The accusation winds that point of tension tighter in Louis, a simultaneous bracing alongside the unconscious reaction to the rattled warning of Lestat's voice.
His knuckles are whitening over the back of the chair.
A separate argument caught behind Louis' teeth. Who suffered what. What Armand took. The roots in Louis that exist still to be yanked upon. Seventy-seven years of companionship that do not untangle simply because Louis stepped away. Fingerprints dug into him as if Louis had been wet concrete, which belong to Lestat and which have been overlaid by Armand.
He feels baited. (Or just helpless, cornered.) But his jaw clicks closed, eyes intent on Lestat as Daniel makes his appeal.
Louis won't undercut him. Doesn't want Lestat to make good on his threats to go.
The wood creaks quietly under his hands, a comical addition to Daniel's extended hand, but that can't be helped.
Baiting or cornering, Lestat's focus on Louis has all the expectation for reprisal, feeling as much as seeing or hearing the bloodless tension in the other vampire's hands, a sense of restraint that makes him want to shake loose whatever is being held back from him. Go, then, say it, say whatever it is, Lestat's sneer seems to say.
Ignores Daniel at first, or seems to, holding Louis' intent focus right up until that Okay?, and Lestat wavers.
His look over to Daniel has gone traitorously glossy, rose-tinged. In the secondhand account of arguments with Lestat, there was never an awful lot of if you're unhappy, we can change things in either direction, and he tenses against it as he had tensed against the transaction of kindnesses in a mobile store.
Restless, arms folding once again. "Is it not so? Without any throats to demonstrably tear open." Sulkier, now, a little flick of his hand. "I do not want to eavesdrop to learn things. And there would have been nothing I could hear if you were both fit enough to speak in your minds."
A sore point. And there is, of course, another element to all of this, but he finds himself guarding it jealously (ha) once more.
That Louis hasn't much is a burning coal in Daniel's awareness, but he doesn't know what to do about it. He doesn't feel confident checking in on him telepathically, still feeling so raw.
"You've been having a good time, too. That much has to be true."
An appeal to emotion. Come on, man, you loved stealing a guitar and accidentally getting high after murdering four people! They're building friendships. Learning about each other, be it for the first time, or how they are, now, so many years removed from brutal wounds.
He nearly continues, but— ah, fucking Christ, speaking of feeling raw. Daniel doesn't quite sway on his feet, but it's still an odd fuzzy moment before he sits down in a chair. Extremely annoying, and he says nothing about it. Whatever.
"I didn't know you well enough to feel comfortable talking to you about it. Maybe we should have re-evaluated. Before Armand pulled this bullshit."
Daniel doesn't know if that's true. Lestat's reactivity here is sensitive enough to make him think that the ideal is still to keep it under wraps— but that's not possible, so there's no sense dwelling on it, and defending it is just asking for a bad fight. Pushing forward as-is. It's fine.
Silent still, biting down on his fear, on the anger that is so much easier to reach for.
He knows he is not truly angry at Lestat. Maybe not even at Armand. Maybe it is as simple as having had a mirror held up to himself, and being shown his failures, his short-comings, the terrible cost of them. (You were still in the building.) Armand has ever possessed an insight, honed over seventy-seven years of companionship. Maybe Louis is only angry with himself.
(Whose voice does Louis mind speak in, when this insight comes to mind?)
The tension in Louis' face breaks as Daniel wavers. Sits. A flex of worry, the protesting creak of wood as Louis' hands grip briefly tighter against the impulse to cross back to him.
Holds his place against that impulse. Daniel's tired of being coddled, however justified Louis' concerns may be. Looks from Daniel, now seated, to Lestat, and back again. Moderating the temptation of his temper in the wake of Daniel's conciliatory offerings once more when he offers, "What do you want to learn, Lestat?"
Voice flattened into blank syllables, tightly controlled into neutrality.
It's possible his anger could disintegrate altogether if it was only Daniel here, feelings Validated and ego Stroked, Lestat's lessening physical presence less a sign of retreat as it is a relaxing of the stranglehold he can have over the gravity of a room. He gives a skeptical little exhale for the idea of Daniel not knowing him very well, given the circumstances of their acquaintance, but alright, yes—
And then something in Louis' question, his chosen tone, like a needle. A slightly watery but intent zigzagging study follows, Lestat half-pivoting on a heel to regard him. Mouth tense once more.
