damnedest | shotgun.

Internal sigh.

"You're welcome. Hey." Corralling Louis and keeping him from escaping. "Half his fucking torso was falling off, help him put that on."

(No good nurse jokes no good nurse jokes no good nurse jokes bad coping mechanism bad coping mechanism)

"I know you're pissed," he continues, out loud because doing it telepathically would be obvious and possibly send Lestat into a tailspin, "but you're where you're needed right now."

Lestat needs Louis here. Daniel needs Louis here. Louis needs to be right here, and not off doing anything stupid, be it going after Armand or spiraling in self-loathing or whatever's going on in his head. Daniel can't actually manage both of them, somebody else in this bathroom is going to have to be at least A LITTLE less neurodivergent for a FEW MINUTES at least.

Daniel might have gotten away with the former interjection, with preventing Louis from vanishing bodily from the room. He is allowed.

But the latter—

Maybe it's right. (It's probably right.) But it's unwelcome. It's unwelcome even when it's Daniel saying it. It strikes Louis as patronizing instead of comforting, needling at the well-banked embers of his anger.

"Alright."

Flat.

Petty, maybe, in refusing to even instigate an argument. Withholding maybe for the same reason Daniel didn't touch his mind: Lestat is calm now, but it all feels fragile still. Louis doesn't want him to break apart again.

And so Louis returns to Lestat. With the bath water draining away, the wounds stand out agonizingly stark on pale skin. Louis' jaw tightens, though his hands are gentle, steadying, as he reaches out for Lestat.

Daniel can stay if he wants.

Daniel stays in case they need another hand, unruffled by Louis' unresponsiveness. Plenty experienced with being on the receiving end of the silent treatment. What does Louis want, for Daniel to inform him he's being childish? Real productive use of everyone's time. If he wants to be a simmering angry zombie, he's free to. Daniel isn't his parent, and he's not his partner, he's not in a position to scold him.

What he will do is continue to ask Louis to help make sure Lestat actually makes it to the garage. Obviously uninterested in leaving Louis unsupervised.

Perhaps Lestat says the same thing as Daniel in the way Louis must take his weight to draw him to his feet, steady him, encourage fabric where it's meant to go and is otherwise too awkward to reach without causing pain or aggravate injuries. He is not certain of the substance behind the tension he senses, save for the generalised notion that he has caused it.

Well. Oh well. Everyone can be unhappy, then.

Help is accepted right down to the entryway to the garage, at which point he says, "I have it now," voice soft and drifting but focus forwards, and goes to move on in by himself. Steady enough on his feet, and it's a little as if the presence of prey is its own encouragement, balance, support. If there is something he can be certain in, his skill for it, his need of it, his desire, it's this.

And there will be no playing, just the car being opened, and strong hands making still struggling humans, and a strong bite closing around their throats where he will drink too deeply to make much of a mess at all.

And so Louis is in the room after all, trailed a few steps inside the doorway to stand sentinel. Presses knuckles to his mouth, watching Lestat make his way forward. Watching how his steps steady, strengthen.

Louis can hear them too. Rapid heartbeats, harsh breathing. They reek of fear. He can't identify the emotion in his own body immediately, but eventually:

Relief. An absence of anything else. Slow, delayed for that absence.

Lestat makes it very quick. There are no screams.

The gravity of what Louis had offered in that same backseat has not occurred to him at all, only in the sense that Lestat did not take enough, that it was insufficient. This will be enough. Two, and then sleep, and Armand's handiwork will be erased.

More or less.

Well, if Louis would communicate, he could find himself in the kitchen instead, while Daniel posted up in the doorway between it and the garage, but no.

He is skeptical that Armand's handiwork will be erased by tomorrow. Lestat reeked of Armand's blood, the same blood that healed Daniel's mind in an instant after the psychic blowback from his stupid 'prank' back in New York, and he was in a horrific state. What had he been like when he first crawled into the dumpster? How bad had it started off, how much gruesome work was already hidden away by ancient blood?

What does Armand look like, right now? Like Louis in New Olreans, bad enough to banish Lestat from his life for years across the river?

Violence makes Daniel sick to his stomach. He hates seeing this. He hates that Louis is quiet and withdrawn, unresponsive, like he was in Dubai before he threw Armand into a wall. Like he was after the attack at the museum. He doesn't want it to boil down to violence anymore. It's fucking stupid. It's tiring, and pointless, and it just makes everything worse, and worse, and worse.

"Keep an eye on each other."

To Lestat, and to Louis. A mutual task, as Daniel passes him to return to the car. He knows where the body bags are tucked away, having coordinated with Rachida. He'll clean this up, get everything ready for the fixer crew to slink in as soon as they're out of the garage.

