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.
Lestat breathes in a little heavier than the last. Does he feel better? Has all this blood done something, done enough? Perhaps not. But still. Envious for the scent of the smoke in the air, for this little point of familiar connection.
"The doctors of our time would probably have prescribed it," a little curl of humour as he turns the cigarette between his fingers, offering the unlit end.
A scoff. Not a laugh, but acknowledgment of the implication Lestat is chuckling over.
Louis' scrutiny gives way to action, a palmful of flame lifted and offered out. Lestat can make what he will of the offering. Louis' cigarette remains unlit, worked to the corner of his mouth.
"Go on," as the women on screen begin to yell. Raised voices, an explosion of sound filling the quiet between them.
A scoff, not a laugh. Close enough, enough to warm him. A slant of unlikely sunshine.
Lestat dips his head in, accepting the offered method. Eyes hooding as he tips the end of his cigarette to the flame, the other caught between his lips. His eyelashes get to be their usual blonde today, every trace of clinging ink thoroughly cried away.
"You know my life's work is making you smile," he says, because the thought comes to him, and the weight of its truth ushers it out of his mouth. "It feels so meaningless when I cannot."
Words meant as a comfort, Louis knows. To make him smile, crack the shell hardening over him.
It does touch him, this assertion. Louis knows it to be true. And feels it as he did once in New Orleans: a weight, a guilt. A sense of something wanted and hoped for and beyond Louis' ability to give.
His palm closes around the fire, extinguishing it as Lestat says this thing and Louis feels it twist in his chest.
"I don't got one for you tonight, Lestat."
Dull, tired tones flattening the words. A turn of his own hand, flame reappearing in miniature, caught between his fingers. Enough to light his own cigarette, and vanish.
"You shouldn't be worrying about me anyway."
Given the givens. The injuries still standing out stark on his body. Lestat should be resting. Louis knows a little about it. Recovering after such extensive injury.
And he'll take it. Lestat draws shallow from his cigarette, barely letting it graze his lungs before releasing smoke out into the air. A look swung back to the television, the flattened artifice of modern human experience.
He has wondered before, and wonders again now, what it's like to be mortal. Why they all waste time like they aren't. If he knew his death was a handful of decades away, would he have fucked around so much trying to be respectful, saying nothing, enduring all? Perhaps yes, he was left to rot in New Orleans, but he would still be there, it's true, if he thought Louis preferred him there.
A sigh. "It injures you, that I am hurt," he says. "Do you imagine the same cannot be said, the other way around?"
The kind of assertion Louis makes as if it is comfortable truth. And there is truth in it. Louis wasn't fished from a dumpster, drenched in blood. Louis spent a pleasant evening with Daniel. The scrapes Lestat dug into his arms are gone. There is not a mark on him.
And maybe, delayed, Louis recognizes the potential to be baited. Doesn't care to permit it, prefers to stay as he is.
Tacks away from the implication, the sigh, questioning: "Has the blood helped?"
Several arguments line themselves up behind Lestat's tongue, and a physical swallow expresses the desire to suppress them. He is too tired. He will blunder them. Louis will not be honest so long as when he looks at Lestat, he sees bloodied sclera and bruises.
"Yes," he says. Answering the question, smoke-soft.
And then nothing. His sense of Louis swerving out of reach of him, telling himself that it will be enough to linger in each others presence. That he did what he had to in forcing the issue, making sure Louis would not sacrifice himself on a useless altar. He has always maintained he would prefer Louis alive and hating him than Louis dead but thinking a little more fondly of Lestat in his final moments.
Lestat shifts, a sideways curl on the couch, head resting on the raised back and cigarette more or less permitted to burn itself out between small sips of smoke.
Wants to believe it will simply be better tomorrow. Would Lestat heal faster than Louis once had? Maybe. Enough blood, closed into his coffin, given the time, maybe it would all be better tomorrow.
And then quiet, but for the glossy artifice of reality television.
Lestat's cigarette burning down. Louis watching him, smoking, making no secret of his study.
Unbearable to simply be sitting here, opportunity slipping away. (How long until all this repeats itself? Until there is something else, something else from Armand where Daniel is hurt, Lestat is hurt.) Unbearable to leave when he has been snared so thoroughly by twinned appeals.
Daniel smokes his cigarette, and another one, and contemplates the leftover coke, and Louis' calls out into the Many; hears it in his head, an echo, Armand, Armand, Armand. Of course he isn't going to answer. Daniel wouldn't know if he does— but he won't. He feels certain of it, and something about it annoys him. Several somethings about it. Annoying that he can hear the impression of Louis' fishing, annoying that he is so certain, annoying that this is happening at all.
He lets it go with the ashes he tips off the end of his coffin nail. (We have fun.)
