A hand touches his hair, and if there is a coin flip between accepting comfort from this gesture or lashing out, it finds itself weighted to the former thing by the recent memory of warm water, of Louis' fingers against the nape of his neck, of Louis saying just as gently that he will never regret coming to find Lestat again.
Vampires don't need to breathe, but the body forgets. It certainly sounds like it as Lestat barely muffles this latest bout of grief into silky robe fabric, just as vital and damp and struggling as any mortal, and slow revs down as Daniel speaks. The slightest lean towards that hand as he does so.
Looks to him, vision a rosy blur, as Daniel speaks of his companion, his former companion, lost in the wind still.
Absorbing. Some sense of internalisation, information for sifting through, shredding apart like paperback pulp print. Lestat says, "He said he didn't like my music," but this time it's with a laugh, quiet and wet, a brief flash of white, blunt teeth, because isn't that funny, even if tears haven't quite stopped.
"At divorce mediation with my second wife, I told her she almost looked healthier after having finally gained some weight somewhere besides her ass. She looked great, but I made her feel awful. We all say shit when we're mad and hurt."
Lestat is very handsome. Daniel looks at him, and sometimes forgets to see a person; he's a figure from Louis' story, a fixture of his existence, a threat, a force of nature to be navigated. He supposes the blond vampire is all that, too.
Gentle pats. Just trying to offer him something to feel stable against. Hands that don't tremble and shake, not anymore. Would Lestat worry about him and Louis, if he'd seen Daniel when he was sick? Would he understand how fucking ridiculous his concern is, then?
"I'm sorry you heard any of it."
Daniel tries not to sound too tired. Violating, to know more of his trauma is being shared, but he understands Lestat was definitely not focusing on him. And he understands (hates that he understands) that Armand was probably going for the most effective way to hurt Lestat. Daniel just happened to be incidentally bleeding on the floor for a fair bit of it. Oh, well.
It makes him laugh again, this first thing Daniel says, the way mirth can kind of break through beneath the tears. It isn't funny, really, except in the way it's funny that everyone is a little terrible, and it can be a delightful sort of surprise the ways it manifests. Pettiness, little cruelties. Daniel is sorry Lestat heard any of that. Did Louis want him to, once?
Not now. They had moved on so quickly off the topic, back in New York. And now, Louis, going cold and still and silent. Walking away.
"The cruelest things a lover can say to you are the things you can see in yourself," he says. "That you most fear about yourself. Not the part about music. That's absurd."
But the rest. Lestat is a lot, he is not perfect.
He brings a hand up and covers Daniel's with his own, pressing it there to the side of his head for a moment. Soaking up this kindness like it's life-giving, excess crimson squeezed from beneath his lashes as he closes his eyes tightly for a moment, like wishing some substantial portion of heartbreak to soothe.
"He showed me," quiet, "your time in Dubai. The way he would govern Louis. The way he would toy with you. Do you wish to see?"
See, it's not so dismal. They can have some quiet laughter, a small bit of relief before Louis comes back and is probably still fucking miserable. Daniel hopes not, but he also knows, with a strange, depressed resignation, that he's going to have to go find Armand, if not tonight then soon, and it's going to make Louis feel a million times worse all over. Not looking forward to it, but he's also not enjoying the way it feels like his insides have been removed like somebody scooping them out to make deviled eggs.
A pause, like a hitch in breathing.
"I was there," he ventures, wry. "He and I interacted a lot while Louis was asleep. I dunno if I need to see whatever filter he put over it. Is it going to give you a headache to do?"
On the one hand, Daniel wants to know things. On the other, Daniel is not eager to see himself with Parkinson's again.
This question is replied to with a sound. Maybe, maybe not.
And it doesn't matter. At least, now, the air around him feels a little less heavy, less full of psychic radioactivity since their first encounter in the alleyway. The blood of two humans and the sampling of Louis' blood, and some calm restored over the passing minutes, doing something to stitch these things closed.
"Not if you take it," is probably true. Lestat's mind feels—swollen, perhaps, like muddy rivers leaking past their delineations, like a mouthful of broken glass. Memories that don't belong to him, information he didn't ask for. The gifting of one shard won't relieve any of it, but perhaps it can have a purpose. Perhaps all of this can have had a purpose, and he won't just collapse on Daniel's chest and cry that Louis always liked his music.
Instead, he closes his eyes. Focuses, recalling this one thing, and parcelling it up carefully into a single crystalline fragment. The cool lights of the penthouse, Louis speaking in soft tones about making Daniel one of them, and the undercurrent of feeling—frustration, annoyance, disgust—that comes with making him rest. Here is Daniel, hands shaking over a plastic bottle he is trying to open, and the texture of his hair in the palm of your hand as you grip a handful, yank his head backwards.
The scent of sunlight on wet concrete. Light illuminating off of metal, drainage pipes, wheel hubs, the taste of blood.
Lestat doesn't shove this into Daniel's mind. Pushes it to the front of his own. It would be nice if it doesn't hurt either of them.
He could shut it out. It occurs to him as it starts, that he's developed enough to be able to. For a suspended moment within himself, Daniel feels like he's standing in a doorway with one hand on the frame, easy to be on one side or the other. Seeing himself is excruciating misery he left behind writing a memoir, but it feels like being a little bitch to opt out.
Goddamnit.
Armand is—
Strange. Inhuman in a way the other inhumans aren't. Lestat will see Daniel's surgical regard of him, watching this, taking in emotion dispassionately, cataloguing it. Matching it up against information he already has, experiences he's already run through, Louis' mocking offer, and earlier than that, Armand, dark brown eyes, staring at him, doing nothing but staring directly at him, even when Louis is sitting next to him, even when Louis is nowhere to be found, standing together out on the balcony a million miles in the air in the desert, and Armand is still just staring at him.
