Who's embarrassed? Not Lestat. That's against his brand.
Especially after a cigarette and a half-pint of rum-laced warm blood, anyway, settling back at the the table, bright eyed and easy smiling. The latter twisting a little, because ah, good, more acronyms he doesn't understand, and also, did he give permission for Daniel and Louis to enjoy themselves while he was away, but he gamely shrugs, placing his elbows on the table, and asks, "What is an NFT?"
So that should take up some time.
They leave late, but before they can be the last ones left being shooed out by the staff, Lestat opting for a jovial enough mood to link both men's arms in his as they walk off the confinement of the bar for a block or so. The air is refreshingly brisk, and recent rain paints everything in reflective shine.
There are a couple hours until dawn by the time they make it back into the hotel, into the lobby, where the human staff are silent and polite and the atmosphere of the place is filled with the noise of foot falls, the sharp clack of heels that echoes in what Lestat judges to be a pleasing manner. The night has not been so wild that he has become disheveled, and he has, this time, remembered he has paint on his eyelids and not smeared it everywhere. He confirms this by being drawn to his own reflection in the gilt panels and glass as they go.
And so he is a little distracted, and as they step into the elevator, it's only when the doors are closing that he seems to notice something, a moment of eye contact with one of Louis' security that unsettles him in some unnamed way. But the doors close, and they are drawn upwards. His expression is still, as is his posture, everything, a subtle shift that nevertheless has a way of changing the mood in the little space of the elevator without saying anything. The sense that Daniel and Louis are not sharing the same space with an amiable Lestat bedecked in gold and feathers, but a wolf, hackles up, eyes blown black.
Maybe they ask him what's wrong. He pays no attention. And when the doors slide open, to the familiar hallway that branches off towards their rooms, Lestat is the first one out with a business-like stride that terminates as soon as they all see it: a shivering Roy Travis, standing facing them.
The shift in Lestat does no escape Louis, even if he does not place the cause. In the space of that short elevator ride, Louis' hand drifts first to Lestat's elbow, and then to his hand in the space between them. A little catch of a touch, Louis' thumb drawing a question down the back of Lestat's hand.
But no, the answer doesn't come in the space between ground floor and penthouse.
It comes as the doors slide open, as Lestat begins to laugh.
Louis understands immediately what's prompted the reaction, easier to field when it is directed so broadly.
"Wait," for Lestat, hand still held. Warding against Lestat's immediate impulse towards action, or against the possibility that someone other than Louis will have the opportunity to deal with this. A little edging movement, stepping forward, a hand placed to keep the doors from closing.
Is it like this when he sends someone? pings in the back of Daniel's head, flat and urgent.
Fully oblivious about any aura of unease— Daniel is, first and foremost, plotting his escape. A common occurrence, he's used to living alone and his social timer is low, and leaving is a luxury of being old and having a handle on addictions. (It didn't matter what he was or wasn't excited about, in his 20s, he was going to put up with anything to score. He had to.)
Checking his phone in the elevator. Confusion, unease, and before he can formulate a thought, things happen in quick succession.
"What?" is for all of it. Lestat's shift, his laugh, Louis' question, his own missed messages, Roy Travis in the fucking hotel?
"Molloy?!" Different than at the bookshop. The human looks frantic, but present. He stands rooted in place, arms shaking. "Where am I? I keep fucking blacking out, I tried to talk to you earlier, I was fucking screaming and you just stood there with your f—"
Abruptly, he shuts up. Forceful enough to hear the snap of his teeth as his jaw slams closed.
Louis has his hand, and that's fine. Lestat keeps it in a negligent hold as he moves out into the hallway, a certain amount of circling around with his gaze fixed on this man.
A broad smile that shows fangs already, subtle but present. Malice, glittering.
"An admirer has sent us a gift basket," he says. There is no particular emphasis on admirer—they have, technically speaking, countless enemies, and they'll have have their tricks. This one has impressive flare, true, an attention to detail that might itch familiar, but all the same, his conclusions begin and end with thinking it unwise to immediately drain this present. He's gotten got that way before, goodness knows.
Roy Travis, meanwhile, sweating, a vein throbbing in his forehead, but some of that initial struggle relaxes. Is forced to relax, his attention still fixed on Daniel.
"You just stood there," he repeats, much calmer than a moment ago, "and you're normally so skilled at seeing what's in front of you."
Drawn along with Lestat, wound tight as a coiled spring, to inspect.
And with that singular piece of information Daniel has given to him and not to Lestat, Louis is making his own guesses as to the identity of the admirer.
This gift permitted to keep some mobility, but maybe not autonomy. Maybe a similar gift as the last Daniel had mentioned.
Woah woah woah. Still clutching his phone, reality catches up to him. Half a dozen texts and missed calls from Jeannie, who had encountered Travis as he stood in the parking lot by her car for too long, but who had vanished into the night the moment she started recording him. (No cops, she doesn't call cops on principle, another reason he hired her.)
"No, it's not like this." An answer to Louis' question, out loud, because there's no use hiding it anymore. He texts his assistant back that he's fine, that he'll figure out and handle the Roy Travis thing, enjoy your vacation. "They're always injured already and shoved in a bathroom or a closet."
And he'd checked the guy's head, at the bookshop. Could he have made a mistake that bad? Could all three of them have missed something? It threatens credulity, but the facts are lining up, and there's nothing else to do for it besides push into the man's head again, and—?
It feels gentle. Hands on either side of Daniel's face, cradling him, gently pulling Daniel from his own body as if his soul were made of feathers.
(Not so dramatic as that, and if Daniel were think to try, he is perfectly capable of wiggling toes and fingers, but in the moment, something that feels like a painless dislocation—)
There's a fire. A magnolia tree, whom Armand said had been planted because the interior designer felt that the austere atrium needed something of the natural world in it, has combusted from inside itself. Daniel, on the floor, dying, held by an angel made of steel, blood trickling. Weakness. In his head, Armand says, "I would have stopped, if you'd told me to," his voice near Daniel's ear.
