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?"
Maybe it's not always obvious. Sure, Daniel was willing to let himself get blown up by collateral damage in Dubai, downing a martini with a mental ah fuck it before pulling the pin on a grenade, but he also published the book against Louis' wishes. Mixed messages.
But he loves him. He does. Even right now. It's why it's so frustrating.
"I want you to cope in a way that's not trying to turn yourself to fucking stone. Like Armand would want you to do, just shut down and smother it. If you think I'm making an unfair demand of you, because I don't want the guy with a skeleton key to your brain to accidentally pop you like a balloon, I guess that's fine. It's fucking stupid but fine, whatever, feel how you're going to feel, but can you just communicate about it instead of whatever the hell this is?"
A particular gift Daniel has, a gift of sensing fractures and weak points, and taking a crowbar to them.
The after effects of seventy-seven years' exertion of power. A skeleton key that will always open up Louis' mind, because Armand built every door, every lock, every wall inside Louis' mind. All his mannerisms clipped and pruned like the tree now absented from the atrium in Dubai.
Daniel will spend lifetimes shackled to Armand, and it will always be because of Louis. Louis' choices. Louis' mistakes. (And he knows, because Armand has told him: You were still in the building.) Daniel says over and over it's forgiven, but how can it ever truly be made right?
All of this remains. Armand will always remain.
Louis will never have an opportunity like this again.
The crowbar scrapes along gouged surfaces, along fractures. Daniel, still digging.
"No."
Building tension, pressure in his ears. Temper gathering under a chilly shell. Louis has yet to move. Claudia's voice, far off. Cautioning, cutting, calling. (His love is a small box he keeps you in, warning that has born itself out over and over again in his lifetime.) Lestat a bristling presence at the far end of the couch. Louis doesn't turn his head, doesn't need to, peripheral awareness of him even as he watches Daniel.
"You asked me to let him live, and I'm gonna. You don't get to tell me how I live with that too."
"Don't make shit up," he barks. "This isn't about me trying to spare my maker or 'let' him live. It's about sparing you. We dragged Lestat out of a dumpster. Are you fully present for this, or are you in some imaginary other universe where we weren't terrified all goddamn day, where this isn't a crushing nightmare? Help me fucking understand. Because from where I'm standing, it really feels like you're more pissed at me for not wanting to enable another suicide attempt than you are at Armand."
Daniel observes himself saying all this. Is aware that it's unkind, and—
You know. Hey man, night swimming. Why don't you just cheer up.
But he's tired, and Louis is being unreasonable, and he's right about Daniel, who does not know how to stop digging. It's so fucking maddening to watch this and watch Louis be more in love with wanting to end his own existence than the people standing in the room with him, begging him to live.
There is a universe where Lestat and Armand fought and Louis could weather it without any of this.
But this is not that. It's pieces of his life made into weaponry. A second clash to remind Louis that Armand is always going to be dangerous.
A second clash to remind Louis that he'd made Armand a promise.
Stubborn, the tightening clench of Louis' jaw. Digging in heels again. Said no, meant it. Closed Daniel out of his head, vanished behind a hard gleaming shell.
But—
"I'm not trying to die."
Comes with a gleam of anger. A chilly flash of feeling, there and gone, slipped between moving plates.
Words picked carefully after, withholding and sparse, sentiment compressed down into bare minimum.
"I know what he did. I haven't forgotten."
(Except maybe he has. They have a day. Before, Daniel had one piece. A handful of days fifty years ago. What about the rest? Seventy-seven years. What else is missing?)
(It's not about that.)
"You two asked what you asked. I'm done talking on it now."
No one's changing their minds. Louis is letting this night slip away.
Pushing at that blip of anger. Sticking fingers in. Brushing off the rest of what Louis says, because that's a pedantic pool of quicksand, done with doing something he hasn't actually engaged in at all yeah yeah whatever.