Another little while before he returns.
Beholds two vampires sitting awkward, smoking indoors (does no one have any decency beside him, please), and watching some kind of housewife content. The misery is palpable, thick, like they're trapped in a jelly mold the likes of which were abhorrently in style then he and Louis met at Mary's. Jiggling sadly, suspended in wet, gross, tension.
"Are you serious?"
Are you just sitting here stewing, has no one talked, oh my god.
Lestat is thinking about considering maybe saying something in response to Louis' directive. Trying to assess the muddied murk of worry and then irritation for the sense of being put aside so Louis no longer has to sit with him, his capacity to articulate anything he is feeling, the value of trying tonight, and all of is in the process of internal collapse by the time Daniel has made it in.
And says that. Lestat's glossy stare at the television screen flicks to him. Cracks a mirthless smile.
"It's quite good, actually," he says, of the programming, a weary but reflexive dash of humour in his voice. Dry, mild. "If you pay no mind to the script underpinning the cat fights."
Maybe Louis would have insisted more stridently. It's hard to know what Lestat would have said. Likely a denial. Maybe something else. Lestat is hurt and Louis' blood will do nothing for him, but rest might.
Either way, it doesn't matter what he would or wouldn't have said. The moment passes.
Daniel reappears. Louis' gaze cuts from Lestat to him, turning that incisive study away from Lestat's profile to Daniel's face.
Eyebrows raise. Inviting clarity. Inviting whatever it is that Daniel is going to say, because Louis knows him. He knows Daniel has something else to say, always.
"You're going to sit here and be pissed off that the people who care about you don't want you to fucking die, while you shut down even though you know— you know,"
emphasis! complete with an accusatory point in his direction,
"that it's a bad coping mechanism of yours which has only caused you and those around you more heartache? Rhetorical, that's demonstrably what you're doing, but I want to know why concern for your continued survival is so fucking distasteful. And you know Armand's not going to answer. You have to know that. He feels like he's nearly dead anyway, and his phone's off, for your information."
nOt tHat yOu asKed
But yes, surprise, Daniel does have something else to say.
Lestat's wry little smirk vanishes, expression going hard and steely. Eyes still wet, just, permanently wet tonight, and flaring a little bigger that Daniel does not say some other dismissive thing on his way to sitting down or crossing the room.
An instinct that wishes to snap at Daniel is, in the moment, kept locked down between tight jaws, a sharp little inhale through his nose.
Lestat bristles all over. Louis doesn't need to look at him to observe the shift. He is aware. He can feel it. He can also feel the weight of Lestat's eyes on him, the quality of restrain curbing the reaction.
The intake of breath is loud in the quiet. Louis' cigarette trails smoke through the air as Louis straightens. Uncoiling by degrees. Ankle hooked up over his knee returned to the floor. Posture corrected. Seated, still, as he turns over Daniel's query.
Nearly dead anyway. Words that hook like burrs, dig into his skin. Knowledge impossible to dislodge, made terrible when set alongside Lestat's earlier recounting.
Nearly dead.
"How would you like me to cope?"
Deceptively even-toned. Turning the cigarette in his fingers, before leaning forward to stub it out on a coaster.
"You made a demand of me, I agreed. What more do you want, Daniel?"
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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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Lestat breathes in a little heavier than the last. Does he feel better? Has all this blood done something, done enough? Perhaps not. But still. Envious for the scent of the smoke in the air, for this little point of familiar connection.
"The doctors of our time would probably have prescribed it," a little curl of humour as he turns the cigarette between his fingers, offering the unlit end.
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Louis' scrutiny gives way to action, a palmful of flame lifted and offered out. Lestat can make what he will of the offering. Louis' cigarette remains unlit, worked to the corner of his mouth.
"Go on," as the women on screen begin to yell. Raised voices, an explosion of sound filling the quiet between them.
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Lestat dips his head in, accepting the offered method. Eyes hooding as he tips the end of his cigarette to the flame, the other caught between his lips. His eyelashes get to be their usual blonde today, every trace of clinging ink thoroughly cried away.
"You know my life's work is making you smile," he says, because the thought comes to him, and the weight of its truth ushers it out of his mouth. "It feels so meaningless when I cannot."
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It does touch him, this assertion. Louis knows it to be true. And feels it as he did once in New Orleans: a weight, a guilt. A sense of something wanted and hoped for and beyond Louis' ability to give.
His palm closes around the fire, extinguishing it as Lestat says this thing and Louis feels it twist in his chest.
"I don't got one for you tonight, Lestat."
Dull, tired tones flattening the words. A turn of his own hand, flame reappearing in miniature, caught between his fingers. Enough to light his own cigarette, and vanish.
