But as a professional man who cannot shut up, Daniel isn't down for long. It was challenging enough getting himself to just disengage instead of trying harder to make Louis react, there's less than no chance he's going to box himself into a coffin and sleep this off. A bit of pacing around, a quick freshen up to lose any lingering miasma from dumpster diving and victim luring, and—
"You alive?"
Knocknock. He already knows the answer. Both answers. Lestat is still here on this realm, Lestat is still undead, so yes and no. He made the joke already and he doesn't care how annoyed the other vampire might be at him, so just say something so he can open the door.
Soft, conversation-level volume, but adequate for two vampires on either side of a closed door. An unlocked closed door, passive welcome.
Inside, Lestat has settled in his coffin, the lid flung back, visible only where he has one leg draped over the side and hooked over the knee, still clothed in the soft, slouchy things he'd been given, plus slipper.
Nearby, on the ground, his headphones, as if tossed aside. Someone has discovered that he can't access his music when his phone has been destroyed.
Door opens, old manpire enters, door closes. Daniel doesn't move far inside— keeping his distance, either out of self-preservation, respect, or the desire to be out of here again as soon as possible, who knows. Flavors of all three.
"I gotta make sure Jeannie and Mark haven't been abducted by Talamasca or whatever," he says. "Most of their luggage is still here and all." Well, whatever, he's sure Lestat doesn't care about that. Point is, he has something to do, and he's announcing his plans to at least one person, because if he tries to talk to Louis again he thinks his friend might leave back to fucking Dubai.
"Do you need anything critical before I go do that?"
His Spotify account logged into a spare laptop, maybe, but Daniel isn't feeling quite that generous after oohhhh young ones are impatient oohhh.
It isn't very hectic in here—a more transient situation than the home base they'd made of the New York floor, however temporary. A few discarded winter coats, a cluttered vanity, a lingering cigarette smoke smell likely from a day or two ago, because Lestat smokes in coffin as well as indoors. His keyboard in its case leans against the wall.
He elbows himself up enough to peer past the coffin edge.
"No," Lestat says. "You've done enough." Gentle, smirking layers of shade for all of that, earlier, and then something different when he tips his head, adds, "You've done plenty," because his brain is no longer bleeding his own traumas (and other people's) into his own skull, drowning him.
Always hunting with his shovel. What's in there. But,
"I hope not. If I run out of time, assume I'm staying in a room adjacent to the peanut gallery. I'd text you since I imagine you've got a headache, but." He shrugs. "If it's a real emergency I can probably still tell Louis."
Probably. Daniel is the type of guy to get in a horrible fight and be fine the next day, but maybe Louis will be mad still. He hopes not.
A shift in posture as Daniel speaks—leg retracted, arm hooked over the coffin edge instead to rest his chin upon. Focus lazy to collect but settling in its own time. Pale and pale-eyed, something colourless in his answering smile too.
"Very okay," lazy callback, but not really a lie. He will rest, and be okay. Considers now these offered logistics.
Lestat might say don't go, a background hum of desire to have all of them under the same roof that has not let up since the first time he felt it. A sharp observer could probably detect its contemplation under the surface. Could sense the way it's let go again as his attention skirts down, levelled at the stretch of floor between them.
Something something, doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to know Lestat doesn't want him to (wouldn't want anyone to) leave, something something, another drug addict investigator. It's kind of a whatever, though, Daniel has responsibilities outside of just them, and he's not going to go try and murder Armand even if he does end up wandering off.
A potential that lurks close over his head like a sword. A potential he's pretty sure Lestat can intuit. But what the fuck can he say about it? He can feel Armand, in a fucked up way.
He makes a sound, a dull bark of an almost-laugh.
"I'm not the type."
Louis is stuck with him, even if he hates it. Even if this is a bridge being torched. Daniel will find a way, like the annoying, determined jackass he is.
Which is nice. Lestat's impulse to keep everyone close, claws in, some latent fear of those around him vanishing at a whim. It eases ever so, even if he suspects that Daniel's departure might well continue past checking in with Jeannie and her partner. If it even begins there.
"Your book," he says, his focus shifting off Daniel, a little aside, as if he could pierce his vision through the walls where Louis is likely watching the curtains, the sky. "I noticed a particular lack of account in how constantly I gave into all of our arguments. How selflessly obliging I was at every turn."
Laying it on, from his lazy slouch in the coffin. "Perhaps I instilled some bad habits."
"There was a theme," Daniel notes. "It tied back up in the end. You waited."
Waited out Louis' moods, until he snapped. Waited in the rotting leavings he was abandoned in, until he was called to Paris. And then, life becoming art, waiting in a collapsing hovel in New Orleans until Louis returned. Something in there. Waiting in the living room watching Real Housewives.
