Telepathy is interesting, and sometimes overwhelming to navigate. Daniel has a special gift of getting angles. Being able to needle people into the truth, and tell when he's being lied to. Even without mindreading and empathetic transference, he'd know how tenderly Lestat regards Louis, and his art. Like he knew how Louis felt about Lestat.
Claudia, beautiful vintage cuts. Like stained glass impressions. Interesting, as he opens his laptop.
"I think they're mostly architecture around Paris," he says, "and practice shots." Half to himself as he remembers where they'd be filed under on his remote storage. Taktaktak, some passwords, and he opens the folder. He mouses over them, making sure he can reasonably identify the ones he has here, in case Lestat asks (or, heaven fucking forbid, there's one in here by somebody else and Louis thinks there's some kind of psyop in a few weeks).
Pause. Daniel looks at the screen for a moment, and there are no unspoken clues from his mind.
Then,
"Architecture, portraits of people in their neighborhood, and group photos, which include Claudia."
And it's transparent in his face, the way it gives him pause. A real and genuine instinct to change his mind, just a moment of that, before Lestat gives a hummed sound of acknowledgement. Yes, of course, Claudia would be, their life together after him, their life together before the end of it all. Why should she not be photographed? Why should he not wish to view them, not that Daniel was asking?
Ridiculous for him to not have anticipated it. There is an additional moment where he thinks: perhaps Louis is not just shy. But then he says, "Oui," dismissing it. "Good."
How does this work. Lestat just holds out his hands for the laptop to be delivered to him.
No interruptions, while he decides. Daniel would want a head's up if he were in the same position, and he wouldn't want commentary.
(A brief derail of thought, the last time he saw his oldest girl, sitting across her kitchen table and watching her expression twist as he explained his diagnosis. Do you want me to feel sorry for you after all this time? She was so angry with him, spitting venom. Deserved.)
Good, Lestat says, and Daniel gives an 'mm' of acknowledgement. Here we go, then—
Always awkward. There are robots singing Happy Birthday on Mars but there's not a suave way to share a laptop screen in person. He gets up and shuffles over to crouch beside Lestat's seat, letting him hold it, poking in one finger to indicate how to swap to the next image.
"He turned the kitchen of their flat into a dark room. You can tell even with these, where he's not using the camera perfectly— that eye of his. The photos are developed perfectly."
Lestat's expression doesn't change when he snares on that thought. There have been little moments here and there, the other person on Daniel's phone account, and so Lestat is not ignorant to Daniel having mortal family left. Of course, Louis had his troublesome mother that reminded Lestat of his troublesome father, and a matter of siblings—
Children, though. Isn't that such a different thing? A daughter's anger. Familiar. Deserved.
It has not been such a long time since Lestat thought about it, about Claudia, and he can receive the laptop with about as much grace as the device allows instead of fumbling over the pang he feels beneath his breast. It is balanced on his knees and it becomes immediately evident he has never touched one of these things in his life.
But he can learn to do this one thing once it's demonstrated, keeping nails in check against the touchpad. "I don't know much about photography," murmured, a confession, but Lestat isn't here to appraise them, or judge them. Just look. And they're striking.
A streetlamp on old brickwork, and the reflection of its glow mingling in tree leaves. Lestat does not zoom through the pictures, lingering. Pointing out something he recognises, some street or building, unconsciously welcoming Daniel's participation rather than attempting to curl up with the images on his own. Then, humans, men, and Lestat grins, tilting his head as he admires the work.
"You can tell he found them beautiful."
He should get a medal for not getting jealous about mortals from eighty years ago, he thinks.
Daniel is a better journalist than he is a father. Here, his fascination with the world and people plays out as he lets Lestat talk about every detail, asks small questions to prompt more if he feels like talking. Here is the journalist, paying very close attention in a genuine way to the feedback of a man who was alive when these were taken, who is a part of the hidden-away subculture of vampires, who knows the artist personally.
Daniel is also a better journalist than he is a friend, but he'd like to think he's getting better.
(Helps that he actually has a fucking friend, now.)
"That must be a universal trait of artists," he reflects, thinking about Louis and his graciousness in between all the times when they made each other pointedly uncomfortable. "They think everything's beautiful. Which has to be incredible. The whole world exists for artists to interpret, and comment, and capture."
