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."
The dark, hazy shapes in the shadows that is The Interview. The general premise of it, of Armand being caught out in a specific lie, Armand banished, Lestat rescued. It had all made more sense, in a way, when Lestat had barely understood what exactly had happened. The role of the biographer like some kind of pawn between Louis and Armand, maybe. Stupid luck.
Details flooding in. Settling into new, more clarified shapes.
"The first breakthrough," Lestat repeats. "How many were there?"
"That's probably how I'd map it out, if I had to."
Other things they can keep, sticking details of pain, or confusion. Louis' trembling, tearful thanks over a small detail over Claudia he had reworked to be more accurate; Daniel's terror over finding Talamasca documents loaded onto his laptop and finding photos of himself. Perhaps Armand had his own, too, though Daniel can't begin to guess.
"Confronting that you did not want to kill Lestat, and would not let Claudia burn him." One. "When we figured out San Fransisco." Two. "...And everything detonated after the curtain went down."
Three.
The explosion gathered slowly at first. Louis recounted his revenge while Daniel organized his notes. Then, and Daniel glances away as they come near the end of this recounting, he was left there with Armand, and everything went sideways again.
His eyes flick from Louis' face, down to Daniel's, at (of course) mention of his name. Curiousity pricking his ears, even as he feels a low twist of apprehension for the topic at hand. The hand gripping Louis' to his chest pulses a quick squeeze, and he drops his head to lay a kiss against his knuckles, presses it there for a moment.
The intricacies of the interview can wait, perhaps. The intricacies of a murder attempt, a murder that was not. Things they haven't quite begun to speak of.
(Meanwhile, his personal crisis has managed to drag itself back down beneath the dirt, as if the simple matter of proximity, the welcome of Louis reaching for his hand, has assured him of his place in the cosmos.)
"I am very impressed," he says, after a moment, "that you both avoided a second tantrum courtesy of our mutual friend. Or survived it."
Daniel looks back at Louis. He's already had his selfish indulgence— demanding that Louis go over San Fransisco with him, weeks about you, something about me, please, my head is fucked. But he's not going to pull that now. Louis left him alone with Armand, Daniel is angry with Armand, but not because of that.
Complicated and simple at once, which is a headache. But the end of it is: he doesn't blame Louis. He's not going to drag him into whatever he needs to do to deal with his fucking maker, his making.
"He didn't hurt me." Not the first assurance, but the first this far away from it, when Louis can look at him directly and know he isn't just trying to paper over it and absolve him, or squirm away from a difficult conversation. "He can't get in my head anymore. You and I get to talk. I get to vanish and leave my kids and their kids a lot of money, and it'll be the best thing I've ever done for them. I'm not in pain."
He has a lot to unpack. More than he can do sitting here, speaking with them. More than he can do in a year or more, probably. In time he will hit a wall and have to deal with his new nature from all the sides of it he's choosing to ignore right now. He understands all of those things.
Such verbal largesse, from this corner, a handwave for the clear snarl of angst being tugged on between them. And also an actual handwave, Lestat showing the topic out the door. "Rare, that any of us get to choose our maker. Those who were not bonded together in unholy matrimony are doomed to do that most difficult thing: make the most of it."
Sparkling optimism, a sprinkling of glitter over the possibility that the true loss is that Louis did not make Daniel himself.
It's not what I wanted for you is a reflexive whisper of thought as he squeezes Daniels hand back.
Had he hoped for something like Claudia had given to Madeleine? Something beautiful?
He didn't hurt me Daniel asserts, and Louis doesn't doubt this. But Daniel had it said it himself: Armand's gentleness can be a kind of violence.
And Armand had been angry.
It is hard to let go, but Louis recognizes the way both of them are reaching to lift this particular topic from his grasp. He breathes out. Refrains from argument, unfair when it's Daniel asserting his own wellness.
"I told him he was ready for it now," Louis answers Lestat. "I'm pleased to be right."
That's all they can ask for. After Louis' life spilling out of him like a wound, they should both be grateful for being here, and having this period of grace where everything is essentially fine. Even with vampires trying to kill them, even with the fabric of reality being upended from a book. They're here in a hotel, and Lestat is very politely not freaking the fuck out, and it's okay.