Two hundred and forty years ago or so, Lestat kept and bred mastiffs. Most of them are sweet hearted beings who loved one another, until something reminded them of being animals. He thinks of the several seconds of time before something snaps and he would have to wrestle one dog off the other, air filled with deep phlegmy growls and scattering saliva. He doubts very much that Daniel and Louis would fly into such rages against each other, against him.

But still. They are a group of predators in containment, overlapping ill tempers, triggers, and it feels familiar. Lestat says to Louis, "Come sit with me," on his way back inside, feeling new blood pulsing beneath his skin, made pink from replenishment.

They can all find each other once respective tasks have been accomplished. Lestat is quiet for the moment. Memories and thoughts come up as random as sparks off a campfire.

He had a dark pull, a handsome Satan. I'm sure you do, Amadeo. Violins, violins. Save your kisses for the world. And on and on.

Echoes of their past. Come to me cutting through the grief and agony of one of the worst nights of his life, carried to him with all the richness of Lestat's voice.

Come sit with me Lestat says now, and the words hook him, just as they did then. And even though Louis remains very still, a long, held breath of time where he watches Daniel go about his work, Louis allows himself to be beckoned back inside.

Little to say once they're inside. Lestat is quiet, and it worries Louis, but he is having his own troubles finding something to talk about. A tendril of though still probing among the Many, a restless, likely futile exercise.

They sit. Louis lights a cigarette. From here, it is easy to hear all the signs of clean up. Louis' staff moving like ghosts into the garage, soft murmurs releasing Daniel from any further involvement. Can't touch Lestat's mind, won't touch Daniel's, so all there is left for him to do is be nearby, as present as he is capable of in this moment.

Daniel looks at them.

Thinks: he is pretty irritated with Lestat, which could be alleviated or exacerbated based on details he does not yet know. He is frustrated with and a little bit scared for Louis. He is anxious about Armand, and could easily become angry with him, should the wind blow that way. None of that is going to help. He's not going to not be any of those things, but he can take a moment to stand there and acknowledge what he's feeling, and then shelve it all as 'unproductive to prioritize'.

He moves into the sitting room, and then, as the room asks, he sits.

"Alright. So what happened? Exactly."

Lestat considers a cigarette, except he's pretty sure his lungs are still trying to work out how to be lungs again, and it would be very undignified to cough his way through a puff and probably hork up some of this blood he just took. So. He stays here, at the edge of this sofa, hair drying into frayed curls. Nebulas of bruises across his face, some of the swelling going down. Little red bleed throughs where his eyes should only be white.

A reflexively sullen cast to the look flicked to Daniel when asked so directly.

"I said in the car," he says, after a beat. "I attacked him. We fought. I hid. I don't know where he is," is offered a little more insistently, like perhaps this is the chase Daniel and Louis would like him to cut to, casting a glance to Louis to include him in this answer. "If he isn't where I left him, and you would have noticed."

By now, Louis has other details to hold in his palm. They fit neatly into the picture Lestat paints, adding vivid detail rather than acting as missing pieces.

Louis exhales a stream of smoke.

"He wasn't where you left him."

Clearly.

And then rises, treading to the well appointed little minibar beneath the television to fetch a chilly can of soda. Lestat is offered this, Louis' off hand gesturing wordlessly to his own face with his cigarette held between two fingers. Trailing smoke. Proposing a hilariously human remedy to the riot of bruises on Lestat's face.

No comment, on Armand's whereabouts. It twists in Daniel's insides. Somewhere near there, but he doesn't want to say it aloud. He watches Louis for a bit, then looks back at Lestat.

"You attacked him," Daniel echoes, a confirmation. "Why? I get that you have motivation, he's the worst. I don't mean that. Were you looking for him? Did he call to you? Was he standing out by the docks talking shit, challenging you to a duel for Louis' hand?"

Did Armand come to Burlington for this. Was it this all along, did he lose his patience, decide that whatever long con he made vague plans with Daniel for wasn't worth enacting. Was he here for Louis, was he he just waiting for them to be somewhere less populated than New York.

(Is he alive.)

The item is accepted with a moment of puzzlement, and then—ah. Tentative, Lestat places the can along his cheek. Takes it away. Replaces it, holds.

Yes, better.

"He was wandering," he says. There is no reason to lie. He has lied before, famously, but he is not much of a casual deceiver. "I felt him, and went to see for myself. He didn't know I was there until I knocked him to the ground." He has motivation, Armand is the worst, but he knows it matters who the aggressor was. He knows how thin the line is, between Armand being on the outside, and his being on the inside.

An attempt at widening it, maybe, this whole thing. "And so I don't know what he was thinking about. Prying would have alerted him. I didn't care, really."

