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.
It is difficult to bear. He'd put Daniel in harm's way, not once, but twice. To say nothing of Lestat, banished. Exiled.
"No," softly. It stands on its own a moment, a gentle deflection, before Louis stitches further words to it: "This is the right time. Still too generous, by half, but better said now than before."
Far from Dubai, no possibility of the words being twisted beyond Daniel's meaning.
Louis is still holding Daniel's face, expression remote, as he plucks up the scattered threads of their shared recitation, the history they pieced together, to take them from that moment to the next.
"Armand closed me into my coffin," as his eyes lift to Lestat. "After he'd finished with you."
Rest, he'd said. Louis remembers this, except—
"But he left the door open when he left the room. I could hear him, as he went to attend to Daniel. And I had the strength then, after he'd given me his blood, to intervene. Ensure that Daniel lived."
"He was trying to get me to agree to die." Seductive and whispering and lovely, a beautiful, horrible creature luring him to the edge, but Daniel did not want to be lured. He could see Armand, and no amount of hypnotism was going to work. "You said, later, the way you described his hunting to me— that it was never violent. But it felt violent, then, even with how quiet he was. I wouldn't agree to it out loud, so he did something and I put my head down anyway, and I couldn't do anything but comply."
He was exhausted by then. Drained and battered and without food or water for at least a few days, badly hungover on top of everything else. Not enough energy to fight against full control, but nothing was ever going to make him want to die.
"And then you were back. I wasn't afraid of you. It was a relief to see you, even with you in that state, even after you attacked me. You were the guy who was charming at the bar, still. The last familiar thing before the world got put on its head."
He could go to the balcony and focus, as he has tried to do in the past, and pinpoint Armand's elusive presence in the world. He is fifty years stronger now, and has been drinking human blood for the past few months—Lestat is certain he could do it, without drawing Armand's focus. The curse of their kind, their steady growing powers, the removal of their humanity.
That said, Lestat feels fairly human in this moment, full of petty feeling distracting him from the bigger ones. Sick with petty feeling. You'd think a century would change some habits.
He listens to Daniel speak to Louis, the story unfolding. They are remembering together, this profound and horrible thing. Before the world got put on its head, and he feels some anxious thing grab at him beneath his ribcage. The certainty that whatever fragment of knowledge Lestat had received that day, September 8th, 1973, is all that has existed of it for half a century.
It had been agony. Louis remembers how his body had screamed with the pain of it, heavily burned limbs forced into movement.
A detail omitted, along with a handful of others: the newspaper on the windows, enough to hold back the full force of sunlight but not to spare Louis the discomfort of that muted glow. Long days in bed, sheets sticking to open wounds. The sound of Daniel's body thudding over and over onto the floor. The sound of his pleas, cries of pain, through a closed door.
"I convinced him," Louis repeats. "And he allowed Daniel to live, for me."
Say nothing of what Armand felt he was owed. What benevolence he might have felt in that moment, allowing Louis to talk him back from Daniel's throat.
"Armand took precautions to obscure the events of the past week from Daniel's mind," slower, parsing out that fact. The choice of what was left and what was omitted. Looking up at Lestat, uncharacteristically silent. Holding his gaze as his thumb runs back and forth across Daniel's check.
They've been back and forth with this story so far, a tragic chorus — brutal, Daniel knew it would be a rough go, it's hitting him harder than he anticipated — but here, he waits. He had demured about the exact details to Lestat, because he didn't put almost anything about it into their book and he didn't want to expose Louis without asking first. Surely obvious, right now.
And I think a lot of it feels like it happened last month, opposed to last century, sitting on the train, trying to appropriately convey his worry about his friend.
It's one thing to do it to some junkie kid to try and preserve secrecy. It's another to do it to your fucking partner. Daniel says nothing, just lets Louis process it, decide how he wants to say it out loud. If he does at all.
Lestat's greatest fear was that Louis had hurt himself. What that meant. What it could mean, having survived it, and Lestat not there to pull him back. Familiar, that fear, like a ghost from the past gripping his throat in the form of Armand's voice gently slithering into his mind to inform him that Louis has been thinking of Lestat again, and has injured himself. That he is unwell.
Slower, the rest, working its way through him. Processing the idea of a week in lingering torment. Of a man with the kind of blood in his veins that could heal Louis overnight, maybe faster with enough of it spilled, who was supposed to be in love with him, to look after him, and instead letting it happen. Louis, who was hurt so badly that he couldn't help himself, or help Daniel, not until the very end.
