title: Louis Blue's My God

author: Kris

Fandom" Vampire Chronicles

pairing: Louis/Lestat/Daniel/Amel

ratings: NC-17

Category: drama

status on going

archive: sure

status: on going

Feedback: Yes

warnings: rape violence

website:

series: Louis Blue

Louis Blue's My God
By Kris

The thing that Louis noticed first was the life in the room. The life of spiny, tall cacti's captured in pots, reaching their green, stiff limbs into the air. Leafy, lush flourishing ferns hanging in baskets
from the ceiling, strings, and strings of whispering green finery on such frail stems. Cats, slender and delicate, prowled underneath the jungle of potted plants. Aquariums holding quaint sea life of
fragile, slender glimmering scales of fish, shrimp, and snails were placed statically about the room You felt surrounded by a collective sigh of languid life. All this life in a room peopled by all these dead, Louis thought to himself.

Jesse whispered hearing his thoughts, "Doesn't the dead want to be amongst the living?"

He smiled willingly at her. She distracted him from his fears he had for Lestat's safety. She was so bold in her shell of flesh. Her red hair a silken caress of flames. The white stalkness of her delicately boned faced carried inquiring, intelligent, green sparks for eyes. Her pale lips barely tinted mauve, parted to reveal impossibly, white teeth, Her death left her breath stealingly beautiful. To be so young, Louis marveled, yet to look so ancient.

"Are you saying I look old?" Jesse said gently, her lips in a mock frown. She had just died a couple of days ago. It was her who was the woman who was injured at Lestat's concert. Her maker was Maharet her own aunt of sorts. Now her lithesome body was a container which needed to be filled with blood now and then to freshen the roses in her cheeks. Her maker Maharet was a very ancient vampire. Her ancient blood replaced Jesse's mortal blood making her bleached out as bone and old laces. It also made her less thirsty for blood than your typical fledgling.

Jesse, all of them, wanted to extend their sympathies to Louis for Lestat having been apprehended by Akasha. But his detached, kindly, polite aloofness intimated them into silence.

Louis took her small, fine boned hand with its glitter of translucent nails, and kissed it properly. "No," Louis said gallantly, "I'm saying you look too bewitching to be so young."

And to be so dead, he thought sadly to himself.

"I don't mind being dead. Not when I am in such good company," she said sweetly.

He was distracted by a high pitched squeal. Ah, yes, he thought, A capture. A kill. He watched as a sleek, black cat pounced and played with a wretched mouse. They were hiding, the mice, as well as they could from the sleek, shadowing hunters that stalked them.

"She likes to set mice free amongst her cats. No Louis," Jesse said nervously, "Don't mistake it for cruelty on her part. She is so very old that she fears to forget what she is. A being belonging to the Savage Garden. She doesn't want to be eaten alive by spirituality, by musings about her past history. See Pandora?"

Louis turned his head to the vampire she referred to. So sad, Louis, Jesse projected into his mind, How she loses herself to sleep and dreams, to the dust of times long gone past by, and she in her mind walks in that dust still. The dust of an ancient Rome, a long gone Paris, a centuries past Florence, all long past dead and whose details of life are long past forgotten except in history books and to scholars. She talks to people whose bones are coffined in museums. Bones thought of as being antiques. So is she a bunch of antique, splendid bones. She gives barely a thought to the present or to the future. History and memories are a comforting trap to those who have grown so old that they can't bear another day of being dragged into an endless future. Maharet does not want to "die" not even if it's a mere state of a pretended death by dreams. She watches the hunt and kill of her pets to remind herself that her Rome, her Florence, her Paris, is nature. Nature is her city, more eternal than any city, any government, any civilization can be. You can not leave nature behind you as you have left behind a New Orleans which was without cars, a New Orleans of plantations barely civilized. She will watch what is eternal. Life, death, killing, birth, nature. She is eternal because she holds no ties with history, with the past.

Maharet smiled at the two of them, reading Louis thoughts. "Jesse," she said, affection rich as new milk in her voice, "I do mark the passing of time with each child born into our Great Family. Forward, how the children push us forward. I have ties with the past, my love. My darling one, my family, the children of the Great Family, most of all you my child, are my past, present, and future."

Louis regarded all those at the table. Marius, his blond, tired head bent down in angry reproach at himself for loving a being who turned on him in hatred In his most unguarded moments he had been moved towards adoration of Enkil and Akasha.

How bitter to know that the one I loved enough to think of as being a god hates me, Marius thought to himself, shielding his thoughts, To be hated by god. Isn't she the source, the continuance that animates our dead flesh? The very source of myself hates me. Her buying him in ice crushed in him the smug belief that he held that he was loved, and valued in a god's heart.

