He could shut it out. It occurs to him as it starts, that he's developed enough to be able to. For a suspended moment within himself, Daniel feels like he's standing in a doorway with one hand on the frame, easy to be on one side or the other. Seeing himself is excruciating misery he left behind writing a memoir, but it feels like being a little bitch to opt out.

Goddamnit.

Armand is—

Strange. Inhuman in a way the other inhumans aren't. Lestat will see Daniel's surgical regard of him, watching this, taking in emotion dispassionately, cataloguing it. Matching it up against information he already has, experiences he's already run through, Louis' mocking offer, and earlier than that, Armand, dark brown eyes, staring at him, doing nothing but staring directly at him, even when Louis is sitting next to him, even when Louis is nowhere to be found, standing together out on the balcony a million miles in the air in the desert, and Armand is still just staring at him.

Whatever. Armand is a freak. Louis needs help. Lestat needs something to be done about the melting, the swelling, the spill of tender ribbons out of his head. Daniel's hands are cold because he's an old man who smoked too much in life, and they're soothing in the telepathic world, sifting through, trying to carefully put things back onto a shelf.