Lestat lingers in place, likewise waiting to see what he himself is going to do. Daniel doesn't dismiss him, which is a little like an invitation in the absence of one. A step forwards, and another, and then meandering to the arrangement of lounge furniture. Steps with one long leg over an arm to lever himself onto the seats.
Lands to lay down across the cushions with the resigned gravity of a Great Dane, sigh and all. His hair kind of gets in his face so he's forced to fix that, but then goes still.
"How was your night."
And besides, if a conversation occurs that he doesn't feel is personally productive to himself, he can always become catatonic.
Daniel thinks: Lestat has brutalized Louis before, Lestat did not save Claudia. He also thinks: Lestat saved Louis, Lestat condemned himself to abject misery ever since out of shame. He saved Daniel, he's been fine this whole time. He had a bad tantrum, he put Louis into a trauma response (even if he has to earmark that with Louis being in a bad state thanks to Armand).
Looks like he at least feels bad. Does he feel bad about Louis or himself, though.
"Intense and sad," Daniel tells him frankly. "How are you feeling?"
Awkwardly talking around it is for losers. Cough up your innermost demons.
Lestat is quiet, in the wake of that question. Not because he is reticent. If he didn't want someone to talk to, he wouldn't have left his collapse at the door.
Only that it is difficult to define, especially with a penchant for speaking in prose. He feels like wooden splinters and snapped piano strings. Like an alarm that won't stop. Like the steadfast walls and boarded up windows against a hurricane, but from the outside. Little claw pinpricks into the fabric of the upholstery.
"Bad," finally. That about covers it.
His eyeline settles on the sheen of Daniel's laptop, which is about level, and winds around his internal, innate sense of Louis in the building, which is a collection of things. His scent, his heart beat, and something else less precise but even more distinct. Finds himself holding onto it like a fishing wire.
"He didn't wish to speak to me, I think. I got in a little while ago."
The icons on his desktop are a mess; they're in a very specific pattern that his brain likes, which makes everyone else insane. He has a few projects he'd given up, in the interim years, but he's going to see which ones have any busywork he can do today. Something to half-focus on and help him stay awake.
Bad. Yeah, he believes that.
"He doesn't want to talk to me either," Daniel offers in consolation. "I'm a professional and I only got a few sentences out of him. Granted, I also feel like shit right now, and my technique was leaning heavily towards 'having my own breakdown' versus 'competent and clever support', so what can we do."
Consolation offered. Bristled at, except there's no discernible way to tell when they are staying out of each other's minds. Lestat is certainly doing so, no desire to fuck around with the tangled spaghetti of psychic injury still healing, and his own walls are up, impenetrable to the point that even the gremlin would have some difficulty.
So, privately bristled at, otherwise unmoving. He imagines Louis did not outright refuse Daniel's company. He imagines that whatever sentences were dragged out of him were worthy ones. He imagines—
He needs to stop imagining. This, he has the sense enough to know.
"At least you didn't yell at him in two languages," finally. "Regarding your competency and cleverness. How is your breakdown faring?"
Were the languages the issue, Lestat. Was that what set Louis off.
Daniel opts not to pick a fight. Tired. And Lestat seems fragile in a wild animal way. Not interested in getting a hand bitten off.
"If only my ego were of any practical use." Alas. Nope. Then he sighs, tapping something absently on his laptop and... doing nothing. "I'm incandescently angry at Armand, I'm terrified for Louis, and I feel like a fucking idiot. It's not the worst breakdown I've ever had but it's unpleasant."
A few of those emotions seem productive, at least.
As opposed to what Lestat has done, which was become angry at Louis and Daniel, namely Louis, and then afraid for himself. Not the same kind of fear, but this, this anxiety like nails on a chalkboard that he has ruined things and Louis will never speak to him again. Petty, but overwhelming.
And Daniel is speaking to him, but he's pretty sure Daniel would speak to anyone at any time. Lestat considers this, terrified for Louis, angry at Armand. Decides one of these is more urgent than the other.
"How did he seem to you, before he went to coffin?"
Daniel had pestered him as long as Louis would tolerate, the both of them processing a silent swell of emotion. At least they'd talked a little. Not that talking is a cure-all, but it's Daniel's primary trick, and it'd done a lot of good for Louis in Dubai. Eighty years of emotional insincerity and manipulation. A long time, even for a vampire.