Santino's eyes stared solidly at the table. Two black beams of light never daring to approach Louis' face. They both knew what the others did not. The months he had kept Louis as a slave in his flat out of revenge for Louis being the one who killed the vampires des theatre.

Louis didn't mind looking at him. It gave him a chilly feeling of superiority that he could look at him as if it was the most natural thing in the world to look at him with his expressionless, clear eyes.

He did feel a subtle flash of resentment, seeing Santino's partner, Eric a dainty, pretty piece, nervously patting Santino's arm as if to prove that what was happening had substance to it. He could feel the love that Santino had for this sad eyed, fearful ancient, He closed his eyes at the picture of the vampire that had raped him long ago being so gentle and so protectively in love with his partner.

Mael, a shaggy, ill kept Druid, his beauty boastful and demanding, glared at them all, daring them to do something, anything to bring abut the ruin of Akasha. A blow of death which would cut them all down from the living. His baleful eyes seemed to repeat a manta, Which of you would die, to make us all extinct by killing her? He shook his head. None of you! Including me. Why should we die for the love of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters we have left behind years ago? None of us can claim a fatherland that we would want to protect and fight for. Revenge for the ancients she killed. No one cared about those doddering, wicked, old vampires. Revenge for the new rogues she killed? None of us cared for the newly dead, he roared into their minds.

Daniel flushed looking away,

You are one of us fresh killed child, he assured Daniel with his thoughts, Perhaps we should acquiesce to her vision of killing men. We kill men. Mauls's thoughts crept into the thoughts of all.

"Yes, we all kill men, but not in the pointive manner in which she kills," Pandora said gently, playing with her bracelets, not daring to look at those seated about her, "Her point is ludicrous, To kill all men to bring peace to the world for women. It's madness."

"Oh let her," Eric said bleakly, "If it isn't her, it will be one of their damn atomic bombs. Why should we involve ourselves in this one way or the other? It's between her and mortals, The hell with mortals, As long as she doesn't interfere with our survival let her have her drama play. Mortals have always loved their dictators, their Hitlers. They'll love her too, I warrant. They'll fall to her like devotees at a tent revival.

"They loved their Mother Teresas, their Martin Luther Kings, their Gandhis too, Eric," Louis said gently.

Armand looked dismissively at the passive, gentle, civility of Louis' face, "Mael Has a point. None of us spared mankind our hunt of them. Why should we interfere with her? This may be what God meant to happen. Why not? Who is God? Why can't God be an immortal dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh? Mortals worshipped her before." Armand shrugged his shoulders bitterly, "They'll worship her again. Yes, Louis, like in Lestat's song. Devils replaced by demons visible, demons of pain, hunger, and war. Well, lets spin the wheel full circle and replace war, pain, and hunger with gods, with devils, demons, with us, Louis, vampires. Lets bring it all back to them, mortals, when they all truly believed in the devil and God. When they truly believed in digging up some poor corpse in times of an epidemic, driving a stake through the decaying muscle of a heart, only to release gases, causing the corpse to jerk about like one living. The suspicious fools. But in times where there are no answers, why not fall on superstitions? I have no answers," Armand said softly, "And I always treasured my superstitions when I was lost." He looked pointedly at Marius who abandoned him to the Santino's coven of The Children of Darkness. The coven that gave him a creed of superstitions to live and kill by.

"You merely say this Mael and Armand to be hurtful. You're afraid of her," Marahet said with cutting ruthlessness, "I told you the prophesy, the curse. My sister Mekare, she is coming, she is crossing rivers, jungles, to keep her promise to the mother of us all, Akasha, to kill her, to revenge herself against the savagery she did to us." Maharet gestured to her eyes, lifeless, and still, staring in the sockets of her skull. "She plucked out my eyes for she claimed I sought to make her believe in blasphemies. She did it because I saw what an evil thing she was. A heartless, cruel begetter of monsters, none more monstrous than herself. Khayman," Maharet clasped his hand, "Father of my Great Family, you saved me and my sister from the flames she sentenced us to. You brought her and I into this life of hunt and catch. We will, Mekare and I, will repay the favor you did us. Will will kill Akasha Queen of the Damned."

And damned if we won't die too, Eric thought roughly,

"So be it," Marius said angrily, "If the damned must die to be saviors to mortals then I say let's die."

She's awfully dramatic isn't she Louis? All this waving her arms about into the air. Making speeches like incantations. Curses, prophesies, really I don't know Louis. Sounds like old wives' tales to me, told by a rather old fool of a wife, a voice said in Louis' mind. Louis blinked his eyes. Louis looked serchingly about him face to face. Who projected that into my mind he thought to himself, shielding his thoughts, Who?

END PART 1