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.
On the last day Daniel was mortal, he had flinched away from Louis. The man had only offered his hand, but it had been on the heels of violently throwing Armand across the penthouse. A pathetic little old man prey rabbit response, instinctively terrified of being next. Maybe flavors of unpurged racism, too, though of course, worldly and well-traveled and child-of-ethnic-immigrants Daniel Molloy is eons past that kind of self-awareness. A scary black guy who could turn his violence towards him, even though Daniel hadn't been afraid of him when he was a charred monster, and even though it's the kind of instinct he'd skewer if noticed.
But mostly it was guilt. Buyer's remorse, just a little. One thing to think Fuck you, you deserve it about Armand, another to watch it happen in realtime thanks to his work. Guilt manifested into nervousness.
Tonight he doesn't flinch. Guilt sits somewhere in him, present, You published our book, but he's past being afraid of Louis. He doesn't think he's immune, doesn't think there's some magic spell between the two of them that would spare him any retaliation if he pushes much too hard. Fear is a point on a radar. A thing that makes a sound when he's going in the right direction.
"Still a shitty liar, but great at being mean."
It does kind of hurt his feelings, but not as much as violating his head to make fun of him about his first wife, so. Braced. But Louis set his own bar pretty high.
Louis moves as he never did before in New Orleans, and all of this could be occurring while the rental they are in is going down in flames, and Lestat would still feel a swell of pride, desire, admiration. A moment of coming close to the idea that perhaps they have made an error, him and Daniel, in holding back this elegant creature from doing what he wants.
But then he breathes in, and can feel that odd swollen tightness in his own chest. A pity that his fledgling's chosen prey is as inevitable and eternal as the forceful separation of all planetary bodies in the universe, racing to those darkest borders.
Liquid, the shift of his focus to Daniel. A fragment of thought: it will be a shame if Lestat has ruined it and that the three of them never hunt together after all.
"Forgive him," he says. Some misplaced instinct dropping his fangs just enough to see between the consonants. "The young are impatient."
Diminishing, deliberately, the things Daniel is expressing. Love and care compressed down to an impulse Louis knows lives in him: curiosity, eagerness to know and understand. Louis saw it in him fifty years ago. It was not diminished or extinguished by time.
It's meant to hurt. A warning shot across the bow as Louis feels increasingly trapped by the snaring quality of this conversation, of three in a room navigating something difficult.
Focus on Daniel broken as Lestat speaks, and Louis' gaze comes around to slice, to hold.
"I'll beg my own apologies."
Maybe.
(Probably.)
(Most likely.)
It's an unnecessary reminder. Louis is young. He will always be outstripped by Armand, by Lestat. There will always be an imbalance. Louis will have to create his own opportunities, will have to make his own elevation now as he had done in New Orleans. He has lived a century, but what is a century?
Claudia wouldn't flinch at the imbalance. Louis closes fingers around this, a memory with sharp edge. Instructive. Their clever, vicious daughter. She would have already left the room.
Fangs and all. This threat is not lost on Daniel, who finds he can't be surprised, even though Lestat's head was resting in his lap an hour ago.
Just some accident. A loose end that Armand should have tied up decades ago. He should bolt, probably. But Daniel stays where he is, listening to the radar ping only he can hear.
There is a flickered moment of misunderstanding as he meets Louis' gaze, replaced then with a wounded look. For being an assumed enemy rather than ally, for old misgivings brought to bear, sharp and invisible. A terrible thing about immortality. You hurtle through so much time, but there is no promise of fleeing your own errors. You just tally up more of them.
Scarcely the point, of course. Lestat is not truly in this argument, for all that he can sense Daniel's commitment to being some irrelevant footnote in Louis' story, and not among its primary authors. They are speaking of something. He should have perhaps continued watching his stories.
Fangs go blunt once more.
"I see," he says, as he gets to his feet as well. "Everyone is jealous of me. Everyone would like to bleed about their problems as I have done, have something to show for it all. Well," a flip of his hand, "claw at each other as you like. The truth lives somewhere under the skin, we all know."
In the coming hours (days, weeks) Louis will feel badly for all of this. Guilt for the way he spins out. (Something unproductive in its own right.)
But the feeling is absent now.
