A familiar thing—Lestat watching Louis move, watching where his hands go, where he chooses to be in the room, where he settles. Transfixing, always, and so, he has Lestat's attention, and keeps it.
He remains in this universe, attuned to the room, as Daniel joins in from his corner, granted a look that drags from Louis at a delay. He still feels insane, like some terrible trick is about to be played on him by two men who have more than demonstrated an interest in maintaining his comfort, but he is well-bundled into the corner of the couch and too curious to do anything but stay there.
Drugs and coffins. The 70s, or something. He was busy at the time. Good music, though.
Lestat doesn't pipe up here, deciding to focus on some amount of getting a grip while Louis answers the question.
Straight forward. As linear a recounting as they can, considering the effort that had gone in to piecing together the horrible string of days they'd lived through together.
"I was hunting then," Louis admits to Lestat. "Your favored prey."
A tangled bit of truth. Prey chosen for a reason, even if Louis hadn't been able to see it at the time.
"Daniel was at one of the bars I frequented with his tape recorder. He offered to interview me, and I agreed."
A tip of his hand to Daniel, inviting: this is more or less how it went, wasn't it?
The missing piece: Armand, demurring. Louis holds that in his hand, uncertain where to place it.
More or less. He opts to mention the absent monster as it will become relevant in short order, though this, too, creates an order fumble for Daniel. Surely Louis always remembered him at the bar, but Daniel did not; for fifty years, just Louis, then Louis and 'Rashid', dark eyes covered by lenses his mind put there because it couldn't remember the real man, then Louis and Armand, the truth of it.
"His then-partner checked in before we got in the cab." Forging ahead with the tale. "It was behavior I was used to seeing out of gay hookup culture, so I didn't think anything of it. I had plenty of experience already with doing whatever was asked of me to get high."
A writer. He can foreshadow.
"And Louis asked about my work, wanted to be interviewed, engaged with a weird loser about the gigantic tape recorder he was lugging around."
Daniel shrugs, spreads his hands. Hook line and sinker, a very charming cute guy while Daniel was pretending he wasn't queer and was only doing it for drugs, he got into the taxi, they went to his crash pad. This is rough, but there's an element of pleasant nostalgia to it, too. He meant it, what he'd said when they spoke not too long ago, sitting and chatting across the planet. I liked it.
"And then, yeah. Your creepy hitman safe house and your sex coffin and your backgammon board full of quaaludes and coke. I was invested. Extremely cranked and on another planet in an easy ten minutes, but invested."
Relaxes enough that Lestat can detangle himself from the defensive curl he had begun, listing back to retrieve cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Rattles the pack, not so many left, selects one, lights up by way of ancient vampire magic and then leans to toss the pack onto the table. In case anyone is interested.
Smoke trails thick from mouth to cigarette as he catches it between his fingers, swoops it aside.
"Did you know he was a vampire," he asks of Daniel, "or did the sex coffin tip you off?"
Cigarettes were discarded long ago. Pared away along with the rest of Louis' many vices, it has been an age since he indulged.
Maybe, if they were discussing something else, he would have demurred. But this is fraught. Louis would like to pretend it js only difficult for Lestat to hear.
And so he accepts the silent offer, draws a cigarette out of the pack. Treads over to the sofa to solicit Lestat's indulgence as he relays with sly amusement:
"He didn't believe me, until I demonstrated. And even then, I think he had his doubts."
A slow burn (hah) for Daniel; he will accumulate it secondhand until he breaks down. Which he surely will— slowly adopting vices back into himself now that he has fewer reasons to have quit them. If only he'd reformed his life because of a change of heart and strong moral fiber, and not because he didn't want to die in a flop house.
"Mmhm." Oh, the adventures we had, in an apartment with a slant to the north. "Pretty sure I asked you if you were the Zodiac Killer, and then to show me your fangs again, which I thought were super fucking cool. No idea if I thought it was real or not. Nothing's real when you're that high, and you kept giving me more."