Oops, virus scan notif. No threats found. Daniel pokes it away via touchpad.
Virus scan notif. >8| Lestat's hands come up, curling together as Daniel takes care of this thing, and then back to perusal.
"You see this one," he says. Here, a young man bending to speak into another's ear, the surprise of whatever is said on the face of the other. "Nothing staged in it. When we took our portraits in New Orleans, you had to stay sitting for several moments or else it would be ruined. Everything just so. But these photos are the things you see and notice when you are in love, always moving and momentary."
In love with Paris, with humanity, with cute boys, why not. Lestat is, clearly, not shy about sentiment at all. He pivots a look at Daniel, a thin twist of a smile. "Perhaps that is why you rendered Louis so well in your own pages, hm?"
Lestat's openness about feeling is parts refreshing and parts scalding. It's the childlike aspect, as he reported to Louis, but maybe— is it childlike, or is it just that he isn't a little bitch about being honest about emotions, unlike the Baby Boomer brainrot that has been a part of Daniel's DNA since birth.
"Oh, Louis is definitely hot," he says, firing back at that ploy without hesitation. "But nobody needs a particular eye for that."
Louis is hot. An objective fact. Even Daniel Molloy, a for real straight guy with two kids and two ex-wives, can see it. He's just reporting the news.
"Fiction writers see beauty. They're the artists. Journalists get to go dig up all the skeletons."
An indulgent I see. What a delightful double-act Louis and Daniel might make, demurring their artistic ability. Their sensitivities. Latent homosexual tendencies as younger men, probably. Lestat sees all. "Then we shall call your book a beautiful danse macabre. Like the bit about me fucking your maker in a theatre box while my heartbroken ex-lover gazed on from the orchestra pit," a slow sweep of his hand to indicate the dramatic tableau. "Such delightful fictions in your journalism."
All credit to Daniel, who'd made sure about indicating the particularly uncorroborated hearsay while providing certain contextual elements. He is a good journalist or whatever. Appropriately, Lestat's tone is not the bristling aggression it could be, but light and dry, acerbic humour like flames licking off the edges.
Back to the photographs. Daniel is probably permitted a word in edgewise before it flips to a smiling Claudia, the backdrop that of a Parisian wine bar, blur and light, and Lestat's hand lifts off the touchpad, a slight flinch.
Weird and sad, and a liar. Given developments three chapters from now, a line in the back half of the book reads, concerning details conveyed to him by the vampire Armand, his word is somewhat difficult to commit belief to. No need to read ahead, just put a mental pin in there to hold yourself up from being swept away by the haunting seduction of his narrative.
But who doesn't want to include fucking in theater boxes? Come on.
Just a faintly amused hm for all of that, and then there's Claudia. Lestat's hesitation makes Daniel glad he gave him a warning. He knows they had photographs of her before, and he knows she doesn't age, but he also knows the last time Lestat saw her in the flesh was one of the worst things he's ever had to hear about.
"Louis asked me not to put any of her in. But I think he did excellent with these, too."
His Claudia, delicately dabbing the tip of her pen in his neck wound. His Claudia, one final look of defiance, of which there was none in her real final look to him.
Lestat's hands settle on either side of the keyboard as he gazes at this unmoving image that nevertheless shows so much movement. Life. Something stinging, about the happy life she briefly found in Paris without him, and immediately sickening, the guilt, for even thinking it, when Paris so thoroughly tore her to pieces. These feelings are familiar and they come and go as Lestat sits silently with them.
The next picture. Claudia again. He tips his head, then says, "I like that little capelet on her. She had all of Louis' refinement, I remember," towards the end, the adult vampiress trying to claw her way out through styling, body language, language, "but my passion for very expensive things."
Is now the time to say his true critique of the book? The thing neither Daniel nor Louis could, actually, represent, because Lestat wasn't in the room to make his case. Whether it even matters, when the cruel things he said and did, rendered on the page, were true things.
Still, there it is, in his voice, in the slight glossiness to his regard, a wellspring of love that doesn't quite match with the account Daniel was given. But Daniel knows all about fucking up one's daughters despite best intentions to the contrary.
