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.
"On account of having been nearly turned into brain paste," he says to Lestat, "I'm giving you a pass for being unhelpful and also trying to shut down."
Withering, but not... you know, not funny. A little.
"Nobody's trying to claw at anyone, I'm talking to you."
Does Louis really think that's what it is? That Daniel's just digging at him because he's a curiosity? It doesn't make Daniel want to stop, exactly, because he lacks that instinct, but it does make him consider doing so. It feels shitty to just pick an argument and then abandon it so unresolved, but at which point is he just hitting his head on a brick wall?
He was able to get Louis to respond in Dubai. Maybe he's lost something, becoming a vampire. Or maybe Louis just doesn't have a use for him anymore. He doesn't know.
Delicate. Question like the point of a knife pressing to skin, claws set just so.
Are they talking? Is that what they're doing here? Louis hasn't wanted it. Louis came back, the best choice he could make, but containing the hurricane of anger and misery and regret inside his body feels impossible. Demands something Louis will never be able to acquire as long as he remains.
"What else do you want from me, Daniel?"
Turning from the window.
"This is what I got to offer. You asked me to stay, and I have. You need to fix me now so you both can feel better about it?"
Fix spat out of his mouth.
The rising, desperate realization: I don't want to be here. Wanting to claw out of his skin, out of this moment, out of this room. Recognizes anger bigger than his body, anger and hunger and loathing building in him. (Recognizes the quality of this thought, always familiar even when it comes colored by anger rather than despair.) He should have gone. It's all his fault, where they are now. His doing. His failure now, passing the chance to rectify it.
"I am talking to you, and you are reacting badly to it. I don't know what you're hearing instead of what I'm actually saying, but it has nothing to do with wanting to 'fix' you. I've never thought that about you at all, and you fucking know that."
Daniel thought that Lestat and Louis were fooling around this whole time, he thought Louis was feeling a lot better than he actually was— thought, whatever, he's going to publish the book anyway, because he's owed after what he was put through, and nothing Armand said to him in those weeks has been treated as plainly factual.
Fix is something that lives alone in Louis' head.
"You've shut down over and over since you got here, and it just sucks. It hurts to watch and it can't feel good for you. You've got a nuclear radiation aura."
Lestat has moved off a little to create some more space. Perches on the arm of a chair, arms wrapped around himself. Unhelpful, shutting down, yes, perhaps so. Sulking, most definitely.
A minor flinch in it at all at the vitriol, even directed as it is at Daniel. Louis' talent for making him feel so selfish for wanting things to be better for them, for him, mixed in with all the times he really was being selfish. No sense of delineation.
He doesn't interrupt, here. There is a ghost of things he has said before, tried before, in Daniel's punchier approach. Perhaps it will do. The man got a whole book out of Louis. Lestat has a track record of years of silence.
A involuntary consideration: maybe Louis should have stayed in Dubai, maybe he wasn't ready to be here with them, this way. It's an unsteady, ugly thought. It's his own, but Louis can hear it in someone else's calm, cossetting tones. Feels like touching a hot stove, like catching fingers in a stray strip of sunlight. It spins up his heart rate, this whisper like a sprung trap inside his own head.
Terrible, brittle silence, before Louis dredges up careful, neutral tones to tell him:
"Then don't watch."
Not unaware that they are skating towards a breaking point. Louis' breaking point. A point where the impulses and fury and pain in his body spin out past his ability to contain. And then what?
Says this and bites down on the rest. The spitting fury over every part of the past twenty-four hours, all this helpless, agonizing feeling that Louis can do nothing with but turn inward, because if he loosened his grip it would shatter him apart, break them all from each other. Maybe what little he's said has already done this.
Repeats, again, "I got nothing else for you tonight, Daniel. I'm done, now."
Done. Taking all splitting cracks and hairline fractures from the room with him, leaving. Implosion, empty space. This is what he has left to give.
Serious irritation, One of my kids used to do that when she was thirteen, you know, if I said her room wasn't clean enough she'd scream 'Then don't come in here', have you considered growing the fuck up? But this is discarded. Lestat has an excuse to be deliberately unhelpful, Daniel does not.
The other side of the weight is what tips furthest. Daniel hates to do it, hates succumbing to hurt feelings and indulging Louis' bullshit, reinforcing the stupidity of what's going on here, but what else is he going to do?
Disappointing. Bitterly so. Uncharacteristic silence remains for another few heartbeats, as though the tense nothingness is threatening further argument.
He lets him keep the last word, and leaves the room.
Lestat draws in a breath, as deep as he cares to allow, and tips a look back to Louis. Fond, despite himself. Sad as well. A myriad of complicated feeling left to flow like a bitter, briny undercurrent, untested, unable to reach for it. He feels like hammered shit, still, and is vaguely disappointed that he thinks Louis has likely rescinded his offer for a second helping of blood.