He'd asked Daniel if Louis is okay now. The honest uncertainty he was met with, an echo in Daniel's present quiet.
Easier to feel anxious and panicked about Louis' hand laying against Daniel's cheek, but this all sounds like a great big Armand-flavoured detonation in reaction to, what, a fight? Inadequate love? So Lestat shuts his fucking mouth! about that! and will shiver about it some other time, maybe five minutes from now, and reluctantly engages with the odd grief-like feeling that has his next breath come out as a shudder.
Lestat is also fucking furious, which is nice. Maybe Daniel can feel it, a kind of emanating warmth, building as they speak. Louis, in his different, limited way. There are bloodied crescent moons in his palm where his nails dig in.
You're angry, Armand had posited from his seat alongside Louis. You have no right to be. You asked me to do it.
A similar flex of agony, indecision, works across Louis' face as Lestat makes his assertion. Maybe in a few weeks, Louis will find some humor in this, how united Daniel and Lestat are in their responses. Anger. Disdain.
"I asked him to take it away," Louis says, eyes falling to Daniel's face. Wondering if he will find disapproval there. "Armand told me I asked that of him, after. I don't remember if I did or not."
Quiet, but firm. Daniel looks at him without any disapproval or judgement. He gets it, how it'd be easier to believe, to pull something over the wound, to hold onto a scrap of rationalizing in a sea of fucked up, but he just. Didn't.
"I don't need to read anyone's mind for that. I didn't, when he lobbed it at you. I can break it down for you if you really want, spend a couple hours deep in the imaginary draft of my entry level psychology paper of the spaghetti bowl of trauma that makes up his brain, all the weird shit that went on while you were asleep, but it boils down to him lying right then. He was panicking and he was angry. We were talking about Claudia, we were on the edge of talking about the trial, and he knew you'd grab anything to make it hurt less, and he wanted to shut me up."
A shift, he looks from Louis to Lestat, and skims a hand over the empty sofa space beside Louis.
'Would you sit here and hug him already, he wants you to.'
(Something else he doesn't need to read minds for.)
Some minor internal flinch back when this directive slithers through, like a school of fish startling under a shadow—
But a breath out of Lestat. Perverse, almost, for him to be a source of comfort, for all that he has no issue in accepting it, but. He says, "No," and gets to his feet. A hand out, touching Louis' shoulder on his way to sitting. A hand that flutters up, a touch to his face, ear, back down to the shoulder, plucks at his jacket collar before settling again, eyes roving his features. "You would not wish to forget the boy you saved. You would not want to forget me, even this little bit of me."
A glance at Daniel, some sharp bit of humour making it out of the bloodied feelings of it all. "And you would not have two sets of biographies in the world if any part of you would want any part of you gone, mon cher. Because you are me, and Claudia, and all those you've loved."
Back to looking at Louis. A momentary clutch of affection, different to the usual screaming klaxxons of love that sound off all day every day—his fledgling, still, this whole century later, a possessive feeling.
"Armand wants his kills to ask him to die. He wanted you to ask for it too, these little pieces. It would suit him well, to believe in the story that you did."
All things Lestat is not privy to, that Daniel hadn't seen.
The things Louis had to ask for, books and diary pages and Daniel's life. For the interview. For his own memories.
It had become routine. He had let it become routine. The slippery quality of his own control within their relationship, the moments when Armand grew tired of permitting Louis his say.
He takes these assurances, reaches a hand up to snare Lestat's roaming fingers.
"It served him, for some time," Louis says, acquiescing. Whatever parts he holds on to, whatever guilt-filled responsibility he cultivates, it goes unseen.
"He left me enough," veers back to the story they are telling. His hand at Daniel's cheek, expression thawing away from the remoteness of before. "Enough of Daniel to ask him back, after a few decades had passed."
They'd bargained with that too. Agreements made. Facts obscured, protection afforded Armand as Louis bared his own throat.
Daniel shifts his position— here, even he forgets his knees don't mind this anymore, feeling perfectly youthful (and perfectly inhuman) beneath the 69 forever, nice aged exterior. Still leaving Louis as much contact as he wants, sitting on the floor, one elbow on the sofa, perched.
Stressful to think about it all. He doesn't quite make it to tears, but the edges of his irises seem to take on a bloody quality to them for a moment anyway. He was on the verge of having nothing, when he got that mysterious package, and the same reckless, desperate curiosity gripped him as it had in 1973. Pointed this time instead of the overall danger of getting picked up by strangers.