There are things that Louis and Armand told him of Claudia that are in the book; there are things Claudia told him that are in the book. There are things he was told that he left out, feeling that no disclaimer could cover his disbelief. Hard things are there, hard because they are brutal, hard because Daniel kept seeing himself and his own failures in it.
"She's beautiful." Present tense, because they're looking at a photo, it is here, she is here. "Hell of a diarist. Funny, insightful, vicious. I felt like I got to know her a little, which is dangerous for a research project. Skews perspective, getting attached. In the end I figured she was owed a little."
Claudia is the heart of the book. Pared down, the whole thing is an accounting of the world as it fits in with her diaries, her timeline, her grievances and joys.
"I can't imagine reading diaries from either of mine."
In a way, Lestat and Claudia exit the narrative together. A final stinging flourish, a would-be execution for his crime in failing to save her, or so it had seemed to him at the time, and then nothing else—until the rest.
And in all the melodrama of the story that motivates present feeling, Daniel says this thing, and Lestat's sound of reply is very ordinary: relatable. No thank you. Even if reading the book is a mediated version of doing just that, hidden beneath layers of various opacity.
"It wasn't all terrible. Sometimes I was her favourite."
And he would like to think it wasn't just the moments he showed her how to murder people or drive cars, although yes, a lot of that. He made her laugh often, and she he. Sharing in Louis' exasperation when they would trade secret fanged smiles of increasing ferociousness in public, to see who would get caught by him first.
A hell of a diarist. Not liable to let her narrative get bogged down. The next photo is one of light and shadow, a streetcorner lit up. Releasing him, for a moment. It isn't just a deflection when Lestat asks, "Are yours very far from your mind, now?" Curiousity persists.
She was like him, Daniel understands. A viciousness inherited by choice and inspiration— they did not raise her from the cradle, the world had made an imprint on her already. To some degree, she would have had to look at parts of Lestat and resonate with them, want them, on her own. And so he believes that claim without the skepticism he often applies to them.
Makes sense. You love your family, even when you hate them.
Most parents would take the kids out of a house fire before their spouse, though. Daniel has had cause to think of it. Would he save one of the girls, or Alice? What if it was back then? If he had to choose between her and the baby?
Well. Again. A better journalist than a father.
"They don't want much to do with me, so I respect that." Which is not really an answer. Far from his mind. He huffs a sigh. "Sometimes. And sometimes I think of them very often."
There is advice to give, maybe. An awful thing, to watch your child die. Insist yourself on them, before they haunt you forever. He makes a study of Daniel's profile, before looking back to the screen.
Lestat had saved Louis. He had saved Louis and now Claudia's footsteps echo down the stairways when he is alone, or he hears a derisive little sound in moments of second guessing. Worse, sometimes. There is being a shitty father, and then there's barely understanding the assignment until the moment your child looks to you as they perish.
The next photograph is flipped to, and the next, and Lestat realises he isn't really looking at them, and stops.
He lifts the laptop. "I'd like to see the rest another time."
Watching his kids die was his first objection to Louis' offer (which Daniel thought was mocking him, and still struggles with, privately). It is on his mind now and then, an unpleasant weight; he has known peers who've lost children and has seen the way it leaves them changed. It's naive to think that observing a natural death from a distance, happening to people he is estranged from and has been for years already, will pass over him without impact.
But what's he going to do about it? Walk into the sun? Turn his girls into vampires? Ideas so worthless as to barely qualify as laughable, simply nothing. He'll figure out how to endure that when he gets there. He has changed before.
A hum of acknowledgement, and Daniel takes the laptop back. A few taps on the touchpad as he rises, and then he closes the clamshell of it, ready to be tucked away again. It's probably time for him to get a full touch screen, one of those combo ones you can fold in every which direction. Innovation relentlessly forges ahead.
"He should get back into it." Louis, photography. "Do something besides crunch numbers and contemplate panda blood jell-o for a few hours a week."
Lestat's expression is agreeable, and then, a nose wrinkle at the notion of panda blood jell-o. An upgrade from rat? Maybe. Fancy rat.