And a junkie has no manners. Daniel did not give a single fuck that Louis wasn't indulging and that he as wasting thousands of dollars worth of product and was, apparently, not even going to ask Daniel to blow him (disappointed at the time in a way he still doesn't like looking too closely at, but they're not here to talk about Daniel's closet space). All too happy to consume, more, more, more.
"For hours. Louis talked, and told me about his life as a vampire, and I just kept doing lines and drinking. Until the reality of picking up a weird loser with a tape recorder hit, and I really, really pissed him off."
Pleasing, Louis' approach, Lestat drawing a breath from his cigarette to coax the embers hotter before he offers it out with a graceful turn of his hand, a fond tip to his head.
This does all feel like it's going somewhere, and not just, and then they fucked around and Louis bid him adieu. How does that become a reunion, fifty years in the future? With the premise of vampirism on the table? How does Daniel live through it, when it sounds a little like he should not have? These questions and more, sure to be answered, but before they continue—
"Your book implied it," Lestat says, looking to Daniel. "That it was a second interview. This is the first, then. Do you have your recordings still?"
Bros before exposing each other being the most cringe—
"Nope." A shrug. "I chucked the tapes into a bin and Louis let it on fire, it was very spooky. A peace offering, starting over."
He doesn't even have to lie. The high quality re-recordings were done by Talamasca, from piecing together their shoddy 1970s surveillance footage and, apparently, having broken into his home in the 90s and made copies while he was in Ireland on research.
But his recordings are gone, and Louis is spared having to reveal he spent about six hours screaming about Lestat being the worse, and Daniel is spared the whole 'turn me uwu' thing. Bad. Horrible.
"Très dramatique," as if the current state of his French accent isn't clinging to his voice for dear life. At least the New Orleans verve that remains is accommodating to it.
Lestat takes a breath at sideways, and looks to Louis. The man who, in that room, would have had all the power. Would have the final decision of what the night would look like. No matter how compelling or clever a human is, this is simply the truth of the thing. A prey animal living at the discretion of the lion.
Doesn't harp on about lost media, just looks to him. Encouraging.
Exhaling a plume of smoke, Louis looks back to Daniel.
He has gone very still. Even in motion, returning to his seat. Poise that suggests an absence of movement. Of tightly held control.
Or of an absence entirely. A few decades evolved from New Orleans, cultivated by long years at Armand's side.
"I tried to drain him," Louis says. "I almost killed him. Armand intervened."
Daniel cannot help with this recitation. Louis' eyes leave him, move to Lestat.
"He and I argued. I drew blood," metaphorically speaking, "And he responded in kind."
A pause. Cigarette turning in Louis' fingers, his eyes falling to study the ember. He has had time to consider this truth, knowing how it will pain Lestat to hear it again.
"I left the apartment," one door slamming. "I ran to the rooftop." A second door slamming. "I walked into the sun."
A pause. Louis says nothing. Remembering? Composing himself?
It's not a shift for those sharing the story, but perhaps for the listener; nervous laughter and sad nostalgic smiles are not covering up an illicit affair. Surprise. Louis picked him up in early September, when the first week became the second, in 1973.
Door opens. Slams. Steps. Metal door. Daniel blinks away something, a feeling, and he watches Louis with concern and pain creased into his face, made all the more obvious with the rigors of mortal aging.
He worries more about Louis than himself. He's told Lestat so, a few times by now.
"I wasn't lucid or really awake for most of it," he murmurs. "I was high and then Louis was high, from me. And then he was gone."
Gone because Armand ripped Louis off of him. Gone because he fled upstairs. Door opens. Slams. Footsteps. Scream. Getting a boy from a bar loaded, so he could simulate company, and then enjoy a bloody, intoxicated kill. Of course it was going to blow up in his face eventually. Daniel happened to win the lottery, and it blew up while he was there.