"Eternal gravitas is way cooler than being trapped as a youthful but idiotic junkie forever," he says, forcibly interjecting some levity into this, trying to buoy Louis' spirits. Daniel still struggles to accept that they were going to offer it to him, despite hearing it from Louis and Armand both by now, but a part of him is aware it's his own indecision and self-image that makes it impossible for him to engage with. He doesn't know what he'd have said. He still doesn't. In a way, Armand forcing it was a relief, though he will never, ever say that to Louis.
A look to Lestat. "That's how we met." Ahaha. Aha. Right. That's what they were going over. "Something we haven't touched on since Dubai."
Obviously. A fucking wreck of a conversation.
"Thanks."
For listening. For sitting next to Louis. For waiting for him this whole time.
A fledgling fifty years in the making. Very sweet. Perhaps Lestat should send another batch of roses to Armand, except that it's actually worse this way when neither Daniel or Louis have to fumble through the natural divide between maker and fledgling, if fumbling is what they choose to do, and also except that Lestat is going to dropkick that gremlin off the side of the flat earth his stupid medieval soup mind probably believed in at some point.
Anyway.
An offered thanks, and he feels a twinge. Heartsore, still, probably all three of them, but the smile comes easy, easy to be generous as he says, "You're welcome," and looks back to Louis. A flicker.
"Thank you for telling me," because he had asked, and Louis had not decided to give him a short answer over the phone. Lestat would have accepted it. He would have had to.
Hug him, Daniel had said. Just as good to sit near him, probably, is what he meant, but there's also the truth that despite all they are to each other, despite exuberant embraces at the airport or the tight clutching in the throes of grief during a hurricane, Lestat has been struggling to remember if they ever did that very much. If in all his words and preaching about shamelessness and pleasure, the little cherishing affections through to the greater obscenities, he had somehow missed out on these simpler, less dignified forms of love.
All this to say, a small crack in veneer, and Lestat winds his arms around Louis, a doggish leaning in of his weight, chin to back of shoulder. Glad he is here again. Glad he persists.
Face turned away, Lestat misses what Louis' face does as Lestat embraces him.
Unexpected, outside of New Orleans and Lestat's shack, no hurricane, no pattering rain, only the echoes of the past Daniel and Louis unfurled for Lestat's benefit. Louis could have kept all of this from him. It feels right that he know, holds this part of Louis' story in his hand. It feels right, that he understand fully what Daniel is to him.
Louis' hand grips tight around Daniel's as his expression breaks, something raw and aching laid bare. As he slings an arm around Lestat, returns the embrace.
Turns his face into Lestat's, breathes there into his hair. Gathers himself by degrees, finding enough composure to loosen his grip on either of them.
"You agreed to wait for my answer," Louis reminds him. "I owed it to you."
And Daniel had indulged him. That goes without saying, when allocating gratitude.
A needling contradiction, slipped between his mind and Daniel's: You were no idiot. Only young.
'You just really like idiots,' is unbearably fond.
If he gets to have Louis as a friend forever, even if Louis had awful boyfriends and never reads their book, he will be so fucking lucky.
A check-in with Louis, then, if he minds Daniel bailing at this point — seems like this is the followup to a prior conversation and they might prefer to have some space, but maybe he's not ready to be left alone with Lestat in a vulnerable state, and if so, he'll stay — but this is kind of enough emotional exposure for one night, for Daniel. Possibly a little soon; more grace would see him pad this out for a few more minutes. But heaven forbid he find something to say Yeah to and tip this over into a bad session.
Assuming he is cut loose—
Another squeeze to Louis' hand, and as he gets to his feet, he even reaches out to brush a touch to Lestat's shoulder before withdrawing.
Daniel had expressed, at least twice, that he's glad they're talking. Odd, how heartening that little sentiment had been. Odd, now, as Lestat considers what to do with it, with all of his new understanding. That he should in someway be good for Louis. Helpful.
Something he considers as Louis loosens them from the embrace, and he feels the brush of Daniel's hand through metal-studded leather, and they are left alone. And it seems to happen so suddenly.
