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.
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."
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—
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.
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.
I'm companion enough for myself, he had said to Lestat as a hurricane whipped around them. He'd meant it. Means it still. Meant it when he said to Daniel he couldn't go back to Lestat, not until it felt less like he was living with nothing but broken pieces, overgrown garden, fractures on fractures, absences like missed steps on a staircase. Who is he? How can be any kind of companion without knowing?
He'd wanted time.
Armand is dragging that away from him too. Trapping him into declarations, into closed doors. Trying to quantify a thing he had felt so strongly, and then had been taken out of his hands fifty years ago. Trying to do that in tandem with understanding what he and Lestat can be, will be, to each other now.
And all this time, Louis has been tending to his anger. The relief of Lestat alive made space for it, made it easier for Louis to hold it in check. He'd nursed it. Kept it close, caught between his palms. This great swell of feeling over seventy-seven years, what's been done, how inescapable it feels.
Now Lestat says all these things, and Louis is forced to consider the transgression. No immediate distraction of Lestat, covered in blood, to prevent him from considering the fullness of what's been done. There is only Lestat, reminding Louis that Armand had used these pieces of his life as a weapon. Dragged out the intimacy of a conversation in their marriage bed, the horror of a small room in San Francisco. The things he'd said in that room before everything had come apart, how it had felt to say the worst things, the ugly things, to talk and laugh and be heard, certain Daniel wouldn't ever require Louis to bit his tongue. Feels shades and shadows of what he had felt on a stage in Paris, pieces of him put under harsh light to be scrutinized. Here, now, weaponized.
There is a ringing in his ears. Louis is watching himself grind out a cigarette on the windowsill. He is watching himself turn to walk briskly towards the door.
There is a sharp, unpleasant uneasiness that comes up in Daniel when Lestat talks about these things. Daniel feels— what the fuck does he feel? It's not quite embarrassment, which he can bulldoze through unbruised by. Deeper. Outright humiliation. Armand already showed Louis his turning, a pathetic, crippling thing, and now he's peeling layers off of Louis, twisting the screws into Lestat, and using Daniel to do it.
But it would make sense, wouldn't it. If Armand believed it, and wanted to hurt Louis with it. Just killing Daniel isn't going to work for him anymore, not with the bond between them of maker and fledgling. But he can spend time with Daniel, and kiss him, and curl up and let himself be held as they sleep. If he was contending with something with Louis, that would really fuck them up pretty good, wouldn't it.
What an incredible idiot Daniel is.
"Armand wasn't there until things got bad," Daniel says, and he might applaud himself for sounding so fine, so calm. His tone turns a wry as he adds, "There's plenty he didn't see. Both times."
Self-deprecating. Louis, casting a scathing look over him for pulling his shirt off, Louis, mocking him with an offer while his hands were shaking and he'd had the unbelievable gall to ask if they'd fucked in the 70s, Louis, spending both interviews pouring his soul out, metaphorically bleeding all over, speaking of no one but Lestat, Louis, angrily putting out a cigarette and walking to—
"Woah, hey."
In between Louis and the exit in a blink. Hands up! But he doesn't touch him, doesn't particularly want to get decked or thrown into a wall.
He feels it like a heart attack, Louis making to leave. It's a little familiar. Their old pattern: simmer, explode, separate, and most usually Louis to walk away first. The next step: Lestat allowing it. It always feels like something bad would happen, but allowing it anyway.
This is all a mess, misaligned, out of order. So why not some variation.
"Louis," echoes after. Not quite so able in this moment to do more than that, but Lestat pushes it anyway. Panic. Puncturing upholstery with his nails to get out of his seat, movement too sudden, a sharp thread of pain pulling taut until he finds himself caught with a knee to the ground, a splayed hand stopping him from going completely face first.
But he can't send Louis to Armand, no matter what state Armand is in. No matter how angry Louis might be. Or perhaps because. "Ne pars pas," is shameless pleading from the ground, an echo of his appeal to him in the bathroom. "S'il te plaît, ne le fais pas."
Maybe if he had, if he had done what he should have done in Dubai, Daniel could have been spared a horror show of a transformation. Lestat would have been spared the agony of the past twenty-four hours. Louis had held back.