"Armand really did a number on him." Quieter. "Not just the other night. Since Paris. One long, muffled scream, and I think he's still not sure how much of it was even in his own voice."
These moments of silence out of Lestat are probably not a bad sign. Better than kneejerk responses flying from his mouth, volatile reactivity, gestures and a way of performing that is perfectly sincere but nevertheless: a lot. He, like the other two, is quite tired. The sun is in the sky and he can feel the old instinct to go somewhere dark and submit to sleep, but here they are.
And he is not incapable of listening, as a person. Since Paris, and his eyes take on a glossy sheen of dilute red. Louis, deciding to punish them all. Lestat, allowing it. Armand, allowing it.
"He is different," once he is sure his voice will come out even. "I miss him still."
Daniel could run with that — Is Louis different, or is Lestat's perception different? — but Louis probably deserves better out of him than sitting here and trying to dissect him further, trying to figure out who between the two of them knows the guy best, and about what. (Daniel thinks it's Lestat, anyway, one way or another.) Not everything has to be an investigation.
"No," after a moment's consideration. "I took it out on a policeman and dinner." And a window, but that escapade he decides doesn't need sharing.
Maybe Daniel should check some of his messages.
His vision is still rosily blurry, but doesn't yet devolve further. "And what is the use of it. Being angry with him won't cause him to trust me again." Strike that, devolving a little, brow creasing where the stress of great feeling tends to gather. He can feel it closing around his throat like a hand, and so his words come out slightly strangled; "Nothing will."
Absurd of him to speak of this to Daniel, when Daniel is the one who is most trusted, but who else is there, now? Not Louis, certainly.
Daniel will not be checking his messages, hearing that. Maybe if they'd interfered less with editing the book he'd give them more leeway, actually pass information along now and again, but he feels like he's done plenty for them.
Then again. Louis wants to talk to Sam. Maybe Daniel can give them some bullshit for a better number to try. Not now, though. Still battling exhaustion and migraines and misery.
And, this. It takes some willpower not to give an exasperated sigh at the self-pity. Come on, man, just because you didn't do everything doesn't mean you did nothing. The silver lining is that, true, being angry won't cause Louis to trust him. Fucking hell, Lestat.
"That's not true." Daniel leans back on the sofa. "He wants to trust you."
Surely that's fucking obvious. Would be even to a blind person. Right? Louis' been desperately in love with Lestat ... forever, Daniel thinks, and nothing has changed that, not even Louis wishing he wasn't, not even Armand's near-century mindfuck. He still looks at Lestat like he hung the moon, even when Lestat is being the most ridiculous creature Daniel has ever seen. In person, and secondhand. Your 'love' was in a box.
"It's just going to take time and work. Shit nobody likes, I know."
There is probably nothing Daniel can say, kind or cruel, that would prevent the continued leak of bloodied tears threatening to stain the upholstery, so that happens. Self-pity, an indulgent state to be in, too much so to resist.
A thing to retreat to. Alternative options include abject fear, roiling jealousy. Anger, already declared unhelpful, exhausted, unavailable.
"But I don't know," his voice has gotten higher, "what I can give him anymore. I have given him all these decades. We have never liked apologies and he has them already. He wants for nothing, not gifts or companionship or- or-," whatever the third thing is at the end of that stammer is lost in a creaking, pitiful sound, choked from him.
Daniel freezes like a rabbit realizing it's about to be eaten by a wolf, except, you know, he's an adult man (supernatural predator) facing down a much older adult man (supernatural predator) who is now openly crying. About some therapy shit that is beyond Daniel's capacity as a journalist, despite his keen insight.
But he knows how much Lestat cares about Louis. That has to be a start. He sits there for a moment, considers patting him on the shoulder or something. Doesn't. How awkward would that be.
"Be here." Quieter than before. "Just be here. This is new territory for both of you."
I want you to stay, Louis had said. You're here, that's gift enough, he had also said, a little further back ago, and some less self-sabotaging wiring in his brain offers these up, which briefly serves to make him cry harder.
Unself-conscious in this way. Maybe too much so, certainly too much so to be very concerned if Lestat himself is making anything feel weird and awkward.
But, a breath taken. Recognition that he is being given advice, benefit of the doubt, trust in its own way, and he flicks a look back to Daniel, sitting attentive. A slight shift, angling his collapse to be partially more upright against the arm of the sofa.