"That the gremlin leaves dead birds on Daniel's doorstep, when we all share a doorstep now. That you spoke to him, that he destroyed something that belonged to you both. I can't protect either of you if I don't know these things. I don't understand why I don't know these things."
And something else. The measure of hurt Armand levied at Louis, shared with Daniel and not Lestat. But this, he pushes aside as he adds, tearfully, "I have no secrets from either of you."
There are ways he can argue all that, and feel justified - be justified, frankly - but he sits on them. He thinks Lestat needs to bleed this mood more, and he's still winding himself back up in increments. Daniel holds the ice pack, staring to lose its integrity again already, between his hands. It sloshes around and adds a weird audio layer to this tense moment. Sorry. He has a fucking migraine.
Oh god, is he crying? He's crying. He glances at Louis, but finds Louis a statue, slowly destroying the back of a chair. Ah, fuck, all of this.
"It sucks to talk about, and I don't think either of us wanted to. I didn't. I just wanted Armand to get bored and stop, and I thought drawing more attention to it would provoke him more. Turns out that was a bad call. I can't do anything about it now but make different ones from here forward."
Maybe Louis' conversation with Armand was the catalyst, but maybe it was inevitable. They can't know, and assigning blame won't do anything. He looks at Louis again, trying to assess if he's okay, but he really doesn't seem to be. It twists that note of worry in him tighter.
And it twists something Louis, though he holds his place. Remains where he stands, straight-backed behind his chosen chair.
Of course Louis has had the thought. Perhaps if he had not reached out to Armand, Armand would not have dug a bomb into Roy Travis' skull and sent him to New York to make a point. Because Armand was making a point. Might have made it another way if he and Louis had not spoken, if Louis had maintained totality of silence between them since he left.
Strips the accelerant from his tone, leaving his voice as measured as it must be on the first of Daniel's Dubai recordings where they nest in the cloud when he tacks on his offering to Daniel's explanation.
"I wanted to protect you. Both of you."
Unspoken: he failed, catastrophically.
Daniel has a migraine. Lestat is upset. A human's head caved in. A poor showing for Louis' hopes of keeping Armand's rebuttal's contained.
And he doesn't quite recognise this, what he sees in Louis now. Hears. Louis and his fiery rage and great well of sensitivity, who suffers and laughs, ever prepared to match Lestat, whether to yell back at him or go to him at first sign of distress, to plead or negotiate or tell him to fuck off. And why shouldn't he be different? It's been eighty years. Lestat is different as well. They are not companions anymore. Louis stands with a chair between them like a shield.
Daniel with his migraine, speaking sense. A mistake, perhaps, and there is no changing what has happened, the decisions that were made, and the only option available is to move forwards differently, and there is the quiet, barely conscious knowledge in Lestat that he is making it worse, but also, he has ceased to start feeling better, so maybe everyone should get to feel worse too.
So he smiles, and sweeps a gesture about the room, and says, "And see how well that turned out," in a certain kind of hush cruelty that the slight thickness of his voice doesn't mitigate.
A fast snap, then, turned on Daniel, voice hiking back up in volume; "You think you have tricked the devil once that you can do it again. I assure you, my clever friend, he will not allow it. And a man who has survived the tedium of half a millennia is not predisposed to becoming bored with anything, least of all the one fledgling he has made in his long, miserable, empty life. You are both,"
a vividly angry look cast back to Louis, "children, who have no idea," now he's yelling, "of the forces you are toying with. Armand, the rest of the vampire world, tu amènes tous les monstres à ta porte. And my task is to watch it happen. Va te faire foutre."
Daniel doesn't flinch in the face of yelling, though he doesn't love it. He especially doesn't love it aimed at Louis.
"If you're not going to accept apologies and explanations—" he says, not actually raising his voice but turning his tone hard, stern. Unflinching and leveling Lestat with an unimpressed look. "Then people aren't going to want to offer them to you. Did you want us to come in here and make up some bullshit instead of answering you honestly?"
Who knows. He's a loose cannon. He could grab either one of them and do fuck-knows-what, and if he does it to Louis, it's going to be devastating and Daniel is going to blame himself for not ditching the guy and never saying anything to Louis about it, and if he does it to Daniel, well, who cares really, except Louis, who will probably end up super fucked up over it.