"Armand pulled him back inside." Still quiet, carefully recounting. "I don't know how much either of us remember that with any precision, I think we.. came back around at different times. Sometimes I—" he pauses and then shakes his head. "I don't know if they're real memories, or dreams. Just fragments."
Anyway.
"Then the three of us, in the apartment, for a week."
The date, scored into his consciousness. Clinging to it for another fifty years. Time progressing, slipping further away, threatening to, but Lestat, stubborn, claws in, repeating it to himself in the dark so that he wouldn't forget it while other memories slip, slide around, fade. September 8th, 1973, 11:07 a.m. in New Orleans, 9: 07 in San Francisco. Louis was in a dark way so he walked into the sun.
It's cold, the tide of understanding. Numbing, first. Barely feeling the cigarette between his fingers, barely conscious of the lavish room they are in. The wind, slamming the shutters of his hovel, the muffled sirens as the storm kicks up. Or, maybe, just the sound of an elevator moving through hotel levels, just the sirens in a city.
Lestat finds that the breaths he is pulling in are a little deeper and faster than before, and stems it by bringing his cigarette to his mouth. The smoke escaping him, fluttering. Eyes, watery.
"A week?" he repeats. Close to childish in tone, this confusion.
Daniel looks back at him, plain emotion there. A tiny shake of his head, and no one needs telepathy to understand: people argue all the time. Couples, even. Louis didn't hurt him bad enough to warrant what happened. Being hurt isn't an excuse, and it wasn't Louis' fault.
Nervous energy slips free from calm into him. Here's where it goes sideways, and here's where his memory comes 'back', but stays screwy. Daniel pushes himself to his feet to pick up a cigarette, which he lights himself. (Apart. He and Louis have their friendship, but Daniel is still closed off, in his way. Would he even accept open comfort, about this? He doesn't know.)
Quiet for some time.
"Armand saved me," Daniel begins again, eventually. Smoke in the room, different from then. "And Armand saved Louis. Then he made us pay for it."
A nearly-drained mortal who could have been dropped off at an emergency room, who wouldn't have remembered anything, or been believed if he did. A vampire in his prime who could have been fed and enclosed and recovered overnight. But Armand facilitated neither of those things, and so they stayed there, just like that. For fucking days.
"I remember him talking to me and going through my head. I remember hearing you in the other room. Dead neighbor on the floor. The TV. Breaking my nose on the edge of the front door when I fell. And that thing we couldn't figure out—"
A hitch in attention, and Daniel looks back to Lestat for the first time since what feels like hours ago, though it's only been a few minutes.
Daniel finds Lestat watching him, listening, eyes large and glittering with unshed dilute red. Just a moment, before his focus veers back to Louis.
Something more outward about this display of emotion than the inward curling up of upset that invites focus. Someone he loves was tortured for a week and, plainly, this is upsetting, no matter if it was yesterday, fifty years ago, one hundred, and the crumbling in Lestat's expression is more of a show of restraint than a loss of control, jaw locked to keep himself silent as it happens.
I gave you to Armand, a faint memory of his own words. The strange and familiar blast radius. Nicki. Claudia. Daniel Molloy.
He doesn't say anything, doesn't pay attention when unsmoked cigarette ash litters to the floor beside him. Listening.
"I thought it was a movie, or a commercial. I couldn't process why he'd be standing behind me talking to himself. 'No. I won't tell you where. Just listen.'"
No concept at the time of what the fuck Armand might be doing. Even if one accepts the existence of monsters, it'll a bigger leap to assume said monster might be mentally phoning someone hundreds of miles away. Even in Dubai he struggled to fully understand the scope of what vampires - or just one very old, very powerful vampire - could have been doing.
It wasn't enough for Armand to just screw with who he had captive, he had to drag Lestat into it, too.
He puts his cigarette down.
