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.
Even unreadable, ominously good posture, looking away from him, all of that. A missed beat, then, where Lestat would answer Louis hovering at the edge of the room by getting up and swanning over, even if to do nothing else but be near. Here, there's a slight listing forwards in Lestat's posture, as though the temptation is there.
"No," he says, focus intent, even as Louis' flicks off of him.
Louis is so beautiful. Disarming, sometimes. (So, we didn't.) (No.) (WHICH IS FINE, because Daniel is, you know.) (Straight.)
Stray thoughts that hopefully go nowhere, befuddled as he claws back to the present, and remembers exactly what they're doing out here, something his stomach swooping with relief and embarrassment at once. Louis is beautiful, sure, whatever, but Louis does not look like he has yanked open the curtains of his room to embrace the mid-afternoon sun, which is the important part.
"Oh yeah we were just," scrubs hand over face, "making out and doing lines of a little coke and rainbow sidewalk chalk. Fun and ordinary noonish activities."
But even exhausted, scraped raw and holding too tightly to all this fresh hurt, Louis looks at them and feels affection swell in his chest. It doesn't yet touch his face, as he looks at them. There is some element of study, not unlike how Louis was consider a piece of art. Observing their tableau and finding himself reluctant to join it.
The debris of the destroyed chair have been removed. It might be as if nothing had happened at all.
"You look tired."
Open-ended. It applies to either of them, and Louis doesn't specify.
Now Lestat gives in to impulse, gets up, a restless wander around that doesn't beeline for Louis, but breaks up the scenery, the tableau being studied.
"This one is up past his bedtime," he says, a little gesture to the old man baby on the couch before setting hands against the back of an armchair, leaning. So casual, never mind the transparently desperate way Lestat hasn't taken his eyes off Louis since he entered the room. "I was about to say to him that he needed his beauty sleep."
As if it's perfectly normal for either Louis or Lestat to be up at noon themselves, that everyone in the room doesn't look various degrees of wrecked, some self-inflicted. One problem at a time, he rationalises.
Daniel closes the lid of his laptop with a soft click, confident no one in this room is guessing his password, and stands up. He crosses the room to Louis, to look at him up close, assess him as best he can. He reaches out, lays hands on the other vampire's forearms, bracing. Just—
Something. Feelings, man. Daniel looks at him for a moment, trying to will him to understand how much he cares about him and all the shit he keeps trying to bury like layers of volcanic ash hardening inside of him, compressed and forgotten.
"Stop being so hard on yourself or I'll throw up or something," there.
That works. He looks over his shoulder to Lestat as he drops his hands, and gestures at him like!! Relax, remember? You'll be fine. Just fucking chill, chill right now, he sees you un-chilling yourself.
A thing Daniel might understand: the novelty of Louis carrying the memory of a fight into the next day.
The chair and it's debris are gone. How many times has it been as simple as that? Detritus swept up, the heat of anger cooled, the detail of whatever it was that prompted a disagreement lifted away?
But Louis has all of it still. Daniel's intercessions, Lestat's shouting, Louis' ugly sideswipe, the slammed door. All of it, here still. A strange, miserable kind of gratitude for it runs alongside a sickening awareness of how often, how easily, seventy-seven years passing with no friction to mark them.
Daniel's hands drop. Louis catches him on the downswing of the wider gesture. A tight squeeze of contact as Louis laces their fingers together. Holds there for a breath, as Louis tells him, "You should."
The squeeze of their fingers telegraphs, We're alright.
And then, Thank you, as an audible thing between them. Understanding clearly what kept Daniel awake, and knowing it wasn't awaiting Lestat's re-entry.
Louis and Daniel hold hands and Lestat doesn't vibrate himself into a million pieces.
Or anything. His grasp on the back of the armchair anchors him in place, and he tries out the thought that it will be okay, as Daniel said. It will be okay even if Louis pivots and returns to his room as soon as he has made sure Daniel is away to coffin. It will be okay if he stays and they exchange niceties, or they fight again, or Louis patiently untangles a remorseful Frenchman clinging to his legs. It will be, because anything is more okay than the nothing he has endured.
Manages a blink, a glance in return to Daniel. A tight smile. He is chill.
"Bonne nuit," soft-spoken. He has never yelled at anyone in his life.
Obliged to release Daniel to his coffin, to the sleep he needs, Louis is left to consider what next. How long he can linger in the entryway without making a choice. He watches Daniel go, lets him hold his attention until the sound of a door closing, the fading sounds of Daniel returning to coffin.
And then his gaze swings back to Lestat.
They are not so good with apologies, he and Lestat. Better with arguing, if their track record is anything to go off. All things feel fragile, unable to withstand the force of the cruelty they're capable of inflicting on each other. Too many new weak points, too many ways to shatter each other.