He is otherwise reaching for his headphones and device as Daniel speaks, fiddling with them both of them to ensure they are pairing properly. He will indulge in something appropriately melancholic and stretch out on the seating, or perhaps start working his way through Daniel's recommendations, and try not to worry about whether his cellphone can receive calls while he is using it for music.
"I am sure he has not given up reading," he says, all the while. A glance up, a gesture with his phone, faint amusement mingled with exasperation. "Except in the situation of your book, apparently."
Because it is easier to tease them about it than actually look at that for any length of time. Back to scrolling his somewhat disorganised playlists.
"He already knows what's in our book," Daniel says gamely, "and he's already heard far worse commentary out of me about it than what was published."
Fourteen days of combat, intrigue, pain, bonding, upheaval, revelation, healing, worsening. Louis is allowed to skip it, just like Daniel is allowed to poke him about it. He thinks they each get it. Louis doesn't feel a need to scorch himself, Daniel feels like he only exists through his work. Balance, or something.
"And he read my other stuff, so I'm not too insulted."
Looked for himself in it. Found it, and couldn't recognize it—
Whatever. Headphones on is the universal sign of That's enough, pal, anyway.
A little lip curl, some unhappy thing about what Louis may or may not know of the book, of how necessary a reading is not—but Lestat's eyes are on his screen and he is choosing not to make it Daniel's problem in this moment. Whatever that problem might be.
Strains of music spill from unworn headphones. Fleetwood Mac.
"Then between he and I, we have your full repertoire," is his finishing flourish. He hasn't read Daniel's other books and will not begin now.
Headphones on. Time to—well, he cannot gaze out the window at this hour, wistful and thoughtful, but he can twist around with his back to the carriage wall and fold in on himself with a rustle of leather, and a heavy sigh out.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Claudia, beautiful vintage cuts. Like stained glass impressions. Interesting, as he opens his laptop.
"I think they're mostly architecture around Paris," he says, "and practice shots." Half to himself as he remembers where they'd be filed under on his remote storage. Taktaktak, some passwords, and he opens the folder. He mouses over them, making sure he can reasonably identify the ones he has here, in case Lestat asks (or, heaven fucking forbid, there's one in here by somebody else and Louis thinks there's some kind of psyop in a few weeks).
Pause. Daniel looks at the screen for a moment, and there are no unspoken clues from his mind.
Then,
"Architecture, portraits of people in their neighborhood, and group photos, which include Claudia."
no subject
And it's transparent in his face, the way it gives him pause. A real and genuine instinct to change his mind, just a moment of that, before Lestat gives a hummed sound of acknowledgement. Yes, of course, Claudia would be, their life together after him, their life together before the end of it all. Why should she not be photographed? Why should he not wish to view them, not that Daniel was asking?
Ridiculous for him to not have anticipated it. There is an additional moment where he thinks: perhaps Louis is not just shy. But then he says, "Oui," dismissing it. "Good."
How does this work. Lestat just holds out his hands for the laptop to be delivered to him.
no subject
(A brief derail of thought, the last time he saw his oldest girl, sitting across her kitchen table and watching her expression twist as he explained his diagnosis. Do you want me to feel sorry for you after all this time? She was so angry with him, spitting venom. Deserved.)
Good, Lestat says, and Daniel gives an 'mm' of acknowledgement. Here we go, then—
Always awkward. There are robots singing Happy Birthday on Mars but there's not a suave way to share a laptop screen in person. He gets up and shuffles over to crouch beside Lestat's seat, letting him hold it, poking in one finger to indicate how to swap to the next image.
"He turned the kitchen of their flat into a dark room. You can tell even with these, where he's not using the camera perfectly— that eye of his. The photos are developed perfectly."
no subject
Children, though. Isn't that such a different thing? A daughter's anger. Familiar. Deserved.
It has not been such a long time since Lestat thought about it, about Claudia, and he can receive the laptop with about as much grace as the device allows instead of fumbling over the pang he feels beneath his breast. It is balanced on his knees and it becomes immediately evident he has never touched one of these things in his life.
But he can learn to do this one thing once it's demonstrated, keeping nails in check against the touchpad. "I don't know much about photography," murmured, a confession, but Lestat isn't here to appraise them, or judge them. Just look. And they're striking.