"We began as friends," is back at a normal octave, but voice shivering still, thick in his throat. "In your book, it is different. It is friendship that disguises a predator. I didn't—it wasn't how I saw things. We would talk all the time. He would share everything with me, I would share what I could with him. And now," a slight laugh, "we are friends again, so. I don't wish to ruin it, I just—"
A shuddered breath out. "He knows I dislike being excluded."
'Everything' versus 'what I could'. A theme, with the elder vampires in Louis' life. Daniel thinks it's hypocritical for Lestat to complain about Louis having his own business, but he's not going to say so. Right now, anyway. Maybe another time, because Daniel has no real sense of self-preservation, he's just pretending to for the sake of getting through the day and making sure Louis' okay later.
Also, he has to remind himself: there's something to be said for Lestat having known that Louis and Claudia were trying to murder him for weeks, and Daniel is being uncharitable because he has a bias towards Louis. Hmhm. Well. Alright. How do we handle this.
"I'm sorry we didn't tell you about Armand." Does this help?? Maybe not. He's not Louis. "It's been challenging. For me, because I really, really fucking hate seeing people fight,"
(his horrible unease at the way Louis threw Armand across the penthouse, not feeling any satisfaction about it after all, caught there in strange silence, staring at each other)
"and I think Louis is struggling with the vulnerability this all means for him. These aren't decisions made to exclude you."
The world just doesn't revolve around Lestat de Lioncourt, is all. :'(
I'm sorry we didn't, and there is a too-late flutter of Lestat's hand. A gesture that says don't or it's fine, indicating either way that he was not seeking apology—not from Daniel, who has already explained, and perhaps not exactly from Louis either, save that it would be better than a closed door.
That hand moves to rub at his face, a touch to some stress point in his brow before using his palm to smear aside tears.
"He is your maker," not quite a shrug in his voice. A big deal, yes, but a concrete reality. As he speaks about things that are not strictly about himself, there is room to get a still-shaky grip. "Forever, he will be that to you, and there will be no reprieve until the day he chooses the long sleep of the ancients."
Just as Louis has no real choice but to account for Lestat, but he twists away from this comparison even as he makes it, quietly, to himself.
"It's your fate to determine as you will. But if you wish to avail yourself of my assistance," a loose gesture between them finishes the thought. Here it will be.
Armand reasons. Being turned by an ancient monster reasons. Shit he tries to keep behind a locked door, shit Armand leaked to Louis, when Daniel really wishes he hadn't. Should he have screamed? Hoped that Louis would hear him, run back in, throw Armand off of him? But then he probably wouldn't be a vampire; Louis says he was going to offer it to him, but he didn't. He walked away and left him there.
Doesn't matter.
He tries, after a bit more silence—
"It's safety in numbers about the threats over the book, and Louis' shotgunned bet out into the night. Armand is..." What the fuck is Armand. "You're not a guard dog, Lestat, you're a person who's here because we all want to be here, together, you don't have to haul that weight around."
But. He touches his shoulder, or wherever is closest.
"Which is not an attempt to cut you out of Armand stuff. I'm just saying. This is a mess. I know he fucked up your life, too, and that you knew him earliest. I know you do have insight into him."
Here, Daniel is subject to big wet eyes staring at him, grey-violet and bloodshot, in an expression that is somehow both receptive to the things he is saying as well as defensive. Temporarily fortified against further tears, but affirmations that he is a person with a fucked up life while touching his shoulder this way quickly target the integrity.
But maybe it's a good sign, this further crumbling, because it comes with a hasty nod, a watery, "Okay," like maybe Louis is just hurt and quiet and angry for reasons that don't? have anything to do with him?, and the ones that are aren't permanent, aren't about something too fundamental, too permanent for him to do anything about besides leave.
Lestat just seems like a kid, sometimes. Daniel had said so to Louis. First impressions. Strangely childlike even in the midst of charisma and danger.
Daniel shifts towards him, squeezes his bicep in a way he hopes his comforting.
"Go easy on yourself, go easy on Louis. It's easy to be angry because we all feel so much, I know. But look. You can unwind from all that. And it's going to be okay."
The guy who Louis described dropping him from miles up in the air to crumble on impact, the guy who twelve hours ago made Louis step away from Daniel out if lizard-brain concern. Is the same guy who came to Daniel's rescue, who saved Louis from execution, who is crying on the sofa.
