Why, Louis…?" I let him come close to me, and we stood level to each other.
"I couldn't blame you."
"Each time you come back, you know me as if we have never been apart. You read my mind, but then you cannot. You are part of me as I am part of you."
"I don't know why I hurt you," he said. "Even after you told me, in the cathedral, I could still go and do what I did. Even after that."
"I don't hold it against you." I spoke to him. I realised that it was the truth.
"You know that I feel the same." he said, "And that you hurt me too."
"That is what is between us. That is why I can never let you go. But never, for the sake of the love you might feel for me, if there ever is love, never give me cause to wish that I could."
It was almost an eternity, standing there, watching the subtle nuances in his face, the sounds of the night louder in the preternatural silence. Everything passed within seconds, as I listened for the one confession that could make the pain of thinking that I had lost go away.
"No." he said. "We can't make promises that we know can be broken. It would be a lie."
I gave a little smile. "It's really that hard?"
"You know I want more than anything to be able to say that I could promise you that. It's the one thing I don't know how to give you. The only thing I can ever be certain of, is that I can tell you the truth, and I can hope that you will be there for me to say it to you."
"So we can be willing to hurt, because we cannot say to each other that we won't break promises?" I asked him. He looked sad, sighing a little.
"I am never willing to hurt you, Louis. But I will not lie to you."
"I don't know if that is enough… and I tell you this from the heart."
He touched the lapel of my coat, and fingered the edge. "You knew I was coming tonight, didn't you?" he said softly.
I nodded. "You always come back, I am just never sure when. Or what we will say to each other when you do."
"Then, within, we have that truth. That I would never hurt you, if I could prevent it. If my insatiable nature could stop it, if I could stop needing to test everything, to want to break all the rules."
I looked him in the eye, and all of him looked back at me, unblinking.
" The only thing is, that within all of that, you have to know that I love you. And all of me, including that selfish part of me that is irrational and will not listen to this stronger desire, in all of my damnable self - I want you to feel the same!" His gaze flickered, and he turned away.
"But I do, Lestat." I walked around to face him, to take the locket from his hands. It made a faint tinkling sound as it plunged into the fountain, where she would have wanted it to be. In my mind's eye, the paint slowly floated to the surface and smoothed out, falling into the water.
" That is why I asked you," I said, " So I would know."
Then I heard his voice, answering mine, without any words. In that, what he said to me was everything that we had said that night - that there was no greater truth
- than this.
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Artemesia
27/5/2000