If Louis didn't want to be badgered with this kind of relentlessness, he should have let Armand eat him in 1973. He personally made a 20 year old junkie's hopeful passion into a permanent part of his core programming, so this is only fair.
A frown that makes Daniel look like an annoyed badger out of a CS Lewis story, but then he relents. The ice pack is losing its chill, so he adjusts it away from his head, a blobby container that sloshes aimlessly, like a lava lamp. He sits where Louis directs him to, but not far away. Permitting Louis to take a moment and get some fussing out of his system before he starts needling him, if he has to.
He will even dutifully consume a blood bag when it arrives. See, look, he's being so cooperative, setting a great example.
There is no deferring the questions. Louis is aware he has been permitted a minor reprieve, that Daniel's acquiescence is entirely begrudging and has its limits. The quiet in which Daniel permits Louis to settle him in one of the comfortable chairs beside the window, accepts Rachida's delivery of blood warmed into a comically large I&mdashNY mug.
Louis could wait, and let Daniel ask again. Permits him the stretch of quiet where Daniel drinks and Rachida pulls back the heavy curtains, reveals the city alight below them. The door clicks closed behind her. Louis hitches one foot up, heel set over knee. Poise plucked up like armor, interposed between the two of them in this room and the answer Daniel wants.
How is Louis? He still cannot quite pin down the right word for it. So instead, dispassionate imparting of what Armand had put into his head.
"He showed me how he did it. What you tasted like. How he watched you after."
Softly. (When Daniel saw him, smiled at him. Louis does not say this.)
"And he put me back into that room in San Francisco when he was finished," Louis murmurs, brow knitting as he says, "He let the sunlight in."
The blood tastes like a mid-tier microwave meal compared to actual food. It's not the worst, but he does worry about Louis and depression eating. On the other hand, he understands an addict having to fill the void. That was a lot of guys, in San Fransisco.
Patient, while Louis decides to speak. Daniel sips from he novelty mug, and listens, and then closes his eyes.
Goddamnit, Armand.
A slow breath in and out. He did not want Louis to see that. Some minor squeamishness over the whole thing he hasn't entirely dealt with yet, some less than minor feelings of privacy, and of course, the fact that he's sure Louis will feel a dozen times worse knowing it happened basically the second the door closed on his heels, that the look Armand gave Daniel from the floor where Louis had thrown him was so much like the looks Armand had given him all through those two weeks, that Louis probably should have been able to guess. A flicker of memory, I'm fine, Daniel, and Daniel's internal panic, finding it so off-putting. Seconds later, Armand had his face in his hands.
The sunlight detail is worse. Daniel rubs over his face, squeezes the bridge of his nose. He knew that, he thinks. Louis was burning, and Daniel reached over to close the door, and that's when it felt like a bomb went off in his head.
"I'm sorry."
Again. Maybe if Armand had just kill Daniel instead of turning him. He doesn't feel that way, doesn't yearn for death, but this situation is so fucking frustrating.
Maybe he'd withheld simply to avoid this possibility. To avoid Daniel offering this, an apology as if he had any culpability at all in this. Daniel had closed the door. Louis doesn't regret stepping in as he had. As Armand had perhaps counted on, given how readily he had dispatched his retribution.
"Alright." Daniel looks at him. Sighs. "Alright, but still. It's fucked, and I wish it didn't happen."
So, you know. Fuck this fucking thing. He takes a moment and re-orients, best he can while his head still hurts. He's not sure if the blood is helping, but it's not making it worse, so that's fine. Better to keep ... protein, or whatever, up.
"This is new. Every he sent before was just... passive. And there was nothing in their heads but weird bullshit from him. Completely harmless to me. The last time we communicated was also completely fine, outside the baseline weirdness of it happening at all."
He's irritated that Armand targeted Louis. 'Why' is a stupid question, 'Why now' is the important one.
"Did something happen? Did you hear from him before this?"
Daniel looks at him and Louis looks away, out at the city.
"We spoke."
And hurt each other in the process of it, perhaps. Louis has picked so obsessively over the conversation since then that he doubts anything more can be gathered from it. If the conclusions he draws from it are even close to correct.
Seventy-seven years is long, even for vampires. Don't they know each other, he and Armand? Which parts had been real? It couldn't all have been artifice.