(Why? He has turned it over and over. Hard to look at the moment now, to touch it remembering how angry he had been, how it had felt like hearing his life breaking apart in the background of those moments while he looked down at Armand, covered in dust.)
Lestat is on the floor. Daniel is in the way.
Louis has done a million terrible things to Daniel, but he won't hit him now. Will consider the window if he has to, pay the fine for shattered glass.
"Don't ask that," a sentiment split between them, Lestat speaking French from the ground, Daniel with his hands up. They are both appealing, a united front, and Louis feels their shared fear like a vise tightening around his chest. Asserts still, "I get to decide, after all this."
"I know it's not ideal, some tabloid manipulation bullshit about being with me, but it can't be this bad. What's going to happen, going after an ancient vampire who's hurt and cornered? What if he lashes out and incinerates you in an instant, even by fucking accident? What if he folds your head in two? Louis he can just— you could just come back changed, and what the fuck are we going to do then?"
Daniel speaks sense. Or speaks essential things. Makes the kinds of arguments that Lestat is familiar with the way they fail, break, slide away.
And while this occurs, he makes his presence known as a physical, tangible thing. A light grasp at Louis' pantleg that graduates to a weight, a solid presence of a shoulder leaning in against the back of his knee, Lestat leaning weight there, his breathing shallow, pained. Please don't, in the way he leans, the slight whine to his breathing. Je suis désolée, in the grasp to pant fabric, the press of his cheek to the side of Louis' thigh while the sight of the floor blurs from his vision.
His fault, of course. He has said the wrong thing, and the right thing evades him, feels beyond his grasp.
Bristling, angry (angrier) at the way Daniel says these things. As if the objection is the implication of them, together. Absurd.
Daniel's voice breaks.
Lestat is touch him, grasping, on his knees. (Louis had begged him from his knees. Begged, desperate, panicky, for Claudia. A terrible memory, stirred in his mind.)
They are in combination a paralytic. Stranding Louis with his rage, his hurt. Nowhere for it to go but inwards, inwards, inwards. Can't bring himself to move Daniel, to wrench away from Lestat. And so he is trapped.
Breathing too fast. Cold and hot at the same time. Watching himself become a statue, lose momentum as Lestat holds onto him and Daniel blocks the door.
"You want me to be afraid of him? Tiptoe around, beg 'em to stop fucking with the pair of you? Live another hundred, two hundred years letting him make me, and my fucking life into a knife to hurt you with?"
Fury, rushing from him like blood, like he is bleeding and hadn't realized. Lestat is holding onto him and Louis doesn't feel it, observes it from outside his own head too. He fell, because Armand hurt him, and it was too severe to heal. Just like Daniel, wan and pale the day after Armand's last offensive volley. Hurt on hurt and none of it lands on Louis, only on those standing near him.
"You think I'm so weak that I gotta hide, and hope he don't take you and kill Lestat next time?"
Of course there is a next time. Louis sees it now, the inevitability of it. Long years unfurling, marked by Armand's attentions as he sees fit to bestow them.
Daniel is aware, in his peripheral vision, that Lestat is on the ground and now grabbing Louis' leg and he thinks— well, that's a lot, but maybe warranted?? Not enough time to deviate to go Hey chill, particularly when Louis needs the most chilling out. Still. Hey, that's a lot. If this moment could extend, like a rubber band stretching out, he might bark a little incredulous laugh about it. Has he ever felt so much, so shamelessly? Impressive, in its on way.
"I don't want or think any of that," Daniel tells Louis. "And I'm pretty sure you know that, or you would, if you'd take a second to breathe."
See again: chill out.
He can tell Louis is angry. Radiating off of him like heat, like standing too close to a bonfire. But Daniel stays where he is, not because he thinks Louis is weak. Very aware he could end up smacked aside or incapacitated. Simply willing to endure it, if so.
"Lestat made a split-second decision to do something violent, and look what happened. Crushing ourselves over and over, repeating it, won't fix anything. Please don't. This isn't the way forward, it can't be."
And, horribly, Daniel does not want Armand to be dead. On the off-chance Louis succeeds, what the fuck does that feel like? The thought of it makes something feel like it's suffocating him. All of it, every angle, sucks.
It feels better, to cling this way. He feels as though that if Louis is under his hands, in contact with him, then he won't go anywhere. All things make sense, Lestat thinks, when they are touching one another, if only Louis would touch him back.
