Title: Silence of the Wolves
Author: RavenWolf
Pairing: Lestat/Louis
Rating: R
Summary: The first time Louis begged Lestat to stay with him.
~~
“Don’t touch me, Lestat.” I didn’t look up from my book, as I was used to his antics by now. He grinned at me, and I had the feeling he hadn’t heard a word I said. His smile was that shit-eating grin type of smile, the one that made me wonder if he’d ever been human.
But oddly enough, he backed off. I had never known him to respect my wishes just for my own pleasure. In fact, it had always seemed to me that he rather enjoyed my pain.
I dipped my head back into my reading. I didn’t trust his acquiescence, so I kept one eye on him at the same time. Again, he was acting weirdly. Instead of leaving me for the hunt, as he usually did, he stayed. He sat down in a plush chair and stared out the window. I quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing. If Lestat wanted to act bizarrely, that was his business.
My veins were pinched with empty hunger, but I would not eat. I’d found that the most efficient way was to only feed when I was at the pinnacle of my hunger, sometime after one in the morning. If I fed on enough rats then, I could last until daylight, when sleep would take me away from the starvation.
I knew by the way Lestat eyed me that he found my habits despicable. I could easily say the same to him.
“I’m going out, Louis.” That was all he offered me before he swept out the door and into the night. I’d come to expect less, so I was surprised that I was offered even this common courtesy. I wondered vaguely what was going on with him. And then I put it out of my mind and returned to my book.
***
I half expected him to return with a couple of two-bit whores, ready to put on his nightly show of terrors in my very lap. He’d often fallen back on this tactic for trying to get me to feed. Torturing women and then begging me to put them out of their misery. I pinched the bridge of my nose. The thought of it made me sick.
But tonight he came in alone. And his usual jaunty manner was completely absent. In its place, a dejected air had settled around Lestat. I tried not to stare, but the sudden change in him was remarkable. I remembered earlier in the evening when he had again tried to kiss me, and I’d tried hopelessly to make him leave me alone. He had. And now I seriously wondered why.
“Lestat,” I said warily. “Why haven’t you brought home your whores?”
“An inelegant way of putting it, to be sure, Louis. I’m afraid I don’t quite know the answer myself.”
He stood quietly by the window, his soft pale hair gleaming in the moonlight. I tried to go back to reading, but his presence was like a splinter. It was a niggling thought in the back of my head, and I couldn’t let it go.
“Lestat...” I said quietly. I didn’t really know what else to say. No words came to me to express the odd longing I felt. I wanted to touch his pale face, and feel the fresh blood flush beneath it. I shook myself mentally. I needed to get control. I needed to stop thinking things like this.
I looked at the grandfather clock. It was ten of one. Late enough to go out. I stood up, fully intending to walk out the door and head into the outskirts of town, but my legs would not respond. A treacherous voice in the back of my head whispered that there was plenty of powerful blood right here. Plenty enough to slake my thirst.
I flinched at the powerful thought. Lestat was not like a pig or a rat. I could not just think of him like that, in such a profane way. He was not for my bloodlust. He was not for my anything lust. He was my Maker, my torturer, and that was all.
I felt like I was going crazy. I needed to leave, right now, before anything happened. Hunger made my control weaker than it usually was, and now Lestat was looking at me. I had the feeling he wanted something from me, but I could not, for the life of me, figure out what it was.
“I-I have to go...” I said, making no move toward the door.
“Of course you do, chere.” He walked over to me, and got so close I was practically breathing his breath. Another hunger woke deep inside me, one that I was not familiar with. The air between us was electric, and it seemed impossible that we could stand here like this and not do anything.
Of course, I, a constant victim of my weak will, was the first one to move. I reached out a tentative, shaking hand to touch his hair. It felt soft and vibrant beneath my fingers, not at all like the hair of a dead thing.
Lestat can move much faster than I, when he wants. Within seconds, I was again on the couch, this time on my back with Lestat on top of me. He kissed me, hard and fierce, and this time I did not tell him to stop. His sharp fangs ripped into my vulnerable lower lip, and I could taste my own blood, salty and rich, flowing between us.
There was something heady and intoxicating about being so out of control. Lestat owned me in those moments. He was my whole world, filtered down to a crimson blood drop.
He was sitting on me, with a warm, dangerous weight. My lips and tongue were thick with thirst and desire. He was taunting me with his ephemeral smile and fleeting sad eyes. There was so much more to him beneath the surface. What he showed me on a daily basis was only the tip of the iceberg. He had never let me see the rest of him, and I knew, with a fearful certainty, that the part of Lestat that I loved was the part that I had never seen. If only he would just show me!
Suddenly, his passion died. He sat up and clutched my head to his chest, moaning sorrowfully. “Oh, my Louie, my Louis. You worry me, love. You don’t eat, you don’t speak, you don’t feel. Will I have to watch you waste away before my very eyes? My Louis, my love, you must eat! Drink from infants in their cradles or old men on their death beds, it matters not to me. Just as long as I don’t have to watch you waste away like this anymore!”