"A building we lived in burned down afterwards. I assume it was his doing, given the nature of the blaze."
They're both grown-ups. Their respective connections (can they be called relationships? playing with fire, there) to Armand are entangled, yes, but different, and personal. They decided to keep shit quiet and just carry on, they don't have to report incursions to each other, but suddenly in retrospect it seems stupid to have not made that stipulation. Despite that, Daniel still feels strangely about exposing their meeting at the book signing. Even though nothing had happened, even though Armand had been almost fucking personable, by his standards.
"We might be idiots, Louis."
Deadpan. Daniel rubs his forehead. At least they're idiots together, or something. Arson is something Louis should have mentioned, he thinks. But what's he going to do, get mad about it. Daniel is the one who didn't say shit about Armand for weeks in the first place.
A raise of eyebrows as Louis' attention swings back around to Daniel.
Maybe this answers the question before Louis tells him, "It didn't go well."
And it had been painful into the bargain, touching the still-bleeding stump of a limb severed.
Louis refrains from saying a handful of other things. Things he knows will make Daniel's face do that thing he does when he finds Louis' life to be painful. They have enough to manage without that.
"Regradless, he didn't need to send a mortal into this place if he were inclined to touch my mind."
"And he didn't need to do all that to get in contact with me." Armand has his fucking phone number, even, though he's never used it. Literally no trouble finding him at any time, anywhere, which he's proven eerily several times over; if he wanted to fuck with Daniel's head specifically, he's had enormous opportunity. "Which means he was probably being a spiteful cunt just for the sake of being one."
He's so mad. Enough that he winces, some sympathetic throb of his headache ramping up with his temper. Daniel swears under his breath and sets the mug aside, picking up the ice pack again instead. (Refreshed by Rachida, who got a 'Thanks, New Rashid' out of Daniel for it.) Back on his head it goes, though he's not sure it's actually doing anything.
Not necessarily excluding Lestat's theory, the possibility that Armand had simply wanted to touch Daniel's mind and made an attempt.
Louis is quiet. Watches Daniel with his mug, with the ice. Feels the tender, warm pulse of emotion in his chest, still making itself known even with Louis only half-inside his own body.
"Possibly," Louis agrees at last. Probably. Armand is making a point. Answering them the only way he can without presenting himself in person.
Daniel's silver lining, having Armand banished from his mind, Louis is taking the dismantling of that to heart.
"Please stop beating yourself up about it. I mean it. I don't have to read your mind to know you're doing it, and Armand beat us both up enough without piling anything else on, okay?"
Many things are possible, with Armand. Possibly endless things. Daniel will have to ask him what he was trying to do, and scry answers from his face the way Armand can't do to him. He wonders if his maker will even permit a meeting, now, with that in mind— he's definitely picked up on the fact that Armand hates their imbalance of intuition. But he's going to have to fucking cope.
Louis' head half-turns towards the sound, keeping the thread of conversation between them as he answers, "I'm not sure he would have felt the need to make a point had our conversation gone better."
Though it begs the question: in what world did their conversations go well, now that Louis knows what he does?
There are things that can be forgiven. Armand knows he has not transgressed in a way Louis can forgive, unless Armand takes it from him.
Perhaps it is some kind of love, that Armand let Louis keep what Daniel showed to him.
"Maybe," he hedges, because they both have to learn something from this, not just tell each other it's okay and fall on their own bullheaded swords. "But he shouldn't feel a need like this. We've got to work on approaching him better, if he's going to be lurking around."
Which feels inevitable. He supposes they could part ways, but that feels like shit, honestly. Daniel leans elbows on his knees, and extends his free hand to brush knuckles against the back of Louis'. He sighs.
Quiet, then. Not even really thinking. Just sitting here with him. That's why he thinks he smelled burning, he guesses. Louis remembering being in the sun, because Armand forced the memory into him, in real time. Not afraid then, not afraid now. He'd still embrace him, no matter how fucked up.
"Want to get some air? This hotel feels like a fucking Kubrick movie, tonight."
That little brush of contact sparks a movement in turn, Louis catching Daniel's fingers before he can draw back. Laces them together, linking them as they lapse into silence.
The loop plays on. Louis was still in the building. Somewhere in his head he is still standing in the sun. Still trapped in a bed while Armand stood over Daniel's crumpled body.