In the hallway, Roy Travis says, "I would leave you alone, if you told me to," in synchronisation, and Daniel has the kind of vampiric attention span to hear both things at once. Maybe more of a remove, when the mortal looks to Louis as he adds, "But he hasn't."
(At Louis' side, Lestat is still. Unreadable, momentarily.)
A fire. A magnolia tree. A tender clipping toted along with a single suitcase into an apartment where blood pooled across the floor.
Louis is holding so tightly to Lestat's hand that it must be painful. He is so far outside his body; when he lets go of Lestat, it is not to avoid the break of bones, but to take that single step closer, spine straight, eyes dark.
You were still in the building, Armand had said. And now Louis knows what it looks like, has this fragmented piece of what it had been like twisting into his gut.
"Armand," is soft as the ashes the mingle now with rocks rescued from a coffin in the burned out basement of the Théâtre des Vampires. Not asking but acknowledging. Yes, here you are. Yes, you are seen.
"What did you say about the book, Mr Travis?" comes out as an echo in between glimpses of Armand in the man's house in Tampa, walking back and forth in front of him, absently going through his cupboards and judging his coffee mugs with political slogans on them. Out loud, from the mortal, and psychic, inside his head.
"I said it was probably half-fake," he begins to recite. "The vampire shit, that's fake, but the gay shit, that's all real, all Daniel Molloy because he's. Please, man, it's in my head, I can't get it out of my FUCKING HEAD—"
switching so quick. grabbed again. carrying on,
"—Everybody knows Molloy was a hooker. He wrote the AIDS book out of some oppression Olympics guilt that he didn't catch it. I said. I said. I want to go home. I said of course the fantasy guy's black. Please. You could tell him to stop, right? That's what he said."
That's different. A different class of threat, and Lestat knows these two knew about the possibility, knows they have spoken of it and that this isn't exactly the first time, knows because he is highly practiced in deducing these kinds of things, but there is no room to feel anger for it, or jealousy, or whatever bullshit. Not when it's fear that immediately dashes cold through his system.
Which turns into anger. Convenient.
"Help him," Lestat says from behind Louis' shoulder, and the press of his hand encourages Louis in a Danielwards direction while he focuses (not quite a shove, but a little bit of one), slithering around the grasping thing in this mortal's mind that has snared Molloy, trying to find the connecting thread through which Armand is puppeting him. Where are you, love?
A memory: rumpled sheets, a candle, a chair pulled up beside the bed. Armand's fingers on Louis' skin, murmuring about focus before Louis rolls over to present Armand with a compelling distraction.
A moment where Louis is in this room and gone at the same time.
A moment where he is brought back to it by the brief contact of Lestat's hand.
Understands that there is no time to ask what exactly Louis is meant to do. It is a forgone conclusion. They are years and miles removed from a little room in San Francisco but it is the same game, the same stakes.
Louis takes Daniel's face in his hands.
Listen as though I'm the voice of God or an angel talking to you.
Words spoke aloud in perfect synchronicity as Louis presses them into Daniel's head. Here he is. Remember? Does Daniel remember? He had pieced it together, the only reason they have these words to recall.
Telling you that room was a cage and it was never meant to hold you. That you already broke the lock and walked away from the monster inside. Come away, Daniel.
Louis' fingers, cradling Daniel's face. Stood bodily between Daniel and Travis and Armand hidden within him, a physical barrier. Lestat is near, engaged in work of his own.
Louis coaxes, Come to me, stubborn and afraid and desperate all at once.
Fortunately, Daniel is more fucking stunlocked than he is properly trapped, though the difference matters little for how it catches him. Seeing himself on the floor, knowing only half of the other side of that screwed up film reel not because he was mindfucked but because he was plain and simple passed out—
The voice of God, or an angel, and Claudia had called Louis an angel, too. Wrote it down over and over, until she was angry at him and embarrassed for doing so. Daniel reels, but one hand grabs at Louis' arm like he's catching onto something while falling.
A room. A cage. San Fransisco. Dubai. Louis' majordomo with his leather gloves and creeping presence, looking at him. The memory is real: 'Rashid' in daylight, in the lounge room, handing Daniel a power cord adapter. The look on his face is open and surprised, and he doesn't quite manage to hide the smile at whatever Daniel said to him. Then it melts, because one brown eye is red, orange, horrible, like a shotgun blast that's shredded half of the man's face, until it's Armand and they're in the same room, but now he's staring, staring, staring, and Louis is sitting beside him, and doesn't seem to notice the way Armand is drilling fucking hole into Daniel's head right there in the goddamn living room—
The door to the room slams. Daniel puts it away while standing outside of it, locked in some distant recess of his mind where he stores Armand Shit I'm Not Talking About. The grip on Louis' arm squeezes tighter, then Daniel flinches, and drags in a breath. Come to me, and he does.
"Motherfucker."
Roy Travis is still rambling about what he thinks about gays and people of color, and people of color who are gay, and what should happen to them. Tears of terror and agony are pouring down his handsome face.
(Armand, somewhere, glances at his threads being touched. Like a scrying eye flicking its attention over some unwanted visitor. Oh. You.)
Daniel is shuttering himself away from the tangled mess that is Roy Travis' brain, and he has no true ability to do much about it. But he can hear Louis' voice in the strange echoed loop, he can feel the shape of the door, of the chamber within, that is being closed off, until he can feel very little. He could stop now, if he wanted, slither out of Lestat's slow progress along the shivering strings of his control.
Finds himself unsatisfied. Maybe Daniel will sense it too, because Louis certainly will—a sensation that's also like a door, only this one is being slammed open under great force, directly into Louis' mind. On the other side—
It feels like sunlight, for a moment.
And it clears, and here, the taste of Daniel's blood in his mouth, and here, Daniel completely unaware as his body dies, the feeling of white and silver curls under his palm, Armand's palm but Louis can feel it too, and here, Daniel's blood swallowed down his throat and hearing the thought, you were fascinating and you still are, and here, the texture of a curtain with afternoon light bearing down, considering the slowly waking fledgling on some shitty motel bed.