"You've been picking fights for months, basically telling me to go fuck myself every time I've tried to get you to reel it in. And now this. If we weren't here, what would you be doing? Do you think nobody would miss you, that I wouldn't be—"
Stripped of context, because Lestat does not need to hear that Louis changed his mind. That Daniel published it anyway. No rise in tone, heat of his temper glazed over and obscured. Tightly contained, as he dusts stray flecks of ash from his trouser, straightens further. Growing momentum, the resolve towards absenting himself, making his no into something inarguable.
"You want me back in a box?"
Love. A small box. Louis bent to fit. Feels like it now, love like a snare, that stays his hand, spares Armand and cements the promise of all this again, and again, and again. The rest of his life. The rest of Daniel's. Louis' errors forever imprinted on them, something to be born because they've asked, begged, and Louis is caught in it now.
But if they're going to talk about the book, about how Louis is choosing to re-enter the world, the ways he exerts his autonomy—
"You want me to hide for a few centuries? Back in my coffin, out of sight? Think I can't decide for myself what fights I want to pick and choose? You forget what we talked about before you went to print?"
Stretching the truth. They had talked about the book's theoretic reception before it had been published, yes. An eternity of life passed between that conversation and the book's publication, but it had been said. The Many would not appreciate Louis' memoir.
"If you want to re-litigate that, we can, but you're going to have to separate how you actually feel, the things you communicate clearly to me about how you actually feel, and batshit insane things I heard from Armand pretending to be a mortal in a Ramadan French maid outfit while you two were doing live kink roleplay that I was being held hostage in."
Sorry for saying that in front of Lestat, who Daniel remembers is still there. Oopsy. Is he actually about to get his head punched through this time, like some unfortunate priest? Could be.
But it would make sense, in a dismal way. He's always expected the other shoe to drop. Daniel loves Louis, might be the only person left he cares about (more than his kids, how fucked is that), but he's bad at caring about people (see again: his kids). It's always going to be this, going to be Daniel eventually hitting the end of his patience with the shut-down behavior. He'd put up with it, walked with him, held his hand, apologized—
Just what he fuck else. Louis can't still be doing this. He spent two weeks bleeding himself out talking about the failures and agonies of his life and he's still doing it. Daniel can't imagine it's not unbearable, so why?
"I'm not Armand, I'm not going to just dig into your head and pick and choose what answers I feel like working with. You have to know yourself, and amputating how you feel and shutting down if you don't get to throw yourself into a meat grinder, is not doing yourself any good on top of driving me fucking nuts."
Lestat's cigarette is more or less finished. Not much smoke has been breathed.
He presses the embering end into his fingertip, rolls burnt paper and leaf around under his thumb. He thinks about boxes, because he has spent many years replaying that one awful night in his head, counting every word spoken, scratching them all into the interior walls of his own skull even before it was all dedicated to print. Implications about the circumstances of the book's publication snake by him, allowed to pass. There is simply no world in which he can feel worse as Molloy speaks of the mysterious Dubai hours he has seen little glimpses of.
Ah, youth.
"Are you angry with us, Louis?" he asks, and he sounds a little far away, a drawl like an anchor dragging itself along the bottom of the ocean without anything to catch it.
But he looks across at him again. Blue eyes still ringed in red, still bloodshot, still bloodied at the borders of iris.
The fight is written all over Lestat's face, blooms still across his skin.
Louis wore their fight for weeks after. He wore the aftermath of the argument in San Francisco, but Louis can't say for certain how long.
All of it lives in his body still. Lanced and realigned, all ordered neatly once more, but painful still. Too near.
Lestat speaks and punctures the building heat of Louis' anger. Draws Louis' attention briefly from Daniel, a flicker of study to assess this quality in Lestat's voice.
Answer: "No."
Might be true.
Or it might simply be familiar, old habit, a wall lifting to bar Louis off from the question, the ugliness of the feeling held in his chest. True because Louis makes it true. Feeling compressed into disassociative nothingness, made into an absence..
Lestat had been adept at coaxing Louis from behind it, in the earliest stretch of their companionship. But they're a long way from those days. Louis does not wish to be coaxed. What he has is this glacial composure, something to hold fast to in the wake of all that's happened.