Whatever. Armand is a freak. Louis needs help. Lestat needs something to be done about the melting, the swelling, the spill of tender ribbons out of his head. Daniel's hands are cold because he's an old man who smoked too much in life, and they're soothing in the telepathic world, sifting through, trying to carefully put things back onto a shelf.
Armand is a freak. Unbidden, Lestat feels a twinge of affection, enough so that it pulls at his expression, demands a tiny smile. It's funny, and a little familiar. They were incompatible because they were impossible, but they were.
He almost pulls back completely when he feels that touch to his mind, and stops. Something like the lion letting the mouse tend to the thorn in his paw, save that the mouse could harm itself, become full of thorns too, and the lion is not certain he would like to invite such an outcome. But it's a comfort, a touch of cool on something over-warm, skill in the way psychic touches move past the jagged wounding.
Old memories pushed back into the hazy layers they belong. New memories carefully contained. Slowly, the noise dims. Likely a dusting of impressions come away on Daniel's fingers. The sting of snow, of hard wooden floors under raw knees, and a black ribbon on glossy black hair and familiar faces fleeting in a spotted mirror, the scent of perfumes and powders.
Meanwhile, Lestat has shifted in closer, his brow now pressed to Daniel's shoulder in a doggish pursuit of—well, not affection, exactly. Shelter.
A scant handful of years for Armand and Lestat, were, and barely any time at all for Armand and Daniel and whatever that looks like, are, and it feels like they're on either sides of a see-saw with Louis and Armand in the middle as the fulcrum, 77 years inscribed on the pedestal.
Lestat already knows that he'd seen his maker before they left New York. It slips by, Armand and Daniel sitting on the floor; it feels burned, now, thinking about Armand throwing him under the bus to hurt Lestat. He doesn't believe that Armand actually believes Daniel and Louis are together, but he does believe Armand might convince himself of its viability to torture... anyone. Himself, them. He sees the stupid keychain. He feels sick, and not all of it's because of the bond.
Focusing on trying to stabilize Lestat helps. He's an investigator, he's a details guy. He can do puzzles. He sits and he leans in a little, against the sofa, against the other vampire, and tries to gently put things where they should go. His hands don't shake anymore. Feasible.
It paints a different picture to the one that Louis had implied, that Daniel had tried to claim when they spoke in the bloodied snow. Not exactly a guilty bystander, not exactly collateral. Perhaps no more so than Armand and Louis' seventy-seven years was only a punishment for Lestat.
Armand had not shown him this. Armand had protected it, this little moment in Daniel's New York apartment, though Lestat knew it had occurred. Maybe it just wasn't useful to summon. Perhaps it is special. Lestat sees fire-orange eyes, sees a kiss, sees a keychain disappeared into a fist.
Well. There are worse ways makers can behave.
Fragments, if not healed into whole things, shuffled back where they belong. There is a man named Marius in all the mess. Lestat had wielded his evocation like a knife. Not with recollections or stolen images of horror, but gentler ones of his own possession. Love, equal parts fatherly and erotic. Abandonment, the same. Telling him to leave. Telling him in reasonable tones that Lestat and all his children would be destroyed if he spoke of the things he learned there.
Daniel speaks to him.
'Oui.'
Lestat has stopped crying, finally, properly. Time has passed, a little slippery when immersed this way. He thinks that they must have been like this for hours, him and Armand, but he's past the point of feeling uneasy. Minutes here, at most, leaning in against Daniel and a hand braced at his arm.
Very unfortunately, Daniel knows who Marius is, though he and Armand have not discussed him. And very unfortunately, those flashes of memory are real, and Daniel feels unbelievably fucking stupid. Lestat will be able to feel that clearer than any bit of intel. It's one thing to go screw around with too-young mortals with screwed up daddy issues because he can and because he doesn't care, it's another to let himself get taken in by someone he knows perfectly goddamn well is a manipulative liar. There's stupid [just partying], and stupid [should probably go outside at noon].
It's embarrassing. Fuck his fucking life, alright.
'That's alright.'
What's Armand gonna do, be mad at him for saying this? Daniel has empathy (see again: very unfortunately) for him, but he's also pretty stung.
'I don't love this fighting bullshit. But what are any of us gonna do, in this mess. Your job is to recover, now.'
Also embarrassing (nearly) (it takes quite a lot for Lestat to actually approach experiencing this emotion) is his sense of relief that Daniel's response comes so easily. Cheap relief, maybe. It isn't like shame was not well deserved in the past, each moment Lestat lost his temper to catastrophic levels. But it's nice, for now, not to feel it again as the only recourse.
Affection catches him instead, and then, a flicker of movement too fast for a human eye to track, or even a fledgling's eye when he is expecting it. Lestat knelt in front of Daniel, both hands gentle on either side of his face.
"You must know," he says, out loud, voice soft-toned but weighted, quiet drama in how serious he is being, "what it means that we are not human. The freedom of this meaning. You remember opening your vampire eyes and seeing all the secret beauty in the world you were not capable of taking notice of before, don't you? The depth of the shadows, all the colours the darkness holds, the songs of stars. You only believe you are not desirable because mortals are governed by fear of their own ending, but no longer does it apply."
He means it, too, insistent, as if this were the most pressing concern, but perhaps it is one he can take care of. One of his eyes is still bloodied, and a bath only makes him look fractionally less insane, nerves fried and bloodied tear tracks still drying on his skin. All the same.