And here, another bookstore, like the one from tonight but different, further back, gazing past the heads of a polite crowd. Armand, leaning against a load-bearing pillar, and Daniel, taking questions. Daniel, he looks at him, and they see and recognise each other, and something in Daniel's ever-present smile sharpens.
(Lestat, meanwhile, winds those threads around psychic fingers. Gathering some strength. He could, possibly, sever the connection, but he would like it to hurt when he does.)
Why should anyone be surprised at the bang of that door?
Armand built everything in Louis' mind. Of course, it opens for him. The force of entry only serves to underscore the point: seventy-seven years together cannot be erased in a matter of days, weeks, months.
Of course the ashes mingle in the rocks lining the floor of Louis' atrium. Of course they it will never be possible to sweep them away in their entirety.
Sunlight scalds. A memory bursting in the half-space between Louis' withdrawal from Daniel's mind and his own, ash flaking off him in great chunks, gray and red mottling across his skin.
Only a memory. Erodes quickly as Louis retreats, sucked down into his own mind with the memory of blood and Daniel's soft curls and these aren't his but they are Armand's, and they burrow down into the place where Louis' rage and pain and guilt live.
He was in the building. He was leaving, and Armand had done this.
The disorienting overlay of past and present, Daniel's smile sharpening over the heads of gathered humans and Daniel laughing while a clutch of New Yorkers applauded and Daniel with his massive clunky tape recorder saying I'd really like to interview you.
Louis' hands spasm at the sides of Daniel's face.
Leave him alone, Armand, is as raw now as it had been then, trapped in a bed beneath newspapered windows, watching as Armand looked up from his study of Daniel's prone body to observe Louis, helpless a room away.
In San Fransisco, Louis was an alien, but Armand was a nightmare worse than that; leaving New York for Dubai, Daniel told his editor that he was meeting the most dangerous man in the world, but he went, and he sat there, and he never flinched away. The centuries-old vampire research organization told him to be afraid of Louis over Armand. Idiots, all of them.
Louis should have been the monster. Louis who was burned and crumbling, Louis who snapped at him, hurt him about Alice. But now, like the, he just hasn't been afraid. Louis is grabbing his face and Daniel wraps his arms around him, pulls him back away from that door. In his mind's eye there's a sensation of holding him while ash and skin are flaking away. He doesn't recoil.
Armand built everything in Louis' mind. Daniel knows a fucking thing or two about how Armand builds, by now.
Roy Travis' brain is starting to collapse under the strain of being used as a conduit for four supernatural creatures, two of which are psychic juggernauts who could shrug and rend him to pudding with an aftershock. Daniel reaches out—
'Fucking unacceptable way to have this conversation,' is as bullish as it ever ways in Dubai, as dismissively hostile as DISREGARD, as smugly combative as WE'LL GET TO YOU. He does not concern himself with the threads being worried, with the dickhead human he hopes dies anyway, with the unnerving feeling of being a tiny little guppie fish in a tank with fucking sharks. 'You're not getting an answer like this.'
Armand showed him where to find the flaws, where to make turns. Daniel finds the lip of one, just a little turn, and slips it so the door shuts, separating Louis from this vortex of malice. A tiny movement, and yet—
Lestat, meanwhile, is holding onto Roy Travis' face with a cage of claws pressing bleeding pinholes around his chin, eyes black and fangs long.
And looking through him, an irrelevant puppet of meat and bile. It might even physically hurt, the measure of his gaze, piercing past panicked eyes, drilling into grey matter. Lestat is not attuned to the struggle occurring in his ex-husband's head right now, hearing the faint echo of Daniel's thoughts. The scent of ash, the scent of cooked flesh.
Gets the sense of a fashionable but empty apartment. Gets the sense of Armand standing tall and calm at the window. Of reflective lights, of city shapes.
Gets the sense of a flinch.
(Armand, who is holding open a metal door, letting the sunlight through into Louis' brain, the blazing conviction that Daniel is his, that Daniel is intrigued by him, that Daniel has yet to turn him away, Daniel who he will never leave alone despite Louis' worthless commands of him—
And the door closes, a shock, like he was not holding it open at all but barely keeping it from slamming with the tips of his fingers, and he is gone from Louis' mind.)
But not yet from Roy Travis. The sense of Armand pulling back for a clean withdraw.
And he does, but rather than flicking an empty hook out from the ocean, a megalodon breaks through the waves. In the reflection of Armand's highrise window, Lestat is almost visible, all fangs and wild golden curls, launching himself for Armand's throat in a wild lashing of psychic claws and teeth that also feels like a slice across the neck, a slow and loving bloodletting, and also like a tender kiss to the forehead, so nice to see you again after all this time.
In the hallway, Lestat tosses his head back to laugh. We have fun here. He is so angry at everyone.
A scream of sunlight bronzing the silk-toned, everlasting loop of something Louis has accepted to be the truth: You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the building. You were still in the buil—
Severed, so abruptly that the pain multiplies. (The sun never hurts; it's absence is where the agony lives.) That Daniel's embrace is an agony of its own in that initial plunge into darkness as the door bangs closed again.
Help him, Lestat had said, and Louis is uncertain whether or not he managed even that.
The sunlight slices in around the cracks in the door before vanishing. Lestat is laughing. Louis can't feel his body, chilled through in spite of Daniel's grasp on him.
Echoing after, words like ice gliding beneath the waves: I'll kill you if you come near him again, I'll kill you, I'll kill you.
Words that lack heat in spite of the tremor of anger that accompanies that. Scalded. Flaking ash. Hands clutching clumsily at Daniel's face in some stubborn inclination towards protection.
A clean parting, with just the barest static singe to his fingertips— annoyance at being defied surges up he rides the swell of it until it pours him to the other side, where he is surprised Molloy managed it, and perversely proud that he did. A strange pop of pleasure. He taught him something. A clever, capable fledgling. His.
Rude, though. It's no longer a chess match. The hurt is real, the wounds are open. Fucking unacceptable rings in his head, over the mortal's rapidly deteriorating speech, over Louis' impotent threat.
Overtaken quite suddenly.