He has a thought, then, that makes him feel fucking insane. He hates it. He moves away from it so fast as to barely be aware of it, though maybe he'll scream about it later when he's alone. If he's ever alone again, Jesus Christ. This hotel really is a psychological horror film.
The back of the chair splinters in Louis' hands. Splinters and upholstery crumble to the carpet, some incidental awareness of the scrapes on his palms as Louis releases his grip.
The movement in Louis' body is subtle. A flinch back and away from the force of Lestat's shouting that calcifies, coils into brittle tension.
Louis, who has been near silent throughout this negotiation, feels Lestat's dismissal like a sunburst. Something that scalds from the inside out. Daniel is talking. Louis' palms are scraped. Perhaps it would be more productive for him to say nothing.
"He wants to scold," Louis answers, as if the question had been given to him. Words like a gathering thunderstorm. Breath coming faster, regardless of how steady his words, how still he's gone.
Explanations, apologies. These are things Lestat should want, it's true, and has he gotten them? More or less, yes, from Daniel, who he then must believe when he is speaking on behalf of them both. His own breathing heightened after following the bright ribbon of his anger, crimson still colouring his waterline—
Tears, for fear of them both tempting fate, risking themselves, underestimating the threats surrounding them? This thing they are talking about? No, not really. A conversation in a room he is not in. An awful day in the seventies that he is a part of but not really. A book that has his name over and over again, written between only two of them. Louis, saying so easily, that he had intended to choose Daniel for himself. The ways he can be useful to this endeavor, subordinate to what the pair of them share now.
And in the moment, Daniel saying all the right things when Lestat would give anything to hear it all come from Louis.
Who then says that instead, words that fly past him, and Lestat only sees red, a hideous breaking of temper like a detonation in his mind.
"Enfant," unconscious echo of Armand's insult backhanded his own way, but the word leaps from him far more vicious, with greater feeling. "Enfant imprudent, appelant les loups depuis sa tour et ne redescendant que lorsque son propre chiot était en danger."
French rattles out loud and fast, probably sparing Daniel the obligation to intervene even if he still wished to. Unfortunately, English comes next.
"I want," is an answer to Daniel, even with his sights set on Louis, "for him to say it. Why he came here really."
Unpleasantly, Daniel is reminded of Armand and Louis gearing up to pry into his head about his ex-wife. A bad habit of Louis' when he feels pushed, he's surmised. And, apparently, a bad habit of Lestat's is exploding.
He tries to follow the French but can't make sense of it, not enough swearing or directions to the nearest train station, outside of Child, danger, and it sounds insulting but probably in a more specific way he can't translate.
Daniel doesn't have an immediate response. Put behind in the conversation by the language jump and by the answer to his question, which doesn't make any sense. Almost less sense than the French.
A step backward, unconscious instinct flinching away from the boom of Lestat's voice even as his own temper leaps higher.
What a collection he has gathered in the course of twenty-four hours. A melody of additions to the running loop in his mind, and this last harmoney of Armand's voice and Lestat's hurling Enfant will slot in easily among the pieces that Louis' guilt has absorbed.
"Don't call me child, Lestat."
Louis' French untouched, passed over in favor of accentless English.
"You know why I am here."
He'd offered. They'd encouraged. Louis had gotten on plane.
A glance down at the shattered wood littering the floor, back up at Louis. There is a split run through Lestat's temper as well, buckling beneath the pressure of—something. His voice, likewise splintering when he says, "And so remains the mystery of my presence," with a dramatic swing of an arm. I want you to stay, fragmented memory crushed under his heel as he pivots away from the room.
"You wish him to eat human tonight, you figure it out," is all venom past his shoulder, teeth bared and eyes wet, a glance that hooks on Daniel but not quite enough firmly enough to stall him.
There's a coat by the door. It might even be his. Lestat snatches it as he goes.
Galling, to have the scorch of anger broken through the lingering numbness Louis had carried into the room, and then near instantly be deprived of the argument.
"Lestat," is not quite a yell, but pitched loud enough to carry after him. "Lestat," again, uselessly bouncing off the slammed door. The velocity of Lestat's retreat carried Louis forward in much the same way as his yelling had driven Louis backward, and the slam of the door breaks their shared orbit.
Louis is breathing so hard his chest hurts. Looks to Daniel, shivery with the effort of wrestling back his own feeling into a body flayed raw only hours ago by Armand.