"You are among us, us beautiful creatures. You were chosen twice over, made into a thing to live for all eternity. I don't permit you to feel foolish for feeling wanted."
He's working on it, carefully, focused on the raw feeling of Lestat's mind, resigned to sharing feelings and glimpses as he does it— sure, he's embarrassed, but that's nothing new. While Daniel does have shame, he's never let it moderate his behavior. What a deeply pathetic mirror. Afraid of Armand but not afraid of fear. Embarrassed with Lestat, but forging ahead, because what's the worst that could happen.
The worst that could happen, for the record: Lestat telling Louis. Exposing this. Lestat hadn't run off and tattled when Daniel confessed to having met up with Armand, but at the time, Lestat had not been falling apart and in hysterics over the suggestion that Louis may have chosen Daniel romantically. A tidy way to put that firmly to bed. If Lestat tells Louis now, Daniel is pretty sure he'll never speak to him again, and it's a depressing thought. He doesn't even have a great excuse. He was freaked out after the Met, he was feeling shut out and helpless, he was stupid.
Lestat has moved and is speaking before Daniel has fully registered the change. In the middle of something. A flinch, hey, I was working on that, and—
"You don't have to do all that."
A shuttered expression on the heels of a shocked one. He drops his gaze. It's so fucking absurd. Lestat makes it sound beautiful and ethereal, but it isn't. Daniel is a different kind of vampire, and would be even if Louis did make him, because then he'd be someone's desperate attempt at connecting with humanity, and Louis would regret it, because Daniel is a better monster than he was ever a person.
"He was lying. To you, about Louis and I. To Louis, about everything, for decades. It's not on you to put together what he knocked over, not for me. You've been through enough over it."
His hands are gentle, but also, they're weapons, and will move when they are ready to move. Something innately threatening and intense in plenty of Lestat's dealings, including this one, but it would probably be out of order even for him to tear Daniel to shreds for not believing the things he says.
"But it was Louis who said to me he chose you, and so I saw you as his." A gentle, presumptive stroke of his thumbs. Somewhere, Armand would consider tearing his hands off for the transgression. It would be romantic, twofold. "His clever, beautiful fledgling, taken when he was ready to be taken. Taken when Louis had selected him to be taken. And Armand,"
his hands gentle more, a slow relieving of pressure. "He is a liar. He doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do. Not anymore."
It was Lestat who freed him of it, whether Armand agrees or not. And he likely doesn't.
Anyway, in summary: Lestat darts in to press a kiss to Daniel's cheek, and then his other cheek.
A profound offering, extremely kind, a lot, and maybe Daniel's emotional skittering away has got a blush of insulting ungratefulness in there. Self-doubt, abrupt discomfort with turning this all around on himself, and just a simple inability to process it all in a heartbeat. It's meaningful. Enough that it will stay lodged somewhere (potentially unpleasantly like an arrow in his throat), and he will have to work through it. Decide if he thinks Lestat is full of shit or not. Decide if he can accept it.
In time.
But hey, they've got a fair bit of it. Ha, ha.
Hands on his face, and he thinks maybe Lestat really will kill him, transcended to some place past being worried about it. Instead he ends up being given affection, and he frankly doesn't know what the fuck to do about it. There's a tight feeling in his chest, in his head, he blinks something away (tries to, tries again, manages it).
"Yeah, sleeping in dumpsters sucks." The voice of experience?? Daniel?? He reaches out, pats Lestat's shoulder awkwardly, carefully. (This? This weird guy, this is who has been chosen? Is wanted? ... ??) "Louis should be back soon unless he fucked off."
A slightly awful note to his voice, there, helpless to keep it held back. He hopes Louis hasn't just fucked off.
Maybe this is spoken with a hush tone, the kind of weight that suggests that Lestat might have told someone this seventy-seven years ago, and look, he was right. Perhaps not so dire as that. Surely he might have clung to Louis' leg again if he thought he might walk out for another century.
Maybe they are speaking of something else. Lestat can sense it in the air, a little, though he isn't reading Daniel's mind with perfect clarity. A run-off sense of resignation, and he can put some things together. Less that Daniel is anticipating whether he personally will be the one to deliver this latest piece of gossip, more that it will come out eventually, and then perhaps Louis will vanish from Daniel.
But if he does, Louis will be back. Of this, Lestat is sure. It just takes some yearning, some patience, some tireless begging. Maybe that's how friendship works too, if they are, after all of this, just friends.
A moment of quiet study, and then he asks, "Where do you want to be, now?"
Daniel, despite everything that's been impressed on him in these strange few minutes, is still the guy Louis left alone with Armand. Over and over, he left him alone with Armand, Armand-as-Rashid and Armand-as-Armand, until the last time, when it was the worst time. Daniel has forgiven him for it wholeheartedly, but he comes back to it sometimes. Louis left him with Armand. Now a part of him is forever left with Armand.
The question lands like he's been slapped. Daniel just looks at him for a moment, hurt by the implication, but aware he deserves it.
"In a mansion built in 1985 with an endless supply of heroin and ludes and a fembot zombie of my first wife," he says, unkind. "Barring that, here. I know what I feel like. You know what I feel like. Doesn't mean it matters more than here."
A look that is held, even, and only wavers once Lestat's question is answered. Daniel could want more to go find Armand, yes, but also to go find Louis, who may not come back. He could, himself, fuck off forever, and all of these possibilities are differing degrees of uncharitable.
By now, it's not a surprise that Daniel reiterates remaining here in this building, or in this room, but also, Lestat has a complex or two. Touching anyway, and his eyeline dips, and then he nods.
"Will you—"
A little gesture, indicating himself, his mind. Plays it off with a faint laugh. "You were doing good work before I interrupted."