Lestat moves and it spurs Louis into motion, crossing away from them both to the window where he can take in the quality of the dark, observe the lightening of the sky. Creates distance, his back to them, a little breathing space. Inevitably reminded of time and opportunity slipping away from him, while Lestat draws his robe closed, wounds veiled, the damage to his face made starker. Louis doesn't need to look; the map of his injuries are imprinted so clearly in his mind. He doesn't want to claw into Daniel. He wants to scratch out of his own skin.
"Daniel can claw if he likes."
Wow, so generous.
A mistake to think on Claudia. She sticks in his head like Lestat's wounds stick in his head like Daniel's predicament sticks in his head. All that Armand has touched and broken and destroyed. And Louis permits it all to stand. Fights a war that changes nothing, and Armand continues on and on and on. Louis has promised, and must adhere to it now, no matter what it feels like to him.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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But mostly it was guilt. Buyer's remorse, just a little. One thing to think Fuck you, you deserve it about Armand, another to watch it happen in realtime thanks to his work. Guilt manifested into nervousness.
Tonight he doesn't flinch. Guilt sits somewhere in him, present, You published our book, but he's past being afraid of Louis. He doesn't think he's immune, doesn't think there's some magic spell between the two of them that would spare him any retaliation if he pushes much too hard. Fear is a point on a radar. A thing that makes a sound when he's going in the right direction.
"Still a shitty liar, but great at being mean."
It does kind of hurt his feelings, but not as much as violating his head to make fun of him about his first wife, so. Braced. But Louis set his own bar pretty high.
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But then he breathes in, and can feel that odd swollen tightness in his own chest. A pity that his fledgling's chosen prey is as inevitable and eternal as the forceful separation of all planetary bodies in the universe, racing to those darkest borders.
Liquid, the shift of his focus to Daniel. A fragment of thought: it will be a shame if Lestat has ruined it and that the three of them never hunt together after all.
"Forgive him," he says. Some misplaced instinct dropping his fangs just enough to see between the consonants. "The young are impatient."
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It's meant to hurt. A warning shot across the bow as Louis feels increasingly trapped by the snaring quality of this conversation, of three in a room navigating something difficult.
Focus on Daniel broken as Lestat speaks, and Louis' gaze comes around to slice, to hold.
"I'll beg my own apologies."
Maybe.
(Probably.)
(Most likely.)
It's an unnecessary reminder. Louis is young. He will always be outstripped by Armand, by Lestat. There will always be an imbalance. Louis will have to create his own opportunities, will have to make his own elevation now as he had done in New Orleans. He has lived a century, but what is a century?
Claudia wouldn't flinch at the imbalance. Louis closes fingers around this, a memory with sharp edge. Instructive. Their clever, vicious daughter. She would have already left the room.
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Fangs and all. This threat is not lost on Daniel, who finds he can't be surprised, even though Lestat's head was resting in his lap an hour ago.
Just some accident. A loose end that Armand should have tied up decades ago. He should bolt, probably. But Daniel stays where he is, listening to the radar ping only he can hear.
"You two going to take it out on me, instead?"
Like what the fuck are we doing here, fellas.
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Scarcely the point, of course. Lestat is not truly in this argument, for all that he can sense Daniel's commitment to being some irrelevant footnote in Louis' story, and not among its primary authors. They are speaking of something. He should have perhaps continued watching his stories.
Fangs go blunt once more.
"I see," he says, as he gets to his feet as well. "Everyone is jealous of me. Everyone would like to bleed about their problems as I have done, have something to show for it all. Well," a flip of his hand, "claw at each other as you like. The truth lives somewhere under the skin, we all know."
He fusses his robe shut.
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But the feeling is absent now.
Lestat moves and it spurs Louis into motion, crossing away from them both to the window where he can take in the quality of the dark, observe the lightening of the sky. Creates distance, his back to them, a little breathing space. Inevitably reminded of time and opportunity slipping away from him, while Lestat draws his robe closed, wounds veiled, the damage to his face made starker. Louis doesn't need to look; the map of his injuries are imprinted so clearly in his mind. He doesn't want to claw into Daniel. He wants to scratch out of his own skin.
"Daniel can claw if he likes."
Wow, so generous.
A mistake to think on Claudia. She sticks in his head like Lestat's wounds stick in his head like Daniel's predicament sticks in his head. All that Armand has touched and broken and destroyed. And Louis permits it all to stand. Fights a war that changes nothing, and Armand continues on and on and on. Louis has promised, and must adhere to it now, no matter what it feels like to him.
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