Finds the only words he has off hand to be I'm sorry and so opts not to say anything at all instead.
Daniel looks at Louis, shock and worry clashing in his expression. He pushes up onto his feet and moves over, but stops short of touching him— not wanting to invade his personal space if he's not up for it, but plainly hovering, concern making him too restless to sit still. The elder vampire's gravity well has left some kind of static feeling in its wake, off-putting, negative space from which seething anger had been radiating moments before.
"Louis."
Louis, what? Are you okay, maybe, even though he's not. I'm here, even though, fucking obviously, and what's that going to do. Louis, breathe. Daniel is bad at this. He'd be better if there was a real argument, probably.
There is an impulse to follow Lestat. Shout until his words scrape out of his throat, give the unbearable tangle of emotion in his chest somewhere to go.
But no. Daniel is moving, says his name. Beyond this room, Lestat's footfall recede into silence.
"No," to whatever Daniel is not asking. No, he isn't alright. No, he doesn't want to discuss it.
A beat. The door does not fly open. Lestat is not going to return.
Louis' No feels like a second slammed door. Daniel has a brief impulse to snap at him. Just because Lestat explodes doesn't mean Louis should implode. It's not actually better to hold it together if everything happening inside is corrosive, which it plainly is. Daniel is angry at Lestat for doing this now, he's frustrated at Louis for borderline picking a fight there at the end.
And he's still worried. The prevailing feeling in him is unsteady, tense and roiling concern, because Louis ran into the sun once, and Armand made him relive it, and Louis looks so fucking haunted. Daniel can't speak for a moment, emotion strangling him. He wants to find Armand and scream at him, even though he knows it wouldn't do anything, would just result in eyes staring owlishly back at him, watching him like a science experiment, heartless.
"Sure," he manages to say, and he just sounds sad.
One more transgression to add to the list, it appears. Daniel sounds sad. Louis' fingers feel numb, but he touches Daniel's cheek anyway, a brief graze of knuckles before Louis tells him, "We'll try the park."
Louis may well be extraneous to this task too. Daniel and Lestat have been hunting together for some time now. Perhaps all Louis can offer tonight is the weight of expectation, keeping Daniel from going hungry out of obligation to Louis' myriad of recen mistakes.
Rachida is given custody of Louis' phone. He collects a coat from his room. They depart, to ruin someone else's night.
Daniel isn't sure he's actually got the wherewithal for this right now, but it seems even harder to argue with Louis or make his concern seem unwanted. So off they go, and Daniel wars with himself the entire time until they briefly part ways. He thinks he might puke, but he tells himself to stop being a fucking pussy about it all. Some guy out for a night jog. A night jog in a park in Manhattan, go fuck yourself. It's so normal and he hates it.
He doesn't feel better, but he feels something, and he returns to Louis at his park bench station with a tired kind of determination. Somewhere between desperate and resigned. He stands in front of him with his arms crossed, though it looks more self-soothing than standoffish.
"I feel like a weird dog you just took out for a shit," he says, because he is a professional writer. "Would you please talk to me? You're scaring me, everything feels awful, I don't know what you said to Armand, I don't know what the fuck Lestat meant. I'm asking you."
They want it to go away, Daniel included. A few days of uncomfortable silence and no one mentions it again. But it's not going to happen.
While Daniel is mauling night joggers, Louis occupies a park bench. Turns heads, despite or perhaps because of his inattention to the late night stragglers making an ill-advised detour through the park. The black and white flecked wool of his pea coat catches the lamplight. Soft joggers, bare ankles, pristine sneakers, no one is mistaking Louis as a man intending any kind of athleticism.
He is sitting quietly, listening to the silk of Armand's voice in his head. To Lestat's knife-twist of a dismissal. Asking Rachida for news articles about the fire to pore over in some moment in the days ahead.
Louis should eat. But he cannot put his teeth near Damek's neck in this state, so the novelty mug it will be when they return.
Daniel is unhappy. Louis looks up at him, silent for a long moment.
Not quite a concession to now followups (we have fun), but this is the one he can't just try to ask Lestat about. It occurs to him he could ask Armand, but then he'd have to find Armand, and actually talk to him, and he's not sure he'd equipped for that right now. Even if - with a horrible, private realization - it'd probably be easier for him to find his maker than the other vampire. He hasn't dared inspect the bond in his head, but now it sits there like a burning thing, daring him to engage with.