Daniel isn't a quitter. He's not much of a wait-er, either.
"You don't know the half of it," he sighs. "About bad habits. If he... I don't know. If something happens— when he and I 'met', it was because he was out picking up young mortal men to drug, fuck, and kill. Hundreds, until Armand put the Stepford Whammy on him. So uh. Eyes peeled. If he slips out."
Of their thirty years, thirteen of it had been spent in miserable holding pattern. Waiting for the sun to come out. Waiting for love.
And so on. What's a little more?
These thoughts are allowed to skitter off into their dark corners, and Lestat listens instead to these new escapades. A little doubt. Louis? His Louis? Well—yes, his Louis. Vicious, anger like the magma that boils beneath ancient rock. Anger and passion. His expression transparently glazes into something like affection and intrigue rather than, like,
worry,
which is probably fine. That Louis is probably doing it all miserable doesn't make it less hot. Maybe it's hotter, even. Anyway.
It's the only answer he can give, and isn't a falsehood. He wants to rage and throw things, he wants to cry, he wants to fling himself at Louis' feet or find a place to collapse outside his door, he wants to get in line and find Armand again (and again, always a circle), but: he will be okay, ish. If nothing else, he has nothing left to do but sleep. Every complicated conversation that might untangle the knots inside of him, he is too exhausted to even contemplate, and it certainly isn't this fledgling's duty to attend them. Not until a book deal is in the works, anyway.
And Lestat has not survived this long without becoming okay, ish, after a minor self-made disaster, never mind his hysterics from hours ago. The thin press of a smile he awards Daniel with is self-aware in this way. "As will Louis," he offers. "I won't let him go far from me."
It still claws at Daniel, a horrible spiky feeling, to know Louis is doing this to himself. Flavors of why he was such a shit parent. Decent at negotiating, at herding, but his touch isn't gentle. There comes a point (and it's quick) where he just wants to shake people into understanding. It was one thing when Louis was a client, another when he figured he'd probably not make it out of Dubai but was going to unpin the grenade anyway, and now—
What the fuck grenade could there be? It's not like he can prove Louis wouldn't survive. There's no smoking gun he can put on the table. Just really feels likely that it'll go so much worse than scraping Lestat out of an alley.
"Phone shopping could be fun. He doesn't even have a TV."
You know. If nobody spirals. Maybe they can just go shopping.
Will there be phone shops open late enough for such an outing in downtown Burlington or is Daniel thinking like a human? Or perhaps he expects to be gone a little longer after all, and see you not so soon. Or it's just a thrown bone.
Lestat doesn't snare at him, regardless. He slides back into the silky depths of his coffin instead as the door closes. They could be watching a housewife show. Early morning infomercials. Vintage sitcoms. He feels a petty pain for the knowledge he will simply be here instead, listening to the sound of Louis' heartbeat, knowing he can do nothing if he chooses to leave him as well.
Come to me, and the one person he wishes would won't hear it.
Louis hadn't slept the day before. Doesn't intend to lay himself down to sleep when dawn comes and the sun rises. A directionless decision, unshaped but fixed in his mind as he smokes at the window.
It is as Lestat had imagined: Louis, watching the sky. Marking the lightening quality of the dark. A little absent, detached from himself and the tumult of fury and hurt and misery in his body. Listening, but not to voices in the next room or the noise of the abandoned television set. It's an outward focus, marking humans moving in the darkness of the parking lot. Idle, the way he might have once flipped through a heavy book, slouched at uncomfortable angles. Something to hold his thoughts so they don't return to Lestat, bloody and broken in a dumpster. Daniel's face creased in frustration. The wreckage Louis had left when he had removed himself from their presence.
Maybe he would have done this through the dawn. Played fingers in the heat at the edge of the curtain. Directionless, propelled by what he doesn't wish to touch, by what he has been forbidden.
But Louis hears it, when Daniel goes. Not the conversation that precedes it, but the doors closing. The familiar gait carrying Daniel away. Away to Armand. Armand, who Louis is not allowed to seek. Who turned Daniel. Who nearly killed Lestat. Who—
Splintering. An interruption of sins, a record scratching.
Directionless decision cementing itself abruptly to old, old desire: to be gone.
Louis has not always needed to leave to absent himself. But he needs to leave now, he thinks. Lestat is healing, and there is nothing Louis can offer him to speed the process. And Daniel is going to Armand.
Daniel is going to Armand. (Certainty, unearned and unfounded, but Louis feels it twisting in his chest.)
The sound of a door closing. A coffin sliding shut. Louis has ruined it all, and still has the ugly, twisting wreckage inside of him. Can't fit himself into what remains, can't reel back in what's broken. Can't feel it this way, anymore.
Long minutes pass, Louis standing at the window. Daniel is gone. Lestat has fallen silent.
