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lestat de lioncourt. ([personal profile] damnedest) wrote2024-07-27 03:00 pm
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-03-22 03:44 am (UTC)(link)
"You in a state to be smoking?"

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-03-22 09:27 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-03-27 04:42 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-03-28 02:51 am (UTC)(link)
"I'm not hurt."

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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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-03-28 03:22 am (UTC)(link)
"Good."

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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[personal profile] followups 2025-03-31 10:58 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-03-31 11:12 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] followups 2025-03-31 11:28 pm (UTC)(link)
"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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-04-01 03:54 am (UTC)(link)
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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[personal profile] followups 2025-04-01 04:23 am (UTC)(link)
"I want the fucking world for you, Louis."

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?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-04-01 06:04 am (UTC)(link)
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."
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[personal profile] followups 2025-04-01 06:26 am (UTC)(link)
"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.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-04-01 07:05 am (UTC)(link)
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.
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[personal profile] followups 2025-04-01 07:17 am (UTC)(link)
"Aren't you?"

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?"
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-04-01 04:33 pm (UTC)(link)
"You published our book."

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.
Edited 2025-04-01 16:41 (UTC)
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[personal profile] followups 2025-04-01 08:49 pm (UTC)(link)
"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."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2025-04-02 06:43 am (UTC)(link)
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.

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