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."
"Pass. Unless you want to see it again in a minute."
Do vampires throw up? He feels like he could, right now, and the horror of psychic intimacy with a stranger, draining their blood— no. Not with how he feels, after trying to help Lestat, and after contending with ... whatever, this all has been, the fight, and these pieces he's picking up.
If they want to share, he'll step away, give them space.
Or half lies. Louis has eaten recently enough. A mug, warmed, before anyone had realized what Lestat and Armand were doing with their evening.
He ate before. He does not want to eat now.
(Maybe it would have appealed before, a meal shared between three. Now, it's too much to ask of him.)
"Go on."
Prompting. Sphinx-like encouragement as Louis' hands slide into his coat pockets. Fingers the collection of the night's detritus, matchbook and tarnished coins and a crumpled dollar passed along a sticky bar to Louis who has not handled paper money in decades. Distraction. Reminders.
Rings an odd memory, of Louis coaxing him to the poisoned twin eighty years ago. Irrelevant to the moment, save that Lestat has a decent sense of when Louis is lying to him.
He lets out a 'hmm' in answer, disappointed and unsurprised, and in no mood to argue. His attention swivels back to the human, offered up for slaughter, and approaches. Tender hands on his face, claws gently stroking the soft flesh at his cheeks. A gift all the same, fetched for him. A moment to let his fangs down, to show them to the mortal as he parts his mouth before pulling him in close, and sinking a bite into his throat.
Bordering on indulgent, this third, even in his state, but Lestat drinks deeply all the same. Watches Louis as he does so before he follows the urge to close his eyes. The mortal's knees give as he swoons. Lestat holds him.
Nothing to contribute, no instinct to do anything but try and provoke Louis into engaging, but aware how fucking stupid that is. Thinks again about the exasperation and frustration of Armand being the only one willing to talk to him, a couple weeks ago— but now he has to wonder if any of it was genuine. He'd hit roadblocks, gotten around them, and he keeps turning it over in his head. That moment where it seemed like Armand was going to lose it if he didn't believe him, strained, tense, not at all like his obvious doe-eyed lying.
Is Daniel just a fucking idiot? Was Armand just lashing out at what he knew would piss Lestat off most, comfortable with putting Daniel in bad spots?
He doesn't leave, but he goes onto the back patio for a smoke.
Hears himself recite Fuck these vampires out from Claudia's diary, an apropos memory, and nearly laughs.
An arm's length away, an absence of a presence, watching as Lestat sinks teeth into this man's neck. Louis can feel the way the piercing pain ripples through mortal awareness, detached, unable to find purchase when Louis has pushed his mind so far under.
Louis watches as the man's legs buckle. As Lestat takes his weight, and doesn't topple. He is better than Louis left him.
Eventually, Louis turns from the sight of Lestat drinking deep from the throat of a man unlucky enough to smile hopefully down the bar at Louis.
Treads into the house, becomes aware he isn't certain of where to go. What now?
(Leave. Break all his promises. Fix one single thing, just one.
No.)
Well, necessities. Take out the phone, arrange for the disappearance of one more body. A practical task.
Being left alone in a smelly garage with his meal is the opposite of what Lestat was proposing.
Irritation and hurt feelings flicker together as he drains this offering dry, barely cognizant to the flow of bewildered, muted fear, little shards of memory of a mediocre life lived. A flash of seeing a handsome man in a bar, the hope for a fun evening. Lestat lets him crumple to the floor, and considers his mood. The various ways he might express it.
The impossible exhaustion that blankets it. He cleans his mouth with delicate fingers as he turns, and makes his careful way along Louis' path. Balances himself with a hand on the wall, here and there. There, Louis is taking out his phone. A sweep of perception notes the fledgling on the patio. That's fine.
He comes nearer, reaches out. Brushes his fingertips between Louis' shoulderblades.
Lestat isn't quite asking, just expressing a preference. He would like it if Louis sat with him. He would like it if Louis stayed here in his room.
Louis knows.
The same sensation of being locked within this room by them both, by their pleas, the promises they'd elicited. He's already made all his promises, but there is no blotting out awareness of passing minutes, of Lestat healing and Armand surely doing similar, faster, elsewhere.
Sends the message. Abandons the phone on nearby end table.
Daniel is a remote presence, adjacent. Lestat's voice has dipped so, so soft.
(Recollections of New Orleans. Spiraling into despair while Lestat reached after, coaxing and exploding by turns.)
"If you like."
If he sits, Lestat will sit, rest. And eventually Daniel will come back inside and Louis can leave the two of them to each others company, vanish into an adjoining room to watch the sun come up behind the curtains. Think on his failures.
Lestat picks up the remote control as he moves back towards the sofa to reclaim his spot there. Louis could sit beside him. Louis could also pick the armchair adjacent, or the decorative chair off in the corner by the decorative table with the vase, and that would be fine, preferable to him vanishing again, or going somewhere else in the house alone.