It is an impulse, as it so often is. Often was. As perhaps it always will be, in Louis' long, long life. An impulse, sparking in Louis' chest.
Between one breath and the next, Louis is out the window. Gone.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a transitional interlude
But as a professional man who cannot shut up, Daniel isn't down for long. It was challenging enough getting himself to just disengage instead of trying harder to make Louis react, there's less than no chance he's going to box himself into a coffin and sleep this off. A bit of pacing around, a quick freshen up to lose any lingering miasma from dumpster diving and victim luring, and—
"You alive?"
Knocknock. He already knows the answer. Both answers. Lestat is still here on this realm, Lestat is still undead, so yes and no. He made the joke already and he doesn't care how annoyed the other vampire might be at him, so just say something so he can open the door.
no subject
Soft, conversation-level volume, but adequate for two vampires on either side of a closed door. An unlocked closed door, passive welcome.
Inside, Lestat has settled in his coffin, the lid flung back, visible only where he has one leg draped over the side and hooked over the knee, still clothed in the soft, slouchy things he'd been given, plus slipper.
Nearby, on the ground, his headphones, as if tossed aside. Someone has discovered that he can't access his music when his phone has been destroyed.
no subject
"I gotta make sure Jeannie and Mark haven't been abducted by Talamasca or whatever," he says. "Most of their luggage is still here and all." Well, whatever, he's sure Lestat doesn't care about that. Point is, he has something to do, and he's announcing his plans to at least one person, because if he tries to talk to Louis again he thinks his friend might leave back to fucking Dubai.
"Do you need anything critical before I go do that?"
His Spotify account logged into a spare laptop, maybe, but Daniel isn't feeling quite that generous after oohhhh young ones are impatient oohhh.
no subject
He elbows himself up enough to peer past the coffin edge.
"No," Lestat says. "You've done enough." Gentle, smirking layers of shade for all of that, earlier, and then something different when he tips his head, adds, "You've done plenty," because his brain is no longer bleeding his own traumas (and other people's) into his own skull, drowning him.
Swings and round abouts. "Will you be gone long?"
no subject
You've done enough.
Always hunting with his shovel. What's in there. But,
"I hope not. If I run out of time, assume I'm staying in a room adjacent to the peanut gallery. I'd text you since I imagine you've got a headache, but." He shrugs. "If it's a real emergency I can probably still tell Louis."
Probably. Daniel is the type of guy to get in a horrible fight and be fine the next day, but maybe Louis will be mad still. He hopes not.
"You gonna be okay?"
no subject
"Very okay," lazy callback, but not really a lie. He will rest, and be okay. Considers now these offered logistics.
Lestat might say don't go, a background hum of desire to have all of them under the same roof that has not let up since the first time he felt it. A sharp observer could probably detect its contemplation under the surface. Could sense the way it's let go again as his attention skirts down, levelled at the stretch of floor between them.
"You have not given up on him, have you?"
no subject
A potential that lurks close over his head like a sword. A potential he's pretty sure Lestat can intuit. But what the fuck can he say about it? He can feel Armand, in a fucked up way.
He makes a sound, a dull bark of an almost-laugh.
"I'm not the type."
Louis is stuck with him, even if he hates it. Even if this is a bridge being torched. Daniel will find a way, like the annoying, determined jackass he is.
no subject
Which is nice. Lestat's impulse to keep everyone close, claws in, some latent fear of those around him vanishing at a whim. It eases ever so, even if he suspects that Daniel's departure might well continue past checking in with Jeannie and her partner. If it even begins there.
"Your book," he says, his focus shifting off Daniel, a little aside, as if he could pierce his vision through the walls where Louis is likely watching the curtains, the sky. "I noticed a particular lack of account in how constantly I gave into all of our arguments. How selflessly obliging I was at every turn."
Laying it on, from his lazy slouch in the coffin. "Perhaps I instilled some bad habits."
no subject
"There was a theme," Daniel notes. "It tied back up in the end. You waited."
Waited out Louis' moods, until he snapped. Waited in the rotting leavings he was abandoned in, until he was called to Paris. And then, life becoming art, waiting in a collapsing hovel in New Orleans until Louis returned. Something in there. Waiting in the living room watching Real Housewives.
Daniel isn't a quitter. He's not much of a wait-er, either.
"You don't know the half of it," he sighs. "About bad habits. If he... I don't know. If something happens— when he and I 'met', it was because he was out picking up young mortal men to drug, fuck, and kill. Hundreds, until Armand put the Stepford Whammy on him. So uh. Eyes peeled. If he slips out."
no subject
And so on. What's a little more?