Aware of an argument occurring over his head. Aware of its substance. This time, it's alright if he is mostly spoken of as though he isn't in the room, because everything he has to say in possible response might project from him in a loud volume, stealing energy from anger, frustration, familiar patterns.
Sympathy pangs for the things Louis says. Armand, an ever-haunting presence. The scale of time, the extent. Lestat had laughed when Daniel had asked if he'd ever get bored and fuck off.
"Stay," he says. A murmur, only just audible, as if he is speaking to the floor more so than the man above him. "Stay here with me, mon cher. Ça me brisera le cœur si tu pars."
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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."
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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.
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"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.)
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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."
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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.)
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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?"
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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."
no subject
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.
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"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."
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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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I'm companion enough for myself, he had said to Lestat as a hurricane whipped around them. He'd meant it. Means it still. Meant it when he said to Daniel he couldn't go back to Lestat, not until it felt less like he was living with nothing but broken pieces, overgrown garden, fractures on fractures, absences like missed steps on a staircase. Who is he? How can be any kind of companion without knowing?
He'd wanted time.
Armand is dragging that away from him too. Trapping him into declarations, into closed doors. Trying to quantify a thing he had felt so strongly, and then had been taken out of his hands fifty years ago. Trying to do that in tandem with understanding what he and Lestat can be, will be, to each other now.
And all this time, Louis has been tending to his anger. The relief of Lestat alive made space for it, made it easier for Louis to hold it in check. He'd nursed it. Kept it close, caught between his palms. This great swell of feeling over seventy-seven years, what's been done, how inescapable it feels.
Now Lestat says all these things, and Louis is forced to consider the transgression. No immediate distraction of Lestat, covered in blood, to prevent him from considering the fullness of what's been done. There is only Lestat, reminding Louis that Armand had used these pieces of his life as a weapon. Dragged out the intimacy of a conversation in their marriage bed, the horror of a small room in San Francisco. The things he'd said in that room before everything had come apart, how it had felt to say the worst things, the ugly things, to talk and laugh and be heard, certain Daniel wouldn't ever require Louis to bit his tongue. Feels shades and shadows of what he had felt on a stage in Paris, pieces of him put under harsh light to be scrutinized. Here, now, weaponized.
There is a ringing in his ears. Louis is watching himself grind out a cigarette on the windowsill. He is watching himself turn to walk briskly towards the door.
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But it would make sense, wouldn't it. If Armand believed it, and wanted to hurt Louis with it. Just killing Daniel isn't going to work for him anymore, not with the bond between them of maker and fledgling. But he can spend time with Daniel, and kiss him, and curl up and let himself be held as they sleep. If he was contending with something with Louis, that would really fuck them up pretty good, wouldn't it.
What an incredible idiot Daniel is.
"Armand wasn't there until things got bad," Daniel says, and he might applaud himself for sounding so fine, so calm. His tone turns a wry as he adds, "There's plenty he didn't see. Both times."
Self-deprecating. Louis, casting a scathing look over him for pulling his shirt off, Louis, mocking him with an offer while his hands were shaking and he'd had the unbelievable gall to ask if they'd fucked in the 70s, Louis, spending both interviews pouring his soul out, metaphorically bleeding all over, speaking of no one but Lestat, Louis, angrily putting out a cigarette and walking to—
"Woah, hey."
In between Louis and the exit in a blink. Hands up! But he doesn't touch him, doesn't particularly want to get decked or thrown into a wall.
"Please don't. Louis."
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This is all a mess, misaligned, out of order. So why not some variation.
"Louis," echoes after. Not quite so able in this moment to do more than that, but Lestat pushes it anyway. Panic. Puncturing upholstery with his nails to get out of his seat, movement too sudden, a sharp thread of pain pulling taut until he finds himself caught with a knee to the ground, a splayed hand stopping him from going completely face first.
But he can't send Louis to Armand, no matter what state Armand is in. No matter how angry Louis might be. Or perhaps because. "Ne pars pas," is shameless pleading from the ground, an echo of his appeal to him in the bathroom. "S'il te plaît, ne le fais pas."
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Maybe if he had, if he had done what he should have done in Dubai, Daniel could have been spared a horror show of a transformation. Lestat would have been spared the agony of the past twenty-four hours. Louis had held back.