Armand shoves Lestat away from his mind like a train slamming into a parked car. Of course has to have the most dramatic final moment. Armand hisses at him, at air, at a reflection of nothing, and his anger crackles around him. He doesn't want your teeth, your claws, your blood, your mocking kiss. A boot in his face, shoving him out the window. The very pointed feeling of being rejected. Armand's desire for Lestat is a nightmare of a thing tied up in issues buried too deep for a shark bursting through undead radio frequencies to get to.
'Enfant.'
Roy Travis' head caves in.
Armand closes his mind.
(Daniel stays standing with Louis, protected, protecting, even as consciousness swims strangely and blood leaks out of his ears.)
An echo of a familiar cackle is shoved out of Armand's mind with the rest of him. Bonne nuit.
Lestat turns his hand so that Roy Travis' dead body doesn't strike him on its way to collapse, just a slight breaking of sweat across his brow from the exertion of his own little trick. Ringing silence in the hallway, heavy breathing, thumping heart beats, and he can smell blood and sweat.
Reality like ice water, dousing adrenaline. He sidesteps the corpse on the floor and moves nearer to the two, eyes zigzagging in his assessment of them. "He's gone," Lestat says. Touches, first, the back of Louis' neck, the soft contact of fingertips running up the centre before his palm settles. His other touches Daniel's arm, a touch that firms into a grip when he seems to realise that the fledgling is barely on his feet.
"Come, sit for a moment," he says. Disinclined to use the same psychic inroads to reach out to Daniel. They both need to come to the surface. He doesn't need Louis' help when he says, "Louis, help me with him." Because Louis is also hurt, but perhaps not in imminent danger of drowning unless he stays this way.
All too possible they're both too far from him to heed him, but he shall try. It's either that or have a tantrum, anger temporarily strangled.
It's in Louis' nature, this depressive streak. He is difficult to comfort, Lestat had explained, as if Daniel hadn't gleaned as much. As if Armand had not understood this about Louis.
The loop plays on and on and on and on in an endless spiral that calls to the part of Louis that had opened the door. That hears Claudia and remembered his promise and remembered that she was dead, so what kept him from the rooftop?
Dispassionate accounting: Lestat's fingers on bare skin. The weakening force of Daniel's embrace. The scent of blood. Sweat. The echoing thud of a body.
Armand's voice, far off. Insubstantial echo.
All these sensations skidding along the surface of his mind without finding purchase. The loop yoked around this throat, anchoring Louis to his guilt, pulling him down into blackened ocean depths.
Louis, help me with him comes out muffled, a great distance between them despite the fingers at his neck. It buys Lestat a flinch of movement. A flinch, then a slow unraveling of hands from the punishing grip at Daniel's face.
Mired still, so the murmur of thought behind the impulse bubbles up between them: He's gone.
An echoed offering to convince Daniel.
Are they moving? Louis' hands have gone as far as Daniel's elbows, an automatons offering of support if not yet actual movement.
A lifetime of learning auto-pilot comes in handy. What's a grievous psychic injury to a professional high-functioning user, a man who was still sometimes doing a fuckload of cocaine while dealing with a toddler, someone in mid-stage Parkinson's. Louis grips his arms and some part of Daniel understands the wisdom of moving now, while Lestat is engaged enough to do something about it if they collapse.
It hurts to think. Daniel has never felt anything like it.
He's not fully cognizant of how he gets to the sofa, only that he does. Sideways, hands at his own face now, feeling blood and not being able to complete a thought.
"I'm fine," says man who is not fine; probably, Daniel would say this if a bear ate his legs. Just an FYI. Check on Louis, or the asshole who he does not realize is very much dead with a skull that currently looks like lasagna.
It was such a minor move, but Daniel in the infancy of these abilities was still punching so high above his weight class that the blowback is disproportionately painful. Like reaching for something and being burned, fumbling into a nail being bent back, stumbling, but much, much worse, and it pisses him off, and it embarrasses him, and it frustrates him. Things to be felt in full later, as he is currently preoccupied with holding very still and thinking nothing.
To Daniel on the tail of I'm fine. But this quip is probably going missed by his audience of mind-blendered two. Brilliance once again overlooked. Lestat's life is hard.
He finds himself quite stressed in this moment. On the plus side, it sublimates the pettier aspects of his anger.
Louis' silence has this affect on the best of days. But, here, Lestat allows him to do as he wishes or feels compelled towards while he gets an arm around Molloy, a hand hooked into Louis' shirt if Louis fails to attach himself in this effort, and sees them all into the apartment, low lighting glowing in the corners, and Daniel onto the sofa. Pats his head. There.
'You,' is a thought he delivers to—what was her name. Louis' familiar. Rachida. 'There is a body in the hallway outside. Have it taken care of.'
Good? Yes.
"Louis," comes next, still with a palm placed on Daniel's skull, as if that gentle contact is there to stem the bleeding from the wild tangle he can sense within it. Is not capable of sensing the same in Louis', so Lestat's hand will go out for his chin, to steer him. "Look at me."
A minor ordeal, moving as a group. A moment where Louis' claws dig in rather than move with, before good sense overrules hind-brain instinct that cares very little for whether or not Daniel should be on his feet.
The loop continues. On and on and on, a neatly laid tripwire sprung. Ashes trailing them from the room. Daniel's blood under his nails.
I'm fine summons something near to a scoff, muted but unmistakable, unconscious as it is. As hooked as it inevitably becomes to the loop of blame playing like a second heartbeat in his head.
He hadn't meant to sit. Has found a seat regardless, straight-backed absence of himself letting a hand find Daniel's hip. His chin is easily caught; Louis does not fight the upwards tip of his face.
They've done some variation on this, he and Lestat. Louis' absence. Louis present but simply gone. They are in some halfway space, Louis' head going quieter and quieter as he closes himself off with the poison of these truths.
"How?" surely heads off everything else at the pass, the sterile neutrality of Louis' voice like a finger laid upon the heart of the trap Armand sent to them. "He was here."
Where here should mean Daniel's head, but feels like something else. Feels as if Armand stood in this room, just long enough to deal out injury.