"You shouldn't be worrying about me anyway."
Given the givens. The injuries still standing out stark on his body. Lestat should be resting. Louis knows a little about it. Recovering after such extensive injury.
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And he'll take it. Lestat draws shallow from his cigarette, barely letting it graze his lungs before releasing smoke out into the air. A look swung back to the television, the flattened artifice of modern human experience.
He has wondered before, and wonders again now, what it's like to be mortal. Why they all waste time like they aren't. If he knew his death was a handful of decades away, would he have fucked around so much trying to be respectful, saying nothing, enduring all? Perhaps yes, he was left to rot in New Orleans, but he would still be there, it's true, if he thought Louis preferred him there.
A sigh. "It injures you, that I am hurt," he says. "Do you imagine the same cannot be said, the other way around?"
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The kind of assertion Louis makes as if it is comfortable truth. And there is truth in it. Louis wasn't fished from a dumpster, drenched in blood. Louis spent a pleasant evening with Daniel. The scrapes Lestat dug into his arms are gone. There is not a mark on him.
And maybe, delayed, Louis recognizes the potential to be baited. Doesn't care to permit it, prefers to stay as he is.
Tacks away from the implication, the sigh, questioning: "Has the blood helped?"
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"Yes," he says. Answering the question, smoke-soft.
And then nothing. His sense of Louis swerving out of reach of him, telling himself that it will be enough to linger in each others presence. That he did what he had to in forcing the issue, making sure Louis would not sacrifice himself on a useless altar. He has always maintained he would prefer Louis alive and hating him than Louis dead but thinking a little more fondly of Lestat in his final moments.
Lestat shifts, a sideways curl on the couch, head resting on the raised back and cigarette more or less permitted to burn itself out between small sips of smoke.
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Wants to believe it will simply be better tomorrow. Would Lestat heal faster than Louis once had? Maybe. Enough blood, closed into his coffin, given the time, maybe it would all be better tomorrow.
And then quiet, but for the glossy artifice of reality television.
Lestat's cigarette burning down. Louis watching him, smoking, making no secret of his study.
Unbearable to simply be sitting here, opportunity slipping away. (How long until all this repeats itself? Until there is something else, something else from Armand where Daniel is hurt, Lestat is hurt.) Unbearable to leave when he has been snared so thoroughly by twinned appeals.
Eventually, "You should go to coffin, and rest."
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He lets it go with the ashes he tips off the end of his coffin nail. (We have fun.)
Another little while before he returns.
Beholds two vampires sitting awkward, smoking indoors (does no one have any decency beside him, please), and watching some kind of housewife content. The misery is palpable, thick, like they're trapped in a jelly mold the likes of which were abhorrently in style then he and Louis met at Mary's. Jiggling sadly, suspended in wet, gross, tension.
"Are you serious?"
Are you just sitting here stewing, has no one talked, oh my god.
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And says that. Lestat's glossy stare at the television screen flicks to him. Cracks a mirthless smile.
"It's quite good, actually," he says, of the programming, a weary but reflexive dash of humour in his voice. Dry, mild. "If you pay no mind to the script underpinning the cat fights."
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Either way, it doesn't matter what he would or wouldn't have said. The moment passes.
Daniel reappears. Louis' gaze cuts from Lestat to him, turning that incisive study away from Lestat's profile to Daniel's face.
Eyebrows raise. Inviting clarity. Inviting whatever it is that Daniel is going to say, because Louis knows him. He knows Daniel has something else to say, always.
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emphasis! complete with an accusatory point in his direction,
"that it's a bad coping mechanism of yours which has only caused you and those around you more heartache? Rhetorical, that's demonstrably what you're doing, but I want to know why concern for your continued survival is so fucking distasteful. And you know Armand's not going to answer. You have to know that. He feels like he's nearly dead anyway, and his phone's off, for your information."
nOt tHat yOu asKed
But yes, surprise, Daniel does have something else to say.
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An instinct that wishes to snap at Daniel is, in the moment, kept locked down between tight jaws, a sharp little inhale through his nose.
Looks to Louis, for a cue, for a response.
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The intake of breath is loud in the quiet. Louis' cigarette trails smoke through the air as Louis straightens. Uncoiling by degrees. Ankle hooked up over his knee returned to the floor. Posture corrected. Seated, still, as he turns over Daniel's query.
Nearly dead anyway. Words that hook like burrs, dig into his skin. Knowledge impossible to dislodge, made terrible when set alongside Lestat's earlier recounting.
Nearly dead.
"How would you like me to cope?"
Deceptively even-toned. Turning the cigarette in his fingers, before leaning forward to stub it out on a coaster.
"You made a demand of me, I agreed. What more do you want, Daniel?"
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