It's not that he doesn't feel his insides going cold, still. And it's not that he doesn't want to go find Armand, both to assure himself that his maker is alive and to ask him what the fuck is your problem. But Louis is more important, and leaving will hurt Louis as sure as telling him the details of his meetings with Armand.
And Lestat too, he guesses.
"Alright." Something to do is better than trying to figure all that out. In a little bit, maybe he'll muster the courage to ask if Lestat thinks Armand will kill him, if he goes to find him. Internal sigh. "Make yourself comfortable, since I dunno what the fuck I'm doing."
On the sofa again, or does he just want to splay out right here with his head in Daniel's lap like a weird animal?
Resident weird animal Lestat settles as encouraged, electing to stay here on the floor, electing to settle his head down against Daniel's thigh with perfect confidence he will not be shooed away for it. Drawing his limbs in, a protective curling position even as his mind is laid bare. It should feel stranger to hold his own defenses open this way, and maybe with another day of healing, it will.
But he would prefer not to be alone in his head, and there is something soothing and tactile about the quiet ordering of chaos. Tries not to think of anything too complex, tries not to follow potential rabbit holes. He thinks of a parlour, lit in gold, a cosy presence of someone he loves settled in an armchair, and he has taken up position at a piano, and Bach fills the air. In the curl of his arm, his fingers twitch in subtle mimicry of the motions.
Not immune to bad memories, this place, but still, something of an island in all the present wreckage.
Hands go to Lestat's head, careful, resting there and sometimes smoothing bits of blond hair. Daniel finds it all a little intimate, but he's the guy who encouraged Armand crawl to into bed with him less than a week ago, so he can shut his own objections up, honestly. He wonders at how scattered his own head feels right now, not for any vampiric reasons, but just stress. A desire to have his kind of control over a situation, which is just knowing all the angles and how things might turn out if he winds this way or the other way or flips something on its head.
Right now there's nothing. He does have a few ideas, but they're all bad ones. Like: Louis is never going to speak to him again. Like: he still does want to go and find Armand.
If the first thing happens, it'll free him up for the second, but he doesn't want it that way. He knows what he should let go of, and he's angry enough to, but there's a lurching sickness that comes over him, a pull deep in his gut, when he thinks of turning his back on the creature that transformed him. If nothing else, Armand has shit to answer for.
Daniel thinks it's like intangible, wet clay. There's some instinct to feel where it's been smashed on the throwing wheel, and he can run an attentive touch along parts of it, smoothing it back. Impressions spill over onto him, but he doesn't make an effort to look closely. Just lets it go. No awareness of how long they spend, when his awareness prickles.
"Lunch," he advises.
Too late to ask, Where do you think I should be, now?
Don't be long, Lestat had said, and Louis had heard him.
So it is a conscious choice, when Louis does not return. When he indulges in hours of wrestling with whether to return at all.
When they had begun to fight, he and Armand, Louis had begun to vanish. Fucked off. Disappeared into the crush of nightlife in whichever city they had been in. Absences that stretched as long as Armand tolerated, blood-soaked days of separation.
It had been a relief, each time he was found. Collected. Armand, still inclined to retrieve Louis from the worst of his impulses, to mop up the blood, to find Louis from beneath the gore of his misery. Remained even after, through the days of Louis shaking through withdrawals and misery, wrestling with his own guilt. They'd come back together. They'd argue again. Louis would vanish again.
A cycle that broke, after Daniel. Louis has a better understanding of how that break had happened now than he had before the interview, a fuller picture of how he had so completely turned from the worst of his habits then. But they are in him still, the urge towards self-destruction. Venting what he has no other place to put.
Louis leaves their hotel, wreckage and misery and fury all turned inwards. He could accomplish his task as efficiently as Daniel had, but no. (The urge to fuck off. To go, vanish, run.) Louis takes his helpless, stymied fury and makes it into a cratering kind of implosion.
The routine is the same. Alterations so slight that they simply don't matter.
Find the right kind of man at the right kind of bar. Leave the bar. Sit together in a poorly lit room.
Louis is smoking, a coiled spring sitting on the opposite end of a scorched table, watching this man arrange his little collection of pills. Exhale a plume of smoke as he selects the desired from the neat groupings. Observe his ritual, the preparation.
Balance here, in this space, teetering on the edge of a razor edge of a different bad decision. Louis knows what it would taste like. Oblivion. Guilt, after. Louis could make a home there, for a time. Weighs the choice in his hand. Decides—
No. No, not tonight.
Instead, this man is robbed even of his last high. Louis takes him. He is blank-eyed and sober, steady on his feet as Louis leads him into the garage. Louis' chosen prey as an offering, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, guided down into a seat on the cement floor. Louis has a hold of his mind still, feeling his way through memory and sensation, blotting out the world. Aware of Daniel, of Lestat. Awake, nearby. Surely aware of his return.
So he straightens from his crouch, crosses his arms. Waits, listening the sound of footsteps, of approach, as he holds lunch immobile on the garage floor for Lestat.
It is nearly sleep, what Lestat lapses into. A rest either way, stillness of mind and body, and kept on task of relaxing, recovery, by the occasional sweep of fingers over his hair, of his awareness of psychic orderliness. No crying fits, no sudden catches of feeling, no spiraling, no repeats of the strange day he'd spent in his hiding place. It even does something to nudge him closer to healing, so when he lifts his head at Daniel's prompt, at his own sense of Louis' presence, injuries twinge a little less.
He stays poised and alert this way for a moment before it becomes plain that the expectation is he will go down to the garage again.
A little groggily human in the way he pulls himself up and off Daniel's lap, onto his feet. Tugging his robe around him.