I might die, but I still want to go.
"He thought he could control it, I guess." A sigh, eyes briefly close, open again. "Best as I can figure from my perspective. That he'd be able to nudge me back into a kid asking 'And then what?', before I pissed you off somehow, and he could comfort you about the boy from your memory being afraid of you."
And all of that did happen. Daniel did piss him off. He did devolve into And then what. Except Daniel is actually good at it, now, and instead of fumbling when afraid, he gets deeper into it.
"A week of me, you, and Armand roleplaying your mortal butler, unpacking your life in New Orleans."
Lestat's hand captured, he captures Louis' in turn, curling that shared grip inward to rest against his chest.
A little derisive breath out, and Daniel can maybe feel the sensation of Lestat snagging a memory from him, a cat claw at a goldfish. Just a little sampling: a quick glimmer of Armand in his Halloween costume of a mortal, eyes dark, gloves snugly in place, lurking about the edges of the thing. Idiot.
In trade, maybe, Lestat notes to Daniel at the same time: 'He is difficult to comfort'.
Facts about Louis. Even when Louis would allow himself to cry and confess his inner world to Lestat in those earlier years, there were limits to his powers to help him. Only love, an endless torrent of it, and distraction, and devotion. Reason, Lestat's reason, patient explanations, never took. Neither did yelling, granted, but he could never talk Louis into happiness.
"You learned of it all during this time?" he asks, thumb rubbing over the edges of Louis' knuckles.
Grip on Daniel's face ceded, bowing to his repositioning. Reminiscent of that day, sat on the floor alongside the atrium, Daniel on the step alongside him.
"Daniel unraveled it."
Credit where due.
"I didn't realize what had happened until he began pressing," because Armand had done his work well. There was no seam, no reason to ask.
Nevermind the extent to which Louis had become very much like the recently removed tree in the atrium garden. Carefully cultivated. Growing in the appropriate direction.
Armand in his costume, looking unconvincing, seeming far stranger than Louis to Daniel despite his ignorance. Big fake brown eyes staring uncannily at him, and Daniel, taking scathing notes about him.
'Catholic guys.' [affectionate]
Vampire subtweeting. Daniel stays with the back of his hand pressed against the side of Louis' knee, like the three of them are a conduit of sharing the emotional strain of this. Louis with the fucking worst of it— his life, nearly snuffed out, his relationship, revealed to be even more of a nightmare that he was passively living through.
"Everyone cracks," he says, shrugging one shoulder. "Even me. We pushed each other. We had to."
A trap laid for Armand on purpose. You, I can break, to Real Rashid, letting the ancient vampire feel safe in the belief that Daniel was too aware of the mental power imbalance to try. A trap for Louis, scrabbled together by chance. A curve ball that will seem like less of a surprise and more like an ambush.
A trap for his own fucking self. A dozen times.
"Armand tried to head it off at the pass at the first breakthrough, revealing himself to cow me into laying off. Then the next week of me, you, and Armand roleplaying a supportive partner worried about me bullying you."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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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It is difficult to bear. He'd put Daniel in harm's way, not once, but twice. To say nothing of Lestat, banished. Exiled.
"No," softly. It stands on its own a moment, a gentle deflection, before Louis stitches further words to it: "This is the right time. Still too generous, by half, but better said now than before."
Far from Dubai, no possibility of the words being twisted beyond Daniel's meaning.
Louis is still holding Daniel's face, expression remote, as he plucks up the scattered threads of their shared recitation, the history they pieced together, to take them from that moment to the next.
"Armand closed me into my coffin," as his eyes lift to Lestat. "After he'd finished with you."
Rest, he'd said. Louis remembers this, except—
"But he left the door open when he left the room. I could hear him, as he went to attend to Daniel. And I had the strength then, after he'd given me his blood, to intervene. Ensure that Daniel lived."
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"He was trying to get me to agree to die." Seductive and whispering and lovely, a beautiful, horrible creature luring him to the edge, but Daniel did not want to be lured. He could see Armand, and no amount of hypnotism was going to work. "You said, later, the way you described his hunting to me— that it was never violent. But it felt violent, then, even with how quiet he was. I wouldn't agree to it out loud, so he did something and I put my head down anyway, and I couldn't do anything but comply."
He was exhausted by then. Drained and battered and without food or water for at least a few days, badly hungover on top of everything else. Not enough energy to fight against full control, but nothing was ever going to make him want to die.