A streetlamp on old brickwork, and the reflection of its glow mingling in tree leaves. Lestat does not zoom through the pictures, lingering. Pointing out something he recognises, some street or building, unconsciously welcoming Daniel's participation rather than attempting to curl up with the images on his own. Then, humans, men, and Lestat grins, tilting his head as he admires the work.
"You can tell he found them beautiful."
He should get a medal for not getting jealous about mortals from eighty years ago, he thinks.
no subject
Daniel is also a better journalist than he is a friend, but he'd like to think he's getting better.
(Helps that he actually has a fucking friend, now.)
"That must be a universal trait of artists," he reflects, thinking about Louis and his graciousness in between all the times when they made each other pointedly uncomfortable. "They think everything's beautiful. Which has to be incredible. The whole world exists for artists to interpret, and comment, and capture."
Oops, virus scan notif. No threats found. Daniel pokes it away via touchpad.
no subject
"You see this one," he says. Here, a young man bending to speak into another's ear, the surprise of whatever is said on the face of the other. "Nothing staged in it. When we took our portraits in New Orleans, you had to stay sitting for several moments or else it would be ruined. Everything just so. But these photos are the things you see and notice when you are in love, always moving and momentary."
In love with Paris, with humanity, with cute boys, why not. Lestat is, clearly, not shy about sentiment at all. He pivots a look at Daniel, a thin twist of a smile. "Perhaps that is why you rendered Louis so well in your own pages, hm?"
We have fun here.
no subject
"Oh, Louis is definitely hot," he says, firing back at that ploy without hesitation. "But nobody needs a particular eye for that."
Louis is hot. An objective fact. Even Daniel Molloy, a for real straight guy with two kids and two ex-wives, can see it. He's just reporting the news.
"Fiction writers see beauty. They're the artists. Journalists get to go dig up all the skeletons."
no subject
An indulgent I see. What a delightful double-act Louis and Daniel might make, demurring their artistic ability. Their sensitivities. Latent homosexual tendencies as younger men, probably. Lestat sees all. "Then we shall call your book a beautiful danse macabre. Like the bit about me fucking your maker in a theatre box while my heartbroken ex-lover gazed on from the orchestra pit," a slow sweep of his hand to indicate the dramatic tableau. "Such delightful fictions in your journalism."
All credit to Daniel, who'd made sure about indicating the particularly uncorroborated hearsay while providing certain contextual elements. He is a good journalist or whatever. Appropriately, Lestat's tone is not the bristling aggression it could be, but light and dry, acerbic humour like flames licking off the edges.
Back to the photographs. Daniel is probably permitted a word in edgewise before it flips to a smiling Claudia, the backdrop that of a Parisian wine bar, blur and light, and Lestat's hand lifts off the touchpad, a slight flinch.
no subject
But who doesn't want to include fucking in theater boxes? Come on.
Just a faintly amused hm for all of that, and then there's Claudia. Lestat's hesitation makes Daniel glad he gave him a warning. He knows they had photographs of her before, and he knows she doesn't age, but he also knows the last time Lestat saw her in the flesh was one of the worst things he's ever had to hear about.
"Louis asked me not to put any of her in. But I think he did excellent with these, too."
no subject
Lestat's hands settle on either side of the keyboard as he gazes at this unmoving image that nevertheless shows so much movement. Life. Something stinging, about the happy life she briefly found in Paris without him, and immediately sickening, the guilt, for even thinking it, when Paris so thoroughly tore her to pieces. These feelings are familiar and they come and go as Lestat sits silently with them.
The next picture. Claudia again. He tips his head, then says, "I like that little capelet on her. She had all of Louis' refinement, I remember," towards the end, the adult vampiress trying to claw her way out through styling, body language, language, "but my passion for very expensive things."
Is now the time to say his true critique of the book? The thing neither Daniel nor Louis could, actually, represent, because Lestat wasn't in the room to make his case. Whether it even matters, when the cruel things he said and did, rendered on the page, were true things.
Still, there it is, in his voice, in the slight glossiness to his regard, a wellspring of love that doesn't quite match with the account Daniel was given. But Daniel knows all about fucking up one's daughters despite best intentions to the contrary.
no subject
"She's beautiful." Present tense, because they're looking at a photo, it is here, she is here. "Hell of a diarist. Funny, insightful, vicious. I felt like I got to know her a little, which is dangerous for a research project. Skews perspective, getting attached. In the end I figured she was owed a little."