"For me?" he asks the air, and Daniel may sense that it is not directed to him, that Lestat expects Louis to hear something soft spoken all the way to the garage.
Silently alerted, and the summons is implied. Daniel raises his hands as Lestat hauls upright, helping. Stays sitting for a moment, thinking back to Armand and a book signing. Something he'd said, calling this way and that. He wonders who taught them.
It sinks in just how shitty he feels when he stands, but he doesn't say anything. Something about it is disorienting. Lestat speaks, but not to him, Louis assumes his attention, and Daniel feels as incidental as a toppled over chair in San Fransisco, suddenly.
Still doesn't say anything. Who cares. Get a grip, Molloy. There's no room for sad teenage girl bullshit.
He follows Lestat to the garage to make sure he doesn't topple over on the way there, and stays in the doorway, leaning against it. Doesn't know what Louis' been up to, doesn't know if he's in a position to guess. There's real relief there that he returned, but he doesn't feel like his concern is welcome.
"Yeah," Louis says, into empty air. Watches dispassionately as his offering, as this blank-faced man at his feet, opens his mouth and echoes hazily, "Yeah."
Time enough in between this answer and their arrival for Louis to think again if he should have made a different choice. Run a finger along the knife-edge of that self-destruction, and again put it off.
(Oblivion would give him a little space, Louis knows. A little space from everything in his body that is screaming, screaming, screaming. It's too much. Louis doesn't know how to hold it.
But no. He did not choose oblivion and now he is here.)
Approaching footsteps. Door swinging open on creaking hinges. Louis' head lifts, looks back at them over his shoulder. Lestat, steadier than Louis left him. Daniel, occupying the doorway.
Okay.
Louis looks back, down to the lunch meat on the floor. His eyes briefly trace the heavy vein in this man's throat, a last wavering consideration of how this night might have gone. And then a sigh, a flex of power. The man begins to rise, clumsy, sleepwalking, tugged upwards so Lestat might be spared the task of bending down.
"I'll hold him." Not with his hands. "Least until you drain the fight out of him."
Practical.
(In fairness to Daniel Molloy, no one's concerns are welcome.)
He would like to greet Louis. To move across the room, take him into his arms. But there is something like an emanating fuck off aura about him that may take more navigation, and Lestat flicks his attention to the mortal being puppeted to his feet. An approving twinge at the corner of his mouth.
Well, shades of Armand, maybe, but it is a power Louis possesses, granted to him by Lestat, and why shouldn't he use it?
"I've been very greedy," he says, a tip of his head. "Neither of you have eaten, have you." A trace of dark humour. "We could split it."
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Vampires don't need to breathe, but the body forgets. It certainly sounds like it as Lestat barely muffles this latest bout of grief into silky robe fabric, just as vital and damp and struggling as any mortal, and slow revs down as Daniel speaks. The slightest lean towards that hand as he does so.
Looks to him, vision a rosy blur, as Daniel speaks of his companion, his former companion, lost in the wind still.
Absorbing. Some sense of internalisation, information for sifting through, shredding apart like paperback pulp print. Lestat says, "He said he didn't like my music," but this time it's with a laugh, quiet and wet, a brief flash of white, blunt teeth, because isn't that funny, even if tears haven't quite stopped.
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Lestat is very handsome. Daniel looks at him, and sometimes forgets to see a person; he's a figure from Louis' story, a fixture of his existence, a threat, a force of nature to be navigated. He supposes the blond vampire is all that, too.
Gentle pats. Just trying to offer him something to feel stable against. Hands that don't tremble and shake, not anymore. Would Lestat worry about him and Louis, if he'd seen Daniel when he was sick? Would he understand how fucking ridiculous his concern is, then?
"I'm sorry you heard any of it."
Daniel tries not to sound too tired. Violating, to know more of his trauma is being shared, but he understands Lestat was definitely not focusing on him. And he understands (hates that he understands) that Armand was probably going for the most effective way to hurt Lestat. Daniel just happened to be incidentally bleeding on the floor for a fair bit of it. Oh, well.
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Not now. They had moved on so quickly off the topic, back in New York. And now, Louis, going cold and still and silent. Walking away.
"The cruelest things a lover can say to you are the things you can see in yourself," he says. "That you most fear about yourself. Not the part about music. That's absurd."
But the rest. Lestat is a lot, he is not perfect.
He brings a hand up and covers Daniel's with his own, pressing it there to the side of his head for a moment. Soaking up this kindness like it's life-giving, excess crimson squeezed from beneath his lashes as he closes his eyes tightly for a moment, like wishing some substantial portion of heartbreak to soothe.
"He showed me," quiet, "your time in Dubai. The way he would govern Louis. The way he would toy with you. Do you wish to see?"
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See, it's not so dismal. They can have some quiet laughter, a small bit of relief before Louis comes back and is probably still fucking miserable. Daniel hopes not, but he also knows, with a strange, depressed resignation, that he's going to have to go find Armand, if not tonight then soon, and it's going to make Louis feel a million times worse all over. Not looking forward to it, but he's also not enjoying the way it feels like his insides have been removed like somebody scooping them out to make deviled eggs.
A pause, like a hitch in breathing.
"I was there," he ventures, wry. "He and I interacted a lot while Louis was asleep. I dunno if I need to see whatever filter he put over it. Is it going to give you a headache to do?"
On the one hand, Daniel wants to know things. On the other, Daniel is not eager to see himself with Parkinson's again.
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And it doesn't matter. At least, now, the air around him feels a little less heavy, less full of psychic radioactivity since their first encounter in the alleyway. The blood of two humans and the sampling of Louis' blood, and some calm restored over the passing minutes, doing something to stitch these things closed.