His grip has loosened too, but he still has an arm around the back of the couch and Louis' shoulders, the other hand resting on his arm, and he feels reluctance to give up the territory now that it's won. He is, perhaps, not as handsome as he would be had he not been crying just a little bit ago, and a slight shake of his head communicates an attempt to reset the way his hair falls, at least.
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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."
no subject
Details flooding in. Settling into new, more clarified shapes.
"The first breakthrough," Lestat repeats. "How many were there?"
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Three.
Louis' choices with Lestat and his coffin.
San Francisco.
The trial.
But his eyes fall to Daniel, head tilting. Correct?
no subject
Other things they can keep, sticking details of pain, or confusion. Louis' trembling, tearful thanks over a small detail over Claudia he had reworked to be more accurate; Daniel's terror over finding Talamasca documents loaded onto his laptop and finding photos of himself. Perhaps Armand had his own, too, though Daniel can't begin to guess.
"Confronting that you did not want to kill Lestat, and would not let Claudia burn him." One. "When we figured out San Fransisco." Two. "...And everything detonated after the curtain went down."
Three.
The explosion gathered slowly at first. Louis recounted his revenge while Daniel organized his notes. Then, and Daniel glances away as they come near the end of this recounting, he was left there with Armand, and everything went sideways again.
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The intricacies of the interview can wait, perhaps. The intricacies of a murder attempt, a murder that was not. Things they haven't quite begun to speak of.
(Meanwhile, his personal crisis has managed to drag itself back down beneath the dirt, as if the simple matter of proximity, the welcome of Louis reaching for his hand, has assured him of his place in the cosmos.)
"I am very impressed," he says, after a moment, "that you both avoided a second tantrum courtesy of our mutual friend. Or survived it."
No more horrors, please.
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Doesn't say it, but it's there in his face: how sorry he is.
Yes, they survived. But look at the price Daniel has paid for his revelations. For freeing Louis.
A vampire, yoked to Armand even if Armand is nowhere to be found.
Rather than trap Daniel into deflecting the sentiment, Louis remains quiet. Runs his thumb along the back of Lestat's hands. Watches Daniel's face.
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Complicated and simple at once, which is a headache. But the end of it is: he doesn't blame Louis. He's not going to drag him into whatever he needs to do to deal with his fucking maker, his making.
"He didn't hurt me." Not the first assurance, but the first this far away from it, when Louis can look at him directly and know he isn't just trying to paper over it and absolve him, or squirm away from a difficult conversation. "He can't get in my head anymore. You and I get to talk. I get to vanish and leave my kids and their kids a lot of money, and it'll be the best thing I've ever done for them. I'm not in pain."
He has a lot to unpack. More than he can do sitting here, speaking with them. More than he can do in a year or more, probably. In time he will hit a wall and have to deal with his new nature from all the sides of it he's choosing to ignore right now. He understands all of those things.
"I'm okay, Louis." He squeezes his hand.
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Such verbal largesse, from this corner, a handwave for the clear snarl of angst being tugged on between them. And also an actual handwave, Lestat showing the topic out the door. "Rare, that any of us get to choose our maker. Those who were not bonded together in unholy matrimony are doomed to do that most difficult thing: make the most of it."
Sparkling optimism, a sprinkling of glitter over the possibility that the true loss is that Louis did not make Daniel himself.
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Had he hoped for something like Claudia had given to Madeleine? Something beautiful?
He didn't hurt me Daniel asserts, and Louis doesn't doubt this. But Daniel had it said it himself: Armand's gentleness can be a kind of violence.
And Armand had been angry.
It is hard to let go, but Louis recognizes the way both of them are reaching to lift this particular topic from his grasp. He breathes out. Refrains from argument, unfair when it's Daniel asserting his own wellness.
"I told him he was ready for it now," Louis answers Lestat. "I'm pleased to be right."
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That's all they can ask for. After Louis' life spilling out of him like a wound, they should both be grateful for being here, and having this period of grace where everything is essentially fine. Even with vampires trying to kill them, even with the fabric of reality being upended from a book. They're here in a hotel, and Lestat is very politely not freaking the fuck out, and it's okay.
