The PDA is expected, and despite the internal cringe, so are more attacks. He glances at Louis via the rear-view mirror, checking in, but doesn't make a big deal out of it. That's exactly why they wanted everyone in the same place, so. They're on the right path here.
Sam, though, is a surprise. One he counters with his own—
"I've got a number. Since he works for my new editors." Louis might know more about this if he had read any of the drafts Daniel sent him, which were full of notes and expanded references, but here we are.
"He wasn't in London when I was there,"
where I was spirited away to out of DXB instead of going home, because I was a fucking vampire all of a sudden
"But we've spoken. Interesting guy. What are you thinking about?"
The appeal for him is the guitar, singing away within the layers of drum and lyric. It is to that that Lestat attunes his ears, chin resting on the shoulder of Louis' chair, his gaze wandering more to flickering movement beyond the vehicle. Finding himself infinitely content with the resting Louis' fingers over his.
No answer from him here, lightly tapping out the beat against Louis' collarbone.
Listening to the conversation too, of course. He did begin it. Skirmishes has his mouth set, but says nothing in the moment.
"I'd like to know what Sam knows," is a terribly loaded statement.
Sam must know many things. The workings of the Talamasca, perhaps, and to what extent their hand is directing the response to Louis and Daniel's work.
The working of a theater long since reduced to ash.
His fingers do not interfere with the fidgeting taps of Lestat's, but the bit of contact remains, reassuring, as Louis continues, "What did you speak to Sam about?"
Uhm. Not usually in Daniel's conversational wheelhouse, signaling sheepish embarrassment over the truthful answer to that question. He feigns total absorption in driving for a moment before shooting Luis a look from the edge of his vision, and a lopsided smile.
"Kenneth Tynan, mostly?"
A room full of secret agents managing a critical Zoom call while Daniel puts together who he's talking to, and immediately wants to talk about a man's personal involvement in the history of being able to use the word 'fuck' in artistic media. Slightly more animated—
"It was a weird day. I was. You know, fucked up, and they wanted to put me in a 'secure location' and whatever, but it was making me insane. So was talked for a few hours," HOURS, Daniel, while these poor anxiety-ridden librarians regretted their life choices, "and then I bailed the next evening. We've talked a little after, fact checking, but not for long. He's working on an album, apparently."
because who gives a fuck about Sam Barclay and his music career, Lestat spreading the hand he has on Louis' chest to snare his attention, shifting enough to withdraw his own attention on the road,
"that we had the electrified guitar in our time? The first rockstars among us lived while we were together, died before we were apart? And I don't think I heard a single one until Jimi Hendrix came on the radio and said that a girl put a spell on him."
He is smiling as he speaks. Genuine, no matter what spark of need incited his little monologue and continues it. "And legend has it that the Devil himself gave mankind the gift of this instrument. I am thinking of Robert Johnson, of course. Would you like to hear it?"
He's already fidgeting with his phone, sparkling in Louis' periphery. They can go back to talking while he wrestles Spotify to the ground.
Uhm must strike Louis as funny. Has he ever heard Daniel say it? Amusement colors his expression as he watches Daniel over the center console of this vehicle that Daniel owns, and drove to collect him from the airport with Lestat in tow when—
Abruptly musical history. Lestat's palm flattening over Louis' chest, over his heart. His own fingers circle lightly around Lestat's wrist, a hum of acknowledgement that is so, so familiar. Harkens back to New Orleans, their parlor, Lestat at the piano, Louis holding a book, looking up to smile at him across the room as Lestat beckons for his attention.
"Yes," Louis assures him. "Play some for us."
On the way to: "Do you think he would make time for us now?"
Now that it wasn't an assignment, but a polite request.
Buddy, please don't romantically frame the relationship around a guitar player who DIED,
is probably a thought Louis can hear, thanks to their comfortable rapport. But Daniel is (internally) laughing. Exasperated-fond. Lestat is a fucking ordeal, but some of it's charming, and it's definitely funny in that same charming way to watch him have a very elegant tantrum about Louis' attention straying for even fifteen seconds.
"It's likely," he says, of The Vampire Sam, who had not so long ago been used as Exhibit A in Daniel's dismantling of 80 years of Louis' life. Time heals all wounds, blah blah, now they know Armand was being so gracious about forgiveness and encouraging Louis to do the same because DJ Sam could have outed the play's director were he to be confronted. Live and let live, and never, ever talk to the guy.