"Not if you take it," is probably true. Lestat's mind feels—swollen, perhaps, like muddy rivers leaking past their delineations, like a mouthful of broken glass. Memories that don't belong to him, information he didn't ask for. The gifting of one shard won't relieve any of it, but perhaps it can have a purpose. Perhaps all of this can have had a purpose, and he won't just collapse on Daniel's chest and cry that Louis always liked his music.
Instead, he closes his eyes. Focuses, recalling this one thing, and parcelling it up carefully into a single crystalline fragment. The cool lights of the penthouse, Louis speaking in soft tones about making Daniel one of them, and the undercurrent of feeling—frustration, annoyance, disgust—that comes with making him rest. Here is Daniel, hands shaking over a plastic bottle he is trying to open, and the texture of his hair in the palm of your hand as you grip a handful, yank his head backwards.
The scent of sunlight on wet concrete. Light illuminating off of metal, drainage pipes, wheel hubs, the taste of blood.
Lestat doesn't shove this into Daniel's mind. Pushes it to the front of his own. It would be nice if it doesn't hurt either of them.
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Goddamnit.
Armand is—
Strange. Inhuman in a way the other inhumans aren't. Lestat will see Daniel's surgical regard of him, watching this, taking in emotion dispassionately, cataloguing it. Matching it up against information he already has, experiences he's already run through, Louis' mocking offer, and earlier than that, Armand, dark brown eyes, staring at him, doing nothing but staring directly at him, even when Louis is sitting next to him, even when Louis is nowhere to be found, standing together out on the balcony a million miles in the air in the desert, and Armand is still just staring at him.
Whatever. Armand is a freak. Louis needs help. Lestat needs something to be done about the melting, the swelling, the spill of tender ribbons out of his head. Daniel's hands are cold because he's an old man who smoked too much in life, and they're soothing in the telepathic world, sifting through, trying to carefully put things back onto a shelf.
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He almost pulls back completely when he feels that touch to his mind, and stops. Something like the lion letting the mouse tend to the thorn in his paw, save that the mouse could harm itself, become full of thorns too, and the lion is not certain he would like to invite such an outcome. But it's a comfort, a touch of cool on something over-warm, skill in the way psychic touches move past the jagged wounding.
Old memories pushed back into the hazy layers they belong. New memories carefully contained. Slowly, the noise dims. Likely a dusting of impressions come away on Daniel's fingers. The sting of snow, of hard wooden floors under raw knees, and a black ribbon on glossy black hair and familiar faces fleeting in a spotted mirror, the scent of perfumes and powders.
Meanwhile, Lestat has shifted in closer, his brow now pressed to Daniel's shoulder in a doggish pursuit of—well, not affection, exactly. Shelter.
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Lestat already knows that he'd seen his maker before they left New York. It slips by, Armand and Daniel sitting on the floor; it feels burned, now, thinking about Armand throwing him under the bus to hurt Lestat. He doesn't believe that Armand actually believes Daniel and Louis are together, but he does believe Armand might convince himself of its viability to torture... anyone. Himself, them. He sees the stupid keychain. He feels sick, and not all of it's because of the bond.
Focusing on trying to stabilize Lestat helps. He's an investigator, he's a details guy. He can do puzzles. He sits and he leans in a little, against the sofa, against the other vampire, and tries to gently put things where they should go. His hands don't shake anymore. Feasible.
'You in there?'
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Armand had not shown him this. Armand had protected it, this little moment in Daniel's New York apartment, though Lestat knew it had occurred. Maybe it just wasn't useful to summon. Perhaps it is special. Lestat sees fire-orange eyes, sees a kiss, sees a keychain disappeared into a fist.
Well. There are worse ways makers can behave.
Fragments, if not healed into whole things, shuffled back where they belong. There is a man named Marius in all the mess. Lestat had wielded his evocation like a knife. Not with recollections or stolen images of horror, but gentler ones of his own possession. Love, equal parts fatherly and erotic. Abandonment, the same. Telling him to leave. Telling him in reasonable tones that Lestat and all his children would be destroyed if he spoke of the things he learned there.
Daniel speaks to him.
'Oui.'
Lestat has stopped crying, finally, properly. Time has passed, a little slippery when immersed this way. He thinks that they must have been like this for hours, him and Armand, but he's past the point of feeling uneasy. Minutes here, at most, leaning in against Daniel and a hand braced at his arm.
'I hurt him badly.'
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It's embarrassing. Fuck his fucking life, alright.
'That's alright.'
What's Armand gonna do, be mad at him for saying this? Daniel has empathy (see again: very unfortunately) for him, but he's also pretty stung.
'I don't love this fighting bullshit. But what are any of us gonna do, in this mess. Your job is to recover, now.'
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Also embarrassing (nearly) (it takes quite a lot for Lestat to actually approach experiencing this emotion) is his sense of relief that Daniel's response comes so easily. Cheap relief, maybe. It isn't like shame was not well deserved in the past, each moment Lestat lost his temper to catastrophic levels. But it's nice, for now, not to feel it again as the only recourse.
Affection catches him instead, and then, a flicker of movement too fast for a human eye to track, or even a fledgling's eye when he is expecting it. Lestat knelt in front of Daniel, both hands gentle on either side of his face.
"You must know," he says, out loud, voice soft-toned but weighted, quiet drama in how serious he is being, "what it means that we are not human. The freedom of this meaning. You remember opening your vampire eyes and seeing all the secret beauty in the world you were not capable of taking notice of before, don't you? The depth of the shadows, all the colours the darkness holds, the songs of stars. You only believe you are not desirable because mortals are governed by fear of their own ending, but no longer does it apply."
