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.
Still sensitive enough for the continued gathering of crimson at his waterline, even as Lestat nods to this, attempts to let it in. The singular pronoun, the admission of a wrong thing. How habitual it had been to yell at each other about their various hurts and then wait until they decided not to be angry about it anymore, walls ignored rather than dismantled.
Tempting to make some excuse and scuttle away while the going is good, but the urge to remain in the same room as Louis overrides this easily.
"Eighty years on," he says. "More than that, even, and I am still unaccustomed to not being the only one you—"
A gesture, to fill in the rest of the sentence. Trust, maybe.
Trust. Of course he trusts Lestat. Louis had trusted him even when he had believed the worst, believed Lestat the architect of the trap that had killed their daughter. He had dreamed Lestat, a hallucinatory confidant.
Lestat has always been trusted. It's only—
"I don't want you to see me like that. To have all that in your head when you look at me."
There's no avoiding it with Daniel. Daniel had been there, in Dubai. He'd seen it. Unraveled it. Named it.
A pause, and Lestat leaves his post by the chair. Moves forwards. Close enough, then, that he can reach out and touch the collar of Louis' cardigan, unnecessarily adjusting. A recent habit for smaller, less pointedly intimate, but no less affectionate touches when the desire overtakes him.
"You have nothing to fear of how I might look at you. How I see you." A flutter of a hand at his chest. (More flattering details up close, like where rain didn't wash away a thin film of blood up the side of his neck, the clinging of micro-glitter next to his mouth lifted off the skin of someone unfortunate.) It's not about trust (or whatever other quality Lestat didn't verbalise), but isn't it? says the tip of his head.
He shrugs. "I will be here, anyway. I will always only be moments away from you."
Lestat is permitted this approach, these little touches. Louis meets him, fingers lifting slowly to skim a light, inspecting touch up the faint trail of blood at his throat. Press fingertips to collect the shimmer of glitter at the corner of his mouth.
"I came here because I wanted to be near you," Louis reminds him. "You and Daniel both."
There is no game.
If Louis had been wiser, he'd have stayed in Dubai. A defensible position, easy to draw those who might harm Daniel into the city to die. But they'd asked him to come, so Louis had boarded a plane. Promised Lestat his company for the duration of the tour.
Lestat holds himself very still at that touch to his neck, his face, breath held low in his chest while his hand rests butterfly-light at Louis' sternum. Be here, Daniel had advised, and Louis, too, asking for no greater purpose to his presence, save that his presence intrinsically has purpose.
"Yes," he says, still quiet between them. Resigned to the now predictable, familiar sting of being a third, perhaps the third, but in the mood to quietly ache about it rather than explode. Surely this will be fine in the longterm.
Still, he teeters on the edge of saying more, the urge to do so transparent in his expression, before saying, "I would like it if you spoke to me about hard things. Even when they have little to do with me, or nothing at all. It had been good for you, once."
Long ago. Park benches, walks through the Quarter, and Lestat had made himself an attentive listener.
There are moments when it felt close. Their night at the opera. Enclosed in Lestat's cottage, a hurricane battering the windows. Their shared pain, easier to access than long years apart and the damage Louis had collected.
His fingertips come away with a sheen of glitter.
"It was good," Louis agrees. The words he'd chosen for Daniel: a coal fire, vital, life-giving warmth. Lestat had been that. Could still be, maybe.
"I'll try."
An honest offer.
"We can try. I'll give you what I can."
Which parts, if any, will come easy.
His fingers catch the stringy ends of Lestat's hair. Smiles a little, for the mess of him. How lovely he is still.
I'll try twinges a little at despair, the part of him that yearns for all to be as it was without any effort at all—but is also very sweet and dear, this offer. Miles more than what he is owed, this he knows on some difficult to access level that knows he is owed nothing at all, really.
So. Lestat says, "Good," more of a breath than a word, and the balance between despair and gratitude resolves itself a little when he sees Louis smile, and his heart warms.
Ah, that's right, he is nothing of his best, composed self. This latest argument is nearly nothing compared to the one that broke them forever, although it had carried its echoes, as all of their arguments will, he thinks—so, some memories of carefully choosing his outfits with which to present his apologies, whether finely tailored and expensive or modest(-ish) and humbled, but always purposeful.
Instead, he is asking Louis to trust him with his inner demons again while looking like one of them. He draws some hair behind his ear as he says, "I was going to acquire a new camera for you, but they all look different now," so. No gifts, this time.
What business does Louis have with a camera? He'd barely made anything of his film in Paris.
"I'd rather have you back here," Louis tells him. "No need for a gift."
Equilibrium returning. Louis finding his footing. Packing the desperate, gnawing misery away, tamping it down and down and down. Lestat's fingers warming his skin through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.
"Want a hand with this?"
A hand turning, displaying the shine of glitter on his fingertips. An offer, made in spite of the tentative quality to this conversation, their reconciliation.
No need for a gift, as predicted. But the apology had taken. So that is something.
But he can sense it, Lestat can, an easing in Louis. If not a relaxing, then a balancing. He will take it and it allow it to balance him in return, and even feel a little foolish for having cried so dramatically on the sofa not that long ago. See, everything is fine, and will continue to be.
He flicks a glance to Louis' fingers, momentarily puzzled, before he gives a quiet sound of recognition. Back to Louis. What other answer could there possibly be but—
"Sure."
And then waits to see what happens next. Will Louis lick his face clean. That would be good, if he's taking suggestions.
Louis doesn't belabor the point. They've had enough theatrics in the past twenty-four hours.
He trusts Lestat to follow as Louis turns, makes his way back through the archway.