All this turned over in Louis' head while they sit together, interrupted only by the possibility Daniel puts forth.
"Yes."
A better alternative, as it provides an opportunity for a hunt.
"You and Lestat should eat," Louis says aloud. "It'll help you both shake these after effects."
Even if it means leaving Louis on a park bench somewhere while they do it. Louis brings Daniel up with him by their linked hands, releases him so they might make their way into the main room of the suite, rouse Lestat if he is not already awake.
Standing the main room, leaning back against the edge of the nearest sofa lounge, already oriented in their direction as if with every expectation that they should run into each other. Dressed for the evening, currently, in his oxblood velvet trousers, dressed down with a tank top of silky black fabric, bare arms folded stiff across his chest. No makeup, save for what lingering particles of black and silver he didn't excavate from between his eyelashes.
And emanating a specific kind of poisonous anger that has yet to surface this entire time, but familiar from a distant past for one of them. Different from a preydrive, where black pupils have shrunk small in glacial-grey, and his jaw is set taut, haughty, even when he offers then a small slice of a smile.
"Bonsoir," he says. "I trust you both slept well."
"Maybe if somebody spontaneously breaks their legs in front of me," he says dryly. Not feeling especially predatory at the moment, brain too bruised to think deeply about anything, much less extend psychic awareness to select appropriate prey. Another night of taking it easy won't hurt, especially with the much maligned, now much appreciated, salad bar option.
Or,
maybe the issue is that, suddenly, he doesn't think Lestat wants to hang out.
Daniel is still holding an ice pack to his head like a moron, but he stares at the other vampire, disliking the vibe. Great, now what.
"I did, thanks."
Slightly clipped out of wariness, but despite that, he does mean the thank-you.
Maybe if he did not feel stripped raw from the night before, he would have an easier time tempering his reaction to that expression on Lestat's face. As it is, Louis is simply knocked off balance, tensed between fight or flight.
Intent, as he tacks on, "I thought you and Daniel might need something to eat."
Louis, who did not sleep. Who is braced against the lashing pull of memory in this moment, hoping to simply be wrong.
Ridiculously, mutual responses of reservation and wariness shove Lestat further to the edge of his bad mood, as if he were not passively exuding it like radioactivity. A little 'ah' at Louis' suggestion follows him shifting his weight from his lean and onto his feet, arms unfolding, all too much grace and deliberation in the way he moves.
"Yes, of course, my role here," a gesture between them all. "A devout guard dog, while not-quite-your fledgling grows his fangs."
What would be like from them? To detect exactly what the matter is, to offer apologies and gratitude like tributes to an altar? It would certainly help. His voice loses some of the simpering, ash-soft quality, words coming sharper;
"How long were you both intending to keep his presence a secret from me?"
Alright. This. Perfectly timed for when both Daniel and Louis are already fucked up. Goodwill towards Lestat turns off as a defense mechanism, but it's done tiredly— Hey, man, I saved your whole fucking potential future by cracking that case is probably not going to be helpful.
But what is going to be helpful? The truth is going to be easy to twist from someone who's mad and (ballpark guess) jealous. Lying is pointless. What did Armand show Lestat, if anything? Is Lestat also reeling from something?
Daniel feels another flinch from the migraine. Goddamnit.
"Until he fucked off without incident, preferably."
Bristling is not the right response, but Louis bristles all the same.
The loop plays. Lestat's eyes are terrible and cold.
Louis hasn't slept.
Suppresses only by the barest restraint, to avoid accusatory: You sought him out on your own.
But it's such a brittle, painful thought that to delve into the topic would be destructive past the point of easy repair. So Louis bites it back. Let's Daniel's answer stand as he circles away, crossing to a chair that he can't bring himself to sit in, only stands behind, in a small attempt to present as less of a unified front. Head off some brewing thing Louis has a sense of if not actual sight of.
Armand had showed Lestat very little, and in fact, in the wake of it all, he had allowed himself some internal preening for, perhaps, chasing the gremlin off before he might deign to try it. But there had been something, some small thing, a little sting of rejection when he'd been summarily ejected out the airlock of Armand's brain. Something similar in the feeling that chimes for the hundredth time at Daniel's reply, Louis' roving quiet.