Of course, Lestat would prefer him near. The television is switched on, channels flipped through until landing on some bland, petty reality show which strikes him as engaging enough to settle on.
"I like these ones," he says. Leaning back into his seat, looking up at Louis. Hopeful invitation. "You imagine if they were all vampires, nothing would change but the content rating."
Head tilting, watching Lestat handle the remote, tip his face up to Louis with such clear intention and desire there, Louis entertains a retreat back to the window. Yes, he agreed to sit, yes. But there is some gathering momentum in his body, held there along with the turmoil caged in his chest, and the need to nurture it remains.
Maybe he'll need it. Maybe.
So it takes time for Louis to consider the chairs around the room, the window, and Lestat.
Louis feels coaxed and doesn't necessarily like it. Stubborn, always.
But the desire to avoid more explicit invitation guides him to the sofa. Hands occupied with the retrieval of a cigarette, no complaints for choice of programming.
The look he slants across the sofa cushions is assessing. Takes in the shadows of injury on Lestat's skin. All the hurt that remains, written on him. (Daniel, a splintering presence in the back of his head. The endless murmuring call out into the Many, a stubborn, seeking Armand, Armand, Armand.) Sets his cigarettes on the arm of the sofa beside him.
"I watched some," comes a little stiffly. Dug in heels. Lifting the cigarette. "Not lately."
Familiar, this pattern. Like trying to get a cat to like you, certain it might enjoy the attention it receives should it deign to allow for it. Lestat, of course, is a dog person. Unabashed love, a glutton for affection.
Knows better than to think Louis is being difficult on purpose. Knows the kind of tempers beneath the still like.
Still. He can push a little. He can reach across Louis, making a show even in his own tender state to specifically avoid touching him as he collects up his cigarette case while his focus remains on Louis' profile, and then settling back. Fidgeting loose a cigarette, the little crinkle of plastic.
"My television broke in the late nineties," he says. "Which I felt was for the better, at the time. Do you have a lighter?"
Earlier tonight, Louis had sunk his own fingers into Lestat's chest to dig out a misplaced claw. Has not forgotten the wet, pained sound of Lestat's breathing, the labored quality of his movements.
Louis has made a very detailed accounting. All Lestat's hurts. All Daniel's pains. Holds them close to his chest.
He knows what Lestat is inviting. Old shared habits. Leaning close, lighting cigarettes. Small intimacies that come easy even so many years removed from New Orleans, even with them both changed. Louis hadn't known himself to be capable of producing fire then. Lestat had always used matches.
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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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Do vampires throw up? He feels like he could, right now, and the horror of psychic intimacy with a stranger, draining their blood— no. Not with how he feels, after trying to help Lestat, and after contending with ... whatever, this all has been, the fight, and these pieces he's picking up.
If they want to share, he'll step away, give them space.
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"I've had enough," Louis lies.
Or half lies. Louis has eaten recently enough. A mug, warmed, before anyone had realized what Lestat and Armand were doing with their evening.
He ate before. He does not want to eat now.
(Maybe it would have appealed before, a meal shared between three. Now, it's too much to ask of him.)
"Go on."
Prompting. Sphinx-like encouragement as Louis' hands slide into his coat pockets. Fingers the collection of the night's detritus, matchbook and tarnished coins and a crumpled dollar passed along a sticky bar to Louis who has not handled paper money in decades. Distraction. Reminders.
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He lets out a 'hmm' in answer, disappointed and unsurprised, and in no mood to argue. His attention swivels back to the human, offered up for slaughter, and approaches. Tender hands on his face, claws gently stroking the soft flesh at his cheeks. A gift all the same, fetched for him. A moment to let his fangs down, to show them to the mortal as he parts his mouth before pulling him in close, and sinking a bite into his throat.
Bordering on indulgent, this third, even in his state, but Lestat drinks deeply all the same. Watches Louis as he does so before he follows the urge to close his eyes. The mortal's knees give as he swoons. Lestat holds him.
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Nothing to contribute, no instinct to do anything but try and provoke Louis into engaging, but aware how fucking stupid that is. Thinks again about the exasperation and frustration of Armand being the only one willing to talk to him, a couple weeks ago— but now he has to wonder if any of it was genuine. He'd hit roadblocks, gotten around them, and he keeps turning it over in his head. That moment where it seemed like Armand was going to lose it if he didn't believe him, strained, tense, not at all like his obvious doe-eyed lying.
Is Daniel just a fucking idiot? Was Armand just lashing out at what he knew would piss Lestat off most, comfortable with putting Daniel in bad spots?
He doesn't leave, but he goes onto the back patio for a smoke.
Hears himself recite Fuck these vampires out from Claudia's diary, an apropos memory, and nearly laughs.
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Louis lingers.
An arm's length away, an absence of a presence, watching as Lestat sinks teeth into this man's neck. Louis can feel the way the piercing pain ripples through mortal awareness, detached, unable to find purchase when Louis has pushed his mind so far under.
Louis watches as the man's legs buckle. As Lestat takes his weight, and doesn't topple. He is better than Louis left him.
