A involuntary consideration: maybe Louis should have stayed in Dubai, maybe he wasn't ready to be here with them, this way. It's an unsteady, ugly thought. It's his own, but Louis can hear it in someone else's calm, cossetting tones. Feels like touching a hot stove, like catching fingers in a stray strip of sunlight. It spins up his heart rate, this whisper like a sprung trap inside his own head.

Terrible, brittle silence, before Louis dredges up careful, neutral tones to tell him:

"Then don't watch."

Not unaware that they are skating towards a breaking point. Louis' breaking point. A point where the impulses and fury and pain in his body spin out past his ability to contain. And then what?

Says this and bites down on the rest. The spitting fury over every part of the past twenty-four hours, all this helpless, agonizing feeling that Louis can do nothing with but turn inward, because if he loosened his grip it would shatter him apart, break them all from each other. Maybe what little he's said has already done this.

Repeats, again, "I got nothing else for you tonight, Daniel. I'm done, now."

Done. Taking all splitting cracks and hairline fractures from the room with him, leaving. Implosion, empty space. This is what he has left to give.