Between the three of them, only Daniel and Louis have crossed into each others rooms. Lestat's has been left, sacrosanct, as far as Louis knows. And Lestat has not invited himself into Louis' room.
Louis makes the decision on the fly. Does not cross into Lestat's room, only passes through his own, heading towards the lavish en suite bathroom.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
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.
no subject
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—
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
Still sensitive enough for the continued gathering of crimson at his waterline, even as Lestat nods to this, attempts to let it in. The singular pronoun, the admission of a wrong thing. How habitual it had been to yell at each other about their various hurts and then wait until they decided not to be angry about it anymore, walls ignored rather than dismantled.
Tempting to make some excuse and scuttle away while the going is good, but the urge to remain in the same room as Louis overrides this easily.
"Eighty years on," he says. "More than that, even, and I am still unaccustomed to not being the only one you—"
A gesture, to fill in the rest of the sentence. Trust, maybe.
lol the link
Trust. Of course he trusts Lestat. Louis had trusted him even when he had believed the worst, believed Lestat the architect of the trap that had killed their daughter. He had dreamed Lestat, a hallucinatory confidant.
Lestat has always been trusted. It's only—
"I don't want you to see me like that. To have all that in your head when you look at me."
There's no avoiding it with Daniel. Daniel had been there, in Dubai. He'd seen it. Unraveled it. Named it.
no subject
A pause, and Lestat leaves his post by the chair. Moves forwards. Close enough, then, that he can reach out and touch the collar of Louis' cardigan, unnecessarily adjusting. A recent habit for smaller, less pointedly intimate, but no less affectionate touches when the desire overtakes him.
"You have nothing to fear of how I might look at you. How I see you." A flutter of a hand at his chest. (More flattering details up close, like where rain didn't wash away a thin film of blood up the side of his neck, the clinging of micro-glitter next to his mouth lifted off the skin of someone unfortunate.) It's not about trust (or whatever other quality Lestat didn't verbalise), but isn't it? says the tip of his head.
He shrugs. "I will be here, anyway. I will always only be moments away from you."
no subject
"I came here because I wanted to be near you," Louis reminds him. "You and Daniel both."
There is no game.
If Louis had been wiser, he'd have stayed in Dubai. A defensible position, easy to draw those who might harm Daniel into the city to die. But they'd asked him to come, so Louis had boarded a plane. Promised Lestat his company for the duration of the tour.
"Do you understand?"
no subject
"Yes," he says, still quiet between them. Resigned to the now predictable, familiar sting of being a third, perhaps the third, but in the mood to quietly ache about it rather than explode. Surely this will be fine in the longterm.
Still, he teeters on the edge of saying more, the urge to do so transparent in his expression, before saying, "I would like it if you spoke to me about hard things. Even when they have little to do with me, or nothing at all. It had been good for you, once."
Long ago. Park benches, walks through the Quarter, and Lestat had made himself an attentive listener.
no subject
There are moments when it felt close. Their night at the opera. Enclosed in Lestat's cottage, a hurricane battering the windows. Their shared pain, easier to access than long years apart and the damage Louis had collected.
His fingertips come away with a sheen of glitter.
"It was good," Louis agrees. The words he'd chosen for Daniel: a coal fire, vital, life-giving warmth. Lestat had been that. Could still be, maybe.
"I'll try."
An honest offer.
"We can try. I'll give you what I can."
Which parts, if any, will come easy.
His fingers catch the stringy ends of Lestat's hair. Smiles a little, for the mess of him. How lovely he is still.
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So. Lestat says, "Good," more of a breath than a word, and the balance between despair and gratitude resolves itself a little when he sees Louis smile, and his heart warms.
Ah, that's right, he is nothing of his best, composed self. This latest argument is nearly nothing compared to the one that broke them forever, although it had carried its echoes, as all of their arguments will, he thinks—so, some memories of carefully choosing his outfits with which to present his apologies, whether finely tailored and expensive or modest(-ish) and humbled, but always purposeful.
Instead, he is asking Louis to trust him with his inner demons again while looking like one of them. He draws some hair behind his ear as he says, "I was going to acquire a new camera for you, but they all look different now," so. No gifts, this time.
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What business does Louis have with a camera? He'd barely made anything of his film in Paris.
"I'd rather have you back here," Louis tells him. "No need for a gift."
Equilibrium returning. Louis finding his footing. Packing the desperate, gnawing misery away, tamping it down and down and down. Lestat's fingers warming his skin through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.
"Want a hand with this?"
A hand turning, displaying the shine of glitter on his fingertips. An offer, made in spite of the tentative quality to this conversation, their reconciliation.
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But he can sense it, Lestat can, an easing in Louis. If not a relaxing, then a balancing. He will take it and it allow it to balance him in return, and even feel a little foolish for having cried so dramatically on the sofa not that long ago. See, everything is fine, and will continue to be.
He flicks a glance to Louis' fingers, momentarily puzzled, before he gives a quiet sound of recognition. Back to Louis. What other answer could there possibly be but—
"Sure."
And then waits to see what happens next. Will Louis lick his face clean. That would be good, if he's taking suggestions.
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So little ceremony.
Louis doesn't belabor the point. They've had enough theatrics in the past twenty-four hours.
He trusts Lestat to follow as Louis turns, makes his way back through the archway.
Between the three of them, only Daniel and Louis have crossed into each others rooms. Lestat's has been left, sacrosanct, as far as Louis knows. And Lestat has not invited himself into Louis' room.
Louis makes the decision on the fly. Does not cross into Lestat's room, only passes through his own, heading towards the lavish en suite bathroom.
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yada yada, holler for edits
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