"Eternal gravitas is way cooler than being trapped as a youthful but idiotic junkie forever," he says, forcibly interjecting some levity into this, trying to buoy Louis' spirits. Daniel still struggles to accept that they were going to offer it to him, despite hearing it from Louis and Armand both by now, but a part of him is aware it's his own indecision and self-image that makes it impossible for him to engage with. He doesn't know what he'd have said. He still doesn't. In a way, Armand forcing it was a relief, though he will never, ever say that to Louis.
A look to Lestat. "That's how we met." Ahaha. Aha. Right. That's what they were going over. "Something we haven't touched on since Dubai."
Obviously. A fucking wreck of a conversation.
"Thanks."
For listening. For sitting next to Louis. For waiting for him this whole time.
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A fledgling fifty years in the making. Very sweet. Perhaps Lestat should send another batch of roses to Armand, except that it's actually worse this way when neither Daniel or Louis have to fumble through the natural divide between maker and fledgling, if fumbling is what they choose to do, and also except that Lestat is going to dropkick that gremlin off the side of the flat earth his stupid medieval soup mind probably believed in at some point.
Anyway.
An offered thanks, and he feels a twinge. Heartsore, still, probably all three of them, but the smile comes easy, easy to be generous as he says, "You're welcome," and looks back to Louis. A flicker.
"Thank you for telling me," because he had asked, and Louis had not decided to give him a short answer over the phone. Lestat would have accepted it. He would have had to.
Hug him, Daniel had said. Just as good to sit near him, probably, is what he meant, but there's also the truth that despite all they are to each other, despite exuberant embraces at the airport or the tight clutching in the throes of grief during a hurricane, Lestat has been struggling to remember if they ever did that very much. If in all his words and preaching about shamelessness and pleasure, the little cherishing affections through to the greater obscenities, he had somehow missed out on these simpler, less dignified forms of love.
All this to say, a small crack in veneer, and Lestat winds his arms around Louis, a doggish leaning in of his weight, chin to back of shoulder. Glad he is here again. Glad he persists.
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Unexpected, outside of New Orleans and Lestat's shack, no hurricane, no pattering rain, only the echoes of the past Daniel and Louis unfurled for Lestat's benefit. Louis could have kept all of this from him. It feels right that he know, holds this part of Louis' story in his hand. It feels right, that he understand fully what Daniel is to him.
Louis' hand grips tight around Daniel's as his expression breaks, something raw and aching laid bare. As he slings an arm around Lestat, returns the embrace.
Turns his face into Lestat's, breathes there into his hair. Gathers himself by degrees, finding enough composure to loosen his grip on either of them.
"You agreed to wait for my answer," Louis reminds him. "I owed it to you."
And Daniel had indulged him. That goes without saying, when allocating gratitude.
A needling contradiction, slipped between his mind and Daniel's: You were no idiot. Only young.
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If he gets to have Louis as a friend forever, even if Louis had awful boyfriends and never reads their book, he will be so fucking lucky.
A check-in with Louis, then, if he minds Daniel bailing at this point — seems like this is the followup to a prior conversation and they might prefer to have some space, but maybe he's not ready to be left alone with Lestat in a vulnerable state, and if so, he'll stay — but this is kind of enough emotional exposure for one night, for Daniel. Possibly a little soon; more grace would see him pad this out for a few more minutes. But heaven forbid he find something to say Yeah to and tip this over into a bad session.
Assuming he is cut loose—
Another squeeze to Louis' hand, and as he gets to his feet, he even reaches out to brush a touch to Lestat's shoulder before withdrawing.
At the door, "You kids have fun."
We like jokes here. Later, nerds.
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Something he considers as Louis loosens them from the embrace, and he feels the brush of Daniel's hand through metal-studded leather, and they are left alone. And it seems to happen so suddenly.
His grip has loosened too, but he still has an arm around the back of the couch and Louis' shoulders, the other hand resting on his arm, and he feels reluctance to give up the territory now that it's won. He is, perhaps, not as handsome as he would be had he not been crying just a little bit ago, and a slight shake of his head communicates an attempt to reset the way his hair falls, at least.
"How is your heart?" he asks.
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