These thoughts are allowed to skitter off into their dark corners, and Lestat listens instead to these new escapades. A little doubt. Louis? His Louis? Well—yes, his Louis. Vicious, anger like the magma that boils beneath ancient rock. Anger and passion. His expression transparently glazes into something like affection and intrigue rather than, like,
worry,
which is probably fine. That Louis is probably doing it all miserable doesn't make it less hot. Maybe it's hotter, even. Anyway.
"Noted."
no subject
"Yeah I thought so too, for at least a solid half of it."
Hot.
And then he was being tortured for a week and Louis firewood. (Too soon for a 'and that was still hot' joke, he's too pissed off at Armand.)
"Seriously, you'll be okay? Ish, at least?"
no subject
It's the only answer he can give, and isn't a falsehood. He wants to rage and throw things, he wants to cry, he wants to fling himself at Louis' feet or find a place to collapse outside his door, he wants to get in line and find Armand again (and again, always a circle), but: he will be okay, ish. If nothing else, he has nothing left to do but sleep. Every complicated conversation that might untangle the knots inside of him, he is too exhausted to even contemplate, and it certainly isn't this fledgling's duty to attend them. Not until a book deal is in the works, anyway.
And Lestat has not survived this long without becoming okay, ish, after a minor self-made disaster, never mind his hysterics from hours ago. The thin press of a smile he awards Daniel with is self-aware in this way. "As will Louis," he offers. "I won't let him go far from me."
no subject
It still claws at Daniel, a horrible spiky feeling, to know Louis is doing this to himself. Flavors of why he was such a shit parent. Decent at negotiating, at herding, but his touch isn't gentle. There comes a point (and it's quick) where he just wants to shake people into understanding. It was one thing when Louis was a client, another when he figured he'd probably not make it out of Dubai but was going to unpin the grenade anyway, and now—
What the fuck grenade could there be? It's not like he can prove Louis wouldn't survive. There's no smoking gun he can put on the table. Just really feels likely that it'll go so much worse than scraping Lestat out of an alley.
"Phone shopping could be fun. He doesn't even have a TV."
You know. If nobody spirals. Maybe they can just go shopping.
Okay. Alright. Okay.
"See you soon."
no subject
Will there be phone shops open late enough for such an outing in downtown Burlington or is Daniel thinking like a human? Or perhaps he expects to be gone a little longer after all, and see you not so soon. Or it's just a thrown bone.
Lestat doesn't snare at him, regardless. He slides back into the silky depths of his coffin instead as the door closes. They could be watching a housewife show. Early morning infomercials. Vintage sitcoms. He feels a petty pain for the knowledge he will simply be here instead, listening to the sound of Louis' heartbeat, knowing he can do nothing if he chooses to leave him as well.
Come to me, and the one person he wishes would won't hear it.
no subject
Louis hadn't slept the day before. Doesn't intend to lay himself down to sleep when dawn comes and the sun rises. A directionless decision, unshaped but fixed in his mind as he smokes at the window.
It is as Lestat had imagined: Louis, watching the sky. Marking the lightening quality of the dark. A little absent, detached from himself and the tumult of fury and hurt and misery in his body. Listening, but not to voices in the next room or the noise of the abandoned television set. It's an outward focus, marking humans moving in the darkness of the parking lot. Idle, the way he might have once flipped through a heavy book, slouched at uncomfortable angles. Something to hold his thoughts so they don't return to Lestat, bloody and broken in a dumpster. Daniel's face creased in frustration. The wreckage Louis had left when he had removed himself from their presence.
Maybe he would have done this through the dawn. Played fingers in the heat at the edge of the curtain. Directionless, propelled by what he doesn't wish to touch, by what he has been forbidden.
But Louis hears it, when Daniel goes. Not the conversation that precedes it, but the doors closing. The familiar gait carrying Daniel away. Away to Armand. Armand, who Louis is not allowed to seek. Who turned Daniel. Who nearly killed Lestat. Who—
Splintering. An interruption of sins, a record scratching.
Directionless decision cementing itself abruptly to old, old desire: to be gone.
Louis has not always needed to leave to absent himself. But he needs to leave now, he thinks. Lestat is healing, and there is nothing Louis can offer him to speed the process. And Daniel is going to Armand.
Daniel is going to Armand. (Certainty, unearned and unfounded, but Louis feels it twisting in his chest.)
The sound of a door closing. A coffin sliding shut. Louis has ruined it all, and still has the ugly, twisting wreckage inside of him. Can't fit himself into what remains, can't reel back in what's broken. Can't feel it this way, anymore.
Long minutes pass, Louis standing at the window. Daniel is gone. Lestat has fallen silent.
It is an impulse, as it so often is. Often was. As perhaps it always will be, in Louis' long, long life. An impulse, sparking in Louis' chest.
Between one breath and the next, Louis is out the window. Gone.