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Armand’s body is smaller, more fragile; it does not weigh Louis down enough to steal his breath. He ought to feel lighter, he ought to feel at peace, and yet he misses the heat that once blossomed over every bare inch of his skin when a strong arm coiled around his waist and drew him close in deep, unthinking sleep. Armand smells of soap and violets, a tender, pleasant scent, and yet when Louis breathes him in too deeply, something sharp grazes his throat. He feels every pulse of his heart, every faint stir of Armand’s limbs, every sound beyond the wall. He is not annoyed, only aware that something within him refuses to let the stillness after desire soften into calm.
The coffin he bought in Paris is good — comfortable, in the plainest sense. Everything here is good, because nothing carries the dusty, stale perfume of nostalgia. The air is tepid, the walls are beige, the scents muted by damp.
He cannot sleep long after Armand lies still beside him.
In New Orleans, the silence that filled his mind had been heavy and patient, always ready to claim him the moment exhaustion brushed his thoughts. But Paris hums to a rhythm of its own — one Louis has not yet learned to follow. There are fewer lights, less laughter, less color than he once imagined. Since his arrival, he cannot recall a single night of true rest. With each sunrise, instead of surrendering to the bliss of oblivion, he finds himself staring at the dark coffin lid, thinking of Lestat.
At such times he feels his grief as a kind of gnawing persistent, ravenous, and unappeased hunger. So instead of sleeping, he feeds on memories: the echo of Lestat’s laughter, too bright and alive to be forgotten; the flash of that blue gaze turning to steel when they sparred with words; the tilt of his head before he spoke in that voice thick with honey.
It has been only a few years since that feeling first burned like fire beneath his ribs, and yet Louis feels as though he has spent centuries trying in vain to soothe it.
In Paris, the hunger has teeth again.
Armand stirs beside him once more, as if sensing the tension wound tight beneath his touch. His closeness laps against Louis like a tide against rock, eroding his restraint grain by grain. When soft fingers brush his wrist, Louis realizes how careful he has become with touch. With Lestat, it had always been instinctive. He had allowed himself to be held, possessed, devoured in every sense of the word. His body would melt beneath Lestat’s hands, overcome by that fierce, inevitable belonging. Now he lies still and rigid, waiting for Armand to withdraw his hand, the gesture passing through him like wind through the bare branches of winter.
He knows, somewhere deep beneath thought, that even if he wished it, he could not pretend his roots do not lie buried deep beneath the earth of Royal Street in New Orleans.
He closes his eyes and sees the house again, their home, with its heavy velvet curtains, the piano, the wallpaper blooming with flowers. He can almost hear the creaking stairs whispering with mischief, a teasing note struck on the keys when Lestat sought his gaze. He remembers the scent of silk, of warm skin and champagne. The taste of hot blood on Lestat’s lips as fangs grazed his neck and thighs — their hearts beating together until he no longer knew where he ended and Lestat began.
He opens his eyes sharply. The coffin lid above him is wooden, smooth, terribly ordinary. Armand shifts again, sensing the change in Louis’s breath. The hunger in his chest flares, spreading through his limbs like a swallowed flame.
He had hoped that killing Lestat would free him.
For so long, that thought had been his quiet but poisonous comfort, like a vision of peace painted in blood. An ending that promised silence, clean air, the stillness of a world without him. The end of loving and hating in the same breath.
Yet now, when it has come to pass, the freedom he imagined cannot be found. He follows Claudia and her restless search for meaning, circling the world and losing his own. The promise of colorful, fragrant and alive Europe has faded like an old film, flickering before his eyes. He watches it from a distance, tasting disappointment like ash on his tongue. He knows he could go anywhere, and still he would never find his home.
There is no peace when the only thing he can think of is the single moment he felt no hunger, watching the blood slide down the wound he carved into Lestat’s neck. Sometimes he tells himself it was justice, repayment in kind — Lestat had been his murderer, after all, but also his maker. He had broken all his bones, torn him from his mortal life, but had also given him one charged with beauty, power, and love.
All Louis ever gave Lestat was death.
Now Lestat is gone, and yet Louis still wakes with his name upon his lips, as if his body cannot accept the finality of it. As if, deep within, the line between love and death has blurred beyond recognition.
Sometimes, in the gray hour before dawn, he feels a strange relief, like the hush that follows the ebb of a long illness. The world softens then, becomes less sharp, less loud, less cruelly real. He stares at the pale ribbon of light crawling across the floor and whispers to himself: this is peace.
But it never lasts. The pain always returns when he lies back in the soft but empty coffin and feels that tug beneath his ribs. A pull that grows, spreading through every muscle and bone, until in the silence he can hear the resonance of Lestat’s absence.
He is torn between truths: the knowledge that he is finally free, and that freedom tastes like dust. He can no longer tell where grief ends and longing begins; where love fades and addiction blooms. Sometimes he believes that in Paris he has found himself again, that he can speak, move, and exist without the weight of that gaze upon him. And yet, in this new stillness, in the long hours when no one touches or demands him, he feels as though everything he once hated has become everything he needs.