Apart. Not always. Bad at this shit but trying. He'd cried, sitting there on the floor of their sparse atrium, reading back his own book with Louis' words attributed to someone else, that even Louis couldn't find as his own when he first read it. He feels the threat of it again now. Soft footsteps; Daniel crouches down in front of Louis where he's seated, looks at him.
"You had a bad argument in a shitty relationship. That's not a transgression. You didn't put us there, Louis. You didn't. Armand chose."
Tears spill, Lestat nodding. Yes, those words, he remembers those words.
An impulse to speak moves a breath inside his lungs, comes and goes as Daniel moves. In a moment, perhaps, or perhaps never (unlikely). Daniel kneels before Louis to offer him words of comfort and Lestat can take this moment of distraction to allow self-pity to lash tight through him, head bowing.
Palms away red streaks, memory fritzing in and out. In a daze in his coffin beneath the floorboards, Armand's voice dragging him by the scruff from vampiric slumber. Is there anything worth telling? He fritzes back from it, looks to the other two men.
Armand chose. It might be a clarifying thing to feel anger, when this is done.
Louis holds his face in his hands so gently, and Daniel feels his vision blur. Pinkish. He's never experienced it before. A gentle touch that he trusts despite the scar on his neck, despite the invasions into his head, and everything else. Talamasca wants him to be more afraid of Louis than Armand, but he sits here, and only thinks of how fucking grateful he is that he met him.
"How far back are we going to go with it? I could have told you no at the bar."
He shrugs, light, one hand pressed over one of Louis', bracing. Watery-sounding.
"If the price for you being pulled back inside out of the sun was all of that bullshit, then I'm alright with it. I'm happy about it. I will take us, right here, all of us, over it going worse with somebody else."
Not unfamiliar, the strange icy plunge Lestat feels he has taken. The way it feels like he is drifting in it.
If he could vanish, it might be the thing he chooses to do. Go somewhere else, try to fix this sense of dislocation, soul slipped wrong in his ribcage—coward behaviour, admittedly. Louis looks to him and he looks back, unsure what his own expression is doing (tear-streaked, clearly, more open and receptive than he realises, some begging quality to it though he would not know what he is asking for, exactly) and he stays and listens. No choice there.
A breath in. Reaches out, likewise ashes his cigarette as it burns itself right down.
"I told him," he says, lifting his gaze once more, "to tell you I love you. I didn't know what was happening, Louis. But in the end, that's all I wanted you to know."
In the desperate hope it might save him. As it saved him in the church one night, and then never again.
A long moment holding Lestat's gaze. Understanding the pleading note in his face, the pain of what he is recounting.
How he too, was harmed as Armand sought his retribution.
"He didn't tell me that part of your message," but then, admitting: "I couldn't bring myself to answer what he did pass on."
And then bends to kiss Daniel's forehead.
"It's not a price you should have had to pay. I'm sorry you did."
Not the first time Louis has apologized. But the first time for this series of events. For what happened to Daniel in that room after Armand slammed the door.
The gesture is unexpected, but aching— sometimes (still, because this is all crazy), he forgets how much older Louis is, how Daniel is still a kid compared to ancient monsters. He feels continued relief that Louis is here, he feels awful about him being so fucked up about it, he feels sorry for Lestat, it's all a mess, and he surprises himself with the intensity of it.
That week rewired so much of him. The experience itself turning reality inside out, then Louis (the voice of God), then Armand (surgery on his fucking brain). A different person, but Louis still treats him the same. Like he's somebody worth being around. Maybe he'll never fully get that part. Just some junkie. But maybe a different junkie wouldn't have survived, and Louis would still be living with Armand right now, and fuck that.
"I know you are. I'm choosing to forgive you. I did, as soon as we knew. Maybe as soon as I got to Dubai and realized you were a real person, I don't know. But that's what I'm choosing. I should have said so out loud sooner."
A twist to his mouth at what Louis says to him: I know.