There's a world, by rights probable, where this kindness may cross into condescension, being spoken to like a child in the grips of big feelings, given permission to feel them, to be free of them. But then, in the late seventeen hundreds, Lestat's knowledge of parenting had come in the form of a father who beat his sons like dogs, and his earliest memory of his mother attending to his needs was when she had given him two mastiff puppies and a flintlock pistol at age twelve.
(Sadistic? Louis had queried, when Lestat had referred to his own parenting style. He'd laughed at the time, just a little. True.)
So it doesn't hit wrong and in fact makes him feel better. Calmer. If tears continue, its from some amount of relaxing rather than the winding up of angst, defending it against coming apart. It's going to be okay, and that makes him laugh a little as he goes to stem some tears with the edge of his wrist.
Lestat will choose to believe it, and that hand flutters down to pat over Daniel's. "You have not caused me to feel like your guard," he says, some note of apology in his tone, offered a little grandly for not actually containing the word 'sorry', but, all the same. Recognition for having thrown around Daniel's presence last night like a task Louis was giving him. "I have enjoyed our hanging out."
Daniel hadn't taken much of that argument personally. As usual, worried about Louis. It helps that he's accepted being, if not actually superfluous, then adjacent to that. He has already fought and lost a bitter war against irrelevancy as his career dwindled and age choked him. It's nothing, to be the third wheel here. On his own time he is successful again and a minor celebrity and he has fucking superpowers. Water off a duck's back to be an annoying side note for Lestat.
"We're cool."
Little hand squeeze. All is forgiven, kiddo!! Don't worry about it. Fuck, what is he doing.
"Want to see if these librarian creeps took any good pictures of you?"
His inbox tab has a worrying number displayed on it.
Fortunately, Lestat has also accepted his own third wheel status, and none of tonight's panic and despair has had anything to do with it, due to having accepted it, and he didn't even bring it up once!
We're cool and a hand squeeze and he will take this as true and sincere, because it will be its own crisis if even the one of the two who is not Louis du Lac decides they do not value his presence. Daniel had said nice things to him, but that was before detonation.
A laugh, then. Oh, yeah. Those guys. "I'll disappointed if they didn't," and, indeed, pushes out of his sideways slump to attend this offer.
Turns out there's quite a lot. Apparently, an encounter with a single policeman is enough to motivate the Talamasca to track your whole evening. Here, entering the club he found. The girl he half-drained being helped out of it again. Walking the river. Oh, and this one, later, a fairly dynamic shot in which he uses a bicycle stand he'd removed from the pavement to smash apart a window, and he asks Daniel if he can have it.
He is not completely certain of the time when there is the sound of a door unlatching, and Lestat's attention pivots like the guard dog he is not. A flash of regret—he had begun feeling less dramatic and thus had contemplated a shower and change of clothing before sunset—but it isn't powerful enough to send him running to do so.
A barrage of messages that he ignores, sifting for pictures. Some of it's like exposure therapy. Will he find one of himself someday, a scene he has no memory of? Will Raglan call him, ask, Hey Molloy, where were you last night?, knowing he can't answer?
Not tonight. Tonight he's trying to move past some of this shit, even if it's just a band-aid. Armand can be another bear trap tomorrow.
He tries to stay awake and alert, but eventually, he starts nodding off. The sun hikes higher in the sky, the room heats up despite air conditioning and heavy curtains, and he really wishes he were somewhere else—
A startle back to full consciousness. Blinking. Huh? He looks up at the arched entryway—
A less dramatic figure than a drenched, bedraggled Lestat had struck hours earlier. Straight backed, expression inscrutable, looking at them. Impossible to say whether he had risen from coffin, or had simply passed the hours between their return to the hotel and this moment watching the slash of sunlight move across the room.
Comfortable, even if there is no particular ease in Louis' posture. Joggers today, bleach splatters blooming across soft fabric. Sheer t-shirt, delicacy of the fabric made more so by the heavy-collared speckled wool cardigan pulled over it. Bare feet, silent on the carpet. Louis taking them both in, perhaps assessing how he does, or doesn't fit into the present configuration of the room.
Daniel, dozing. Lestat, intent on the laptop.
Their attention shifting to him, in the entryway.
A moment where Louis' eyes catch on Lestat's and feels that moment of connection like a vise, turning tighter and tighter around his chest, before Louis looks away from him.
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Lands to lay down across the cushions with the resigned gravity of a Great Dane, sigh and all. His hair kind of gets in his face so he's forced to fix that, but then goes still.