"So, never," is a quick sniping back, showing teeth. Blunt ones, still, even if he feels some kind of hackling hindbrain response to the way Louis circles round. Harder to yell at them both that way, but Lestat can cope with some dynamic staging.
Gears creaking, straining to remain in the one mode. Better to stay angry than betray hurt feeling. Hurt feeling is not the point. (It's not!)
"And does that not only prove I know him better than the two of you combined," he says, is flung back at Louis as well. Not quite shouting, but something in his voice has a way of filling the room without any effort at all. "You should know the reason we have not been harassed by the lesser vampires of this area is because of my presence alone. I'm not a fucking decorative accessory to your grand adventure together."
A stalking around, a furious sweep of a look that captures them both. "Or ought I be the one to fuck off without incident and see how you both fare then."
Dueling immediate instincts: worry about Louis, whose move away from him to make himself less offensive is painful to see. He hopes, for a strained heartbeat, that Lestat will notice and understand. See that Louis is fucking scared of him. But it doesn't happen, Lestat goes on, and the pause from Daniel after is awful. I own the night, out into the world, but after a mental asskicking from Armand, Louis is like this against his maker's bad mood.
The second instinct is to get in his face about it. Bark back and argue. Daniel is never afraid when he should be, and he isn't afraid of Lestat, even though he's very aware of what the vampire is capable of. He shoved a hand into Armand's stupid psychic nuke, he'll stand between Lestat and Louis, he doesn't give a fuck.
Neither despair nor hostility are going to work. Think about it. (Thinking hurts.)
"You're right."
Well. Sort of. Maybe. Close enough that Daniel is going to give it to him in hopes of de-escalation. Please see you're scaring Louis. Please care about it. For fuck's sake.
"I did hope for never, because I didn't want anything to happen. And you know that Louis coming here, with me and you, specifically, has been about safety. Armand is something he and I are still fucking processing and it's just been really hard. Maybe we aren't making the best decisions about it. And since I'm sure you were eavesdropping - which we're taking a whatever on, it's fine - you know we know that."
You're right brings Louis' gaze slanting over to Daniel, jaw tight. Assessing.
Louis' hands come to rest on the chair in front of him. Gaze sliding back to Lestat, measuring the effect Daniel's had.
Withholding his own thoughts on who needed what safety. No need to litigate that in this exact moment.
"No one wants you to leave."
Well. Maybe Armand would prefer Lestat absent, but Armand is not part of this calculation.
Louis holds his own temper in check. Trying to follow Daniel's lead, to deflate rather than match Lestat's energy. (Whatever parts of his are governed by the past, by the lesson learned in New Orleans that lives in Louis' body still, Louis will not examine.) Bites down on the part of him galled by the thought of being perceived as in need of protection.
Says a thing that Louis knows to be true, his own growing frustration aside:
It's off-guarding, an unexpected You're right, Lestat silent with hands planted on his hips (nail polish still there, too, save for one bare fingernail picked clean) and a twitch at his mouth for the free pass as pertains to the eavesdropping. A brief short-circuit in the fritzing already occurring in his skull.
Posture tensing at Louis' appeal to him. Daniel is sure he was eavesdropping, like Louis had been certain he had been followed that night in the bayou, and of course Lestat did both of those things, and Louis wants him to stay, stay, stay but for what? Daniel had said it would be good, them talking, but do they talk? He had asked and Louis had said nothing, Daniel had asked and Louis had said everything.
And on and on, fast like lightning, frenetic and irrational, and no one needs to attack him for his heart rate to climb as if they are.
"Armand has had his claws in me for centuries," can still be believed to be true at the same time he feels Armand overlooked him, Lestat is talented in this way. His voice has taken on a wavering quality, like the rattling of a chain holding back an angry dog. A spread of his arms, a grand sweep of a gesture. "Maybe I have my own ~processing~ to do, but what does any of that matter."
The look he casts Louis' way, a splash of acid. "And to do what? Entertain you both between your plotting and planning and heartfelt tête-à-tête? Have I not had my fill of all that?"
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A frown that makes Daniel look like an annoyed badger out of a CS Lewis story, but then he relents. The ice pack is losing its chill, so he adjusts it away from his head, a blobby container that sloshes aimlessly, like a lava lamp. He sits where Louis directs him to, but not far away. Permitting Louis to take a moment and get some fussing out of his system before he starts needling him, if he has to.