If Daniel were lucid he might say something like, 'I wasn't in Armand's head, I was in Louis' head. I think if I tried to connect directly with Armand, things would have actually gone better for me, because I'd have just been kicked out, but instead I feel like I put my entire dick into a garbage disposal, except my dick is my brain, and I'm not exactly sure why, because I don't understand any of this psychic bullshit.'
But he's not, so he just stays where he is, dizzy.
A little patter of Lestat's fingers on Daniel's crown, Louis' chin, thinking, before he ducks into an elegant crouch before them. When he decided to go out in quasi-drag tonight, he did not predict he would be playing mother at some point. May as well commit.
"His little marionette was here," he says. "And he rode along. Like a flea. A tapeworm. A blood-sucking tic." Mixing metaphors, but how can he resist.
Keeping half a sense of what Daniel's mind is doing, like a finger on a pulse, measuring. Nothing more than just being injured, he thinks. Well, 'just'. The brain is a vital kind of organ to be made into tatters. Another, less committed tendril of awareness tracks the progress of Rachida, tamping down fear and putting through calls, and the way the staff of the hotel begin to configure themselves under her direction. Locking down. She is wondering if she needs to tend to Mr. du Lac directly. He flicks a thought at her that it isn't necessary at the moment, and withdraws from that direction.
"I am sure he is terribly jealous of anyone's ability to monitor his fledgling's mind, and built a little theatre to try it for himself." Lestat's hand at Louis' knee, stroking his thumb along the curve of his kneecap. "I assume you got in his way, mon cher."
And Lestat had told him to, without thinking. This inspires less guilt than it does irritation, that will ferment into something more.
"Will you tell me what he did then?"
He is not quite certain, having distracted himself—did Armand fire a nuke into Daniel's brain by way of Roy Travis? Lestat is certain he would have felt it if he had, and he isn't even sure it's possible. The thing he knows Armand did is, in itself, an improbability.
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Especially after a cigarette and a half-pint of rum-laced warm blood, anyway, settling back at the the table, bright eyed and easy smiling. The latter twisting a little, because ah, good, more acronyms he doesn't understand, and also, did he give permission for Daniel and Louis to enjoy themselves while he was away, but he gamely shrugs, placing his elbows on the table, and asks, "What is an NFT?"
So that should take up some time.
They leave late, but before they can be the last ones left being shooed out by the staff, Lestat opting for a jovial enough mood to link both men's arms in his as they walk off the confinement of the bar for a block or so. The air is refreshingly brisk, and recent rain paints everything in reflective shine.
There are a couple hours until dawn by the time they make it back into the hotel, into the lobby, where the human staff are silent and polite and the atmosphere of the place is filled with the noise of foot falls, the sharp clack of heels that echoes in what Lestat judges to be a pleasing manner. The night has not been so wild that he has become disheveled, and he has, this time, remembered he has paint on his eyelids and not smeared it everywhere. He confirms this by being drawn to his own reflection in the gilt panels and glass as they go.
And so he is a little distracted, and as they step into the elevator, it's only when the doors are closing that he seems to notice something, a moment of eye contact with one of Louis' security that unsettles him in some unnamed way. But the doors close, and they are drawn upwards. His expression is still, as is his posture, everything, a subtle shift that nevertheless has a way of changing the mood in the little space of the elevator without saying anything. The sense that Daniel and Louis are not sharing the same space with an amiable Lestat bedecked in gold and feathers, but a wolf, hackles up, eyes blown black.
Maybe they ask him what's wrong. He pays no attention. And when the doors slide open, to the familiar hallway that branches off towards their rooms, Lestat is the first one out with a business-like stride that terminates as soon as they all see it: a shivering Roy Travis, standing facing them.
Lestat laughs, a loud cackle, echoing off marble.
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But no, the answer doesn't come in the space between ground floor and penthouse.
It comes as the doors slide open, as Lestat begins to laugh.
Louis understands immediately what's prompted the reaction, easier to field when it is directed so broadly.
"Wait," for Lestat, hand still held. Warding against Lestat's immediate impulse towards action, or against the possibility that someone other than Louis will have the opportunity to deal with this. A little edging movement, stepping forward, a hand placed to keep the doors from closing.
Is it like this when he sends someone? pings in the back of Daniel's head, flat and urgent.
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Checking his phone in the elevator. Confusion, unease, and before he can formulate a thought, things happen in quick succession.
"What?" is for all of it. Lestat's shift, his laugh, Louis' question, his own missed messages, Roy Travis in the fucking hotel?
"Molloy?!" Different than at the bookshop. The human looks frantic, but present. He stands rooted in place, arms shaking. "Where am I? I keep fucking blacking out, I tried to talk to you earlier, I was fucking screaming and you just stood there with your f—"
Abruptly, he shuts up. Forceful enough to hear the snap of his teeth as his jaw slams closed.
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A broad smile that shows fangs already, subtle but present. Malice, glittering.
"An admirer has sent us a gift basket," he says. There is no particular emphasis on admirer—they have, technically speaking, countless enemies, and they'll have have their tricks. This one has impressive flare, true, an attention to detail that might itch familiar, but all the same, his conclusions begin and end with thinking it unwise to immediately drain this present. He's gotten got that way before, goodness knows.
Roy Travis, meanwhile, sweating, a vein throbbing in his forehead, but some of that initial struggle relaxes. Is forced to relax, his attention still fixed on Daniel.
"You just stood there," he repeats, much calmer than a moment ago, "and you're normally so skilled at seeing what's in front of you."
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Drawn along with Lestat, wound tight as a coiled spring, to inspect.
And with that singular piece of information Daniel has given to him and not to Lestat, Louis is making his own guesses as to the identity of the admirer.
This gift permitted to keep some mobility, but maybe not autonomy. Maybe a similar gift as the last Daniel had mentioned.
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Woah woah woah. Still clutching his phone, reality catches up to him. Half a dozen texts and missed calls from Jeannie, who had encountered Travis as he stood in the parking lot by her car for too long, but who had vanished into the night the moment she started recording him. (No cops, she doesn't call cops on principle, another reason he hired her.)
"No, it's not like this." An answer to Louis' question, out loud, because there's no use hiding it anymore. He texts his assistant back that he's fine, that he'll figure out and handle the Roy Travis thing, enjoy your vacation. "They're always injured already and shoved in a bathroom or a closet."