"How was your night."
And besides, if a conversation occurs that he doesn't feel is personally productive to himself, he can always become catatonic.
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Looks like he at least feels bad. Does he feel bad about Louis or himself, though.
"Intense and sad," Daniel tells him frankly. "How are you feeling?"
Awkwardly talking around it is for losers. Cough up your innermost demons.
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Only that it is difficult to define, especially with a penchant for speaking in prose. He feels like wooden splinters and snapped piano strings. Like an alarm that won't stop. Like the steadfast walls and boarded up windows against a hurricane, but from the outside. Little claw pinpricks into the fabric of the upholstery.
"Bad," finally. That about covers it.
His eyeline settles on the sheen of Daniel's laptop, which is about level, and winds around his internal, innate sense of Louis in the building, which is a collection of things. His scent, his heart beat, and something else less precise but even more distinct. Finds himself holding onto it like a fishing wire.
"He didn't wish to speak to me, I think. I got in a little while ago."
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Bad. Yeah, he believes that.
"He doesn't want to talk to me either," Daniel offers in consolation. "I'm a professional and I only got a few sentences out of him. Granted, I also feel like shit right now, and my technique was leaning heavily towards 'having my own breakdown' versus 'competent and clever support', so what can we do."
Sit here. What they can do is sit here.
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So, privately bristled at, otherwise unmoving. He imagines Louis did not outright refuse Daniel's company. He imagines that whatever sentences were dragged out of him were worthy ones. He imagines—
He needs to stop imagining. This, he has the sense enough to know.
"At least you didn't yell at him in two languages," finally. "Regarding your competency and cleverness. How is your breakdown faring?"
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Daniel opts not to pick a fight. Tired. And Lestat seems fragile in a wild animal way. Not interested in getting a hand bitten off.
"If only my ego were of any practical use." Alas. Nope. Then he sighs, tapping something absently on his laptop and... doing nothing. "I'm incandescently angry at Armand, I'm terrified for Louis, and I feel like a fucking idiot. It's not the worst breakdown I've ever had but it's unpleasant."
Fuuuun.
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As opposed to what Lestat has done, which was become angry at Louis and Daniel, namely Louis, and then afraid for himself. Not the same kind of fear, but this, this anxiety like nails on a chalkboard that he has ruined things and Louis will never speak to him again. Petty, but overwhelming.
And Daniel is speaking to him, but he's pretty sure Daniel would speak to anyone at any time. Lestat considers this, terrified for Louis, angry at Armand. Decides one of these is more urgent than the other.
"How did he seem to you, before he went to coffin?"
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Hence being out here.
Daniel had pestered him as long as Louis would tolerate, the both of them processing a silent swell of emotion. At least they'd talked a little. Not that talking is a cure-all, but it's Daniel's primary trick, and it'd done a lot of good for Louis in Dubai. Eighty years of emotional insincerity and manipulation. A long time, even for a vampire.
"Armand really did a number on him." Quieter. "Not just the other night. Since Paris. One long, muffled scream, and I think he's still not sure how much of it was even in his own voice."
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And he is not incapable of listening, as a person. Since Paris, and his eyes take on a glossy sheen of dilute red. Louis, deciding to punish them all. Lestat, allowing it. Armand, allowing it.
"He is different," once he is sure his voice will come out even. "I miss him still."
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Daniel could run with that — Is Louis different, or is Lestat's perception different? — but Louis probably deserves better out of him than sitting here and trying to dissect him further, trying to figure out who between the two of them knows the guy best, and about what. (Daniel thinks it's Lestat, anyway, one way or another.) Not everything has to be an investigation.
Quiet for a little while. Sympathetic.
Eventually,
"Are you still angry?"
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"No," after a moment's consideration. "I took it out on a policeman and dinner." And a window, but that escapade he decides doesn't need sharing.
Maybe Daniel should check some of his messages.
His vision is still rosily blurry, but doesn't yet devolve further. "And what is the use of it. Being angry with him won't cause him to trust me again." Strike that, devolving a little, brow creasing where the stress of great feeling tends to gather. He can feel it closing around his throat like a hand, and so his words come out slightly strangled; "Nothing will."
Absurd of him to speak of this to Daniel, when Daniel is the one who is most trusted, but who else is there, now? Not Louis, certainly.
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Then again. Louis wants to talk to Sam. Maybe Daniel can give them some bullshit for a better number to try. Not now, though. Still battling exhaustion and migraines and misery.