He will even dutifully consume a blood bag when it arrives. See, look, he's being so cooperative, setting a great example.
Now. Louis?
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Louis could wait, and let Daniel ask again. Permits him the stretch of quiet where Daniel drinks and Rachida pulls back the heavy curtains, reveals the city alight below them. The door clicks closed behind her. Louis hitches one foot up, heel set over knee. Poise plucked up like armor, interposed between the two of them in this room and the answer Daniel wants.
How is Louis? He still cannot quite pin down the right word for it. So instead, dispassionate imparting of what Armand had put into his head.
"He showed me how he did it. What you tasted like. How he watched you after."
Softly. (When Daniel saw him, smiled at him. Louis does not say this.)
"And he put me back into that room in San Francisco when he was finished," Louis murmurs, brow knitting as he says, "He let the sunlight in."
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Patient, while Louis decides to speak. Daniel sips from he novelty mug, and listens, and then closes his eyes.
Goddamnit, Armand.
A slow breath in and out. He did not want Louis to see that. Some minor squeamishness over the whole thing he hasn't entirely dealt with yet, some less than minor feelings of privacy, and of course, the fact that he's sure Louis will feel a dozen times worse knowing it happened basically the second the door closed on his heels, that the look Armand gave Daniel from the floor where Louis had thrown him was so much like the looks Armand had given him all through those two weeks, that Louis probably should have been able to guess. A flicker of memory, I'm fine, Daniel, and Daniel's internal panic, finding it so off-putting. Seconds later, Armand had his face in his hands.
The sunlight detail is worse. Daniel rubs over his face, squeezes the bridge of his nose. He knew that, he thinks. Louis was burning, and Daniel reached over to close the door, and that's when it felt like a bomb went off in his head.
"I'm sorry."
Again. Maybe if Armand had just kill Daniel instead of turning him. He doesn't feel that way, doesn't yearn for death, but this situation is so fucking frustrating.
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Maybe he'd withheld simply to avoid this possibility. To avoid Daniel offering this, an apology as if he had any culpability at all in this. Daniel had closed the door. Louis doesn't regret stepping in as he had. As Armand had perhaps counted on, given how readily he had dispatched his retribution.
The loop plays on, and on.
"Please don't."
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So, you know. Fuck this fucking thing. He takes a moment and re-orients, best he can while his head still hurts. He's not sure if the blood is helping, but it's not making it worse, so that's fine. Better to keep ... protein, or whatever, up.
"This is new. Every he sent before was just... passive. And there was nothing in their heads but weird bullshit from him. Completely harmless to me. The last time we communicated was also completely fine, outside the baseline weirdness of it happening at all."
He's irritated that Armand targeted Louis. 'Why' is a stupid question, 'Why now' is the important one.
"Did something happen? Did you hear from him before this?"
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"We spoke."
And hurt each other in the process of it, perhaps. Louis has picked so obsessively over the conversation since then that he doubts anything more can be gathered from it. If the conclusions he draws from it are even close to correct.
Seventy-seven years is long, even for vampires. Don't they know each other, he and Armand? Which parts had been real? It couldn't all have been artifice.
"A building we lived in burned down afterwards. I assume it was his doing, given the nature of the blaze."
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"We might be idiots, Louis."
Deadpan. Daniel rubs his forehead. At least they're idiots together, or something. Arson is something Louis should have mentioned, he thinks. But what's he going to do, get mad about it. Daniel is the one who didn't say shit about Armand for weeks in the first place.
"Did it go bad? When you spoke."
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Maybe this answers the question before Louis tells him, "It didn't go well."
And it had been painful into the bargain, touching the still-bleeding stump of a limb severed.
Louis refrains from saying a handful of other things. Things he knows will make Daniel's face do that thing he does when he finds Louis' life to be painful. They have enough to manage without that.
"Regradless, he didn't need to send a mortal into this place if he were inclined to touch my mind."
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"And he didn't need to do all that to get in contact with me." Armand has his fucking phone number, even, though he's never used it. Literally no trouble finding him at any time, anywhere, which he's proven eerily several times over; if he wanted to fuck with Daniel's head specifically, he's had enormous opportunity. "Which means he was probably being a spiteful cunt just for the sake of being one."