How ironic, he thinks. There was no peace in loving Lestat, but there was life. Vibrant, furious, vivid life. Touches that left marks on his skin, kisses that stole his breath. Now there is only the illusion of calm, where nothing truly lives. Armand looks at him with tenderness, as though he could heal him by presence alone, but Louis no longer needs tenderness. He does not even know if he needs love. What he craves is passion, maybe pain, the trace of something that rends him open and makes him whole again. It was in Lestat’s fury that he had felt most alive — in the jealousy, the cruelty, the endless battles that were the only language they ever truly spoke.
Perhaps that is why he cannot love Armand. Because Armand does not demand, does not wound, does not insist that Louis become more than he is. And Louis no longer knows who he is, if no one forces him to prove that he exists at all.
Sometimes he wonders if this emptiness is the true punishment. The freedom Claudia once spoke of when Lestat held him captive: freedom from love, from fear, from devotion. A freedom that offers no relief, because there is nothing left to lose.
In the dark he sees the veins of the wood, the faint cracks where the nails were driven too deep. He feels his heart rise into his throat, the scent of violets thick in his nose. His thoughts rattle in his skull, and he can barely keep his chest from trembling as he draws a ragged breath. He remembers that intense gaze — eyes so bright they seemed almost violet, which, before Lestat became a deceitful and treacherous partner, had once belonged to the man with whom Louis had shared all his sorrows, and in whom he had found himself falling more deeply in love with each passing day.
After all, maybe that exquisite enslavement that gave him meaning was love.
Maybe his soul never longed for freedom at all, but for the chains that made it real.
Louis wonders, sometimes, if his heart still belongs to him at all. It beats, slow and deliberate, but it is as if it beats for someone else, echoing through a body that feels borrowed. His existence has become an imitation of life, a memory stretched thin over endless nights. He need to tell himself over and over again that he has chosen peace. That he has escaped the pitfalls and fever of Lestat’s love, and yet every quiet moment betrays him.
There is no true silence, only the echo of what was. He feels Lestat in the spaces between thoughts, in the breath that refuses to leave his lungs, in the phantom weight of hands that once claimed him. When the air in the coffin grows stale, he imagines that if he reached up, pressed his palms to the wood, and pushed, he might find Lestat on the other side, waiting, smiling that infuriating, brilliant smile. And in those moments, he hates himself for wanting it to be true.
He tells himself that what he feels is madness, that memory has sharpened the edges of love into something mythic. But no amount of reason can dull the ache that trembles beneath his ribs. For even now, when he should feel free, his heart moves to a rhythm that is not his own. It belongs to the monster who made him, and to the lover he destroyed.
He has tried to fill the void with Armand’s touch, the muted elegance of Paris, the pale imitation of companionship, but it all dissolves into air. Nothing clings to him or leaves a mark. He is untethered, and in that weightless freedom lies his torment.
He rises each night and goes through the motions: feeding, wandering, speaking softly to Armand, but none of it reaches him. He exists as if through glass. The city hums beneath him, and he watches it with the aching detachment of one who remembers what warmth once felt like but can no longer touch it.
And sometimes, when he catches his reflection in a window, pale and unchanging, he feels the flicker of something almost tender — a recognition tied to the world by one thing only: the reverb of love, or what remains of it. In that fragile echo lies both his torment and his salvation. For if love is a kind of death, then perhaps death, too, is a kind of love — the last and cruelest one, which binds him to Lestat even now, across the gulf of eternity.
He closes his eyes and feels the faint tremor of that bond, like the memory of a heartbeat long extinguished. The ache deepens, sharp and luminous, filling every part of him until he can no longer tell if it is agony or rapture. And somewhere, in that unbearable space between the two, Louis understands: he does not know how to exist without being consumed.
Sometimes it seems to him that Claudia truly hates him. Hates him for not having burned Lestat’s body that night, and for carrying him along everywhere they fled to escape him. For all the words drawn from the very depths of his heart — words he was never sure to whom he truly spoke, when, looking into her face, it was always his shadow that fell behind her. He cannot blame her. For in those moments when the only thing he dreams of is Lestat’s face, he hates himself as well for not having burned his body. He even hates himself for ever having entertained the thought of killing him.
When Armand stirs again, Louis senses at once that he is awake. He tries to breathe evenly, to steady the beating of his torn heart, but his partner is far too aware to believe he sleeps. Several long minutes pass before Armand speaks, his whisper thick and filling the coffin almost entirely.
“What are you thinking about?”
In such moments, Louis thanks all the ancient powers that stripped vampires of the capacity to read the minds of their own kind. He waits for the cold, merciless wave of shame to wash over him, but it does not come, and the ache in his chest only grows stronger. So he lies to Armand, just as he lies to himself every night, telling himself he did the right thing.
“It’s nothing.”