"I can't imagine him following you to a secondary location or anything," this is also fond, because Louis is scary, and Daniel kind of likes that, "but I'm confident a video call is workable."
Morrison and Krieger go abruptly silent when some wrong thing is touched, which gets a quiet, annoyed sound out of Lestat, but he struggles on, and any pretense at following what is actually being said or why they wish to speak to DJ Agent Sam is abandoned completely.
More struggling. A sigh to himself.
Finally, old fashioned blues filters through the speakers. "Here. This is George Barnes playing with Big Bill Boonzy," and he takes delight in this name, managing to eclipse the frustration in failing to shake from the internet what he had been looking for originally, "and it is 1937, this recording."
The song skips ahead by about a solid minute and a half. "The solo starts here," is a little rude, maybe, but here we are.
Louis' thumb runs back and forth across the inside of Lestat's wrist throughout the ordeal of song changing.
"Would you set it up?" first, to Daniel, before: "I like this. The song."
And the solo, presumably. Louis is no musician, but he had shared a roof with Lestat for thirty years.
And then long decades of silence. A thought that blips across the surface of his mind, there and gone again as Louis continues:
"If I'm a convenience to the Talamasca, perhaps Sam could give us some insight as to how we could leverage that. I don't imagine the landscape has gone unnoticed."
"Most people - mortal people - feel the most connection to the 'contemporary' music of their lifetimes," he says, looking at Lestat for a moment, so he knows they're all talking, even though the conversation is multi-sided. "Do you feel that way about different eras that grabbed your interest?"
A little bit of a journalist question, but he thinks Blondie will let it slide.
"I'm pretty sure we're all inconvenient to the Talamasca." Dry. "Just a lesser one than some of their other headaches. But it's a good thought. I'm not sure where Sam stands, politically speaking, but he'll have seen several generations of these guys by now."
Being needy on purpose or not, there's a genuine pleasure to be had in listening to the sharp plucking of the guitar, the lingering on the first string, the odd way the lax resolution of each riff threatens to put his teeth on edge before it concludes. It's possible Daniel saves them from a repeated loop of this specific twenty seconds as Lestat's focus is drawn back over.
His lifetime. A hummed sound, amused. "I thought I would always return to the music of my century," he says. "We went to enough concertos and symphonies that I think Louis can say he has absorbed as much of the golden era of Beethoven and Bach and Lizst as I have, isn't that so?"
Lestat's hand lifts, settles back down, a shrug. "The first time I heard someone play Mozart with skill, it felt like a revelation. Something like that again, in opening my heart to this century's masters. A constellation of influences, stars rapidly dying, blooming. I don't play favourites anymore.
"What's the Talamasca?" Seems important, he guesses.
"The creepy secret agent librarians," Daniel supplies, after 'oddities'. He looks at Louis, and there is no telepathy involved, communicating via the old fashioned unspoken way of clear expressions: he absolutely explained Talamasca to Lestat, but apparently he was not adequately tuned in at the time.
"Don't worry about it, you're way too pretty to be the brains of the operation."
ANYway—
"We can compare notes with what we've got so far. Got a fair bit of data off the one guy's phone, and I've been running down stuff in there where I can. The drives I took with me out of London," Daniel you did what, "have ended up to be mostly archive stuff. Sam might have better immediate intel."
This being not the first time Daniel has gently roasted Lestat, evidently—
A quiet kind of sinister laugh for this, before Lestat turns his voice more towards Louis to tell him, "He flirts with me," apologetically, innocently. "Tell him to stop."
And he slithers back into the backseat, picking up his phone to continue to curate the audio experience. A quick check will confirm: he has not taken to sulking, but absorbed, perhaps, the premise of the Talamasca, the desire to meet with DJ Sam, and is allowing them to continue.
"Oh my god," is the only right response to both Lestat's dramatic fainting couch removal and Louis babying him about it. You fucking dweebs. But, and this is another one of those things he'll probably never say out loud because of his terminal allergy to sentiment, he thinks they deserve to have funny little sweet moments.
People can grow. Maybe it'll be okay, in the long run. He'd like that for them.
"No assault attempts. Smart, with the fake out."
Daniel suspects he knows why, but that's a part of the thing he'd like to discuss with Louis. Not now. Everything right now is—
Fine? Good, even. Kind of nice, despite it also being the craziest fucking thing ever.
"Hey, I like this song."
True of whatever Lestat has landed on. They'll be at the hotel soon, and so will the car with Louis' things.