He comes up off the couch in a single graceful, terrifying movement. No manifesting into action by precise increments. Turning over choice phrases. Get to. Small boxes. Permission granted, permission denied. Daniel digging fingers into weak points, into fractures, chasing after—
"I'm not going to break myself apart to satisfy your curiosity."
Unkind. Uncharitable. A drawn line, because Louis has nothing else on offer.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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?"
no subject
"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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
Maybe it's not always obvious. Sure, Daniel was willing to let himself get blown up by collateral damage in Dubai, downing a martini with a mental ah fuck it before pulling the pin on a grenade, but he also published the book against Louis' wishes. Mixed messages.
But he loves him. He does. Even right now. It's why it's so frustrating.
"I want you to cope in a way that's not trying to turn yourself to fucking stone. Like Armand would want you to do, just shut down and smother it. If you think I'm making an unfair demand of you, because I don't want the guy with a skeleton key to your brain to accidentally pop you like a balloon, I guess that's fine. It's fucking stupid but fine, whatever, feel how you're going to feel, but can you just communicate about it instead of whatever the hell this is?"
no subject
The after effects of seventy-seven years' exertion of power. A skeleton key that will always open up Louis' mind, because Armand built every door, every lock, every wall inside Louis' mind. All his mannerisms clipped and pruned like the tree now absented from the atrium in Dubai.
Daniel will spend lifetimes shackled to Armand, and it will always be because of Louis. Louis' choices. Louis' mistakes. (And he knows, because Armand has told him: You were still in the building.) Daniel says over and over it's forgiven, but how can it ever truly be made right?
All of this remains. Armand will always remain.
Louis will never have an opportunity like this again.
The crowbar scrapes along gouged surfaces, along fractures. Daniel, still digging.
"No."
Building tension, pressure in his ears. Temper gathering under a chilly shell. Louis has yet to move. Claudia's voice, far off. Cautioning, cutting, calling. (His love is a small box he keeps you in, warning that has born itself out over and over again in his lifetime.) Lestat a bristling presence at the far end of the couch. Louis doesn't turn his head, doesn't need to, peripheral awareness of him even as he watches Daniel.
"You asked me to let him live, and I'm gonna. You don't get to tell me how I live with that too."
no subject
Daniel observes himself saying all this. Is aware that it's unkind, and—
You know. Hey man, night swimming. Why don't you just cheer up.
But he's tired, and Louis is being unreasonable, and he's right about Daniel, who does not know how to stop digging. It's so fucking maddening to watch this and watch Louis be more in love with wanting to end his own existence than the people standing in the room with him, begging him to live.
no subject
But this is not that. It's pieces of his life made into weaponry. A second clash to remind Louis that Armand is always going to be dangerous.
A second clash to remind Louis that he'd made Armand a promise.
Stubborn, the tightening clench of Louis' jaw. Digging in heels again. Said no, meant it. Closed Daniel out of his head, vanished behind a hard gleaming shell.
But—
"I'm not trying to die."
Comes with a gleam of anger. A chilly flash of feeling, there and gone, slipped between moving plates.
Words picked carefully after, withholding and sparse, sentiment compressed down into bare minimum.
"I know what he did. I haven't forgotten."
(Except maybe he has. They have a day. Before, Daniel had one piece. A handful of days fifty years ago. What about the rest? Seventy-seven years. What else is missing?)
(It's not about that.)
"You two asked what you asked. I'm done talking on it now."
No one's changing their minds. Louis is letting this night slip away.
no subject
Pushing at that blip of anger. Sticking fingers in. Brushing off the rest of what Louis says, because that's a pedantic pool of quicksand, done with doing something he hasn't actually engaged in at all yeah yeah whatever.
"You've been picking fights for months, basically telling me to go fuck myself every time I've tried to get you to reel it in. And now this. If we weren't here, what would you be doing? Do you think nobody would miss you, that I wouldn't be—"
Fuck, man.
"Just... destroyed?"
no subject
Point of order.