And he'd checked the guy's head, at the bookshop. Could he have made a mistake that bad? Could all three of them have missed something? It threatens credulity, but the facts are lining up, and there's nothing else to do for it besides push into the man's head again, and—?
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(Not so dramatic as that, and if Daniel were think to try, he is perfectly capable of wiggling toes and fingers, but in the moment, something that feels like a painless dislocation—)
There's a fire. A magnolia tree, whom Armand said had been planted because the interior designer felt that the austere atrium needed something of the natural world in it, has combusted from inside itself. Daniel, on the floor, dying, held by an angel made of steel, blood trickling. Weakness. In his head, Armand says, "I would have stopped, if you'd told me to," his voice near Daniel's ear.
In the hallway, Roy Travis says, "I would leave you alone, if you told me to," in synchronisation, and Daniel has the kind of vampiric attention span to hear both things at once. Maybe more of a remove, when the mortal looks to Louis as he adds, "But he hasn't."
(At Louis' side, Lestat is still. Unreadable, momentarily.)
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Louis is holding so tightly to Lestat's hand that it must be painful. He is so far outside his body; when he lets go of Lestat, it is not to avoid the break of bones, but to take that single step closer, spine straight, eyes dark.
You were still in the building, Armand had said. And now Louis knows what it looks like, has this fragmented piece of what it had been like twisting into his gut.
"Armand," is soft as the ashes the mingle now with rocks rescued from a coffin in the burned out basement of the Théâtre des Vampires. Not asking but acknowledging. Yes, here you are. Yes, you are seen.
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"What did you say about the book, Mr Travis?" comes out as an echo in between glimpses of Armand in the man's house in Tampa, walking back and forth in front of him, absently going through his cupboards and judging his coffee mugs with political slogans on them. Out loud, from the mortal, and psychic, inside his head.
"I said it was probably half-fake," he begins to recite. "The vampire shit, that's fake, but the gay shit, that's all real, all Daniel Molloy because he's. Please, man, it's in my head, I can't get it out of my FUCKING HEAD—"
switching so quick. grabbed again. carrying on,
"—Everybody knows Molloy was a hooker. He wrote the AIDS book out of some oppression Olympics guilt that he didn't catch it. I said. I said. I want to go home. I said of course the fantasy guy's black. Please. You could tell him to stop, right? That's what he said."
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That's different. A different class of threat, and Lestat knows these two knew about the possibility, knows they have spoken of it and that this isn't exactly the first time, knows because he is highly practiced in deducing these kinds of things, but there is no room to feel anger for it, or jealousy, or whatever bullshit. Not when it's fear that immediately dashes cold through his system.
Which turns into anger. Convenient.
"Help him," Lestat says from behind Louis' shoulder, and the press of his hand encourages Louis in a Danielwards direction while he focuses (not quite a shove, but a little bit of one), slithering around the grasping thing in this mortal's mind that has snared Molloy, trying to find the connecting thread through which Armand is puppeting him. Where are you, love?
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A moment where Louis is in this room and gone at the same time.
A moment where he is brought back to it by the brief contact of Lestat's hand.
Understands that there is no time to ask what exactly Louis is meant to do. It is a forgone conclusion. They are years and miles removed from a little room in San Francisco but it is the same game, the same stakes.
Louis takes Daniel's face in his hands.
Listen as though I'm the voice of God or an angel talking to you.
Words spoke aloud in perfect synchronicity as Louis presses them into Daniel's head. Here he is. Remember? Does Daniel remember? He had pieced it together, the only reason they have these words to recall.
Telling you that room was a cage and it was never meant to hold you. That you already broke the lock and walked away from the monster inside. Come away, Daniel.
Louis' fingers, cradling Daniel's face. Stood bodily between Daniel and Travis and Armand hidden within him, a physical barrier. Lestat is near, engaged in work of his own.
Louis coaxes, Come to me, stubborn and afraid and desperate all at once.
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The voice of God, or an angel, and Claudia had called Louis an angel, too. Wrote it down over and over, until she was angry at him and embarrassed for doing so. Daniel reels, but one hand grabs at Louis' arm like he's catching onto something while falling.
A room. A cage. San Fransisco. Dubai. Louis' majordomo with his leather gloves and creeping presence, looking at him. The memory is real: 'Rashid' in daylight, in the lounge room, handing Daniel a power cord adapter. The look on his face is open and surprised, and he doesn't quite manage to hide the smile at whatever Daniel said to him. Then it melts, because one brown eye is red, orange, horrible, like a shotgun blast that's shredded half of the man's face, until it's Armand and they're in the same room, but now he's staring, staring, staring, and Louis is sitting beside him, and doesn't seem to notice the way Armand is drilling fucking hole into Daniel's head right there in the goddamn living room—
The door to the room slams. Daniel puts it away while standing outside of it, locked in some distant recess of his mind where he stores Armand Shit I'm Not Talking About. The grip on Louis' arm squeezes tighter, then Daniel flinches, and drags in a breath. Come to me, and he does.
"Motherfucker."
Roy Travis is still rambling about what he thinks about gays and people of color, and people of color who are gay, and what should happen to them. Tears of terror and agony are pouring down his handsome face.
(Armand, somewhere, glances at his threads being touched. Like a scrying eye flicking its attention over some unwanted visitor. Oh. You.)
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Daniel is shuttering himself away from the tangled mess that is Roy Travis' brain, and he has no true ability to do much about it. But he can hear Louis' voice in the strange echoed loop, he can feel the shape of the door, of the chamber within, that is being closed off, until he can feel very little. He could stop now, if he wanted, slither out of Lestat's slow progress along the shivering strings of his control.
Finds himself unsatisfied. Maybe Daniel will sense it too, because Louis certainly will—a sensation that's also like a door, only this one is being slammed open under great force, directly into Louis' mind. On the other side—
It feels like sunlight, for a moment.
