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.
A moment where perhaps Louis doesn't intend to let Daniel go. A tightening of his fingers around his hand, before Louis cedes his grip.
He has asked much of Daniel. If Daniel wishes to go, Louis will let him. None of this could have been so easy for him, even given the time that's passed since that week. The scant amount of time passed since they pieced all parts of it together themselves.
Daniel is allowed to extricate himself. He has done more than enough.
As Lestat straightens, Louis uses his now freed hand to touch his cheek. Thumb away some trace of tears.
"Heavy," is true, even if Louis says it with some measure of humor. "How are you?"
Lestat's hand roves to rest against said heavy heart, as if that might help, finds a resting place there.
"It was not the story I was expecting," he says, first. "But I am glad to know it."
Did not expect to have a guest appearance, did not expect the extent of Armand's villainy, Daniel's suffering, Louis' sadness. This vivid colouring in of a week of what had been, for the longest time, a truly devastating five minutes, warping the next half century. Information he might have expected from asking after that moment again, and not, 'so how did you two meet'.
He pulls in a breath, lets it out. "Does it all feel like it only happened a moment ago?"
Working off a cheatsheet, maybe, Daniel's observations to him, but Lestat can't say he doesn't feel the same. The sound of New Orleans traffic, the knowledge of the glaring sun outside the seven foot long shadow space he was trapped in while reaching so desperately, all vivid.
Reflexively, Louis lifts his own hand to cover Lestat's. Old habit, how he would guide Lestat's hand there, set his own over to press securely over his heart. As much as Louis has changed, this instinct remains.
"In some ways, yes."
Everything feels closer. Speaking of the past drew it into the room. For all that Louis feels he better understands all of it, has come to peace with much of it, there is the inevitable: it is all a kind of open wound. Healing, but raw still.
"I spent a long time, not knowing," and then, almost as a correction: "Not understanding."
Things obscured, memories faded or locked away. So much of his life tidily set aside. Louis had permitted that to happen.
"Fighting the vampire world in your big tower, this is making up for all that time?"
He could make it into something else, another abandoning, save that some distance had seemed imperative after the shock of contact. Lestat could see himself clinging to Louis' sleeve, hiding from the modern world still, making whatever this recovery of Louis' was about his own. Better, he had felt, to make his own haphazard way (and then climb into Daniel's purse, yes, that still counts, he'd found Daniel by himself) for a little while.
But then, the book. The war. Intolerable distance.
A slight flex of his fingers over Lestat's. A stroke of thumb along skin, the still-familiar planes of Lestat's hand.
"In a way," Louis says, because the fights he's picked, the stubborn dedication to drawing attention onto himself and away from Daniel.
Lestat is not the only one finding his way into the modern world. Despite his long life, Louis has lost years to the penthouse suite. The serenity of isolation, hidden within Dubai, Louis was excised from the world. He needs to reclaim his place. There is some healing in that.
"I was lost," he repeats, some similar mournful tremor in his voice. "Feels like I was far away, for a long time."
Lestat turns his hand, long fingers curling around Louis', capturing it there, still resting against his chest. Enticed, simply, to reacquaint himself with the ways they can tangle their fingers, find new configurations to hold each others hands in. His gaze, drifting to this.
Back to Louis' face.
"Uncharted wilderness." There be dragons, or at least, one fire-eyed demon. He has before tried to remember the exact configuration of emotions he had, that night in Magnus's lair. Was there any room for vindictiveness, anger, in his certainty that he had no place at Louis' side? Was there any meaning in his blessing, watching him and Armand wander into the darkness together?
Lestat squeezes their palms together, mouth twinging aside. "You won't be lost anymore," he says, after a moment of thinking. "I won't allow it. Even if you don't know where to go, you can come with me, and figure it out on the way."
A kindness, one that Louis hesitates to accept fully.
They both need to stand on their own, don't they?
But then, how lost can they be when they have each other? When Lestat will be nearby, always available for Louis to orient himself. Had the trouble started because they parted so completely? Because Louis was so alone?