And Louis, closed in a room watching sunlight slant across the floor and thinking of promises made to their daughter. Almost made to Daniel.
"What now, Lestat?"
And then, a little thaw, rueful, as Louis observes, "The velvet is ruined."
As Daniel leaves, as Louis watches him go, Lestat steps out from around the armchair, hand trailing before bracing to lean. A significant percentage more concerned with striking a pose just so when Louis is in the room, even if he has spent most of the morning in various states of tears.
Tears that immediately threaten a return less for the observation of the velvet being ruined and more for that early sign of thaw. A smile breaks through, and he says, "It rained," with a gesture to indicate the sky from which rain happened to him personally.
What now, such a question.
"Louis, I'm sorry for last night," has a kind of familiar raspy quiet to it, like trying to near-whisper beneath some third party's notice, despite there being none present. Like they are speaking in a shared coffin, rather than an expansive living room. "And what I said."
Louis had recounted the series of apologies in New Orleans, the extravagance of each attempt, the persistence of them, how Lestat had made all his gestures on grand and grander scale, but this—
A simple string of words, offered so softly.
It is disarming in its unexpectedness. Louis is taken aback, and some flicker of that shows in his face, looking back at Lestat in his ruined velvet, his lovely hair drying into frizz, mascara dark beneath his eyes.
They hurt each other with such precision. Even after nearly eighty years parted.
"Do you still feel it?" is not an accusation. Only a carefully posed question, as Louis gathers himself.
There is still an overwound snarl in him, he knows, quick-grown tangles that have yet to be worked out. A few knots loosened. The hand braced on the chair back works claws into upholstery, a minor release of tension.
"Not all of it. I spoke a lot of nonsense," a dismissive gesture, that hand dropping, finding an anxious little handhold on an outer velvet seam. "Telling me of Armand would have done nothing to change the other night. It only would have made me feel better about things."
Which, in the grand scheme of it all, has no bearing on Louis' protective capacities, of his measure of the threats against them, of his abilities or maturity—those things Lestat swiped at with claws out, among others.
Still tender, still bleeding, the wounds Lestat had scored.
A lot of nonsense, Lestat says, but not entirely detached from the reality. From what Louis had allowed to happen through what feels like negligence now, in the light of day.
Maybe everything would be different if Louis had said something. Maybe Daniel wouldn't have been hurt.
Louis keeps these things to himself. Wounds to nurse slowly, to set against the running loop of thought Armand had left behind.
Says instead:
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you."
Not we. I.
Louis could hide behind Daniel. It wouldn't be entirely untrue. They'd come to that conclusion together, and like the story of that room in San Francisco, some of it was simply Daniel's to tell.
But what parts of it were Louis', he had not been eager to share.
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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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Even unreadable, ominously good posture, looking away from him, all of that. A missed beat, then, where Lestat would answer Louis hovering at the edge of the room by getting up and swanning over, even if to do nothing else but be near. Here, there's a slight listing forwards in Lestat's posture, as though the temptation is there.
"No," he says, focus intent, even as Louis' flicks off of him.
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Stray thoughts that hopefully go nowhere, befuddled as he claws back to the present, and remembers exactly what they're doing out here, something his stomach swooping with relief and embarrassment at once. Louis is beautiful, sure, whatever, but Louis does not look like he has yanked open the curtains of his room to embrace the mid-afternoon sun, which is the important part.
"Oh yeah we were just," scrubs hand over face, "making out and doing lines of a little coke and rainbow sidewalk chalk. Fun and ordinary noonish activities."
Daniel sits up.
"You okay?"
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Of course.
But even exhausted, scraped raw and holding too tightly to all this fresh hurt, Louis looks at them and feels affection swell in his chest. It doesn't yet touch his face, as he looks at them. There is some element of study, not unlike how Louis was consider a piece of art. Observing their tableau and finding himself reluctant to join it.
The debris of the destroyed chair have been removed. It might be as if nothing had happened at all.
"You look tired."
Open-ended. It applies to either of them, and Louis doesn't specify.
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"This one is up past his bedtime," he says, a little gesture to the old man baby on the couch before setting hands against the back of an armchair, leaning. So casual, never mind the transparently desperate way Lestat hasn't taken his eyes off Louis since he entered the room. "I was about to say to him that he needed his beauty sleep."
As if it's perfectly normal for either Louis or Lestat to be up at noon themselves, that everyone in the room doesn't look various degrees of wrecked, some self-inflicted. One problem at a time, he rationalises.