He means it, too, insistent, as if this were the most pressing concern, but perhaps it is one he can take care of. One of his eyes is still bloodied, and a bath only makes him look fractionally less insane, nerves fried and bloodied tear tracks still drying on his skin. All the same.
"You are among us, us beautiful creatures. You were chosen twice over, made into a thing to live for all eternity. I don't permit you to feel foolish for feeling wanted."
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The worst that could happen, for the record: Lestat telling Louis. Exposing this. Lestat hadn't run off and tattled when Daniel confessed to having met up with Armand, but at the time, Lestat had not been falling apart and in hysterics over the suggestion that Louis may have chosen Daniel romantically. A tidy way to put that firmly to bed. If Lestat tells Louis now, Daniel is pretty sure he'll never speak to him again, and it's a depressing thought. He doesn't even have a great excuse. He was freaked out after the Met, he was feeling shut out and helpless, he was stupid.
Lestat has moved and is speaking before Daniel has fully registered the change. In the middle of something. A flinch, hey, I was working on that, and—
"You don't have to do all that."
A shuttered expression on the heels of a shocked one. He drops his gaze. It's so fucking absurd. Lestat makes it sound beautiful and ethereal, but it isn't. Daniel is a different kind of vampire, and would be even if Louis did make him, because then he'd be someone's desperate attempt at connecting with humanity, and Louis would regret it, because Daniel is a better monster than he was ever a person.
"He was lying. To you, about Louis and I. To Louis, about everything, for decades. It's not on you to put together what he knocked over, not for me. You've been through enough over it."
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His hands are gentle, but also, they're weapons, and will move when they are ready to move. Something innately threatening and intense in plenty of Lestat's dealings, including this one, but it would probably be out of order even for him to tear Daniel to shreds for not believing the things he says.
"But it was Louis who said to me he chose you, and so I saw you as his." A gentle, presumptive stroke of his thumbs. Somewhere, Armand would consider tearing his hands off for the transgression. It would be romantic, twofold. "His clever, beautiful fledgling, taken when he was ready to be taken. Taken when Louis had selected him to be taken. And Armand,"
his hands gentle more, a slow relieving of pressure. "He is a liar. He doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do. Not anymore."
It was Lestat who freed him of it, whether Armand agrees or not. And he likely doesn't.
Anyway, in summary: Lestat darts in to press a kiss to Daniel's cheek, and then his other cheek.
Primly: "I'm tired."
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In time.
But hey, they've got a fair bit of it. Ha, ha.
Hands on his face, and he thinks maybe Lestat really will kill him, transcended to some place past being worried about it. Instead he ends up being given affection, and he frankly doesn't know what the fuck to do about it. There's a tight feeling in his chest, in his head, he blinks something away (tries to, tries again, manages it).
"Yeah, sleeping in dumpsters sucks." The voice of experience?? Daniel?? He reaches out, pats Lestat's shoulder awkwardly, carefully. (This? This weird guy, this is who has been chosen? Is wanted? ... ??) "Louis should be back soon unless he fucked off."
A slightly awful note to his voice, there, helpless to keep it held back. He hopes Louis hasn't just fucked off.
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Maybe this is spoken with a hush tone, the kind of weight that suggests that Lestat might have told someone this seventy-seven years ago, and look, he was right. Perhaps not so dire as that. Surely he might have clung to Louis' leg again if he thought he might walk out for another century.
Maybe they are speaking of something else. Lestat can sense it in the air, a little, though he isn't reading Daniel's mind with perfect clarity. A run-off sense of resignation, and he can put some things together. Less that Daniel is anticipating whether he personally will be the one to deliver this latest piece of gossip, more that it will come out eventually, and then perhaps Louis will vanish from Daniel.
But if he does, Louis will be back. Of this, Lestat is sure. It just takes some yearning, some patience, some tireless begging. Maybe that's how friendship works too, if they are, after all of this, just friends.
A moment of quiet study, and then he asks, "Where do you want to be, now?"
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Daniel, despite everything that's been impressed on him in these strange few minutes, is still the guy Louis left alone with Armand. Over and over, he left him alone with Armand, Armand-as-Rashid and Armand-as-Armand, until the last time, when it was the worst time. Daniel has forgiven him for it wholeheartedly, but he comes back to it sometimes. Louis left him with Armand. Now a part of him is forever left with Armand.
The question lands like he's been slapped. Daniel just looks at him for a moment, hurt by the implication, but aware he deserves it.
"In a mansion built in 1985 with an endless supply of heroin and ludes and a fembot zombie of my first wife," he says, unkind. "Barring that, here. I know what I feel like. You know what I feel like. Doesn't mean it matters more than here."
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By now, it's not a surprise that Daniel reiterates remaining here in this building, or in this room, but also, Lestat has a complex or two. Touching anyway, and his eyeline dips, and then he nods.
"Will you—"
A little gesture, indicating himself, his mind. Plays it off with a faint laugh. "You were doing good work before I interrupted."
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And Lestat too, he guesses.
"Alright." Something to do is better than trying to figure all that out. In a little bit, maybe he'll muster the courage to ask if Lestat thinks Armand will kill him, if he goes to find him. Internal sigh. "Make yourself comfortable, since I dunno what the fuck I'm doing."
On the sofa again, or does he just want to splay out right here with his head in Daniel's lap like a weird animal?
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But he would prefer not to be alone in his head, and there is something soothing and tactile about the quiet ordering of chaos. Tries not to think of anything too complex, tries not to follow potential rabbit holes. He thinks of a parlour, lit in gold, a cosy presence of someone he loves settled in an armchair, and he has taken up position at a piano, and Bach fills the air. In the curl of his arm, his fingers twitch in subtle mimicry of the motions.