He's so mad. Enough that he winces, some sympathetic throb of his headache ramping up with his temper. Daniel swears under his breath and sets the mug aside, picking up the ice pack again instead. (Refreshed by Rachida, who got a 'Thanks, New Rashid' out of Daniel for it.) Back on his head it goes, though he's not sure it's actually doing anything.
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Louis is quiet. Watches Daniel with his mug, with the ice. Feels the tender, warm pulse of emotion in his chest, still making itself known even with Louis only half-inside his own body.
"Possibly," Louis agrees at last. Probably. Armand is making a point. Answering them the only way he can without presenting himself in person.
Daniel's silver lining, having Armand banished from his mind, Louis is taking the dismantling of that to heart.
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Many things are possible, with Armand. Possibly endless things. Daniel will have to ask him what he was trying to do, and scry answers from his face the way Armand can't do to him. He wonders if his maker will even permit a meeting, now, with that in mind— he's definitely picked up on the fact that Armand hates their imbalance of intuition. But he's going to have to fucking cope.
Door slam? Daniel wrinkles his brow.
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Louis' head half-turns towards the sound, keeping the thread of conversation between them as he answers, "I'm not sure he would have felt the need to make a point had our conversation gone better."
Though it begs the question: in what world did their conversations go well, now that Louis knows what he does?
There are things that can be forgiven. Armand knows he has not transgressed in a way Louis can forgive, unless Armand takes it from him.
Perhaps it is some kind of love, that Armand let Louis keep what Daniel showed to him.
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Which feels inevitable. He supposes they could part ways, but that feels like shit, honestly. Daniel leans elbows on his knees, and extends his free hand to brush knuckles against the back of Louis'. He sighs.
Quiet, then. Not even really thinking. Just sitting here with him. That's why he thinks he smelled burning, he guesses. Louis remembering being in the sun, because Armand forced the memory into him, in real time. Not afraid then, not afraid now. He'd still embrace him, no matter how fucked up.
"Want to get some air? This hotel feels like a fucking Kubrick movie, tonight."
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The loop plays on. Louis was still in the building. Somewhere in his head he is still standing in the sun. Still trapped in a bed while Armand stood over Daniel's crumpled body.
All this turned over in Louis' head while they sit together, interrupted only by the possibility Daniel puts forth.
"Yes."
A better alternative, as it provides an opportunity for a hunt.
"You and Lestat should eat," Louis says aloud. "It'll help you both shake these after effects."
Even if it means leaving Louis on a park bench somewhere while they do it. Louis brings Daniel up with him by their linked hands, releases him so they might make their way into the main room of the suite, rouse Lestat if he is not already awake.
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Standing the main room, leaning back against the edge of the nearest sofa lounge, already oriented in their direction as if with every expectation that they should run into each other. Dressed for the evening, currently, in his oxblood velvet trousers, dressed down with a tank top of silky black fabric, bare arms folded stiff across his chest. No makeup, save for what lingering particles of black and silver he didn't excavate from between his eyelashes.
And emanating a specific kind of poisonous anger that has yet to surface this entire time, but familiar from a distant past for one of them. Different from a preydrive, where black pupils have shrunk small in glacial-grey, and his jaw is set taut, haughty, even when he offers then a small slice of a smile.
"Bonsoir," he says. "I trust you both slept well."
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Or,
maybe the issue is that, suddenly, he doesn't think Lestat wants to hang out.
Daniel is still holding an ice pack to his head like a moron, but he stares at the other vampire, disliking the vibe. Great, now what.
"I did, thanks."
Slightly clipped out of wariness, but despite that, he does mean the thank-you.
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Maybe if he did not feel stripped raw from the night before, he would have an easier time tempering his reaction to that expression on Lestat's face. As it is, Louis is simply knocked off balance, tensed between fight or flight.
Intent, as he tacks on, "I thought you and Daniel might need something to eat."
Louis, who did not sleep. Who is braced against the lashing pull of memory in this moment, hoping to simply be wrong.
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"Yes, of course, my role here," a gesture between them all. "A devout guard dog, while not-quite-your fledgling grows his fangs."
