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."
"This ain't a split second decision," spat back, words running alongside Daniel's protest, the logic he is trying to offer.
Louis has thought on this. (He has gone back and forth, wavering.) He has had a lot of time to consider how he would do it, how he would approach the task. The quality of the violence.
But Lestat is holding onto him. Whispers in French, words just for them, an appeal so soft it would be easily lost if anyone other than Lestat were saying them. It is a foregone conclusion: so long as Lestat holds him here, so long as Daniel makes himself an obstacle, Louis must remain. The anger must turn inward, corrosive and acidic through it might be.
Wants to say again, Don't ask me this. How dare you ask me this.
Asks instead, pressing, claws digging in: "Who you protecting, me or him?" as he watches Daniel, walls him out of his mind, hands balled into fists rather than reach down to Lestat. An accusation, a searching kind of provocation.
Daniel does actually believe that it's not a split second decision. He believes that Louis has been stewing since walking out of the penthouse that first time after the ruinous reveal, since he made the mistake of leaving Armand alone with Daniel. He's certain that Louis has thought of what he'd do, has workshopped it in his head over and over again, and is now seeing an opportunity that might never come again. One where Armand is potentially weak, and Louis very, very motivated.
The chances of an opportunity coming along like this are closer to zero than bears quibbling over. It's once in a long, long lifetime, probably. And Daniel doesn't feel selfish at all. Thinks: Fuck you, I'm saving your life. Because even if he didn't feel anything for Armand, even if he was still mortal Daniel Molloy, tagging along on some other goddamn thing, barely functional, then Lestat would still be here crying against Louis' body, and Daniel would still think Fuck you, I'm saving your life.
He doesn't think Armand has it in him, ordinarily, to kill Louis. He's loosely had this opinion for a while, but seeing that Lestat is alive still, it's solidified. But what about half-dead and out of his mind? What about a wounded animal lashing out? No. It's too fucking terrifying.
"Ballsy thing to ask after all the romanticized shit you peddled to me about the vampire bond," Daniel fires back. Doesn't move, stands his ground and glares. "I've felt like my insides have been falling out for twenty-four fucking hours, but I'm still here. With your maker, who agrees with me. Is Lestat protecting Armand, too?"
"Non," here, from the ground, a direct appeal now being made as he tips his head back to look up at Louis. Tear streaked and bruised and hair drying into disorder, a little wild eyed with naked desperation. "The gremlin can burn for the things he's done to you. If he could succumb to your fire, chéri—"
A shake of his head completes the sentiment. The gremlin would burn, it is that simple. Meanwhile, Lestat has half an instinct left not to cry more about the things he has seen, the things he knows.
One hand graduating up to find a handhold into Louis' shirt, a needful tug for attention. "You remember, the last time we saw one another in Paris," he says. "The better death, the greater suffering. If you live and are happy, if you find the ones you love and keep them with you, it is enough."
A tearful laugh, self-deprecating as he adds, "And you were so beautiful in New Orleans, speaking of the promise your future held. This can't be what you meant."
Yes, Louis had said many things about the quality of the bond, attributed a great many things to its existence, but beneath all of those assertions—
If Louis were to bring himself to read the book, to listen again to Daniel's recordings, would he better able to separate which words Armand taught him to say, and which were his own? Would Louis be able to listen again and hear which words were a shield for the way he loved Lestat still, even when all he knew was that Lestat had seen Claudia killed?
He'd felt Madeleine and it had never been the same. It would have been something else, if she'd lived longer. Two points of comparison, all Louis has from which to operate, but enough to judge them all different. And perhaps to say something ugly to Daniel in return (Louis, who had cut Lestat's throat and felt him teeter on the edge of death. Louis, who felt Madeleine burn to ash.) But Lestat pulls his attention down, breaks his focus in this space where it is very clear Louis is drawing breath to say something cruel.
Lestat disrupts the intention. There is nowhere for the impulse to go. And so it turns inward, shuttered behind Louis' eyes.
"What I peddled was about me and him," Louis says flatly, tacit admission of these differences. Of the misrepresentation, the lie that just barely kept Louis from being consumed by guilt over what he could not change. He reaches down, gathers Lestat from the floor if permitted, all brisk, economical movements.
"I thought he'd let us all go, but he ain't going to do that. And you're asking me to give him a chance to do all this, again."
Take Daniel. Kill Lestat. Leave Louis alive, alone. Or maybe kill him too. It is hard to predict. Louis doesn't know, but the danger is a tangible thing. Armand, given time to heal. Armand, given opportunity to come back and finish what he started.
That's what's being asked of him. It's unbearable.
Go ahead and be cruel, Daniel thinks. Go ahead and take it out on me, instead of doing something with finality.
Ready for it, accepting. Even if it hurts, it'll hurt less than losing Louis and being left alone with Armand— because it would just be Armand, then, no matter the details of it all shaking out. Pretty clear that Lestat's just not going to make it in a world without Louis in it, anymore. Easy to imagine him fading away after the trial, now.
Everything is so fucked. But Louis pivots, maybe conceding to the futility of that line of argument. Daniel has not been entirely honest about his dealings with Armand, but he's here, he's always come back to Louis.
"I'm asking you to live. This is a fucking mess, and things will end up changed over it, but the change can't be you going and getting annihilated. You can't ask us to watch you gamble on that kind of an outcome. Especially because—"
Daniel gestures, stuck for a moment, then, ah, fuck it,
"Like I said. I get it, when it comes to a motivation to want to kick Armand's teeth in. He deserves it. But Armand wasn't doing anything to us. He was just around, and if not for this, maybe nothing would have happened and we'd have never known. Don't take this as being scolded, by the way, Blondie, it's fine, I'm just saying. There are things between the state of 'letting us go' and the state of 'constant terrorism', and it's possible to get there. I have to fucking hope it gets there. What'd he say, it's gonna break his heart, if you leave?"
