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.
Lestat says mon cher and Louis gathers the words as if to hold them in one hand.
"He made the point he intended to make."
Chilly syllables. Truth detached from the detail. (How long had it taken Armand to mete out these punishments? Minutes? Hours?) The loop plays on and ash flakes away and when Louis looks down at his own hands, at Lestat's fingers at his knee, it is disorienting to find no sign of either.
Except in the ways in which Lestat is informed about where and how to place his concern. Louis' gaze drops and Lestat shifts his attention, hands moving in to circle his wrists, tipping his head to try to capture his attention.
"I can't see into your mind," he says. A reminder, gentle. "You have to tell me what occurred there."
Or: Louis doesn't have to tell him anything, of course, but the demand comes soft, needful, a desire to be of use rather than a desire to simply be in control of things.
Daniel. silent still. Louis can hear him breathing. He has Daniel's blood under his fingernails. Held on too tightly while Armand went about his work.
Lestat is touching, coaxing. A binding kind of contact that keeps Louis from slipping sideways and vanishing into the unyielding loop running in the back of his mind.
(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—)
Louis looks into Lestat's face. Luminous, steadier than Louis has seen him since they reconciled. The entreaty there is enough to jar loose an answer.
"He had things to show me. And he did."
How quickly Armand had plucked up those images, how quickly he'd pivoted. Louis' eyes stray to Daniel.
Steady is true, unwavering focus, no threat of breaking emotion that he can't simply wear plainly. Lestat strokes Louis' inner wrists with his thumbs, and follows that look to Daniel with a flick of a glance. And back again.
"Memories are real," he says. "As real as glass. As gravity."
If Lestat can't surmise that Daniel rescued Louis from that onslaught, he can at least deduce what it looks like when a young vampire puts himself in harm's way with the intent to do so. How revoltingly sweet of them both, trading heroisms.
"This one needs rest." Lestat pushes himself to stand up, giving Louis' wrist a last a squeeze of assurance before he lets go. A step drifted close to Daniel, his fingers catching the fledgling up under his chin to force a moment of eye contact. "He will feel better tomorrow."
Gentle but unrelenting, the way Lestat pushes Daniel under—away from pain, embarrassment, anger, and into an early rest, as if the sun had already touched the sky.
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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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Lestat says mon cher and Louis gathers the words as if to hold them in one hand.
"He made the point he intended to make."
Chilly syllables. Truth detached from the detail. (How long had it taken Armand to mete out these punishments? Minutes? Hours?) The loop plays on and ash flakes away and when Louis looks down at his own hands, at Lestat's fingers at his knee, it is disorienting to find no sign of either.
"To the extent he could."
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Except in the ways in which Lestat is informed about where and how to place his concern. Louis' gaze drops and Lestat shifts his attention, hands moving in to circle his wrists, tipping his head to try to capture his attention.
"I can't see into your mind," he says. A reminder, gentle. "You have to tell me what occurred there."
Or: Louis doesn't have to tell him anything, of course, but the demand comes soft, needful, a desire to be of use rather than a desire to simply be in control of things.
no subject
Lestat is touching, coaxing. A binding kind of contact that keeps Louis from slipping sideways and vanishing into the unyielding loop running in the back of his mind.
(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—)
Louis looks into Lestat's face. Luminous, steadier than Louis has seen him since they reconciled. The entreaty there is enough to jar loose an answer.
"He had things to show me. And he did."
How quickly Armand had plucked up those images, how quickly he'd pivoted. Louis' eyes stray to Daniel.
"It felt real."
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"Memories are real," he says. "As real as glass. As gravity."
If Lestat can't surmise that Daniel rescued Louis from that onslaught, he can at least deduce what it looks like when a young vampire puts himself in harm's way with the intent to do so. How revoltingly sweet of them both, trading heroisms.
"This one needs rest." Lestat pushes himself to stand up, giving Louis' wrist a last a squeeze of assurance before he lets go. A step drifted close to Daniel, his fingers catching the fledgling up under his chin to force a moment of eye contact. "He will feel better tomorrow."
Gentle but unrelenting, the way Lestat pushes Daniel under—away from pain, embarrassment, anger, and into an early rest, as if the sun had already touched the sky.
"We all will."