No. No fucking way.
He looks at Louis, intent. They have to clear at least one of these hurdles and try to lessen the pressure of an impending geyser.
A familiar patter to fall into. The guardrails of the interview, Daniel drawing out what Louis does not wish to say.
Louis looks away from him, down the path, before rising to his feet. Spares Daniel from coaxing him to his feet, even as Louis wonders if Daniel should be off his. If one unfortunate human is enough to erase the lingering toll of Daniel's exertions.
"He was not pleased to hear from me."
As if that were so hard to deduce, given what followed after.
Louis trusted Daniel enough for the interview. If they have to lean on that kind of trust again, that's fine. Daniel can curb this in genuine friendship, too— the tightness in his chest hasn't quite gone away, not even after killing someone. Iron is still strong in the back of his throat.
They walk, and Daniel arranges any passive speculation he had about whether or not Louis had communicated in between the end of their relationship and now. Even though Louis had said no, Daniel thought surely something, something that had nothing to do with him. Lawyers exchanging emails over finances, passive aggressive notes passed through furniture movers, anything. Maybe not. And Louis was the one to reach out, 'hear from', alright.
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His knuckles are whitening over the back of the chair.
A separate argument caught behind Louis' teeth. Who suffered what. What Armand took. The roots in Louis that exist still to be yanked upon. Seventy-seven years of companionship that do not untangle simply because Louis stepped away. Fingerprints dug into him as if Louis had been wet concrete, which belong to Lestat and which have been overlaid by Armand.
He feels baited. (Or just helpless, cornered.) But his jaw clicks closed, eyes intent on Lestat as Daniel makes his appeal.
Louis won't undercut him. Doesn't want Lestat to make good on his threats to go.
The wood creaks quietly under his hands, a comical addition to Daniel's extended hand, but that can't be helped.
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Ignores Daniel at first, or seems to, holding Louis' intent focus right up until that Okay?, and Lestat wavers.
His look over to Daniel has gone traitorously glossy, rose-tinged. In the secondhand account of arguments with Lestat, there was never an awful lot of if you're unhappy, we can change things in either direction, and he tenses against it as he had tensed against the transaction of kindnesses in a mobile store.
Restless, arms folding once again. "Is it not so? Without any throats to demonstrably tear open." Sulkier, now, a little flick of his hand. "I do not want to eavesdrop to learn things. And there would have been nothing I could hear if you were both fit enough to speak in your minds."
A sore point. And there is, of course, another element to all of this, but he finds himself guarding it jealously (ha) once more.
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"You've been having a good time, too. That much has to be true."
An appeal to emotion. Come on, man, you loved stealing a guitar and accidentally getting high after murdering four people! They're building friendships. Learning about each other, be it for the first time, or how they are, now, so many years removed from brutal wounds.
He nearly continues, but— ah, fucking Christ, speaking of feeling raw. Daniel doesn't quite sway on his feet, but it's still an odd fuzzy moment before he sits down in a chair. Extremely annoying, and he says nothing about it. Whatever.
"I didn't know you well enough to feel comfortable talking to you about it. Maybe we should have re-evaluated. Before Armand pulled this bullshit."
Daniel doesn't know if that's true. Lestat's reactivity here is sensitive enough to make him think that the ideal is still to keep it under wraps— but that's not possible, so there's no sense dwelling on it, and defending it is just asking for a bad fight. Pushing forward as-is. It's fine.
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Silent still, biting down on his fear, on the anger that is so much easier to reach for.
He knows he is not truly angry at Lestat. Maybe not even at Armand. Maybe it is as simple as having had a mirror held up to himself, and being shown his failures, his short-comings, the terrible cost of them. (You were still in the building.) Armand has ever possessed an insight, honed over seventy-seven years of companionship. Maybe Louis is only angry with himself.
(Whose voice does Louis mind speak in, when this insight comes to mind?)
The tension in Louis' face breaks as Daniel wavers. Sits. A flex of worry, the protesting creak of wood as Louis' hands grip briefly tighter against the impulse to cross back to him.
Holds his place against that impulse. Daniel's tired of being coddled, however justified Louis' concerns may be. Looks from Daniel, now seated, to Lestat, and back again. Moderating the temptation of his temper in the wake of Daniel's conciliatory offerings once more when he offers, "What do you want to learn, Lestat?"