Logistics break up the conversation after they pull in, a car ride with a slightly scattered education on the early history of the electric guitar thrumming beneath loose plans and intentions. Lestat offers to take the roses out of Louis' hands to see them somewhere safe and leave his woman valet to more important things.
Maybe there are other people for this, true, but Lestat would like something to do with his hands, all of a sudden. Exiting out of the elevators and onto the floor that belongs to them for the time being, and it isn't so difficult to find a decorative vase on some stand somewhere, and a water source. This, while personal assistants are attended to, phonecalls are made, important business everywhere.
He doesn't mind being frivolous, sometimes. Don't tell anyone.
And if Lestat suspects an !AMBUSH! by the time Daniel and Louis have drifted back to the main central area—well, good news, he doesn't. Splays his hands at the extremely expensive flower arrangement now arranged on the table from where he is lounging. Voilà.
Rachida is already in residence when they arrive, directing the arranging of luggage, among whatever other necessities Louis has traveled with. (Damek, for one, collecting his suitcase and making himself scarce.) It occupies Louis momentarily, seeing to this and that.
And in the course of settling in, trading murmurs between his mind and Daniel's. An opening in which Louis informs him:
He asked, and I didn't wish to speak of San Francisco without you.
Conciliatory: It's not only my story to share.
They've had some practice, haven't they? Piecing together the events of that week, speaking of them? (Not enough. Not enough practice, not really.) Louis is holding fast to that as he re-enters the space, in time to observe Lestat's handiwork. To catch a question that he assumes is for Daniel.
"I can have something sent up for me."
Whatever that looks like. The twinge of defensiveness, of self-consciousness, is there and gone so quickly it may never have appeared at all.
"We might stay in," Louis offers, moving on briskly. "Better to speak here than in an alleyway."
'Christ, Louis.' Exchanges while they sort things. 'Sure, you're owed an ambush,' we have fun here, joking about cornering him with the Talamasca recordings, and Daniel feels a brief, slightly hysterical bubble of almost-laughter threaten to overtake him as he thinks of what it'll look like. Louis and Daniel sitting there explaining a thing that happened in the past to Lestat. Daniel should put his laptop in front of him and hit record. Give him a notepad.
'Just tell me if you want to tap out, alright?'
It's not only Louis' story, but Louis was the one who ran out into the bright morning sun, and is volunteering to relive it again. He hopes it's therapeutic instead of harmful. When he gives the man a friendly squeeze to his shoulder as he walks into the living-room-foyer area connecting their web of rooms, it's both a comfort about the vegetarian lifestyle and support for what he's about to undertake.
"Takeout always gives me heartburn."
Flippant. He was aware they'd have to navigate around certain lifestyle differences, and has already decided to hard ignore it whenever possible. A moral crisis for Someday Daniel. Today Daniel is too busy to worry about all that.
Their energy isn't too weird and conspirational, at least not until the So, which is a drop of blood in the water, vibes-wise. Lestat closes the loop on glancing, Daniel to Louis.
Amusement, tugging his mouth. Maybe it's just weird. It might be nice, to not be the only one who thinks so. "That's the thing about an orgy," Lestat says, a big sigh out, a gesture around at the trio of them. "Someone has to be the one to suck the first cock before someone else panics and reaches for the backgammon board."
A hand up, a splay of fingers. "I'm kidding. Scrabble, for the writer."
That second So. Louis had already been looking towards Daniel. At the invocation of backgammon though:
A moment where it feels as if he's been caught out. Eyes flick between Daniel and Lestat, before Louis tell him, "I didn't pack either. My backgammon days are well behind me, anyway."
Backgammon, and Daniel has already made an odd noise, like a choke or a laugh or something almost a cough, and he's pushing his glasses up where he's pinching the bridge of his nose. Oh for fuck's sake, this guuUUUUYYY.
He shakes that off and looks back up, still nearly laughing, but at least not (uncontrollably) choking (for the rest of the teaser).
"I didn't tell him anything," he says to Louis, aloud, because they're putting this all out there anyway. "I think that was a legitimate board game joke, unless you learned that trick from him."
Woof. He's going to need to sit down for this one. Daniel moves to the large windows, tugging aside sweeping curtains for a look out into the night and its millions of moving parts and lights. Venting some restlessness at the prospect of this conversation, before he moves to find an empty square of suitable furniture.
Mon fucking Dieu, so much for breaking the ice with his comedic stylings.