And, this. It takes some willpower not to give an exasperated sigh at the self-pity. Come on, man, just because you didn't do everything doesn't mean you did nothing. The silver lining is that, true, being angry won't cause Louis to trust him. Fucking hell, Lestat.
"That's not true." Daniel leans back on the sofa. "He wants to trust you."
Surely that's fucking obvious. Would be even to a blind person. Right? Louis' been desperately in love with Lestat ... forever, Daniel thinks, and nothing has changed that, not even Louis wishing he wasn't, not even Armand's near-century mindfuck. He still looks at Lestat like he hung the moon, even when Lestat is being the most ridiculous creature Daniel has ever seen. In person, and secondhand. Your 'love' was in a box.
"It's just going to take time and work. Shit nobody likes, I know."
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A thing to retreat to. Alternative options include abject fear, roiling jealousy. Anger, already declared unhelpful, exhausted, unavailable.
"But I don't know," his voice has gotten higher, "what I can give him anymore. I have given him all these decades. We have never liked apologies and he has them already. He wants for nothing, not gifts or companionship or- or-," whatever the third thing is at the end of that stammer is lost in a creaking, pitiful sound, choked from him.
Time and work. He hates those things.
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Daniel freezes like a rabbit realizing it's about to be eaten by a wolf, except, you know, he's an adult man (supernatural predator) facing down a much older adult man (supernatural predator) who is now openly crying. About some therapy shit that is beyond Daniel's capacity as a journalist, despite his keen insight.
But he knows how much Lestat cares about Louis. That has to be a start. He sits there for a moment, considers patting him on the shoulder or something. Doesn't. How awkward would that be.
"Be here." Quieter than before. "Just be here. This is new territory for both of you."
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Unself-conscious in this way. Maybe too much so, certainly too much so to be very concerned if Lestat himself is making anything feel weird and awkward.
But, a breath taken. Recognition that he is being given advice, benefit of the doubt, trust in its own way, and he flicks a look back to Daniel, sitting attentive. A slight shift, angling his collapse to be partially more upright against the arm of the sofa.
"We began as friends," is back at a normal octave, but voice shivering still, thick in his throat. "In your book, it is different. It is friendship that disguises a predator. I didn't—it wasn't how I saw things. We would talk all the time. He would share everything with me, I would share what I could with him. And now," a slight laugh, "we are friends again, so. I don't wish to ruin it, I just—"
A shuddered breath out. "He knows I dislike being excluded."
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Also, he has to remind himself: there's something to be said for Lestat having known that Louis and Claudia were trying to murder him for weeks, and Daniel is being uncharitable because he has a bias towards Louis. Hmhm. Well. Alright. How do we handle this.
"I'm sorry we didn't tell you about Armand." Does this help?? Maybe not. He's not Louis. "It's been challenging. For me, because I really, really fucking hate seeing people fight,"
(his horrible unease at the way Louis threw Armand across the penthouse, not feeling any satisfaction about it after all, caught there in strange silence, staring at each other)
"and I think Louis is struggling with the vulnerability this all means for him. These aren't decisions made to exclude you."
The world just doesn't revolve around Lestat de Lioncourt, is all. :'(
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That hand moves to rub at his face, a touch to some stress point in his brow before using his palm to smear aside tears.
"He is your maker," not quite a shrug in his voice. A big deal, yes, but a concrete reality. As he speaks about things that are not strictly about himself, there is room to get a still-shaky grip. "Forever, he will be that to you, and there will be no reprieve until the day he chooses the long sleep of the ancients."
Just as Louis has no real choice but to account for Lestat, but he twists away from this comparison even as he makes it, quietly, to himself.
"It's your fate to determine as you will. But if you wish to avail yourself of my assistance," a loose gesture between them finishes the thought. Here it will be.
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Armand reasons. Being turned by an ancient monster reasons. Shit he tries to keep behind a locked door, shit Armand leaked to Louis, when Daniel really wishes he hadn't. Should he have screamed? Hoped that Louis would hear him, run back in, throw Armand off of him? But then he probably wouldn't be a vampire; Louis says he was going to offer it to him, but he didn't. He walked away and left him there.
Doesn't matter.
He tries, after a bit more silence—
"It's safety in numbers about the threats over the book, and Louis' shotgunned bet out into the night. Armand is..." What the fuck is Armand. "You're not a guard dog, Lestat, you're a person who's here because we all want to be here, together, you don't have to haul that weight around."