Voice flattened into blank syllables, tightly controlled into neutrality.
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It's possible his anger could disintegrate altogether if it was only Daniel here, feelings Validated and ego Stroked, Lestat's lessening physical presence less a sign of retreat as it is a relaxing of the stranglehold he can have over the gravity of a room. He gives a skeptical little exhale for the idea of Daniel not knowing him very well, given the circumstances of their acquaintance, but alright, yes—
And then something in Louis' question, his chosen tone, like a needle. A slightly watery but intent zigzagging study follows, Lestat half-pivoting on a heel to regard him. Mouth tense once more.
"That the gremlin leaves dead birds on Daniel's doorstep, when we all share a doorstep now. That you spoke to him, that he destroyed something that belonged to you both. I can't protect either of you if I don't know these things. I don't understand why I don't know these things."
And something else. The measure of hurt Armand levied at Louis, shared with Daniel and not Lestat. But this, he pushes aside as he adds, tearfully, "I have no secrets from either of you."
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Oh god, is he crying? He's crying. He glances at Louis, but finds Louis a statue, slowly destroying the back of a chair. Ah, fuck, all of this.
"It sucks to talk about, and I don't think either of us wanted to. I didn't. I just wanted Armand to get bored and stop, and I thought drawing more attention to it would provoke him more. Turns out that was a bad call. I can't do anything about it now but make different ones from here forward."
Maybe Louis' conversation with Armand was the catalyst, but maybe it was inevitable. They can't know, and assigning blame won't do anything. He looks at Louis again, trying to assess if he's okay, but he really doesn't seem to be. It twists that note of worry in him tighter.
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And it twists something Louis, though he holds his place. Remains where he stands, straight-backed behind his chosen chair.
Of course Louis has had the thought. Perhaps if he had not reached out to Armand, Armand would not have dug a bomb into Roy Travis' skull and sent him to New York to make a point. Because Armand was making a point. Might have made it another way if he and Louis had not spoken, if Louis had maintained totality of silence between them since he left.
Strips the accelerant from his tone, leaving his voice as measured as it must be on the first of Daniel's Dubai recordings where they nest in the cloud when he tacks on his offering to Daniel's explanation.
"I wanted to protect you. Both of you."
Unspoken: he failed, catastrophically.
Daniel has a migraine. Lestat is upset. A human's head caved in. A poor showing for Louis' hopes of keeping Armand's rebuttal's contained.
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And he doesn't quite recognise this, what he sees in Louis now. Hears. Louis and his fiery rage and great well of sensitivity, who suffers and laughs, ever prepared to match Lestat, whether to yell back at him or go to him at first sign of distress, to plead or negotiate or tell him to fuck off. And why shouldn't he be different? It's been eighty years. Lestat is different as well. They are not companions anymore. Louis stands with a chair between them like a shield.
Daniel with his migraine, speaking sense. A mistake, perhaps, and there is no changing what has happened, the decisions that were made, and the only option available is to move forwards differently, and there is the quiet, barely conscious knowledge in Lestat that he is making it worse, but also, he has ceased to start feeling better, so maybe everyone should get to feel worse too.
So he smiles, and sweeps a gesture about the room, and says, "And see how well that turned out," in a certain kind of hush cruelty that the slight thickness of his voice doesn't mitigate.
A fast snap, then, turned on Daniel, voice hiking back up in volume; "You think you have tricked the devil once that you can do it again. I assure you, my clever friend, he will not allow it. And a man who has survived the tedium of half a millennia is not predisposed to becoming bored with anything, least of all the one fledgling he has made in his long, miserable, empty life. You are both,"
a vividly angry look cast back to Louis, "children, who have no idea," now he's yelling, "of the forces you are toying with. Armand, the rest of the vampire world, tu amènes tous les monstres à ta porte. And my task is to watch it happen. Va te faire foutre."
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"If you're not going to accept apologies and explanations—" he says, not actually raising his voice but turning his tone hard, stern. Unflinching and leveling Lestat with an unimpressed look. "Then people aren't going to want to offer them to you. Did you want us to come in here and make up some bullshit instead of answering you honestly?"
Who knows. He's a loose cannon. He could grab either one of them and do fuck-knows-what, and if he does it to Louis, it's going to be devastating and Daniel is going to blame himself for not ditching the guy and never saying anything to Louis about it, and if he does it to Daniel, well, who cares really, except Louis, who will probably end up super fucked up over it.