A look, at the way Louis is cradling his former companion, his maker. As if checking for a translation note, though he doesn't expect Lestat's attention is going to slip free from Louis even a little.
"I feel that. Still, with the lack of technicalities, I care about you more than anyone. You're worth enduring this bullshit."
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no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
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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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Louis has thought on this. (He has gone back and forth, wavering.) He has had a lot of time to consider how he would do it, how he would approach the task. The quality of the violence.
But Lestat is holding onto him. Whispers in French, words just for them, an appeal so soft it would be easily lost if anyone other than Lestat were saying them. It is a foregone conclusion: so long as Lestat holds him here, so long as Daniel makes himself an obstacle, Louis must remain. The anger must turn inward, corrosive and acidic through it might be.
Wants to say again, Don't ask me this. How dare you ask me this.
Asks instead, pressing, claws digging in: "Who you protecting, me or him?" as he watches Daniel, walls him out of his mind, hands balled into fists rather than reach down to Lestat. An accusation, a searching kind of provocation.
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The chances of an opportunity coming along like this are closer to zero than bears quibbling over. It's once in a long, long lifetime, probably. And Daniel doesn't feel selfish at all. Thinks: Fuck you, I'm saving your life. Because even if he didn't feel anything for Armand, even if he was still mortal Daniel Molloy, tagging along on some other goddamn thing, barely functional, then Lestat would still be here crying against Louis' body, and Daniel would still think Fuck you, I'm saving your life.
He doesn't think Armand has it in him, ordinarily, to kill Louis. He's loosely had this opinion for a while, but seeing that Lestat is alive still, it's solidified. But what about half-dead and out of his mind? What about a wounded animal lashing out? No. It's too fucking terrifying.
"Ballsy thing to ask after all the romanticized shit you peddled to me about the vampire bond," Daniel fires back. Doesn't move, stands his ground and glares. "I've felt like my insides have been falling out for twenty-four fucking hours, but I'm still here. With your maker, who agrees with me. Is Lestat protecting Armand, too?"
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A shake of his head completes the sentiment. The gremlin would burn, it is that simple. Meanwhile, Lestat has half an instinct left not to cry more about the things he has seen, the things he knows.
One hand graduating up to find a handhold into Louis' shirt, a needful tug for attention. "You remember, the last time we saw one another in Paris," he says. "The better death, the greater suffering. If you live and are happy, if you find the ones you love and keep them with you, it is enough."
A tearful laugh, self-deprecating as he adds, "And you were so beautiful in New Orleans, speaking of the promise your future held. This can't be what you meant."
sorry this is so many words
Yes, Louis had said many things about the quality of the bond, attributed a great many things to its existence, but beneath all of those assertions—
If Louis were to bring himself to read the book, to listen again to Daniel's recordings, would he better able to separate which words Armand taught him to say, and which were his own? Would Louis be able to listen again and hear which words were a shield for the way he loved Lestat still, even when all he knew was that Lestat had seen Claudia killed?
He'd felt Madeleine and it had never been the same. It would have been something else, if she'd lived longer. Two points of comparison, all Louis has from which to operate, but enough to judge them all different. And perhaps to say something ugly to Daniel in return (Louis, who had cut Lestat's throat and felt him teeter on the edge of death. Louis, who felt Madeleine burn to ash.) But Lestat pulls his attention down, breaks his focus in this space where it is very clear Louis is drawing breath to say something cruel.
Lestat disrupts the intention. There is nowhere for the impulse to go. And so it turns inward, shuttered behind Louis' eyes.
"What I peddled was about me and him," Louis says flatly, tacit admission of these differences. Of the misrepresentation, the lie that just barely kept Louis from being consumed by guilt over what he could not change. He reaches down, gathers Lestat from the floor if permitted, all brisk, economical movements.
"I thought he'd let us all go, but he ain't going to do that. And you're asking me to give him a chance to do all this, again."
Take Daniel. Kill Lestat. Leave Louis alive, alone. Or maybe kill him too. It is hard to predict. Louis doesn't know, but the danger is a tangible thing. Armand, given time to heal. Armand, given opportunity to come back and finish what he started.
That's what's being asked of him. It's unbearable.
w o w
Ready for it, accepting. Even if it hurts, it'll hurt less than losing Louis and being left alone with Armand— because it would just be Armand, then, no matter the details of it all shaking out. Pretty clear that Lestat's just not going to make it in a world without Louis in it, anymore. Easy to imagine him fading away after the trial, now.
Everything is so fucked. But Louis pivots, maybe conceding to the futility of that line of argument. Daniel has not been entirely honest about his dealings with Armand, but he's here, he's always come back to Louis.
"I'm asking you to live. This is a fucking mess, and things will end up changed over it, but the change can't be you going and getting annihilated. You can't ask us to watch you gamble on that kind of an outcome. Especially because—"
Daniel gestures, stuck for a moment, then, ah, fuck it,
"Like I said. I get it, when it comes to a motivation to want to kick Armand's teeth in. He deserves it. But Armand wasn't doing anything to us. He was just around, and if not for this, maybe nothing would have happened and we'd have never known. Don't take this as being scolded, by the way, Blondie, it's fine, I'm just saying. There are things between the state of 'letting us go' and the state of 'constant terrorism', and it's possible to get there. I have to fucking hope it gets there. What'd he say, it's gonna break his heart, if you leave?"
A look, at the way Louis is cradling his former companion, his maker. As if checking for a translation note, though he doesn't expect Lestat's attention is going to slip free from Louis even a little.
"I feel that. Still, with the lack of technicalities, I care about you more than anyone. You're worth enduring this bullshit."
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sneaks in a tag forgive
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