Last morning, he tasted the sun and didn't burn. He is almost sure of it. He does not want to think of how long it will all be for him, now.
"We love you," he says, in the tone of an explanation, the cadence of je suis désolée. "That is all."
And he takes his weight off the chair, and leaves for his own room.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
Withering, but not... you know, not funny. A little.
"Nobody's trying to claw at anyone, I'm talking to you."
Does Louis really think that's what it is? That Daniel's just digging at him because he's a curiosity? It doesn't make Daniel want to stop, exactly, because he lacks that instinct, but it does make him consider doing so. It feels shitty to just pick an argument and then abandon it so unresolved, but at which point is he just hitting his head on a brick wall?
He was able to get Louis to respond in Dubai. Maybe he's lost something, becoming a vampire. Or maybe Louis just doesn't have a use for him anymore. He doesn't know.
sneaks in a tag forgive
Delicate. Question like the point of a knife pressing to skin, claws set just so.
Are they talking? Is that what they're doing here? Louis hasn't wanted it. Louis came back, the best choice he could make, but containing the hurricane of anger and misery and regret inside his body feels impossible. Demands something Louis will never be able to acquire as long as he remains.
"What else do you want from me, Daniel?"
Turning from the window.
"This is what I got to offer. You asked me to stay, and I have. You need to fix me now so you both can feel better about it?"
Fix spat out of his mouth.
The rising, desperate realization: I don't want to be here. Wanting to claw out of his skin, out of this moment, out of this room. Recognizes anger bigger than his body, anger and hunger and loathing building in him. (Recognizes the quality of this thought, always familiar even when it comes colored by anger rather than despair.) He should have gone. It's all his fault, where they are now. His doing. His failure now, passing the chance to rectify it.
no subject
Daniel thought that Lestat and Louis were fooling around this whole time, he thought Louis was feeling a lot better than he actually was— thought, whatever, he's going to publish the book anyway, because he's owed after what he was put through, and nothing Armand said to him in those weeks has been treated as plainly factual.
Fix is something that lives alone in Louis' head.
"You've shut down over and over since you got here, and it just sucks. It hurts to watch and it can't feel good for you. You've got a nuclear radiation aura."
no subject
A minor flinch in it at all at the vitriol, even directed as it is at Daniel. Louis' talent for making him feel so selfish for wanting things to be better for them, for him, mixed in with all the times he really was being selfish. No sense of delineation.
He doesn't interrupt, here. There is a ghost of things he has said before, tried before, in Daniel's punchier approach. Perhaps it will do. The man got a whole book out of Louis. Lestat has a track record of years of silence.
no subject
Terrible, brittle silence, before Louis dredges up careful, neutral tones to tell him:
"Then don't watch."
Not unaware that they are skating towards a breaking point. Louis' breaking point. A point where the impulses and fury and pain in his body spin out past his ability to contain. And then what?
Says this and bites down on the rest. The spitting fury over every part of the past twenty-four hours, all this helpless, agonizing feeling that Louis can do nothing with but turn inward, because if he loosened his grip it would shatter him apart, break them all from each other. Maybe what little he's said has already done this.
Repeats, again, "I got nothing else for you tonight, Daniel. I'm done, now."
Done. Taking all splitting cracks and hairline fractures from the room with him, leaving. Implosion, empty space. This is what he has left to give.
no subject
Weighing between—
Serious irritation, One of my kids used to do that when she was thirteen, you know, if I said her room wasn't clean enough she'd scream 'Then don't come in here', have you considered growing the fuck up? But this is discarded. Lestat has an excuse to be deliberately unhelpful, Daniel does not.
The other side of the weight is what tips furthest. Daniel hates to do it, hates succumbing to hurt feelings and indulging Louis' bullshit, reinforcing the stupidity of what's going on here, but what else is he going to do?
Disappointing. Bitterly so. Uncharacteristic silence remains for another few heartbeats, as though the tense nothingness is threatening further argument.
He lets him keep the last word, and leaves the room.
no subject
Lestat draws in a breath, as deep as he cares to allow, and tips a look back to Louis. Fond, despite himself. Sad as well. A myriad of complicated feeling left to flow like a bitter, briny undercurrent, untested, unable to reach for it. He feels like hammered shit, still, and is vaguely disappointed that he thinks Louis has likely rescinded his offer for a second helping of blood.
Last morning, he tasted the sun and didn't burn. He is almost sure of it. He does not want to think of how long it will all be for him, now.
"We love you," he says, in the tone of an explanation, the cadence of je suis désolée. "That is all."
And he takes his weight off the chair, and leaves for his own room.