Reaches with his free hand to touch Lestat's face, thumb that twinge of muscle at his mouth, the familiar territory of his cheek.
"Thank you."
Lestat, as much his home as New Orleans. True North.
"Have you found your way?" a soft question. Louis has tried not to pry, but he wonders. And while they're trading truths, why not this one?
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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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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?
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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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He has asked much of Daniel. If Daniel wishes to go, Louis will let him. None of this could have been so easy for him, even given the time that's passed since that week. The scant amount of time passed since they pieced all parts of it together themselves.
Daniel is allowed to extricate himself. He has done more than enough.
As Lestat straightens, Louis uses his now freed hand to touch his cheek. Thumb away some trace of tears.
"Heavy," is true, even if Louis says it with some measure of humor. "How are you?"
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"It was not the story I was expecting," he says, first. "But I am glad to know it."
Did not expect to have a guest appearance, did not expect the extent of Armand's villainy, Daniel's suffering, Louis' sadness. This vivid colouring in of a week of what had been, for the longest time, a truly devastating five minutes, warping the next half century. Information he might have expected from asking after that moment again, and not, 'so how did you two meet'.
He pulls in a breath, lets it out. "Does it all feel like it only happened a moment ago?"
Working off a cheatsheet, maybe, Daniel's observations to him, but Lestat can't say he doesn't feel the same. The sound of New Orleans traffic, the knowledge of the glaring sun outside the seven foot long shadow space he was trapped in while reaching so desperately, all vivid.
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"In some ways, yes."
Everything feels closer. Speaking of the past drew it into the room. For all that Louis feels he better understands all of it, has come to peace with much of it, there is the inevitable: it is all a kind of open wound. Healing, but raw still.
"I spent a long time, not knowing," and then, almost as a correction: "Not understanding."
Things obscured, memories faded or locked away. So much of his life tidily set aside. Louis had permitted that to happen.
"I've been making it up for all the time I lost."
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A small twist of a smile. Kindly, still,
"Fighting the vampire world in your big tower, this is making up for all that time?"
He could make it into something else, another abandoning, save that some distance had seemed imperative after the shock of contact. Lestat could see himself clinging to Louis' sleeve, hiding from the modern world still, making whatever this recovery of Louis' was about his own. Better, he had felt, to make his own haphazard way (and then climb into Daniel's purse, yes, that still counts, he'd found Daniel by himself) for a little while.
But then, the book. The war. Intolerable distance.
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"In a way," Louis says, because the fights he's picked, the stubborn dedication to drawing attention onto himself and away from Daniel.
Lestat is not the only one finding his way into the modern world. Despite his long life, Louis has lost years to the penthouse suite. The serenity of isolation, hidden within Dubai, Louis was excised from the world. He needs to reclaim his place. There is some healing in that.
"I was lost," he repeats, some similar mournful tremor in his voice. "Feels like I was far away, for a long time."
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Back to Louis' face.
"Uncharted wilderness." There be dragons, or at least, one fire-eyed demon. He has before tried to remember the exact configuration of emotions he had, that night in Magnus's lair. Was there any room for vindictiveness, anger, in his certainty that he had no place at Louis' side? Was there any meaning in his blessing, watching him and Armand wander into the darkness together?
Lestat squeezes their palms together, mouth twinging aside. "You won't be lost anymore," he says, after a moment of thinking. "I won't allow it. Even if you don't know where to go, you can come with me, and figure it out on the way."
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They both need to stand on their own, don't they?
But then, how lost can they be when they have each other? When Lestat will be nearby, always available for Louis to orient himself. Had the trouble started because they parted so completely? Because Louis was so alone?
Reaches with his free hand to touch Lestat's face, thumb that twinge of muscle at his mouth, the familiar territory of his cheek.
"Thank you."
Lestat, as much his home as New Orleans. True North.
"Have you found your way?" a soft question. Louis has tried not to pry, but he wonders. And while they're trading truths, why not this one?
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