Lestat knew very well the limits of Armand's generousity, which was not generousity at all. Maybe it can give him a kind of bleak pleasure now, to have forced Armand to fumble over what Lestat had wanted to give, when afforded the chance. Of trying to use him as a weapon, and his own resistance.
And Lestat can say it now. Has already said it now. Will say it a hundred more times, a thousand, infinite amounts.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
He remains in this universe, attuned to the room, as Daniel joins in from his corner, granted a look that drags from Louis at a delay. He still feels insane, like some terrible trick is about to be played on him by two men who have more than demonstrated an interest in maintaining his comfort, but he is well-bundled into the corner of the couch and too curious to do anything but stay there.
Drugs and coffins. The 70s, or something. He was busy at the time. Good music, though.
Lestat doesn't pipe up here, deciding to focus on some amount of getting a grip while Louis answers the question.
no subject
Straight forward. As linear a recounting as they can, considering the effort that had gone in to piecing together the horrible string of days they'd lived through together.
"I was hunting then," Louis admits to Lestat. "Your favored prey."
A tangled bit of truth. Prey chosen for a reason, even if Louis hadn't been able to see it at the time.
"Daniel was at one of the bars I frequented with his tape recorder. He offered to interview me, and I agreed."
A tip of his hand to Daniel, inviting: this is more or less how it went, wasn't it?
The missing piece: Armand, demurring. Louis holds that in his hand, uncertain where to place it.
no subject
More or less. He opts to mention the absent monster as it will become relevant in short order, though this, too, creates an order fumble for Daniel. Surely Louis always remembered him at the bar, but Daniel did not; for fifty years, just Louis, then Louis and 'Rashid', dark eyes covered by lenses his mind put there because it couldn't remember the real man, then Louis and Armand, the truth of it.
"His then-partner checked in before we got in the cab." Forging ahead with the tale. "It was behavior I was used to seeing out of gay hookup culture, so I didn't think anything of it. I had plenty of experience already with doing whatever was asked of me to get high."
A writer. He can foreshadow.
"And Louis asked about my work, wanted to be interviewed, engaged with a weird loser about the gigantic tape recorder he was lugging around."
Daniel shrugs, spreads his hands. Hook line and sinker, a very charming cute guy while Daniel was pretending he wasn't queer and was only doing it for drugs, he got into the taxi, they went to his crash pad. This is rough, but there's an element of pleasant nostalgia to it, too. He meant it, what he'd said when they spoke not too long ago, sitting and chatting across the planet. I liked it.
"And then, yeah. Your creepy hitman safe house and your sex coffin and your backgammon board full of quaaludes and coke. I was invested. Extremely cranked and on another planet in an easy ten minutes, but invested."
no subject
Relaxes enough that Lestat can detangle himself from the defensive curl he had begun, listing back to retrieve cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Rattles the pack, not so many left, selects one, lights up by way of ancient vampire magic and then leans to toss the pack onto the table. In case anyone is interested.
Smoke trails thick from mouth to cigarette as he catches it between his fingers, swoops it aside.
"Did you know he was a vampire," he asks of Daniel, "or did the sex coffin tip you off?"
no subject
Maybe, if they were discussing something else, he would have demurred. But this is fraught. Louis would like to pretend it js only difficult for Lestat to hear.
And so he accepts the silent offer, draws a cigarette out of the pack. Treads over to the sofa to solicit Lestat's indulgence as he relays with sly amusement:
"He didn't believe me, until I demonstrated. And even then, I think he had his doubts."
no subject
"Mmhm." Oh, the adventures we had, in an apartment with a slant to the north. "Pretty sure I asked you if you were the Zodiac Killer, and then to show me your fangs again, which I thought were super fucking cool. No idea if I thought it was real or not. Nothing's real when you're that high, and you kept giving me more."