But. He touches his shoulder, or wherever is closest.
"Which is not an attempt to cut you out of Armand stuff. I'm just saying. This is a mess. I know he fucked up your life, too, and that you knew him earliest. I know you do have insight into him."
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But maybe it's a good sign, this further crumbling, because it comes with a hasty nod, a watery, "Okay," like maybe Louis is just hurt and quiet and angry for reasons that don't? have anything to do with him?, and the ones that are aren't permanent, aren't about something too fundamental, too permanent for him to do anything about besides leave.
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Daniel shifts towards him, squeezes his bicep in a way he hopes his comforting.
"Go easy on yourself, go easy on Louis. It's easy to be angry because we all feel so much, I know. But look. You can unwind from all that. And it's going to be okay."
The guy who Louis described dropping him from miles up in the air to crumble on impact, the guy who twelve hours ago made Louis step away from Daniel out if lizard-brain concern. Is the same guy who came to Daniel's rescue, who saved Louis from execution, who is crying on the sofa.
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(Sadistic? Louis had queried, when Lestat had referred to his own parenting style. He'd laughed at the time, just a little. True.)
So it doesn't hit wrong and in fact makes him feel better. Calmer. If tears continue, its from some amount of relaxing rather than the winding up of angst, defending it against coming apart. It's going to be okay, and that makes him laugh a little as he goes to stem some tears with the edge of his wrist.
Lestat will choose to believe it, and that hand flutters down to pat over Daniel's. "You have not caused me to feel like your guard," he says, some note of apology in his tone, offered a little grandly for not actually containing the word 'sorry', but, all the same. Recognition for having thrown around Daniel's presence last night like a task Louis was giving him. "I have enjoyed our hanging out."
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"We're cool."
Little hand squeeze. All is forgiven, kiddo!! Don't worry about it. Fuck, what is he doing.
"Want to see if these librarian creeps took any good pictures of you?"
His inbox tab has a worrying number displayed on it.
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We're cool and a hand squeeze and he will take this as true and sincere, because it will be its own crisis if even the one of the two who is not Louis du Lac decides they do not value his presence. Daniel had said nice things to him, but that was before detonation.
A laugh, then. Oh, yeah. Those guys. "I'll disappointed if they didn't," and, indeed, pushes out of his sideways slump to attend this offer.
Turns out there's quite a lot. Apparently, an encounter with a single policeman is enough to motivate the Talamasca to track your whole evening. Here, entering the club he found. The girl he half-drained being helped out of it again. Walking the river. Oh, and this one, later, a fairly dynamic shot in which he uses a bicycle stand he'd removed from the pavement to smash apart a window, and he asks Daniel if he can have it.
He is not completely certain of the time when there is the sound of a door unlatching, and Lestat's attention pivots like the guard dog he is not. A flash of regret—he had begun feeling less dramatic and thus had contemplated a shower and change of clothing before sunset—but it isn't powerful enough to send him running to do so.
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Not tonight. Tonight he's trying to move past some of this shit, even if it's just a band-aid. Armand can be another bear trap tomorrow.
He tries to stay awake and alert, but eventually, he starts nodding off. The sun hikes higher in the sky, the room heats up despite air conditioning and heavy curtains, and he really wishes he were somewhere else—
A startle back to full consciousness. Blinking. Huh? He looks up at the arched entryway—
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A less dramatic figure than a drenched, bedraggled Lestat had struck hours earlier. Straight backed, expression inscrutable, looking at them. Impossible to say whether he had risen from coffin, or had simply passed the hours between their return to the hotel and this moment watching the slash of sunlight move across the room.
Comfortable, even if there is no particular ease in Louis' posture. Joggers today, bleach splatters blooming across soft fabric. Sheer t-shirt, delicacy of the fabric made more so by the heavy-collared speckled wool cardigan pulled over it. Bare feet, silent on the carpet. Louis taking them both in, perhaps assessing how he does, or doesn't fit into the present configuration of the room.
Daniel, dozing. Lestat, intent on the laptop.
Their attention shifting to him, in the entryway.
A moment where Louis' eyes catch on Lestat's and feels that moment of connection like a vise, turning tighter and tighter around his chest, before Louis looks away from him.
"Am I intruding?"
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lol the link
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yada yada, holler for edits
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