A breath out.

Surprised to find himself frustrated. Thinking again what he had said aloud to Lestat perched on the edge of the tub: He could have killed you.

Louis would have come at it sideways. A better plan, a trap. But it isn't much of a surprise, anything Lestat describes.

Louis turns from them both, takes his cigarettes to the window. Half-turned, bequeathing his attention to the proceedings even as he creates some distance between himself and Daniel's questions, Lestat's answers.

(Armand followed them. Maybe this is forever. Always, Armand, a half-step away. Always.)

Daniel sits with this information. Turns it over. Imagines Armand, wandering around, watching the boats and the moon on the water, suddenly attacked. Does Daniel feel guilt? His fault, for being turned, for not throwing himself into the sun before Louis ever knew of his transformation, for accepting Armand's attentions over the past weeks? Or is he the idiot. Is the the bigger fool who fell for a much more experienced whore, pretending to nervously kiss him in his apartment, pretending to want so desperately to be believed. Was Armand here just to lure out Lestat, just to watch Louis, with Daniel as the fucking court jester, pretending to be a investigator.

He imagines Lestat, too. Decades of misery, nearly a century, missing Louis, missing Claudia. Seeing Armand in the flesh for the first time since the trial, now fully aware of everything that he put Louis through in the interim years apart. Why would he care what Armand was thinking, or what his exact reasoning for being here would be? It's never going to matter.

And he watches Louis. Takes in the restless, unhappy posture. Knows he's upset about it, knows he blames himself for everything that's ever happened to Daniel, and maybe to Lestat, now, too, knows Louis would find a way to blame himself for ants being stepped on, probably. Wonders how boxed in he feels. Three people in a room again, three people talking, trying to sort out something that happened before.

He realizes he's leaned forward and scrubbed a hand over his face. Nervous. Off-kilter. Paddling in the wading pool of disappointment and frustration and worry.

"You hurt each other pretty badly."

Playing his hand a little by accident. Armand is badly hurt, too. He can tell.

"What happened to your mind? I don't... Sorry, I don't know how else to ask."

Lestat's gaze flicks to Louis as he turns, is quiet, and upset crosses his expression unbidden. Redirects it off somewhere else.

What Daniel says is true. It doesn't surprise Lestat, where his focus lies. Armand is his maker, Daniel his fledgling, immutable facts, just as they've discussed. Daniel, forever shackled. Louis, too, forever shackled to Lestat. It makes sense that would both seek an escape in one another.

Slow to answer, this time. Processing that his mind is such that an outsider would see it as injured. Certainly, it feels this way. He wonders—

No. He does not wish to speculate about Armand.

"We fought that way too," finally. Taking the can away from his face, turning it in his fingers, setting it down. "In our minds. He drew me into his and I was apart from myself."

Sitting at a table, sunlight through papered over windows. Panicked breathing from the floor, moaning from behind a door. The tape recorder, squeaking between clawed fingers, playing out two familiar voices, vitriol and laughter. There it is, in perfect recall, more vivid than this living room. Injured feelings that are not so easily healed by blood, immortal or otherwise, running wire around his bruised lungs.

"And I hurt him there," comes out thicker, froggier with great feeling, teetering on the edge of new collapse. "To leave that place, we went somewhere else. And if I got away from it, he would pull me back. No matter how it hurt him to do it."

The shift in tone prompts some minor movement from Louis' corner. A sharpening of his expression, the crease of unhappiness in his face.

The urge to say, We can leave it.

Stop the interview. Leaving the room, feet in rocks, face tipped up to filtered light.

Daniel hadn't stopped. Revelation, once set in motion, finds those it's meant for.

Louis lights another cigarette. Armand is most certainly hurt. Still hidden from Louis, who still seeks him. He could forgive Armand his transgressions in Louis' head more easily than he can forgive any of this.

"But you got away."

Stating the obvious. Doing his minor part to remain in the room.

"And got a light tan while you were at it, looked like."

Really, profoundly unfun. Daniel tries to focus on Lestat, and is mostly successful; he doesn't want to get lost down the rabbit hole of wondering how fucked up Armand is for him to have to just go the path of waiting it out. He has no clue how potentially violent his maker is, what his tactics might be fighting another vampire, what he's really capable of in that regard.

But Lestat has not been incinerated from the inside out. Couldn't Armand have killed him in an instant, if he really wanted to? Daniel feels something inside of him tremble, a confused fear-like response, and he finds himself wanting to grab his own hand like he had before—

He stays still.

"Is the blood helping it at all?"

But you got away, and Lestat nods, looking at some point off in the air, away. He can't speak to it. He doesn't have the words, the understanding, for how he managed it, for the outpouring of power, concentrated enough to knock Armand loose of him finally. And maybe it really was just a second of sunlight.