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Daniel closes the lid of his laptop with a soft click, confident no one in this room is guessing his password, and stands up. He crosses the room to Louis, to look at him up close, assess him as best he can. He reaches out, lays hands on the other vampire's forearms, bracing. Just—
Something. Feelings, man. Daniel looks at him for a moment, trying to will him to understand how much he cares about him and all the shit he keeps trying to bury like layers of volcanic ash hardening inside of him, compressed and forgotten.
"Stop being so hard on yourself or I'll throw up or something," there.
That works. He looks over his shoulder to Lestat as he drops his hands, and gestures at him like!! Relax, remember? You'll be fine. Just fucking chill, chill right now, he sees you un-chilling yourself.
Then, he announces:
"I'm going to bed."
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The chair and it's debris are gone. How many times has it been as simple as that? Detritus swept up, the heat of anger cooled, the detail of whatever it was that prompted a disagreement lifted away?
But Louis has all of it still. Daniel's intercessions, Lestat's shouting, Louis' ugly sideswipe, the slammed door. All of it, here still. A strange, miserable kind of gratitude for it runs alongside a sickening awareness of how often, how easily, seventy-seven years passing with no friction to mark them.
Daniel's hands drop. Louis catches him on the downswing of the wider gesture. A tight squeeze of contact as Louis laces their fingers together. Holds there for a breath, as Louis tells him, "You should."
The squeeze of their fingers telegraphs, We're alright.
And then, Thank you, as an audible thing between them. Understanding clearly what kept Daniel awake, and knowing it wasn't awaiting Lestat's re-entry.
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Or anything. His grasp on the back of the armchair anchors him in place, and he tries out the thought that it will be okay, as Daniel said. It will be okay even if Louis pivots and returns to his room as soon as he has made sure Daniel is away to coffin. It will be okay if he stays and they exchange niceties, or they fight again, or Louis patiently untangles a remorseful Frenchman clinging to his legs. It will be, because anything is more okay than the nothing he has endured.
Manages a blink, a glance in return to Daniel. A tight smile. He is chill.
"Bonne nuit," soft-spoken. He has never yelled at anyone in his life.
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And then his gaze swings back to Lestat.
They are not so good with apologies, he and Lestat. Better with arguing, if their track record is anything to go off. All things feel fragile, unable to withstand the force of the cruelty they're capable of inflicting on each other. Too many new weak points, too many ways to shatter each other.
And Louis, closed in a room watching sunlight slant across the floor and thinking of promises made to their daughter. Almost made to Daniel.
"What now, Lestat?"
And then, a little thaw, rueful, as Louis observes, "The velvet is ruined."
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Tears that immediately threaten a return less for the observation of the velvet being ruined and more for that early sign of thaw. A smile breaks through, and he says, "It rained," with a gesture to indicate the sky from which rain happened to him personally.
What now, such a question.
"Louis, I'm sorry for last night," has a kind of familiar raspy quiet to it, like trying to near-whisper beneath some third party's notice, despite there being none present. Like they are speaking in a shared coffin, rather than an expansive living room. "And what I said."
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Louis had recounted the series of apologies in New Orleans, the extravagance of each attempt, the persistence of them, how Lestat had made all his gestures on grand and grander scale, but this—
A simple string of words, offered so softly.
It is disarming in its unexpectedness. Louis is taken aback, and some flicker of that shows in his face, looking back at Lestat in his ruined velvet, his lovely hair drying into frizz, mascara dark beneath his eyes.
They hurt each other with such precision. Even after nearly eighty years parted.
"Do you still feel it?" is not an accusation. Only a carefully posed question, as Louis gathers himself.
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There is still an overwound snarl in him, he knows, quick-grown tangles that have yet to be worked out. A few knots loosened. The hand braced on the chair back works claws into upholstery, a minor release of tension.
"Not all of it. I spoke a lot of nonsense," a dismissive gesture, that hand dropping, finding an anxious little handhold on an outer velvet seam. "Telling me of Armand would have done nothing to change the other night. It only would have made me feel better about things."
Which, in the grand scheme of it all, has no bearing on Louis' protective capacities, of his measure of the threats against them, of his abilities or maturity—those things Lestat swiped at with claws out, among others.
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A lot of nonsense, Lestat says, but not entirely detached from the reality. From what Louis had allowed to happen through what feels like negligence now, in the light of day.
Maybe everything would be different if Louis had said something. Maybe Daniel wouldn't have been hurt.
Louis keeps these things to himself. Wounds to nurse slowly, to set against the running loop of thought Armand had left behind.
Says instead:
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you."
Not we. I.
Louis could hide behind Daniel. It wouldn't be entirely untrue. They'd come to that conclusion together, and like the story of that room in San Francisco, some of it was simply Daniel's to tell.
But what parts of it were Louis', he had not been eager to share.
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lol the link
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yada yada, holler for edits
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