He has a thought, then, that makes him feel fucking insane. He hates it. He moves away from it so fast as to barely be aware of it, though maybe he'll scream about it later when he's alone. If he's ever alone again, Jesus Christ. This hotel really is a psychological horror film.
"What do you want to do, Lestat?"
Pick. Talk or freak out.
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The back of the chair splinters in Louis' hands. Splinters and upholstery crumble to the carpet, some incidental awareness of the scrapes on his palms as Louis releases his grip.
The movement in Louis' body is subtle. A flinch back and away from the force of Lestat's shouting that calcifies, coils into brittle tension.
Louis, who has been near silent throughout this negotiation, feels Lestat's dismissal like a sunburst. Something that scalds from the inside out. Daniel is talking. Louis' palms are scraped. Perhaps it would be more productive for him to say nothing.
"He wants to scold," Louis answers, as if the question had been given to him. Words like a gathering thunderstorm. Breath coming faster, regardless of how steady his words, how still he's gone.
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Tears, for fear of them both tempting fate, risking themselves, underestimating the threats surrounding them? This thing they are talking about? No, not really. A conversation in a room he is not in. An awful day in the seventies that he is a part of but not really. A book that has his name over and over again, written between only two of them. Louis, saying so easily, that he had intended to choose Daniel for himself. The ways he can be useful to this endeavor, subordinate to what the pair of them share now.
And in the moment, Daniel saying all the right things when Lestat would give anything to hear it all come from Louis.
Who then says that instead, words that fly past him, and Lestat only sees red, a hideous breaking of temper like a detonation in his mind.
"Enfant," unconscious echo of Armand's insult backhanded his own way, but the word leaps from him far more vicious, with greater feeling. "Enfant imprudent, appelant les loups depuis sa tour et ne redescendant que lorsque son propre chiot était en danger."
French rattles out loud and fast, probably sparing Daniel the obligation to intervene even if he still wished to. Unfortunately, English comes next.
"I want," is an answer to Daniel, even with his sights set on Louis, "for him to say it. Why he came here really."
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He tries to follow the French but can't make sense of it, not enough swearing or directions to the nearest train station, outside of Child, danger, and it sounds insulting but probably in a more specific way he can't translate.
Daniel doesn't have an immediate response. Put behind in the conversation by the language jump and by the answer to his question, which doesn't make any sense. Almost less sense than the French.
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What a collection he has gathered in the course of twenty-four hours. A melody of additions to the running loop in his mind, and this last harmoney of Armand's voice and Lestat's hurling Enfant will slot in easily among the pieces that Louis' guilt has absorbed.
"Don't call me child, Lestat."
Louis' French untouched, passed over in favor of accentless English.
"You know why I am here."
He'd offered. They'd encouraged. Louis had gotten on plane.
He'd missed them both too deeply to stay away.
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A glance down at the shattered wood littering the floor, back up at Louis. There is a split run through Lestat's temper as well, buckling beneath the pressure of—something. His voice, likewise splintering when he says, "And so remains the mystery of my presence," with a dramatic swing of an arm. I want you to stay, fragmented memory crushed under his heel as he pivots away from the room.
"You wish him to eat human tonight, you figure it out," is all venom past his shoulder, teeth bared and eyes wet, a glance that hooks on Daniel but not quite enough firmly enough to stall him.
There's a coat by the door. It might even be his. Lestat snatches it as he goes.
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"Lestat," is not quite a yell, but pitched loud enough to carry after him. "Lestat," again, uselessly bouncing off the slammed door. The velocity of Lestat's retreat carried Louis forward in much the same way as his yelling had driven Louis backward, and the slam of the door breaks their shared orbit.
Louis is breathing so hard his chest hurts. Looks to Daniel, shivery with the effort of wrestling back his own feeling into a body flayed raw only hours ago by Armand.
Finds the only words he has off hand to be I'm sorry and so opts not to say anything at all instead.
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Daniel looks at Louis, shock and worry clashing in his expression. He pushes up onto his feet and moves over, but stops short of touching him— not wanting to invade his personal space if he's not up for it, but plainly hovering, concern making him too restless to sit still. The elder vampire's gravity well has left some kind of static feeling in its wake, off-putting, negative space from which seething anger had been radiating moments before.