And a junkie has no manners. Daniel did not give a single fuck that Louis wasn't indulging and that he as wasting thousands of dollars worth of product and was, apparently, not even going to ask Daniel to blow him (disappointed at the time in a way he still doesn't like looking too closely at, but they're not here to talk about Daniel's closet space). All too happy to consume, more, more, more.
"For hours. Louis talked, and told me about his life as a vampire, and I just kept doing lines and drinking. Until the reality of picking up a weird loser with a tape recorder hit, and I really, really pissed him off."
no subject
This does all feel like it's going somewhere, and not just, and then they fucked around and Louis bid him adieu. How does that become a reunion, fifty years in the future? With the premise of vampirism on the table? How does Daniel live through it, when it sounds a little like he should not have? These questions and more, sure to be answered, but before they continue—
"Your book implied it," Lestat says, looking to Daniel. "That it was a second interview. This is the first, then. Do you have your recordings still?"
no subject
Do they have the recordings still?
no subject
"Nope." A shrug. "I chucked the tapes into a bin and Louis let it on fire, it was very spooky. A peace offering, starting over."
He doesn't even have to lie. The high quality re-recordings were done by Talamasca, from piecing together their shoddy 1970s surveillance footage and, apparently, having broken into his home in the 90s and made copies while he was in Ireland on research.
But his recordings are gone, and Louis is spared having to reveal he spent about six hours screaming about Lestat being the worse, and Daniel is spared the whole 'turn me uwu' thing. Bad. Horrible.
He takes a breath, and lets it out.
"Here's where it goes sideways."
no subject
Lestat takes a breath at sideways, and looks to Louis. The man who, in that room, would have had all the power. Would have the final decision of what the night would look like. No matter how compelling or clever a human is, this is simply the truth of the thing. A prey animal living at the discretion of the lion.
Doesn't harp on about lost media, just looks to him. Encouraging.
no subject
He has gone very still. Even in motion, returning to his seat. Poise that suggests an absence of movement. Of tightly held control.
Or of an absence entirely. A few decades evolved from New Orleans, cultivated by long years at Armand's side.
"I tried to drain him," Louis says. "I almost killed him. Armand intervened."
Daniel cannot help with this recitation. Louis' eyes leave him, move to Lestat.
"He and I argued. I drew blood," metaphorically speaking, "And he responded in kind."
A pause. Cigarette turning in Louis' fingers, his eyes falling to study the ember. He has had time to consider this truth, knowing how it will pain Lestat to hear it again.
"I left the apartment," one door slamming. "I ran to the rooftop." A second door slamming. "I walked into the sun."
A pause. Louis says nothing. Remembering? Composing himself?
Either way, it stretches out the quiet.
no subject
Door opens. Slams. Steps. Metal door. Daniel blinks away something, a feeling, and he watches Louis with concern and pain creased into his face, made all the more obvious with the rigors of mortal aging.
He worries more about Louis than himself. He's told Lestat so, a few times by now.
"I wasn't lucid or really awake for most of it," he murmurs. "I was high and then Louis was high, from me. And then he was gone."
Gone because Armand ripped Louis off of him. Gone because he fled upstairs. Door opens. Slams. Footsteps. Scream. Getting a boy from a bar loaded, so he could simulate company, and then enjoy a bloody, intoxicated kill. Of course it was going to blow up in his face eventually. Daniel happened to win the lottery, and it blew up while he was there.
"Armand pulled him back inside." Still quiet, carefully recounting. "I don't know how much either of us remember that with any precision, I think we.. came back around at different times. Sometimes I—" he pauses and then shakes his head. "I don't know if they're real memories, or dreams. Just fragments."
Anyway.
"Then the three of us, in the apartment, for a week."
no subject
The date, scored into his consciousness. Clinging to it for another fifty years. Time progressing, slipping further away, threatening to, but Lestat, stubborn, claws in, repeating it to himself in the dark so that he wouldn't forget it while other memories slip, slide around, fade. September 8th, 1973, 11:07 a.m. in New Orleans, 9: 07 in San Francisco. Louis was in a dark way so he walked into the sun.