Well, perhaps the ice is broken. Half-cracked. Lestat looks to Louis as Daniel moves away, understanding clicking, and that feeling he'd had on the phone, the oddly floaty impact of jealous aftershock, makes its return without warning. The story of these two, yes, he had wanted to know, and how Daniel was nearly Louis' fledgling, the source of that warm thread of affection disappearing into the fog of memory that he had been very polite about not intruding.
And now something about backgammon and/or orgies.
"He learned all his tricks from me," an impulsive rejoinder, even though he has no idea what they're talking about, arms folding across his chest.
A brief smile at that assertion, though it is slightly wan.
In the wake of Daniel's So, Louis suspects it has fallen to him to begin. He has drifted towards the table, running admiring fingers over the rose petals, and abandons that now in favor of considering the room. The room, and his position within it. Where he might set himself to put Lestat at ease, to avoid stranding Daniel.
Near impossible.
Habit wins out. He finds a chair. Hauls it out of alignment into some middling space as he imparts, "I used my backgammon board to store items of interest, in those days."
Those days.
"I'd invited Daniel up to an apartment in a building I owned. I took out the board to offer him his pick, after I showed him my coffin."
FYI. It's kind of Louis to be demure about it, but Daniel has never hidden his past. It's all out there in his own book, even. Whether Lestat hears this or whether he's ascended into another universe already thinking they're telling him about an insane sexual escapade and has shut down—??
"I was a junkie pretending to be a journalist, or a journalist who was a junkie. Something in there. I was cruising at a gay bar, and Louis picked me up."
A beat.
"Sort of."
He looks at Louis, more serious now than incredulous laughing about backgammon. Softer, "What order are we doing this in?"
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Sam, though, is a surprise. One he counters with his own—
"I've got a number. Since he works for my new editors." Louis might know more about this if he had read any of the drafts Daniel sent him, which were full of notes and expanded references, but here we are.
"He wasn't in London when I was there,"
where I was spirited away to out of DXB instead of going home, because I was a fucking vampire all of a sudden
"But we've spoken. Interesting guy. What are you thinking about?"
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No answer from him here, lightly tapping out the beat against Louis' collarbone.
Listening to the conversation too, of course. He did begin it. Skirmishes has his mouth set, but says nothing in the moment.
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Sam must know many things. The workings of the Talamasca, perhaps, and to what extent their hand is directing the response to Louis and Daniel's work.
The working of a theater long since reduced to ash.
His fingers do not interfere with the fidgeting taps of Lestat's, but the bit of contact remains, reassuring, as Louis continues, "What did you speak to Sam about?"
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Uhm. Not usually in Daniel's conversational wheelhouse, signaling sheepish embarrassment over the truthful answer to that question. He feigns total absorption in driving for a moment before shooting Luis a look from the edge of his vision, and a lopsided smile.
"Kenneth Tynan, mostly?"
A room full of secret agents managing a critical Zoom call while Daniel puts together who he's talking to, and immediately wants to talk about a man's personal involvement in the history of being able to use the word 'fuck' in artistic media. Slightly more animated—
"It was a weird day. I was. You know, fucked up, and they wanted to put me in a 'secure location' and whatever, but it was making me insane. So was talked for a few hours," HOURS, Daniel, while these poor anxiety-ridden librarians regretted their life choices, "and then I bailed the next evening. We've talked a little after, fact checking, but not for long. He's working on an album, apparently."
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because who gives a fuck about Sam Barclay and his music career, Lestat spreading the hand he has on Louis' chest to snare his attention, shifting enough to withdraw his own attention on the road,
"that we had the electrified guitar in our time? The first rockstars among us lived while we were together, died before we were apart? And I don't think I heard a single one until Jimi Hendrix came on the radio and said that a girl put a spell on him."
He is smiling as he speaks. Genuine, no matter what spark of need incited his little monologue and continues it. "And legend has it that the Devil himself gave mankind the gift of this instrument. I am thinking of Robert Johnson, of course. Would you like to hear it?"
He's already fidgeting with his phone, sparkling in Louis' periphery. They can go back to talking while he wrestles Spotify to the ground.
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Abruptly musical history. Lestat's palm flattening over Louis' chest, over his heart. His own fingers circle lightly around Lestat's wrist, a hum of acknowledgement that is so, so familiar. Harkens back to New Orleans, their parlor, Lestat at the piano, Louis holding a book, looking up to smile at him across the room as Lestat beckons for his attention.
"Yes," Louis assures him. "Play some for us."
On the way to: "Do you think he would make time for us now?"