Claudia is the heart of the book. Pared down, the whole thing is an accounting of the world as it fits in with her diaries, her timeline, her grievances and joys.
"I can't imagine reading diaries from either of mine."
It would be bad.
no subject
And in all the melodrama of the story that motivates present feeling, Daniel says this thing, and Lestat's sound of reply is very ordinary: relatable. No thank you. Even if reading the book is a mediated version of doing just that, hidden beneath layers of various opacity.
"It wasn't all terrible. Sometimes I was her favourite."
And he would like to think it wasn't just the moments he showed her how to murder people or drive cars, although yes, a lot of that. He made her laugh often, and she he. Sharing in Louis' exasperation when they would trade secret fanged smiles of increasing ferociousness in public, to see who would get caught by him first.
A hell of a diarist. Not liable to let her narrative get bogged down. The next photo is one of light and shadow, a streetcorner lit up. Releasing him, for a moment. It isn't just a deflection when Lestat asks, "Are yours very far from your mind, now?" Curiousity persists.
no subject
Makes sense. You love your family, even when you hate them.
Most parents would take the kids out of a house fire before their spouse, though. Daniel has had cause to think of it. Would he save one of the girls, or Alice? What if it was back then? If he had to choose between her and the baby?
Well. Again. A better journalist than a father.
"They don't want much to do with me, so I respect that." Which is not really an answer. Far from his mind. He huffs a sigh. "Sometimes. And sometimes I think of them very often."
no subject
Lestat had saved Louis. He had saved Louis and now Claudia's footsteps echo down the stairways when he is alone, or he hears a derisive little sound in moments of second guessing. Worse, sometimes. There is being a shitty father, and then there's barely understanding the assignment until the moment your child looks to you as they perish.
The next photograph is flipped to, and the next, and Lestat realises he isn't really looking at them, and stops.
He lifts the laptop. "I'd like to see the rest another time."
no subject
But what's he going to do about it? Walk into the sun? Turn his girls into vampires? Ideas so worthless as to barely qualify as laughable, simply nothing. He'll figure out how to endure that when he gets there. He has changed before.
A hum of acknowledgement, and Daniel takes the laptop back. A few taps on the touchpad as he rises, and then he closes the clamshell of it, ready to be tucked away again. It's probably time for him to get a full touch screen, one of those combo ones you can fold in every which direction. Innovation relentlessly forges ahead.
"He should get back into it." Louis, photography. "Do something besides crunch numbers and contemplate panda blood jell-o for a few hours a week."
Fond, for the record.
no subject
He is otherwise reaching for his headphones and device as Daniel speaks, fiddling with them both of them to ensure they are pairing properly. He will indulge in something appropriately melancholic and stretch out on the seating, or perhaps start working his way through Daniel's recommendations, and try not to worry about whether his cellphone can receive calls while he is using it for music.
"I am sure he has not given up reading," he says, all the while. A glance up, a gesture with his phone, faint amusement mingled with exasperation. "Except in the situation of your book, apparently."
Because it is easier to tease them about it than actually look at that for any length of time. Back to scrolling his somewhat disorganised playlists.
no subject
Fourteen days of combat, intrigue, pain, bonding, upheaval, revelation, healing, worsening. Louis is allowed to skip it, just like Daniel is allowed to poke him about it. He thinks they each get it. Louis doesn't feel a need to scorch himself, Daniel feels like he only exists through his work. Balance, or something.
"And he read my other stuff, so I'm not too insulted."
Looked for himself in it. Found it, and couldn't recognize it—
Whatever. Headphones on is the universal sign of That's enough, pal, anyway.
no subject
Strains of music spill from unworn headphones. Fleetwood Mac.
"Then between he and I, we have your full repertoire," is his finishing flourish. He hasn't read Daniel's other books and will not begin now.
Headphones on. Time to—well, he cannot gaze out the window at this hour, wistful and thoughtful, but he can twist around with his back to the carriage wall and fold in on himself with a rustle of leather, and a heavy sigh out.
Peace.