Eventually, Louis turns from the sight of Lestat drinking deep from the throat of a man unlucky enough to smile hopefully down the bar at Louis.
Treads into the house, becomes aware he isn't certain of where to go. What now?
(Leave. Break all his promises. Fix one single thing, just one.
No.)
Well, necessities. Take out the phone, arrange for the disappearance of one more body. A practical task.
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Irritation and hurt feelings flicker together as he drains this offering dry, barely cognizant to the flow of bewildered, muted fear, little shards of memory of a mediocre life lived. A flash of seeing a handsome man in a bar, the hope for a fun evening. Lestat lets him crumple to the floor, and considers his mood. The various ways he might express it.
The impossible exhaustion that blankets it. He cleans his mouth with delicate fingers as he turns, and makes his careful way along Louis' path. Balances himself with a hand on the wall, here and there. There, Louis is taking out his phone. A sweep of perception notes the fledgling on the patio. That's fine.
He comes nearer, reaches out. Brushes his fingertips between Louis' shoulderblades.
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But Louis says instead:
"You should sit."
And then, after, "I can take care of the body."
Daniel has tended to enough.
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"Your people can take care of the body," he says. His tone is soft, the whispery way he can make it. "I would prefer it if you sat with me."
He drops his gaze to his hands, smudges away the little smears of blood there. "We could watch something on the television. Listen to music."
No talking, at least not as a standing invitation. Perhaps it would be enough to listen to one another's beating heart.
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Lestat isn't quite asking, just expressing a preference. He would like it if Louis sat with him. He would like it if Louis stayed here in his room.
Louis knows.
The same sensation of being locked within this room by them both, by their pleas, the promises they'd elicited. He's already made all his promises, but there is no blotting out awareness of passing minutes, of Lestat healing and Armand surely doing similar, faster, elsewhere.
Sends the message. Abandons the phone on nearby end table.
Daniel is a remote presence, adjacent. Lestat's voice has dipped so, so soft.
(Recollections of New Orleans. Spiraling into despair while Lestat reached after, coaxing and exploding by turns.)
"If you like."
If he sits, Lestat will sit, rest. And eventually Daniel will come back inside and Louis can leave the two of them to each others company, vanish into an adjoining room to watch the sun come up behind the curtains. Think on his failures.
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Lestat picks up the remote control as he moves back towards the sofa to reclaim his spot there. Louis could sit beside him. Louis could also pick the armchair adjacent, or the decorative chair off in the corner by the decorative table with the vase, and that would be fine, preferable to him vanishing again, or going somewhere else in the house alone.
Of course, Lestat would prefer him near. The television is switched on, channels flipped through until landing on some bland, petty reality show which strikes him as engaging enough to settle on.
"I like these ones," he says. Leaning back into his seat, looking up at Louis. Hopeful invitation. "You imagine if they were all vampires, nothing would change but the content rating."
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Head tilting, watching Lestat handle the remote, tip his face up to Louis with such clear intention and desire there, Louis entertains a retreat back to the window. Yes, he agreed to sit, yes. But there is some gathering momentum in his body, held there along with the turmoil caged in his chest, and the need to nurture it remains.
Maybe he'll need it. Maybe.
So it takes time for Louis to consider the chairs around the room, the window, and Lestat.
Louis feels coaxed and doesn't necessarily like it. Stubborn, always.
But the desire to avoid more explicit invitation guides him to the sofa. Hands occupied with the retrieval of a cigarette, no complaints for choice of programming.
The look he slants across the sofa cushions is assessing. Takes in the shadows of injury on Lestat's skin. All the hurt that remains, written on him. (Daniel, a splintering presence in the back of his head. The endless murmuring call out into the Many, a stubborn, seeking Armand, Armand, Armand.) Sets his cigarettes on the arm of the sofa beside him.
"I watched some," comes a little stiffly. Dug in heels. Lifting the cigarette. "Not lately."
A chosen way to pass the time, in Dubai.
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Knows better than to think Louis is being difficult on purpose. Knows the kind of tempers beneath the still like.
Still. He can push a little. He can reach across Louis, making a show even in his own tender state to specifically avoid touching him as he collects up his cigarette case while his focus remains on Louis' profile, and then settling back. Fidgeting loose a cigarette, the little crinkle of plastic.
"My television broke in the late nineties," he says. "Which I felt was for the better, at the time. Do you have a lighter?"
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Earlier tonight, Louis had sunk his own fingers into Lestat's chest to dig out a misplaced claw. Has not forgotten the wet, pained sound of Lestat's breathing, the labored quality of his movements.
Louis has made a very detailed accounting. All Lestat's hurts. All Daniel's pains. Holds them close to his chest.
He knows what Lestat is inviting. Old shared habits. Leaning close, lighting cigarettes. Small intimacies that come easy even so many years removed from New Orleans, even with them both changed. Louis hadn't known himself to be capable of producing fire then. Lestat had always used matches.
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