Now that it wasn't an assignment, but a polite request.
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is probably a thought Louis can hear, thanks to their comfortable rapport. But Daniel is (internally) laughing. Exasperated-fond. Lestat is a fucking ordeal, but some of it's charming, and it's definitely funny in that same charming way to watch him have a very elegant tantrum about Louis' attention straying for even fifteen seconds.
"It's likely," he says, of The Vampire Sam, who had not so long ago been used as Exhibit A in Daniel's dismantling of 80 years of Louis' life. Time heals all wounds, blah blah, now they know Armand was being so gracious about forgiveness and encouraging Louis to do the same because DJ Sam could have outed the play's director were he to be confronted. Live and let live, and never, ever talk to the guy.
"I can't imagine him following you to a secondary location or anything," this is also fond, because Louis is scary, and Daniel kind of likes that, "but I'm confident a video call is workable."
he's just a little guy
More struggling. A sigh to himself.
Finally, old fashioned blues filters through the speakers. "Here. This is George Barnes playing with Big Bill Boonzy," and he takes delight in this name, managing to eclipse the frustration in failing to shake from the internet what he had been looking for originally, "and it is 1937, this recording."
The song skips ahead by about a solid minute and a half. "The solo starts here," is a little rude, maybe, but here we are.
doing his best
"Would you set it up?" first, to Daniel, before: "I like this. The song."
And the solo, presumably. Louis is no musician, but he had shared a roof with Lestat for thirty years.
And then long decades of silence. A thought that blips across the surface of his mind, there and gone again as Louis continues:
"If I'm a convenience to the Talamasca, perhaps Sam could give us some insight as to how we could leverage that. I don't imagine the landscape has gone unnoticed."
clippy lestat notices ur not paying attn to him
A little bit of a journalist question, but he thinks Blondie will let it slide.
"I'm pretty sure we're all inconvenient to the Talamasca." Dry. "Just a lesser one than some of their other headaches. But it's a good thought. I'm not sure where Sam stands, politically speaking, but he'll have seen several generations of these guys by now."
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His lifetime. A hummed sound, amused. "I thought I would always return to the music of my century," he says. "We went to enough concertos and symphonies that I think Louis can say he has absorbed as much of the golden era of Beethoven and Bach and Lizst as I have, isn't that so?"
Lestat's hand lifts, settles back down, a shrug. "The first time I heard someone play Mozart with skill, it felt like a revelation. Something like that again, in opening my heart to this century's masters. A constellation of influences, stars rapidly dying, blooming. I don't play favourites anymore.
"What's the Talamasca?" Seems important, he guesses.
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Oddities.
His thumb continues it's path up and down Lestat's wrist.
"You wanted me to gather more information," he reminds Lestat. Enter: the Vampire Sam.
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"Don't worry about it, you're way too pretty to be the brains of the operation."
ANYway—
"We can compare notes with what we've got so far. Got a fair bit of data off the one guy's phone, and I've been running down stuff in there where I can. The drives I took with me out of London," Daniel you did what, "have ended up to be mostly archive stuff. Sam might have better immediate intel."
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A quiet kind of sinister laugh for this, before Lestat turns his voice more towards Louis to tell him, "He flirts with me," apologetically, innocently. "Tell him to stop."
And he slithers back into the backseat, picking up his phone to continue to curate the audio experience. A quick check will confirm: he has not taken to sulking, but absorbed, perhaps, the premise of the Talamasca, the desire to meet with DJ Sam, and is allowing them to continue.
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"The perception is that I went to Europe," Louis tells him. "I thought a false starting point would be for the best."
And ensure the building would be intact when he returned.
"Have you had trouble, or have you been occupied by your travel?"
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People can grow. Maybe it'll be okay, in the long run. He'd like that for them.
"No assault attempts. Smart, with the fake out."
Daniel suspects he knows why, but that's a part of the thing he'd like to discuss with Louis. Not now. Everything right now is—
Fine? Good, even. Kind of nice, despite it also being the craziest fucking thing ever.
"Hey, I like this song."
True of whatever Lestat has landed on. They'll be at the hotel soon, and so will the car with Louis' things.
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Maybe there are other people for this, true, but Lestat would like something to do with his hands, all of a sudden. Exiting out of the elevators and onto the floor that belongs to them for the time being, and it isn't so difficult to find a decorative vase on some stand somewhere, and a water source. This, while personal assistants are attended to, phonecalls are made, important business everywhere.
He doesn't mind being frivolous, sometimes. Don't tell anyone.