He had told Louis once that he had to be willing. Louis had believed him. Armand as well, it seems.

Refocuses, a breath in, eyeline levelling out. "For my mind, I don't know," Lestat says, voice tight, and a little like he is working on unknotting it as he talks. "With coffin rest, I expect it will." A crack of a smile. "Merci."

If Louis thought it were remotely feasible, he'd leave and drag Armand back to make repairs. Offer blood far more potent than Louis' own to mend what was fractured. Some concrete motion forward, an action to hold fast to.

But this thought probably wouldn't go over well.

Lestat doesn't need to say it aloud: it was a very near thing, him getting away. A near thing that Armand hadn't broken his mind. And knowing that provides no relief. It is painful. Armand might have taken Lestat too.

"You should have more of mine before then."

Practical.

"If you think it would help."

Lestat would know better than Louis.

Lestat would also know better than Daniel, who has nothing to add to that. Meanwhile, on the internal spiral he doesn't want to be on, helpless to get off of it. Armand's blood not quite fixing Lestat, and while that might be somewhat metaphysically explained (somehow?) by the damage having been done by Armand his himself, there is the question in him of: who can be called to donate blood to Armand? Whose blood could come close? Is he so damage to be past his own help, or has he chosen to withdraw and close himself off?

He thinks Louis must be trying to talk to him, threaten him, scream at him, but if so he isn't saying, and there's nothing Daniel can do to try and observe.

"Just so you know—"

A pause, as Daniel leans back, still trying to regulate how he feels.

"There's no world where we weren't going to look for you, and want you to come back. This fucking sucked. Not anywhere near getting brutalized, but it sucked, and you being back here, able to recover, means a lot."

This sentiment fills his eyes with easy tears, of course, or adds to the wetness already gathered. There is some time and distance between sitting here on the sofa and wailing things he barely remembers trying to escape Louis' grip of him, but only some.

The topic of taking more of Louis' blood is set aside for the moment. A topic for future negotiation.

A cracked smile, a spread of fingers. "I felt perhaps I was where I should be," has a touch of self-awareness for it, the absurdity of the thing, and yet. "That is only by small mercies, technicalities, that I can be near and he cannot." A glance between the two of them. Certain foundational beliefs cracked, but not crumbled.

"And that," reluctantly, "perhaps my presence confuses things between the pair of you."

From his rigid position at the window, Louis cuts in: "It ain't a technicality. You haven't done what he did, not to either of us."

Sharp. Tightly contained anger heating the words. A clear line drawn, marking out the things Armand had done, has expressed no particular remorse for. What Armand had done to Louis, for years. What he did to Daniel, in Louis' absence.

What he did to Claudia.

"No one's confused. We want you here," and then, "If anyone's intruding, I am."

Louis, descending from his tower and bringing all sorts of mess with him. Maybe Louis was the tipping point, drawing focus. He isn't sure, but can't rule it out.

Lestat is tearing up and Louis is preparing to throw himself out with the bathwater, of course. Hey hey hey with that. Reel it in.

"There's no intruding. No 'if anyone', it's just not a thing that's happening."

Good grief, kids.

"Shit is absolutely crazy between all of us. Not because of repressed feelings or whatever, but because so much has gone on. It was always going to be a wild ride to navigate, but it's never been anything but welcome. Right? That's how I feel. I have to believe the both of you feel the same. I want to be here, I want you to be here."

The look Lestat casts to Louis clearly indicates: that can be ruled out. They were the ones begging him to return to America, after all, and will surely be tasked with begging him to remain.

Easy to be assured by all this. Louis' quiet but sharp conviction, Daniel's sense of things and easy welcome. Lestat can feel it like the gravity that would have tipped him into Louis' arms as he was rescued, and can feel something like the flex of resistance that had him twisting away.

"I do want it," he says, still tearful, still fraught. "Only—"

Perhaps this is the thing, the breaking thing, and there's a helpless quality to the look he angles back to Louis again. "You want him as your companion, isn't that so?" It feels wrong of him to be the one to say it, but he may start breaking furniture to expend his own restlessness if it doesn't get said. "You said to me you wanted to make him, you chose him. And I saw it,"

now to Daniel, who should know as well, just the barest edge of hysteria reentering his tone from where he has cornered himself into the couch. "Armand, he showed me the pair of you together, how it was. The first interview, on the recording. He showed me," it's all here, readily available, as if he could touch it, "when Louis spoke of it to him, during the second, of wanting to make you."

And how Armand felt about it, clearly, memory filtered through how it was experienced. Of course, this last thing stolen in their final moments of conflict, but it hardly matters.

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