Stripped of context, because Lestat does not need to hear that Louis changed his mind. That Daniel published it anyway. No rise in tone, heat of his temper glazed over and obscured. Tightly contained, as he dusts stray flecks of ash from his trouser, straightens further. Growing momentum, the resolve towards absenting himself, making his no into something inarguable.
"You want me back in a box?"
Love. A small box. Louis bent to fit. Feels like it now, love like a snare, that stays his hand, spares Armand and cements the promise of all this again, and again, and again. The rest of his life. The rest of Daniel's. Louis' errors forever imprinted on them, something to be born because they've asked, begged, and Louis is caught in it now.
But if they're going to talk about the book, about how Louis is choosing to re-enter the world, the ways he exerts his autonomy—
"You want me to hide for a few centuries? Back in my coffin, out of sight? Think I can't decide for myself what fights I want to pick and choose? You forget what we talked about before you went to print?"
Stretching the truth. They had talked about the book's theoretic reception before it had been published, yes. An eternity of life passed between that conversation and the book's publication, but it had been said. The Many would not appreciate Louis' memoir.
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Sorry for saying that in front of Lestat, who Daniel remembers is still there. Oopsy. Is he actually about to get his head punched through this time, like some unfortunate priest? Could be.
But it would make sense, in a dismal way. He's always expected the other shoe to drop. Daniel loves Louis, might be the only person left he cares about (more than his kids, how fucked is that), but he's bad at caring about people (see again: his kids). It's always going to be this, going to be Daniel eventually hitting the end of his patience with the shut-down behavior. He'd put up with it, walked with him, held his hand, apologized—
Just what he fuck else. Louis can't still be doing this. He spent two weeks bleeding himself out talking about the failures and agonies of his life and he's still doing it. Daniel can't imagine it's not unbearable, so why?
"I'm not Armand, I'm not going to just dig into your head and pick and choose what answers I feel like working with. You have to know yourself, and amputating how you feel and shutting down if you don't get to throw yourself into a meat grinder, is not doing yourself any good on top of driving me fucking nuts."
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He presses the embering end into his fingertip, rolls burnt paper and leaf around under his thumb. He thinks about boxes, because he has spent many years replaying that one awful night in his head, counting every word spoken, scratching them all into the interior walls of his own skull even before it was all dedicated to print. Implications about the circumstances of the book's publication snake by him, allowed to pass. There is simply no world in which he can feel worse as Molloy speaks of the mysterious Dubai hours he has seen little glimpses of.
Ah, youth.
"Are you angry with us, Louis?" he asks, and he sounds a little far away, a drawl like an anchor dragging itself along the bottom of the ocean without anything to catch it.
But he looks across at him again. Blue eyes still ringed in red, still bloodshot, still bloodied at the borders of iris.
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Louis wore their fight for weeks after. He wore the aftermath of the argument in San Francisco, but Louis can't say for certain how long.
All of it lives in his body still. Lanced and realigned, all ordered neatly once more, but painful still. Too near.
Lestat speaks and punctures the building heat of Louis' anger. Draws Louis' attention briefly from Daniel, a flicker of study to assess this quality in Lestat's voice.
Answer: "No."
Might be true.
Or it might simply be familiar, old habit, a wall lifting to bar Louis off from the question, the ugliness of the feeling held in his chest. True because Louis makes it true. Feeling compressed into disassociative nothingness, made into an absence..
Lestat had been adept at coaxing Louis from behind it, in the earliest stretch of their companionship. But they're a long way from those days. Louis does not wish to be coaxed. What he has is this glacial composure, something to hold fast to in the wake of all that's happened.
He comes up off the couch in a single graceful, terrifying movement. No manifesting into action by precise increments. Turning over choice phrases. Get to. Small boxes. Permission granted, permission denied. Daniel digging fingers into weak points, into fractures, chasing after—
"I'm not going to break myself apart to satisfy your curiosity."
Unkind. Uncharitable. A drawn line, because Louis has nothing else on offer.
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