He gave a cry and buried his face in my hair. My hands fell loosely around his waist, and my hands ghosted across his shoulders. I didn’t know what to do. I loved him, but I was so lost and confused. I was the rat in the maze, searching through cardboard walls for the final golden answer at the end. I couldn’t be distracted by him. The goal was all-important.
“Lestat, I can’t.” I didn’t explain myself; I just got up and left. But not far. I couldn’t make myself go any further from him than the next room over. I cursed him for cursing me.
For a few moments I vainly hoped that he would leave me alone. But he came, dependable as the sun, a ghostly little shape in the murky room.
“Louis, mon chere, I have discovered a solution for you,” he proclaimed pompously. I turned away and worried my bottom lip with my teeth. There was still fresh blood coming from the wound that Lestat had made.
“And what is that, Lestat?” I inquired blindly.
“You must drink me,” he whispered privately in my ear. I restrained my surprise as best as I could. His breath tickled my ear and the back of my neck. It was warm from the human life he’d taken earlier. And more than anything, I wanted to take what he was offering. A chance to know more of my precious ice berg.
I could practically feel my skin pulled tight against my bones. I was starving; a maddening thirst that I couldn’t hold much longer. I couldn’t imagine saying no to Lestat’s offer. I could already taste his thick, knowledgeable blood running through my mouth and into my veins.
I didn’t even feel myself doing it. My lips were on his throat before I could even breathe. My heart was beating voraciously in my ears, and the moment before my teeth pierced skin was a painful kind of absolute ecstasy.
I’d tasted his blood before; I knew what to expect. But it caught me totally off-guard when his life came roaring into my own brain, a cascade of fluid thought. Pictures of people and places that I had never seen flashed statically across my mind, too fleeting to catch hold of. But there was one image. One thought that punctured my daze. It was an image of me, dying at the old plantation. A picture of Lestat sitting back and watching me die. But there was something there that I hadn’t known about before. Sympathy. Compassion. He hurt for me. I hadn’t even begun to conceive...And then I realized that this wasn’t the exception to the rule of heartlessness, though it was certainly the most powerful example. All through the thread of Lestat, I could find these things. Sadness. Kinship. Love. Sorrow. Regret. The full spectrum of human emotion was present in this being that I had previously thought empty.
I was shocked, to be sure. But the fresh, sweet flow of blood had not yet stemmed, and while I could still taste Lestat on my tongue, I could not force any kind of voluntary reaction from my body. I knew somewhere in my mind that I was clinging to him like a lost child, but I also knew that there was nothing I could or would want to do about it. I know now why I flew that first night Lestat bit me.
I knew instinctually when it was time to stop. Death was no closer to Lestat than it had ever been, but the tug in my veins had abated and he was pushing chidingly at my shoulders.
I fell back against the pillows, blood staining my mouth like the finest red wine. We were both breathing hard, and I could feel the new blood in me pumping toward my fresh arousal. Lestat was...beautiful, laying back, with bloodstains on his collar, and his mouth open slightly as he panted for breath. The barest hint of white fang could be seen against his plush lips. He was so pretty, so sacred.
I rolled away. What was wrong with me? His blood must have done something...I couldn’t help it. I wanted him so badly. I wanted to touch his hips and nuzzle the wound in his throat and hold him safe to my body, my beloved Maker.
Something had come loose inside me, and it was rushing around like a blind rhino. The powerful blood was going to my head, making me dizzy and wanton. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t find my way back to where I was before. I couldn’t even remember why I had been so goddamned unbearably unhappy. Not with Lestat laid out in front of me like a sleeping giant. I wanted to disturb him and wake him and kiss him until he was as dizzy as I was.
My own hand was disconnected from my body, it seemed. I couldn’t control it as it ventured bravely to Lestat’s silent face. He was staring at the ceiling, and paradox of paradoxes, I don’t think he had even noticed me and my inner turmoil.
The bold hand touched Lestat’s face gently at first, and then, when it found the texture pleasing to touch, it began to stroke along his cheekbones. The rest of me was in a second ecstasy. I realized in that important moment that I could have what I wanted. I could have Lestat, take him here and have him with me always. I could have everything that I asked for.
The gap between us was cold and lonely, and bridged only by my arm. I shattered the space and pressed my lips to his throat. To the wound that I had made that was already beginning to close. My tongue darted out to lick the last drops of blood away, to clean him up.
His head turned and his eyes stared at me, communicating silently, pleading lust and love. He rolled over so that he pinned me beneath him. He was sitting on my chest, and this close to him, I could smell his thirsty, horny, musky scent. I breathed him in in deep draughts of air.
I pressed my cheek to his abdomen. A silent red tear traced down my face. “Never leave me, Lestat. Please, don’t ever, ever leave me. Love me forever and keep me with you and lock me up and don’t, don’t let me go. Don’t leave me!”
His spidery delicate hands found the tie in the back of my hair. He undid it and let the hair fall loose around my face.
He kissed the top of my head tenderly. “Now, now, my Beautiful One. I will never leave you. Never.”
I continued to cry.