It's cold, the tide of understanding. Numbing, first. Barely feeling the cigarette between his fingers, barely conscious of the lavish room they are in. The wind, slamming the shutters of his hovel, the muffled sirens as the storm kicks up. Or, maybe, just the sound of an elevator moving through hotel levels, just the sirens in a city.
Lestat finds that the breaths he is pulling in are a little deeper and faster than before, and stems it by bringing his cigarette to his mouth. The smoke escaping him, fluttering. Eyes, watery.
"A week?" he repeats. Close to childish in tone, this confusion.
no subject
Ash, swirling around Louis. Flaking off him in great chunks, dusting the hardwood floor, sticking to the sheets of the bed.
Louis watches the scattering of gray flakes as Daniel speaks. Fills in the space Louis left behind.
"I'd hurt him," Louis repeats. The emotion behind it is complicated, even if his voice is perfectly modulated.
Looking at his cigarette. Lifting his eyes to Daniel.
"Armand kept Daniel to complete our argument, as I was too fragile to continue."
Does this account for a week? A week, when a vampire closed into a coffin should heal in the course of a day?
no subject
Nervous energy slips free from calm into him. Here's where it goes sideways, and here's where his memory comes 'back', but stays screwy. Daniel pushes himself to his feet to pick up a cigarette, which he lights himself. (Apart. He and Louis have their friendship, but Daniel is still closed off, in his way. Would he even accept open comfort, about this? He doesn't know.)
Quiet for some time.
"Armand saved me," Daniel begins again, eventually. Smoke in the room, different from then. "And Armand saved Louis. Then he made us pay for it."
A nearly-drained mortal who could have been dropped off at an emergency room, who wouldn't have remembered anything, or been believed if he did. A vampire in his prime who could have been fed and enclosed and recovered overnight. But Armand facilitated neither of those things, and so they stayed there, just like that. For fucking days.
"I remember him talking to me and going through my head. I remember hearing you in the other room. Dead neighbor on the floor. The TV. Breaking my nose on the edge of the front door when I fell. And that thing we couldn't figure out—"
A hitch in attention, and Daniel looks back to Lestat for the first time since what feels like hours ago, though it's only been a few minutes.
no subject
Something more outward about this display of emotion than the inward curling up of upset that invites focus. Someone he loves was tortured for a week and, plainly, this is upsetting, no matter if it was yesterday, fifty years ago, one hundred, and the crumbling in Lestat's expression is more of a show of restraint than a loss of control, jaw locked to keep himself silent as it happens.
I gave you to Armand, a faint memory of his own words. The strange and familiar blast radius. Nicki. Claudia. Daniel Molloy.
He doesn't say anything, doesn't pay attention when unsmoked cigarette ash litters to the floor beside him. Listening.
no subject
Louis stubs out his cigarette on the table, a smear of ash across polished wood.
"I was too weak to stop him while he punished Daniel for my transgressions."
Lestat's name in his mouth. Daniel's praises on his lips. And the accusations that had followed—
"He finally put me into my coffin. And fed me from his own wrist."
Louis' eyes far away, absent from this room as he says, "Daniel was still in the next room when he brought your voice to me, Lestat."
no subject
No concept at the time of what the fuck Armand might be doing. Even if one accepts the existence of monsters, it'll a bigger leap to assume said monster might be mentally phoning someone hundreds of miles away. Even in Dubai he struggled to fully understand the scope of what vampires - or just one very old, very powerful vampire - could have been doing.
It wasn't enough for Armand to just screw with who he had captive, he had to drag Lestat into it, too.
He puts his cigarette down.