Not immune to bad memories, this place, but still, something of an island in all the present wreckage.
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Right now there's nothing. He does have a few ideas, but they're all bad ones. Like: Louis is never going to speak to him again. Like: he still does want to go and find Armand.
If the first thing happens, it'll free him up for the second, but he doesn't want it that way. He knows what he should let go of, and he's angry enough to, but there's a lurching sickness that comes over him, a pull deep in his gut, when he thinks of turning his back on the creature that transformed him. If nothing else, Armand has shit to answer for.
Daniel thinks it's like intangible, wet clay. There's some instinct to feel where it's been smashed on the throwing wheel, and he can run an attentive touch along parts of it, smoothing it back. Impressions spill over onto him, but he doesn't make an effort to look closely. Just lets it go. No awareness of how long they spend, when his awareness prickles.
"Lunch," he advises.
Too late to ask, Where do you think I should be, now?
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So it is a conscious choice, when Louis does not return. When he indulges in hours of wrestling with whether to return at all.
When they had begun to fight, he and Armand, Louis had begun to vanish. Fucked off. Disappeared into the crush of nightlife in whichever city they had been in. Absences that stretched as long as Armand tolerated, blood-soaked days of separation.
It had been a relief, each time he was found. Collected. Armand, still inclined to retrieve Louis from the worst of his impulses, to mop up the blood, to find Louis from beneath the gore of his misery. Remained even after, through the days of Louis shaking through withdrawals and misery, wrestling with his own guilt. They'd come back together. They'd argue again. Louis would vanish again.
A cycle that broke, after Daniel. Louis has a better understanding of how that break had happened now than he had before the interview, a fuller picture of how he had so completely turned from the worst of his habits then. But they are in him still, the urge towards self-destruction. Venting what he has no other place to put.
Louis leaves their hotel, wreckage and misery and fury all turned inwards. He could accomplish his task as efficiently as Daniel had, but no. (The urge to fuck off. To go, vanish, run.) Louis takes his helpless, stymied fury and makes it into a cratering kind of implosion.
The routine is the same. Alterations so slight that they simply don't matter.
Find the right kind of man at the right kind of bar. Leave the bar. Sit together in a poorly lit room.
Louis is smoking, a coiled spring sitting on the opposite end of a scorched table, watching this man arrange his little collection of pills. Exhale a plume of smoke as he selects the desired from the neat groupings. Observe his ritual, the preparation.
Balance here, in this space, teetering on the edge of a razor edge of a different bad decision. Louis knows what it would taste like. Oblivion. Guilt, after. Louis could make a home there, for a time. Weighs the choice in his hand. Decides—
No. No, not tonight.
Instead, this man is robbed even of his last high. Louis takes him. He is blank-eyed and sober, steady on his feet as Louis leads him into the garage. Louis' chosen prey as an offering, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, guided down into a seat on the cement floor. Louis has a hold of his mind still, feeling his way through memory and sensation, blotting out the world. Aware of Daniel, of Lestat. Awake, nearby. Surely aware of his return.
So he straightens from his crouch, crosses his arms. Waits, listening the sound of footsteps, of approach, as he holds lunch immobile on the garage floor for Lestat.
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He stays poised and alert this way for a moment before it becomes plain that the expectation is he will go down to the garage again.
A little groggily human in the way he pulls himself up and off Daniel's lap, onto his feet. Tugging his robe around him.
"For me?" he asks the air, and Daniel may sense that it is not directed to him, that Lestat expects Louis to hear something soft spoken all the way to the garage.
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It sinks in just how shitty he feels when he stands, but he doesn't say anything. Something about it is disorienting. Lestat speaks, but not to him, Louis assumes his attention, and Daniel feels as incidental as a toppled over chair in San Fransisco, suddenly.
Still doesn't say anything. Who cares. Get a grip, Molloy. There's no room for sad teenage girl bullshit.
He follows Lestat to the garage to make sure he doesn't topple over on the way there, and stays in the doorway, leaning against it. Doesn't know what Louis' been up to, doesn't know if he's in a position to guess. There's real relief there that he returned, but he doesn't feel like his concern is welcome.
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"Yeah," Louis says, into empty air. Watches dispassionately as his offering, as this blank-faced man at his feet, opens his mouth and echoes hazily, "Yeah."
Time enough in between this answer and their arrival for Louis to think again if he should have made a different choice. Run a finger along the knife-edge of that self-destruction, and again put it off.
(Oblivion would give him a little space, Louis knows. A little space from everything in his body that is screaming, screaming, screaming. It's too much. Louis doesn't know how to hold it.
But no. He did not choose oblivion and now he is here.)
Approaching footsteps. Door swinging open on creaking hinges. Louis' head lifts, looks back at them over his shoulder. Lestat, steadier than Louis left him. Daniel, occupying the doorway.
Okay.
Louis looks back, down to the lunch meat on the floor. His eyes briefly trace the heavy vein in this man's throat, a last wavering consideration of how this night might have gone. And then a sigh, a flex of power. The man begins to rise, clumsy, sleepwalking, tugged upwards so Lestat might be spared the task of bending down.
"I'll hold him." Not with his hands. "Least until you drain the fight out of him."
Practical.
(In fairness to Daniel Molloy, no one's concerns are welcome.)
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Well, shades of Armand, maybe, but it is a power Louis possesses, granted to him by Lestat, and why shouldn't he use it?
"I've been very greedy," he says, a tip of his head. "Neither of you have eaten, have you." A trace of dark humour. "We could split it."
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