And it clears, and here, the taste of Daniel's blood in his mouth, and here, Daniel completely unaware as his body dies, the feeling of white and silver curls under his palm, Armand's palm but Louis can feel it too, and here, Daniel's blood swallowed down his throat and hearing the thought, you were fascinating and you still are, and here, the texture of a curtain with afternoon light bearing down, considering the slowly waking fledgling on some shitty motel bed.
And here, another bookstore, like the one from tonight but different, further back, gazing past the heads of a polite crowd. Armand, leaning against a load-bearing pillar, and Daniel, taking questions. Daniel, he looks at him, and they see and recognise each other, and something in Daniel's ever-present smile sharpens.
(Lestat, meanwhile, winds those threads around psychic fingers. Gathering some strength. He could, possibly, sever the connection, but he would like it to hurt when he does.)
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Armand built everything in Louis' mind. Of course, it opens for him. The force of entry only serves to underscore the point: seventy-seven years together cannot be erased in a matter of days, weeks, months.
Of course the ashes mingle in the rocks lining the floor of Louis' atrium. Of course they it will never be possible to sweep them away in their entirety.
Sunlight scalds. A memory bursting in the half-space between Louis' withdrawal from Daniel's mind and his own, ash flaking off him in great chunks, gray and red mottling across his skin.
Only a memory. Erodes quickly as Louis retreats, sucked down into his own mind with the memory of blood and Daniel's soft curls and these aren't his but they are Armand's, and they burrow down into the place where Louis' rage and pain and guilt live.
He was in the building. He was leaving, and Armand had done this.
The disorienting overlay of past and present, Daniel's smile sharpening over the heads of gathered humans and Daniel laughing while a clutch of New Yorkers applauded and Daniel with his massive clunky tape recorder saying I'd really like to interview you.
Louis' hands spasm at the sides of Daniel's face.
Leave him alone, Armand, is as raw now as it had been then, trapped in a bed beneath newspapered windows, watching as Armand looked up from his study of Daniel's prone body to observe Louis, helpless a room away.
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Louis should have been the monster. Louis who was burned and crumbling, Louis who snapped at him, hurt him about Alice. But now, like the, he just hasn't been afraid. Louis is grabbing his face and Daniel wraps his arms around him, pulls him back away from that door. In his mind's eye there's a sensation of holding him while ash and skin are flaking away. He doesn't recoil.
Armand built everything in Louis' mind. Daniel knows a fucking thing or two about how Armand builds, by now.
Roy Travis' brain is starting to collapse under the strain of being used as a conduit for four supernatural creatures, two of which are psychic juggernauts who could shrug and rend him to pudding with an aftershock. Daniel reaches out—
'Fucking unacceptable way to have this conversation,' is as bullish as it ever ways in Dubai, as dismissively hostile as DISREGARD, as smugly combative as WE'LL GET TO YOU. He does not concern himself with the threads being worried, with the dickhead human he hopes dies anyway, with the unnerving feeling of being a tiny little guppie fish in a tank with fucking sharks. 'You're not getting an answer like this.'
Armand showed him where to find the flaws, where to make turns. Daniel finds the lip of one, just a little turn, and slips it so the door shuts, separating Louis from this vortex of malice. A tiny movement, and yet—
He's going to have a bad, bad headache.
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And looking through him, an irrelevant puppet of meat and bile. It might even physically hurt, the measure of his gaze, piercing past panicked eyes, drilling into grey matter. Lestat is not attuned to the struggle occurring in his ex-husband's head right now, hearing the faint echo of Daniel's thoughts. The scent of ash, the scent of cooked flesh.
Gets the sense of a fashionable but empty apartment. Gets the sense of Armand standing tall and calm at the window. Of reflective lights, of city shapes.
Gets the sense of a flinch.
(Armand, who is holding open a metal door, letting the sunlight through into Louis' brain, the blazing conviction that Daniel is his, that Daniel is intrigued by him, that Daniel has yet to turn him away, Daniel who he will never leave alone despite Louis' worthless commands of him—
And the door closes, a shock, like he was not holding it open at all but barely keeping it from slamming with the tips of his fingers, and he is gone from Louis' mind.)
But not yet from Roy Travis. The sense of Armand pulling back for a clean withdraw.
And he does, but rather than flicking an empty hook out from the ocean, a megalodon breaks through the waves. In the reflection of Armand's highrise window, Lestat is almost visible, all fangs and wild golden curls, launching himself for Armand's throat in a wild lashing of psychic claws and teeth that also feels like a slice across the neck, a slow and loving bloodletting, and also like a tender kiss to the forehead, so nice to see you again after all this time.
In the hallway, Lestat tosses his head back to laugh. We have fun here. He is so angry at everyone.
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Severed, so abruptly that the pain multiplies. (The sun never hurts; it's absence is where the agony lives.) That Daniel's embrace is an agony of its own in that initial plunge into darkness as the door bangs closed again.
Help him, Lestat had said, and Louis is uncertain whether or not he managed even that.
The sunlight slices in around the cracks in the door before vanishing. Lestat is laughing. Louis can't feel his body, chilled through in spite of Daniel's grasp on him.
Echoing after, words like ice gliding beneath the waves: I'll kill you if you come near him again, I'll kill you, I'll kill you.
Words that lack heat in spite of the tremor of anger that accompanies that. Scalded. Flaking ash. Hands clutching clumsily at Daniel's face in some stubborn inclination towards protection.
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Rude, though. It's no longer a chess match. The hurt is real, the wounds are open. Fucking unacceptable rings in his head, over the mortal's rapidly deteriorating speech, over Louis' impotent threat.
Overtaken quite suddenly.
Armand shoves Lestat away from his mind like a train slamming into a parked car. Of course has to have the most dramatic final moment. Armand hisses at him, at air, at a reflection of nothing, and his anger crackles around him. He doesn't want your teeth, your claws, your blood, your mocking kiss. A boot in his face, shoving him out the window. The very pointed feeling of being rejected. Armand's desire for Lestat is a nightmare of a thing tied up in issues buried too deep for a shark bursting through undead radio frequencies to get to.
'Enfant.'
Roy Travis' head caves in.
Armand closes his mind.