Apart. Not always. Bad at this shit but trying. He'd cried, sitting there on the floor of their sparse atrium, reading back his own book with Louis' words attributed to someone else, that even Louis couldn't find as his own when he first read it. He feels the threat of it again now. Soft footsteps; Daniel crouches down in front of Louis where he's seated, looks at him.
"You had a bad argument in a shitty relationship. That's not a transgression. You didn't put us there, Louis. You didn't. Armand chose."
no subject
An impulse to speak moves a breath inside his lungs, comes and goes as Daniel moves. In a moment, perhaps, or perhaps never (unlikely). Daniel kneels before Louis to offer him words of comfort and Lestat can take this moment of distraction to allow self-pity to lash tight through him, head bowing.
Palms away red streaks, memory fritzing in and out. In a daze in his coffin beneath the floorboards, Armand's voice dragging him by the scruff from vampiric slumber. Is there anything worth telling? He fritzes back from it, looks to the other two men.
Armand chose. It might be a clarifying thing to feel anger, when this is done.
no subject
But Daniel isn't mortal, not anymore.
Louis bears some responsibility for that too, but they are discussing something else.
Louis reaches down to cup Daniel's face in his hands. The fascinating boy. Revelation. Louis had been waiting for him, even if he had never known it.
"I chose you."
Looking into Daniel's face. You've grown old, Louis had greeted him. He'd been so pleased.
"I brought you there. I put you in his path."
As if Armand was the only terror in that apartment. Louis had nearly killed him. Is he absolved, because he didn't take a weak to work up to it?
"You," he murmurs. "And you," eyes lifting to Lestat. "Were the instruments he chose when he could not argue with me directly."
Collateral. The byproduct of Louis, punching above his weight.
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"How far back are we going to go with it? I could have told you no at the bar."
He shrugs, light, one hand pressed over one of Louis', bracing. Watery-sounding.
"If the price for you being pulled back inside out of the sun was all of that bullshit, then I'm alright with it. I'm happy about it. I will take us, right here, all of us, over it going worse with somebody else."
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If he could vanish, it might be the thing he chooses to do. Go somewhere else, try to fix this sense of dislocation, soul slipped wrong in his ribcage—coward behaviour, admittedly. Louis looks to him and he looks back, unsure what his own expression is doing (tear-streaked, clearly, more open and receptive than he realises, some begging quality to it though he would not know what he is asking for, exactly) and he stays and listens. No choice there.
A breath in. Reaches out, likewise ashes his cigarette as it burns itself right down.
"I told him," he says, lifting his gaze once more, "to tell you I love you. I didn't know what was happening, Louis. But in the end, that's all I wanted you to know."
In the desperate hope it might save him. As it saved him in the church one night, and then never again.
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How he too, was harmed as Armand sought his retribution.
"He didn't tell me that part of your message," but then, admitting: "I couldn't bring myself to answer what he did pass on."
And then bends to kiss Daniel's forehead.
"It's not a price you should have had to pay. I'm sorry you did."
Not the first time Louis has apologized. But the first time for this series of events. For what happened to Daniel in that room after Armand slammed the door.
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That week rewired so much of him. The experience itself turning reality inside out, then Louis (the voice of God), then Armand (surgery on his fucking brain). A different person, but Louis still treats him the same. Like he's somebody worth being around. Maybe he'll never fully get that part. Just some junkie. But maybe a different junkie wouldn't have survived, and Louis would still be living with Armand right now, and fuck that.
"I know you are. I'm choosing to forgive you. I did, as soon as we knew. Maybe as soon as I got to Dubai and realized you were a real person, I don't know. But that's what I'm choosing. I should have said so out loud sooner."
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Lestat knew very well the limits of Armand's generousity, which was not generousity at all. Maybe it can give him a kind of bleak pleasure now, to have forced Armand to fumble over what Lestat had wanted to give, when afforded the chance. Of trying to use him as a weapon, and his own resistance.
And Lestat can say it now. Has already said it now. Will say it a hundred more times, a thousand, infinite amounts.
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