And if Lestat suspects an !AMBUSH! by the time Daniel and Louis have drifted back to the main central area—well, good news, he doesn't. Splays his hands at the extremely expensive flower arrangement now arranged on the table from where he is lounging. Voilà.
"Should we order in? Italian, perhaps."
Vampire jokes.
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And in the course of settling in, trading murmurs between his mind and Daniel's. An opening in which Louis informs him:
He asked, and I didn't wish to speak of San Francisco without you.
Conciliatory: It's not only my story to share.
They've had some practice, haven't they? Piecing together the events of that week, speaking of them? (Not enough. Not enough practice, not really.) Louis is holding fast to that as he re-enters the space, in time to observe Lestat's handiwork. To catch a question that he assumes is for Daniel.
"I can have something sent up for me."
Whatever that looks like. The twinge of defensiveness, of self-consciousness, is there and gone so quickly it may never have appeared at all.
"We might stay in," Louis offers, moving on briskly. "Better to speak here than in an alleyway."
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'Just tell me if you want to tap out, alright?'
It's not only Louis' story, but Louis was the one who ran out into the bright morning sun, and is volunteering to relive it again. He hopes it's therapeutic instead of harmful. When he gives the man a friendly squeeze to his shoulder as he walks into the living-room-foyer area connecting their web of rooms, it's both a comfort about the vegetarian lifestyle and support for what he's about to undertake.
"Takeout always gives me heartburn."
Flippant. He was aware they'd have to navigate around certain lifestyle differences, and has already decided to hard ignore it whenever possible. A moral crisis for Someday Daniel. Today Daniel is too busy to worry about all that.
"So." So!!! He looks at Louis, then Lestat.
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Amusement, tugging his mouth. Maybe it's just weird. It might be nice, to not be the only one who thinks so. "That's the thing about an orgy," Lestat says, a big sigh out, a gesture around at the trio of them. "Someone has to be the one to suck the first cock before someone else panics and reaches for the backgammon board."
A hand up, a splay of fingers. "I'm kidding. Scrabble, for the writer."
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A moment where it feels as if he's been caught out. Eyes flick between Daniel and Lestat, before Louis tell him, "I didn't pack either. My backgammon days are well behind me, anyway."
Just moving past the orgy invocation.
"I promised you a story."
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He shakes that off and looks back up, still nearly laughing, but at least not (uncontrollably) choking (for the rest of the teaser).
"I didn't tell him anything," he says to Louis, aloud, because they're putting this all out there anyway. "I think that was a legitimate board game joke, unless you learned that trick from him."
Woof. He's going to need to sit down for this one. Daniel moves to the large windows, tugging aside sweeping curtains for a look out into the night and its millions of moving parts and lights. Venting some restlessness at the prospect of this conversation, before he moves to find an empty square of suitable furniture.
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Well, perhaps the ice is broken. Half-cracked. Lestat looks to Louis as Daniel moves away, understanding clicking, and that feeling he'd had on the phone, the oddly floaty impact of jealous aftershock, makes its return without warning. The story of these two, yes, he had wanted to know, and how Daniel was nearly Louis' fledgling, the source of that warm thread of affection disappearing into the fog of memory that he had been very polite about not intruding.
And now something about backgammon and/or orgies.
"He learned all his tricks from me," an impulsive rejoinder, even though he has no idea what they're talking about, arms folding across his chest.
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In the wake of Daniel's So, Louis suspects it has fallen to him to begin. He has drifted towards the table, running admiring fingers over the rose petals, and abandons that now in favor of considering the room. The room, and his position within it. Where he might set himself to put Lestat at ease, to avoid stranding Daniel.
Near impossible.
Habit wins out. He finds a chair. Hauls it out of alignment into some middling space as he imparts, "I used my backgammon board to store items of interest, in those days."
Those days.
"I'd invited Daniel up to an apartment in a building I owned. I took out the board to offer him his pick, after I showed him my coffin."
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FYI. It's kind of Louis to be demure about it, but Daniel has never hidden his past. It's all out there in his own book, even. Whether Lestat hears this or whether he's ascended into another universe already thinking they're telling him about an insane sexual escapade and has shut down—??
"I was a junkie pretending to be a journalist, or a journalist who was a junkie. Something in there. I was cruising at a gay bar, and Louis picked me up."
A beat.
"Sort of."
He looks at Louis, more serious now than incredulous laughing about backgammon. Softer, "What order are we doing this in?"
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