#consumptivefreak

            Despite all of these complaints… I must admit it can be a little amusing. Lestat prances around the house at night wearing a red Santa hat and singing carols. He keeps getting stuck on the “Fa La La” one. Hours at a time, just choruses of “Fa La La” echoing around corners.

            He sang one about chestnuts and a fire once, but he promptly stopped when recalling that I was nearby. I wonder why that is. Wait. Actually, I remember now.

            Well, I’ve bothered you enough for tonight, my friend. I hope this letter finds you well and that you will be home with us. In fact, I may pray that you do. I need some piece of sanity in the middle of all Lestat’s festivity.

Sincerely yours, Louis

P.S. Merry Christmas, David

 ____________________________________________________________           Louis set aside the laptop and hit send. He didn’t really like sending emails. He preferred writing on paper, but it was easier this way to stay in contact.

          “Tis’ the seaon to be jolly!” Lestat’s boisterous voice came again, as if knowing that Louis was no longer busy.

          The blond came around the corner into the office, smiling wide, his freshly fed cheeks flushed a cheery pink. He apparently put his Santa hat back on when he got home because there is was, the puff ball at the end touching one of his cheeks beside his hair.

          “Louis! There are carolers!” Lestat cried excitedly, bouncing a bit like a child on his heels. “People outside just singing! It’s lovely.”

          “People are standing outside, just…singing?” Louis asked slowly.

          “Yes!” Lestat rolled his eyes. “Come on, mon cher. Humor me tonight. Please?”

          Louis blinked in surprise. Lestat was asking nicely? He must have something terrible in mind.

          Lestat pursed his lips. “I know that look. I swear, I have no ulterior motive. I just want you to enjoy the holiday with me.”

          Louis stood up and walked over to him, gently taking his hand. “Alright, Lestat. Tonight, I will humor you and do as you ask.”

          Lestat smiled brightly, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “Excellent! To the front room!”

          Louis sighed and followed him, nearly running into Lestat, who stopped suddenly in between steps right as they entered the room.

          “Look, Louis.” Lestat grinned deviously, looking up at the ceiling. Louis frowned in confusion, following his gaze. There was a small plant hanging from the ceiling. A familiar sight from old holiday parties when he was young.

          “Mistletoe, Lestat? Really?” Louis rolled his eyes. “Is this really necessary?”

          “You promised to humor me.” Lestat reminded. “So, give me a kiss.” He leaned in, stopping about an inch from Louis’s lips so that the darker haired vampire actually had to move closer to kiss him. And he did, giving his brat prince a soft kiss.

          Lestat seemed satisfied with this and led Louis into the room further, over toward an open window where they could see the carolers singing in the square. “Merry Christmas, mon cher.”

Louis couldn’t help but smile. It really was all beautiful. The way people laughed in the streets. The cheery way they sang. The way Lestat seemed to glow even among the bright synthetic lights.

“Beautiful.” Louis whispered. “Truly.”

Lestat nodded in agreement. “It really is…”

Louis nodded, enjoying the quiet and peaceful air of the holiday. He could actually learn to enjoy this time of year.

“Some snow would be nice though.”

Lestat, for his part, was beaming as his eyes scanned over the walls as though for the first time. The Talamasca Motherhouse was one of those structures that had history just oozing out from between its bricks, the kind of place that looked like it should have a plaque and postcards and a guided tour three times a day. It obviously didn’t, private and legally nearly invisible. And Lestat initially pretended that he hadn’t heard Louis’ comment, but then realizing he’d have to start a brand new conversation, decided that Louis’ murmur was as good a jumping off point as any. Comebacks were a specialty of his. 

“Well, we couldn’t exactly get David’s things back if we didn’t go to the place they’re holding onto them, Louis. It was a very good idea of yours, getting back something he had before. Now here we are. A Christmas miracle.” Lestat turned his head to grin at Louis, his signature expression meeting Louis’ signature raised eyebrows.

“Stop calling everything dangerous ‘a Christmas miracle,’” he said, voice only a little louder than it had been before. “When I said we should get David something he’d had in his office, the things he’d told us about, I meant getting something just like them, not the exact thing! Maybe shopping online, not coming here!” He gestured briefly, sharply, toward the house before crossing his arms over his chest. His white hand was like its own ghostly apparition in the dark. 

“First off, you’re very bad at online shopping,” Lestat pointed out. “Remember the porn edition of ‘The Great Gatsby?’ Unless you were lying and that was exactly the book you were trying to buy and you were just embarrassed when I opened it.” He held his finger up to stop the automatic, pedestrian argument here- that he shouldn’t have been opening packages addressed to Louis. “Secondly, I feel that it would be something of a disappointment to get him something that only seemed like his own personal item, and then for it to be a copy. A lot of things have more meaning because they’re originals. Oil paintings, first edition books.” 

Louis exhaled slowly, the soft sound of reluctant agreement. It was so hard when Lestat was right. While attachment to physical objects had never been his strong suit, he couldn’t deny the allure of touching things with sentiment and history; sometimes even now, he trailed his fingers along the aged bricks of a building as he walked through the streets of New Orleans simply because the building had stood while he was mortal and those bricks might have retained some sense of his humanity as he passed them by. 