(Daniel stays standing with Louis, protected, protecting, even as consciousness swims strangely and blood leaks out of his ears.)
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Lestat turns his hand so that Roy Travis' dead body doesn't strike him on its way to collapse, just a slight breaking of sweat across his brow from the exertion of his own little trick. Ringing silence in the hallway, heavy breathing, thumping heart beats, and he can smell blood and sweat.
Reality like ice water, dousing adrenaline. He sidesteps the corpse on the floor and moves nearer to the two, eyes zigzagging in his assessment of them. "He's gone," Lestat says. Touches, first, the back of Louis' neck, the soft contact of fingertips running up the centre before his palm settles. His other touches Daniel's arm, a touch that firms into a grip when he seems to realise that the fledgling is barely on his feet.
"Come, sit for a moment," he says. Disinclined to use the same psychic inroads to reach out to Daniel. They both need to come to the surface. He doesn't need Louis' help when he says, "Louis, help me with him." Because Louis is also hurt, but perhaps not in imminent danger of drowning unless he stays this way.
All too possible they're both too far from him to heed him, but he shall try. It's either that or have a tantrum, anger temporarily strangled.
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The loop plays on and on and on and on in an endless spiral that calls to the part of Louis that had opened the door. That hears Claudia and remembered his promise and remembered that she was dead, so what kept him from the rooftop?
Dispassionate accounting: Lestat's fingers on bare skin. The weakening force of Daniel's embrace. The scent of blood. Sweat. The echoing thud of a body.
Armand's voice, far off. Insubstantial echo.
All these sensations skidding along the surface of his mind without finding purchase. The loop yoked around this throat, anchoring Louis to his guilt, pulling him down into blackened ocean depths.
Louis, help me with him comes out muffled, a great distance between them despite the fingers at his neck. It buys Lestat a flinch of movement. A flinch, then a slow unraveling of hands from the punishing grip at Daniel's face.
Mired still, so the murmur of thought behind the impulse bubbles up between them: He's gone.
An echoed offering to convince Daniel.
Are they moving? Louis' hands have gone as far as Daniel's elbows, an automatons offering of support if not yet actual movement.
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It hurts to think. Daniel has never felt anything like it.
He's not fully cognizant of how he gets to the sofa, only that he does. Sideways, hands at his own face now, feeling blood and not being able to complete a thought.
"I'm fine," says man who is not fine; probably, Daniel would say this if a bear ate his legs. Just an FYI. Check on Louis, or the asshole who he does not realize is very much dead with a skull that currently looks like lasagna.
It was such a minor move, but Daniel in the infancy of these abilities was still punching so high above his weight class that the blowback is disproportionately painful. Like reaching for something and being burned, fumbling into a nail being bent back, stumbling, but much, much worse, and it pisses him off, and it embarrasses him, and it frustrates him. Things to be felt in full later, as he is currently preoccupied with holding very still and thinking nothing.
Except:
"Fucking prick."
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To Daniel on the tail of I'm fine. But this quip is probably going missed by his audience of mind-blendered two. Brilliance once again overlooked. Lestat's life is hard.
He finds himself quite stressed in this moment. On the plus side, it sublimates the pettier aspects of his anger.
Louis' silence has this affect on the best of days. But, here, Lestat allows him to do as he wishes or feels compelled towards while he gets an arm around Molloy, a hand hooked into Louis' shirt if Louis fails to attach himself in this effort, and sees them all into the apartment, low lighting glowing in the corners, and Daniel onto the sofa. Pats his head. There.
'You,' is a thought he delivers to—what was her name. Louis' familiar. Rachida. 'There is a body in the hallway outside. Have it taken care of.'
Good? Yes.
"Louis," comes next, still with a palm placed on Daniel's skull, as if that gentle contact is there to stem the bleeding from the wild tangle he can sense within it. Is not capable of sensing the same in Louis', so Lestat's hand will go out for his chin, to steer him. "Look at me."
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The loop continues. On and on and on, a neatly laid tripwire sprung. Ashes trailing them from the room. Daniel's blood under his nails.
I'm fine summons something near to a scoff, muted but unmistakable, unconscious as it is. As hooked as it inevitably becomes to the loop of blame playing like a second heartbeat in his head.
He hadn't meant to sit. Has found a seat regardless, straight-backed absence of himself letting a hand find Daniel's hip. His chin is easily caught; Louis does not fight the upwards tip of his face.
They've done some variation on this, he and Lestat. Louis' absence. Louis present but simply gone. They are in some halfway space, Louis' head going quieter and quieter as he closes himself off with the poison of these truths.
"How?" surely heads off everything else at the pass, the sterile neutrality of Louis' voice like a finger laid upon the heart of the trap Armand sent to them. "He was here."
Where here should mean Daniel's head, but feels like something else. Feels as if Armand stood in this room, just long enough to deal out injury.
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But he's not, so he just stays where he is, dizzy.
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"His little marionette was here," he says. "And he rode along. Like a flea. A tapeworm. A blood-sucking tic." Mixing metaphors, but how can he resist.
Keeping half a sense of what Daniel's mind is doing, like a finger on a pulse, measuring. Nothing more than just being injured, he thinks. Well, 'just'. The brain is a vital kind of organ to be made into tatters. Another, less committed tendril of awareness tracks the progress of Rachida, tamping down fear and putting through calls, and the way the staff of the hotel begin to configure themselves under her direction. Locking down. She is wondering if she needs to tend to Mr. du Lac directly. He flicks a thought at her that it isn't necessary at the moment, and withdraws from that direction.
"I am sure he is terribly jealous of anyone's ability to monitor his fledgling's mind, and built a little theatre to try it for himself." Lestat's hand at Louis' knee, stroking his thumb along the curve of his kneecap. "I assume you got in his way, mon cher."
And Lestat had told him to, without thinking. This inspires less guilt than it does irritation, that will ferment into something more.
"Will you tell me what he did then?"
He is not quite certain, having distracted himself—did Armand fire a nuke into Daniel's brain by way of Roy Travis? Lestat is certain he would have felt it if he had, and he isn't even sure it's possible. The thing he knows Armand did is, in itself, an improbability.
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