"And then you were back. I wasn't afraid of you. It was a relief to see you, even with you in that state, even after you attacked me. You were the guy who was charming at the bar, still. The last familiar thing before the world got put on its head."
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That said, Lestat feels fairly human in this moment, full of petty feeling distracting him from the bigger ones. Sick with petty feeling. You'd think a century would change some habits.
He listens to Daniel speak to Louis, the story unfolding. They are remembering together, this profound and horrible thing. Before the world got put on its head, and he feels some anxious thing grab at him beneath his ribcage. The certainty that whatever fragment of knowledge Lestat had received that day, September 8th, 1973, is all that has existed of it for half a century.
Excepting Armand, of course.
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A detail omitted, along with a handful of others: the newspaper on the windows, enough to hold back the full force of sunlight but not to spare Louis the discomfort of that muted glow. Long days in bed, sheets sticking to open wounds. The sound of Daniel's body thudding over and over onto the floor. The sound of his pleas, cries of pain, through a closed door.
"I convinced him," Louis repeats. "And he allowed Daniel to live, for me."
Say nothing of what Armand felt he was owed. What benevolence he might have felt in that moment, allowing Louis to talk him back from Daniel's throat.
"Armand took precautions to obscure the events of the past week from Daniel's mind," slower, parsing out that fact. The choice of what was left and what was omitted. Looking up at Lestat, uncharacteristically silent. Holding his gaze as his thumb runs back and forth across Daniel's check.
Confirmation of that suspicion, in part.
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And I think a lot of it feels like it happened last month, opposed to last century, sitting on the train, trying to appropriately convey his worry about his friend.
It's one thing to do it to some junkie kid to try and preserve secrecy. It's another to do it to your fucking partner. Daniel says nothing, just lets Louis process it, decide how he wants to say it out loud. If he does at all.
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Slower, the rest, working its way through him. Processing the idea of a week in lingering torment. Of a man with the kind of blood in his veins that could heal Louis overnight, maybe faster with enough of it spilled, who was supposed to be in love with him, to look after him, and instead letting it happen. Louis, who was hurt so badly that he couldn't help himself, or help Daniel, not until the very end.
He'd asked Daniel if Louis is okay now. The honest uncertainty he was met with, an echo in Daniel's present quiet.
Easier to feel anxious and panicked about Louis' hand laying against Daniel's cheek, but this all sounds like a great big Armand-flavoured detonation in reaction to, what, a fight? Inadequate love? So Lestat shuts his fucking mouth! about that! and will shiver about it some other time, maybe five minutes from now, and reluctantly engages with the odd grief-like feeling that has his next breath come out as a shudder.
Lestat is also fucking furious, which is nice. Maybe Daniel can feel it, a kind of emanating warmth, building as they speak. Louis, in his different, limited way. There are bloodied crescent moons in his palm where his nails dig in.
"He had you forget too," he says.
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A similar flex of agony, indecision, works across Louis' face as Lestat makes his assertion. Maybe in a few weeks, Louis will find some humor in this, how united Daniel and Lestat are in their responses. Anger. Disdain.
"I asked him to take it away," Louis says, eyes falling to Daniel's face. Wondering if he will find disapproval there. "Armand told me I asked that of him, after. I don't remember if I did or not."
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Quiet, but firm. Daniel looks at him without any disapproval or judgement. He gets it, how it'd be easier to believe, to pull something over the wound, to hold onto a scrap of rationalizing in a sea of fucked up, but he just. Didn't.
"I don't need to read anyone's mind for that. I didn't, when he lobbed it at you. I can break it down for you if you really want, spend a couple hours deep in the imaginary draft of my entry level psychology paper of the spaghetti bowl of trauma that makes up his brain, all the weird shit that went on while you were asleep, but it boils down to him lying right then. He was panicking and he was angry. We were talking about Claudia, we were on the edge of talking about the trial, and he knew you'd grab anything to make it hurt less, and he wanted to shut me up."
A shift, he looks from Louis to Lestat, and skims a hand over the empty sofa space beside Louis.
'Would you sit here and hug him already, he wants you to.'
(Something else he doesn't need to read minds for.)
"Do you think he'd ever ask to forget?"
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But a breath out of Lestat. Perverse, almost, for him to be a source of comfort, for all that he has no issue in accepting it, but. He says, "No," and gets to his feet. A hand out, touching Louis' shoulder on his way to sitting. A hand that flutters up, a touch to his face, ear, back down to the shoulder, plucks at his jacket collar before settling again, eyes roving his features. "You would not wish to forget the boy you saved. You would not want to forget me, even this little bit of me."