(Why? He has turned it over and over. Hard to look at the moment now, to touch it remembering how angry he had been, how it had felt like hearing his life breaking apart in the background of those moments while he looked down at Armand, covered in dust.)
Lestat is on the floor. Daniel is in the way.
Louis has done a million terrible things to Daniel, but he won't hit him now. Will consider the window if he has to, pay the fine for shattered glass.
"Don't ask that," a sentiment split between them, Lestat speaking French from the ground, Daniel with his hands up. They are both appealing, a united front, and Louis feels their shared fear like a vise tightening around his chest. Asserts still, "I get to decide, after all this."
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Sharp. Unkind. Afraid.
"I know it's not ideal, some tabloid manipulation bullshit about being with me, but it can't be this bad. What's going to happen, going after an ancient vampire who's hurt and cornered? What if he lashes out and incinerates you in an instant, even by fucking accident? What if he folds your head in two? Louis he can just— you could just come back changed, and what the fuck are we going to do then?"
His voice breaks. Embarrassing.
Please, don't.
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And while this occurs, he makes his presence known as a physical, tangible thing. A light grasp at Louis' pantleg that graduates to a weight, a solid presence of a shoulder leaning in against the back of his knee, Lestat leaning weight there, his breathing shallow, pained. Please don't, in the way he leans, the slight whine to his breathing. Je suis désolée, in the grasp to pant fabric, the press of his cheek to the side of Louis' thigh while the sight of the floor blurs from his vision.
His fault, of course. He has said the wrong thing, and the right thing evades him, feels beyond his grasp.
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Daniel's voice breaks.
Lestat is touch him, grasping, on his knees. (Louis had begged him from his knees. Begged, desperate, panicky, for Claudia. A terrible memory, stirred in his mind.)
They are in combination a paralytic. Stranding Louis with his rage, his hurt. Nowhere for it to go but inwards, inwards, inwards. Can't bring himself to move Daniel, to wrench away from Lestat. And so he is trapped.
Breathing too fast. Cold and hot at the same time. Watching himself become a statue, lose momentum as Lestat holds onto him and Daniel blocks the door.
"You want me to be afraid of him? Tiptoe around, beg 'em to stop fucking with the pair of you? Live another hundred, two hundred years letting him make me, and my fucking life into a knife to hurt you with?"
Fury, rushing from him like blood, like he is bleeding and hadn't realized. Lestat is holding onto him and Louis doesn't feel it, observes it from outside his own head too. He fell, because Armand hurt him, and it was too severe to heal. Just like Daniel, wan and pale the day after Armand's last offensive volley. Hurt on hurt and none of it lands on Louis, only on those standing near him.
"You think I'm so weak that I gotta hide, and hope he don't take you and kill Lestat next time?"
Of course there is a next time. Louis sees it now, the inevitability of it. Long years unfurling, marked by Armand's attentions as he sees fit to bestow them.
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"I don't want or think any of that," Daniel tells Louis. "And I'm pretty sure you know that, or you would, if you'd take a second to breathe."
See again: chill out.
He can tell Louis is angry. Radiating off of him like heat, like standing too close to a bonfire. But Daniel stays where he is, not because he thinks Louis is weak. Very aware he could end up smacked aside or incapacitated. Simply willing to endure it, if so.
"Lestat made a split-second decision to do something violent, and look what happened. Crushing ourselves over and over, repeating it, won't fix anything. Please don't. This isn't the way forward, it can't be."
And, horribly, Daniel does not want Armand to be dead. On the off-chance Louis succeeds, what the fuck does that feel like? The thought of it makes something feel like it's suffocating him. All of it, every angle, sucks.
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Aware of an argument occurring over his head. Aware of its substance. This time, it's alright if he is mostly spoken of as though he isn't in the room, because everything he has to say in possible response might project from him in a loud volume, stealing energy from anger, frustration, familiar patterns.
Sympathy pangs for the things Louis says. Armand, an ever-haunting presence. The scale of time, the extent. Lestat had laughed when Daniel had asked if he'd ever get bored and fuck off.
"Stay," he says. A murmur, only just audible, as if he is speaking to the floor more so than the man above him. "Stay here with me, mon cher. Ça me brisera le cœur si tu pars."
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sorry this is so many words
w o w
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sneaks in a tag forgive
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