So now he nodded, though he wouldn’t give Lestat the satisfaction of more agreement than that. Lestat felt the movement beside him and reached for Louis’ hand to pull him toward the house. Not ready to be quite that accommodating, Louis made sure he was just out of reach. Determined not to be sullen over that little pout, Lestat stepped forward so he was walking a little ahead of him. Neither of them were bothered by the security system, no matter how closely they were supposedly observed, or how many strange creatures were supposedly programmed into everything to keep them out. 

Lestat had learned a long time ago that things never kept him out. The universe had handed him a key to every door, every lock, and it was himself. The universe had handed Louis a weakness, Lestat realized as he walked down a hallway and turned to see that Louis was no longer behind him. He’d always thought that he was Louis’ biggest weakness, but it was, and had always been, books.

The Talamasca motherhouse was absolutely filthy with books. There were more books than people, there were more books than furniture. There were books neatly catalogued in libraries, there were books open in stands for studying, there were books in private desks and propping up other books on private shelves. There were books stacked up in forgotten heaps in cellar rooms beside boxes of artifacts, all carefully labeled if there was anyone who was even interested anymore. 

While historical odds and ends were great to play with, he was keener to get his hands on his fledgling, who had likely been snagged by a sexy title with the word “history” or “rime” or “volume 46” in it. Lestat could picture it, suddenly, the way Louis would be lost in a moment, with his hair mussed and his mouth slightly open, standing before the table or the bookcase. 

It was as much the desire to see him that way as actually getting what they came here for and getting out unseen (this part of the house, the western wing, was so quiet with so many scholars taking some time away for the holidays). Lestat crept through rooms that were as neat and put away, enjoying the act of knocking a few things off a desk, switching the order of journals when they were carefully numbered. There were rooms that were paper disasters, with computers that were covered in manila folders and handwritten notes. He wasn’t even sure how to disturb them; they were so disturbed already. He didn’t blame them though. If he had set his whole life to studying eternal and frustrating creatures, and wasn’t one himself, he was sure he wouldn’t be one of the ones with the tidy offices. David, as he recalled, had been a very tidy scholar, with just those little notes poking out of journals to hint that there was something more there. 

An hour’s search found him nothing, and Lestat told himself that he should not be concerned. Louis was clever enough not to be caught, though perhaps he was too passive to keep himself from being locked in and then much too polite to break a door. He’d count on Lestat to break a door. That’s what being a lover was. Knowing which one would be the one to break things, which one would be the one to kiss first, which one would need rescuing. 

Lestat amused himself with all of this, but he still needed to find Louis. He considered texting him, then laughed aloud at the thought. That would have required Louis first of all have his phone, second of all have it charged, and then last he’d have to actually check it. It was down to searching. He couldn’t imagine that Louis would have gotten out of the west wing; he had to have been taken by something shortly after they’d walked in. The problem was that he was quiet normally. David was quiet, but those manners of his made him announce whenever he entered or left a room. It was Louis who appeared and disappeared. Sometimes it seemed it happened in the middle of a conversation. Maybe this would be the time Lestat would make good on his threat to put a bell on him.

He felt the approach of someone, a lone mortal heading back to an office for something forgotten. Lestat briefly entertained the thought of stepping right out in front of her (“Surprise! Merry Christmas!”), but since he’d already managed to lose Louis, it seemed like maybe this time he should keep his head down and just let her pass by without letting her see him. He did grin to himself when he saw which office she stepped into; so she was the neat type who was about to be confronted with a particularly dirty French joke for 1814 scrawled on her dry erase board. Chuckling to himself, Lestat stole down the hall in the opposite direction. 

Another hour of searching and there was no smile left on his face. Dawn came early for Louis still, and Lestat’s overactive imagination was giving him very clear pictures of Louis sprawled on the floor for some other scholar to find, or slumped against the bookshelf, chin on his chest and his pale hand crumpling pages of the book fallen to his lap. That was the horror of it. Someone else finding him, obviously, not the wrinkled pages, though he knew several people in his life would debate that.

It was frustrating to him that his mind kept flashing between amusing comments, as though he was narrating for someone else’s amusement, and then horrible potential outcomes that were real and very possible. How did he just…lose Louis? Or had Louis lost him? Was Louis already outside? Where the hell could he even hope to find anything David had left behind? He hadn’t made it past this one wing, wasting his time walking back and forth over the same space hoping to come across a room he’d missed.

The image came to him again, Louis unaware of the rest of the world because a book had come between him and reality. The way to tell what was going on in a text was to watch Louis’ dark eyebrows. They were fine and gently winged, a shape that leant itself to emotion. While sitting in his chair, head nearly resting against the side as though he’d do something to sweetly mortal as fall asleep reading in the evening at home, he would stay incredibly still, nothing moving except his finger to turn a page when he’d finished it and his eyebrows reacting to whatever was happening in the plot. Lestat paused and leaned back against the wall in the hallway, head against the wallpaper and eyes closed. Maybe it was just the mood of the Motherhouse, a place he admittedly didn’t have extensive experience with, but it seemed to dampen emotions, with its quiet old beams and walls and smells. In a strange way, Louis seemed like he could belong somewhere like this, that it wasn’t so much lost as seamlessly blending into a place that was ordered like his soul, curious but contained. 