A glance at Daniel, some sharp bit of humour making it out of the bloodied feelings of it all. "And you would not have two sets of biographies in the world if any part of you would want any part of you gone, mon cher. Because you are me, and Claudia, and all those you've loved."
Back to looking at Louis. A momentary clutch of affection, different to the usual screaming klaxxons of love that sound off all day every day—his fledgling, still, this whole century later, a possessive feeling.
"Armand wants his kills to ask him to die. He wanted you to ask for it too, these little pieces. It would suit him well, to believe in the story that you did."
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The things Louis had to ask for, books and diary pages and Daniel's life. For the interview. For his own memories.
It had become routine. He had let it become routine. The slippery quality of his own control within their relationship, the moments when Armand grew tired of permitting Louis his say.
He takes these assurances, reaches a hand up to snare Lestat's roaming fingers.
"It served him, for some time," Louis says, acquiescing. Whatever parts he holds on to, whatever guilt-filled responsibility he cultivates, it goes unseen.
"He left me enough," veers back to the story they are telling. His hand at Daniel's cheek, expression thawing away from the remoteness of before. "Enough of Daniel to ask him back, after a few decades had passed."
They'd bargained with that too. Agreements made. Facts obscured, protection afforded Armand as Louis bared his own throat.
It hadn't mattered, in the end.
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69 forever, niceaged exterior. Still leaving Louis as much contact as he wants, sitting on the floor, one elbow on the sofa, perched.Stressful to think about it all. He doesn't quite make it to tears, but the edges of his irises seem to take on a bloody quality to them for a moment anyway. He was on the verge of having nothing, when he got that mysterious package, and the same reckless, desperate curiosity gripped him as it had in 1973. Pointed this time instead of the overall danger of getting picked up by strangers.
I might die, but I still want to go.
"He thought he could control it, I guess." A sigh, eyes briefly close, open again. "Best as I can figure from my perspective. That he'd be able to nudge me back into a kid asking 'And then what?', before I pissed you off somehow, and he could comfort you about the boy from your memory being afraid of you."
And all of that did happen. Daniel did piss him off. He did devolve into And then what. Except Daniel is actually good at it, now, and instead of fumbling when afraid, he gets deeper into it.
"A week of me, you, and Armand roleplaying your mortal butler, unpacking your life in New Orleans."
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A little derisive breath out, and Daniel can maybe feel the sensation of Lestat snagging a memory from him, a cat claw at a goldfish. Just a little sampling: a quick glimmer of Armand in his Halloween costume of a mortal, eyes dark, gloves snugly in place, lurking about the edges of the thing. Idiot.
In trade, maybe, Lestat notes to Daniel at the same time: 'He is difficult to comfort'.
Facts about Louis. Even when Louis would allow himself to cry and confess his inner world to Lestat in those earlier years, there were limits to his powers to help him. Only love, an endless torrent of it, and distraction, and devotion. Reason, Lestat's reason, patient explanations, never took. Neither did yelling, granted, but he could never talk Louis into happiness.
"You learned of it all during this time?" he asks, thumb rubbing over the edges of Louis' knuckles.
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"Daniel unraveled it."
Credit where due.
"I didn't realize what had happened until he began pressing," because Armand had done his work well. There was no seam, no reason to ask.
Nevermind the extent to which Louis had become very much like the recently removed tree in the atrium garden. Carefully cultivated. Growing in the appropriate direction.
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'Catholic guys.' [affectionate]
Vampire subtweeting. Daniel stays with the back of his hand pressed against the side of Louis' knee, like the three of them are a conduit of sharing the emotional strain of this. Louis with the fucking worst of it— his life, nearly snuffed out, his relationship, revealed to be even more of a nightmare that he was passively living through.
"Everyone cracks," he says, shrugging one shoulder. "Even me. We pushed each other. We had to."
A trap laid for Armand on purpose. You, I can break, to Real Rashid, letting the ancient vampire feel safe in the belief that Daniel was too aware of the mental power imbalance to try. A trap for Louis, scrabbled together by chance. A curve ball that will seem like less of a surprise and more like an ambush.
A trap for his own fucking self. A dozen times.
"Armand tried to head it off at the pass at the first breakthrough, revealing himself to cow me into laying off. Then the next week of me, you, and Armand roleplaying a supportive partner worried about me bullying you."
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