What would be like from them? To detect exactly what the matter is, to offer apologies and gratitude like tributes to an altar? It would certainly help. His voice loses some of the simpering, ash-soft quality, words coming sharper;
"How long were you both intending to keep his presence a secret from me?"
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But what is going to be helpful? The truth is going to be easy to twist from someone who's mad and (ballpark guess) jealous. Lying is pointless. What did Armand show Lestat, if anything? Is Lestat also reeling from something?
Daniel feels another flinch from the migraine. Goddamnit.
"Until he fucked off without incident, preferably."
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The loop plays. Lestat's eyes are terrible and cold.
Louis hasn't slept.
Suppresses only by the barest restraint, to avoid accusatory: You sought him out on your own.
But it's such a brittle, painful thought that to delve into the topic would be destructive past the point of easy repair. So Louis bites it back. Let's Daniel's answer stand as he circles away, crossing to a chair that he can't bring himself to sit in, only stands behind, in a small attempt to present as less of a unified front. Head off some brewing thing Louis has a sense of if not actual sight of.
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"So, never," is a quick sniping back, showing teeth. Blunt ones, still, even if he feels some kind of hackling hindbrain response to the way Louis circles round. Harder to yell at them both that way, but Lestat can cope with some dynamic staging.
Gears creaking, straining to remain in the one mode. Better to stay angry than betray hurt feeling. Hurt feeling is not the point. (It's not!)
"And does that not only prove I know him better than the two of you combined," he says, is flung back at Louis as well. Not quite shouting, but something in his voice has a way of filling the room without any effort at all. "You should know the reason we have not been harassed by the lesser vampires of this area is because of my presence alone. I'm not a fucking decorative accessory to your grand adventure together."
A stalking around, a furious sweep of a look that captures them both. "Or ought I be the one to fuck off without incident and see how you both fare then."
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The second instinct is to get in his face about it. Bark back and argue. Daniel is never afraid when he should be, and he isn't afraid of Lestat, even though he's very aware of what the vampire is capable of. He shoved a hand into Armand's stupid psychic nuke, he'll stand between Lestat and Louis, he doesn't give a fuck.
Neither despair nor hostility are going to work. Think about it. (Thinking hurts.)
"You're right."
Well. Sort of. Maybe. Close enough that Daniel is going to give it to him in hopes of de-escalation. Please see you're scaring Louis. Please care about it. For fuck's sake.
"I did hope for never, because I didn't want anything to happen. And you know that Louis coming here, with me and you, specifically, has been about safety. Armand is something he and I are still fucking processing and it's just been really hard. Maybe we aren't making the best decisions about it. And since I'm sure you were eavesdropping - which we're taking a whatever on, it's fine - you know we know that."
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Louis' hands come to rest on the chair in front of him. Gaze sliding back to Lestat, measuring the effect Daniel's had.
Withholding his own thoughts on who needed what safety. No need to litigate that in this exact moment.
"No one wants you to leave."
Well. Maybe Armand would prefer Lestat absent, but Armand is not part of this calculation.
Louis holds his own temper in check. Trying to follow Daniel's lead, to deflate rather than match Lestat's energy. (Whatever parts of his are governed by the past, by the lesson learned in New Orleans that lives in Louis' body still, Louis will not examine.) Bites down on the part of him galled by the thought of being perceived as in need of protection.
Says a thing that Louis knows to be true, his own growing frustration aside:
"I want you to stay."
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Posture tensing at Louis' appeal to him. Daniel is sure he was eavesdropping, like Louis had been certain he had been followed that night in the bayou, and of course Lestat did both of those things, and Louis wants him to stay, stay, stay but for what? Daniel had said it would be good, them talking, but do they talk? He had asked and Louis had said nothing, Daniel had asked and Louis had said everything.
And on and on, fast like lightning, frenetic and irrational, and no one needs to attack him for his heart rate to climb as if they are.
"Armand has had his claws in me for centuries," can still be believed to be true at the same time he feels Armand overlooked him, Lestat is talented in this way. His voice has taken on a wavering quality, like the rattling of a chain holding back an angry dog. A spread of his arms, a grand sweep of a gesture. "Maybe I have my own ~processing~ to do, but what does any of that matter."
The look he casts Louis' way, a splash of acid. "And to do what? Entertain you both between your plotting and planning and heartfelt tête-à-tête? Have I not had my fill of all that?"
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