“Lestat!” The whisper was sharp and carried, his name as only one person said his name. Lestat’s eyes were open immediately and he turned his head to see Louis walking down the hall toward him. “What are you doing? Did you get lost?”

Louis reached him and immediately put a hand on his arm, eyebrows betraying his concern. Lestat laughed, louder than he meant to, shaking his head when Louis’ expression grew confused.

“You’re worried about me? You think I got lost?” he asked. Louis glanced back down the hall.

“Hush! We’re likely on camera and, if not, you’re loud enough to attract attention. I don’t want to know what you’ve been doing. Let’s just go, hmm?” Louis’ scolding was its own gift, and Lestat let himself be led back down the hall. He was pretty sure, as he looked around, that he’d never even made it out of this same hall the entire time they’d been here.

“Oh! David’s gift!” he finally protested, setting his heels. “We’ve wasted all this…what?” Louis was rolling his eyes, a surprisingly modern gesture from him. He hadn’t done that in at least the first hundred years they’d known one another. Too impolite. Now, apparently, it was fair game. “What?”

“I’ve already done it,” Louis said, pulling on Lestat’s arm again. 

“You? You found it? Where?” Lestat asked, making it difficult to walk with him through habit. “What is it? A letter opener? A snowglobe? A pack of cards?”

“No…what?” Louis looked over at him as they got to the doors, still slightly propped by a rock Lestat had kicked into place when they walked in. “This is the stupidest thing we’ve done. And we’ve handled it poorly, just wandering around. We’ve been here hours.”

“Louis. What did you get?” Lestat stopped him, hand on the door in front of him. “A lighter. You’d do that. You got an old vintage lighter.” The fire jokes never got old.

Louis reached into his jacket pocket and held up a metal bookmark. It was old and tarnished, not something as fine as Lestat would have expected the Talamascan to have kept. The shape of it was pleasing, though, the curved top and the way the light caught on the simple font of the engraving as he held it out to Lestat.

“‘To our David on his birthday. Never lose your curiosity,’” Lestat read aloud, then met Louis’ eyes. “From his parents? Grandparents?”

Louis shrugged and smiled a little as he tucked it away again. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I bet he’ll love to tell us.”

Lestat groaned as he opened the door, shaking his head as he let Louis walk out before him. See? He had manners too. “You’re so damned thoughtful, Louis. From now on, I’m taking you with me for all my illegal shopping.” Grinning to himself, he slapped the alarm button by the door on his way out, beaming when Louis’ bright, wide eyes were focused on him again. The klaxon roared through the building. “Uh oh, Louis. We’d better get moving.” 

Ignoring Louis’ outraged sputtering, he grabbed onto his hand and pulled him out onto the broad lawn, dragging him as he started running. He loved the way it felt to laugh and run, the sound torn away from his mouth into the night. He loved the way Louis’ fingers clutched his a little, the sound Louis had made, the way Louis would shoot him little glaring glances all night once they were back at the hotel. This was his gift to himself, with memories he’d store up for when they’d had one of their falling outs (which were bound to happen). He would keep the sensation of Louis’ hand in his, his startled eyes when the alarm went, the softness in his smile when he revealed what he’d found of David’s in some storeroom somewhere. Lestat had been right about the building; it had welcomed Louis, and Louis, annoyed as he was now, had enjoyed his silent stay there.

It didn’t take them that long to put enough distance between themselves and the Motherhouse (Were they reviewing the tapes now? Whose ass was on the line for the micro-invasion?), and Louis was the one to slowed to a walk, knowing Lestat would temper his own speed. They walked in silence, and while he felt Lestat deserved it, Louis didn’t pull away from him. The grass beneath their boots seemed crisp and sharp, with the frost that had covered everything. It wasn’t snow, but it still made the night glisten slightly. Magical enough for them. 

Lestat was quiet, and for a few minutes Louis wondered if they would have the night like this, just a time of being together away from everything else, listening to the sounds of winter. Eventually they would have to take to the air, since Lestat preferred that to a taxi. But for now, it felt like some sort of holiday, something private and sacred and silent. 

The quiet couldn’t last, and Louis wasn’t actually surprised when it was broken. Lestat was too pleased with himself to stay silent.

“Your hand’s like ice!” he said with a lopsided grin to the side. He watched Louis’ profile, his fine features and the tiny smile he was trying to hide.

“So get me gloves for Christmas,” Louis murmured, still looking ahead as they walked. The breeze caught his hair and he ducked his head to avoid it blowing over his eyes.

“Maybe I have better ways to warm you for Christmas,” Lestat murmured back, leaning in toward him. Louis’ hair smelled good, smelled like something expensive that, oh, hmm, perhaps his lover had bought for him.