"Louis."
Louis, what? Are you okay, maybe, even though he's not. I'm here, even though, fucking obviously, and what's that going to do. Louis, breathe. Daniel is bad at this. He'd be better if there was a real argument, probably.
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But no. Daniel is moving, says his name. Beyond this room, Lestat's footfall recede into silence.
"No," to whatever Daniel is not asking. No, he isn't alright. No, he doesn't want to discuss it.
A beat. The door does not fly open. Lestat is not going to return.
"We should find you something to eat."
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And he's still worried. The prevailing feeling in him is unsteady, tense and roiling concern, because Louis ran into the sun once, and Armand made him relive it, and Louis looks so fucking haunted. Daniel can't speak for a moment, emotion strangling him. He wants to find Armand and scream at him, even though he knows it wouldn't do anything, would just result in eyes staring owlishly back at him, watching him like a science experiment, heartless.
"Sure," he manages to say, and he just sounds sad.
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Louis may well be extraneous to this task too. Daniel and Lestat have been hunting together for some time now. Perhaps all Louis can offer tonight is the weight of expectation, keeping Daniel from going hungry out of obligation to Louis' myriad of recen mistakes.
Rachida is given custody of Louis' phone. He collects a coat from his room. They depart, to ruin someone else's night.
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Daniel isn't sure he's actually got the wherewithal for this right now, but it seems even harder to argue with Louis or make his concern seem unwanted. So off they go, and Daniel wars with himself the entire time until they briefly part ways. He thinks he might puke, but he tells himself to stop being a fucking pussy about it all. Some guy out for a night jog. A night jog in a park in Manhattan, go fuck yourself. It's so normal and he hates it.
He doesn't feel better, but he feels something, and he returns to Louis at his park bench station with a tired kind of determination. Somewhere between desperate and resigned. He stands in front of him with his arms crossed, though it looks more self-soothing than standoffish.
"I feel like a weird dog you just took out for a shit," he says, because he is a professional writer. "Would you please talk to me? You're scaring me, everything feels awful, I don't know what you said to Armand, I don't know what the fuck Lestat meant. I'm asking you."
They want it to go away, Daniel included. A few days of uncomfortable silence and no one mentions it again. But it's not going to happen.
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He is sitting quietly, listening to the silk of Armand's voice in his head. To Lestat's knife-twist of a dismissal. Asking Rachida for news articles about the fire to pore over in some moment in the days ahead.
Louis should eat. But he cannot put his teeth near Damek's neck in this state, so the novelty mug it will be when they return.
Daniel is unhappy. Louis looks up at him, silent for a long moment.
"Pick one, Daniel."
For him, Louis will try.
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Not quite a concession to now followups (we have fun), but this is the one he can't just try to ask Lestat about. It occurs to him he could ask Armand, but then he'd have to find Armand, and actually talk to him, and he's not sure he'd equipped for that right now. Even if - with a horrible, private realization - it'd probably be easier for him to find his maker than the other vampire. He hasn't dared inspect the bond in his head, but now it sits there like a burning thing, daring him to engage with.
No. No fucking way.
He looks at Louis, intent. They have to clear at least one of these hurdles and try to lessen the pressure of an impending geyser.
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Louis looks away from him, down the path, before rising to his feet. Spares Daniel from coaxing him to his feet, even as Louis wonders if Daniel should be off his. If one unfortunate human is enough to erase the lingering toll of Daniel's exertions.
"He was not pleased to hear from me."
As if that were so hard to deduce, given what followed after.
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They walk, and Daniel arranges any passive speculation he had about whether or not Louis had communicated in between the end of their relationship and now. Even though Louis had said no, Daniel thought surely something, something that had nothing to do with him. Lawyers exchanging emails over finances, passive aggressive notes passed through furniture movers, anything. Maybe not. And Louis was the one to reach out, 'hear from', alright.
"But you expected as much."
Louis' not stupid.
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But had put his hand into the fire all the same.
Stupid. How stupid.
Lestat's voice, accusing: And see how well that turned out.
Louis has nothing to say for a few paces more. Wrestling the sulfur burn of guilt and loathing into silence before offering:
"I asked him to stop. To leave you alone."
Louis had made a promise. He had been very clear.
He has been thinking on it in the days since. What little reason he has to refrain from keeping it.
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