damnedest | shotgun.

"Hell of a dealer even then, huh."

Impressive. Daniel knows just enough about Schiele to know he died young, young enough for the pedophile allegations to probably be mostly about the obscene nature of his art. Which Daniel is always in favor of, on principle. But it means his work getting out of Europe before World War II would have been a feat and a half.

Ah, Rothko.

"He started off doing impressionism, I think. Then got sick of it." A look over his shoulder at Louis, who'd know more. "Something like that?"

Daniel is keeping an eye out for Rauschenberg, personally.

The sigh broadens Louis' smile. Amused, charmed, both.

"Yes, impressionism," Louis confirms. "Before he moved into abstraction in the 1940s, which led him to his development of what he called the multiform."

They are neither of them obliged to stop with Louis, though he has ceased to keep pace. Slipped one hand into his pocket as he admires the painting. The other hand strays, reaching for Lestat out of old, old habit, palm sliding along his shoulder, his bicep in a loose hold. They are in New Orleans, they are wandering a warehouse, Louis has seen something that strikes him as beautiful and means to make his case for it.

"He was a fascinating man," comes softer. Of course there is something that resonates for Louis in a figure like Rothko. Depressive and melancholic, critical of the reception of his work. Louis' fingers draw Lestat a step closer. "I'd been hoping to acquire something of his for myself."

A beat, then—

"They sell very well. Around eighty million at auction, sometimes more."

There's the art dealer.

Being reached for, being drawn in nearer to observe the painting, being able to study Louis' profile up close as the younger vampire admires the work and, by extension, the artist who did it, all dismantle any bad will Lestat might have for Monsieur Rothko. Basks in the glow of Louis' attention, a hand crossing over to settle on Louis' knuckles, and dragging his focus back to the painting.

"Eighty million," repeated. Wow wow. "I think I could paint one of these for you, mon cher. Save you a few pennies."

He is ready with a winning smile should Louis give him a chastising look.

"Oof," says Daniel, but he's a bit far away by now, and maybe he's talking about Gilliam's draped canvas and also being uncultured. This is the tag.

Mon cher hooks somewhere behind Louis' ribs, interferes with his heartbeat. Pleased to hear it, aware that perhaps better to insist on less familiar endearments.

His fingers tighten at Lestat's arm, anticipated chastising look leveled at Lestat and softening into a smile.

"I'd hoped to purchase one of his later works. Maybe you can share your opinions should I have the opportunity."

The choice, specifics of Rothko's late work acting as an indication of Louis' melancholy, the cool stasis he had settled into in Dubai. Something that will pass his present companions by, something Armand might have recognized. Whether Louis still hopes for one of those late pieces—

His fingers withdraw, slowly, carefully from beneath Lestat's. Louis' hand runs along Lestat's shoulder as he crosses behind him, leaving Rothko to divert attention to Daniel's chosen piece.

"What do you think of it?" Louis solicits.

A pivot on a heel, following Louis' wander behind him as if magnetised. Not so committed to disdaining Rothko's meditations as to be left alone with them, Lestat walks in his wake, eyeing the display that may or may not have gotten an 'oof'.

Likes it more than the Rothko. More colours. Does not share this opinion.

Daniel nearly suggests finding a bootleg of 'Red', but at the last second remembers ha ha ha oh yeah, fucking theater memories. Maybe not, with that recommendation right now. Some day further on.

(Would Armand watch it?)

(Ugh, stop.)

"I like it, and I like the thought behind it. But the desire to stretch it out would make me fucking insane."

In fact, only the awareness of proximity sensors and other security measures is keeping him from doing it right now, which is very childish but. Look at it.

Louis' hand finds Lestat once more, a little nudge of contact: fingers at the cuff of his sleeve, knuckles grazing the back of his hand. A tug, subtle, to keep Lestat alongside them.

"Perhaps we can arrange for you to attend when the rotate the exhibits," is maybe half a joke. Feels a little sacrilegious, and maybe some of that shows on Louis' face, if not in his head.

"I'd been wondering what you'd like," Louis says. "The kind of art that'd speak to you. We didn't get a chance to talk much about it."

They'd been occupied by so much else, in Dubai.

Lestat is bid to follow along, which he does, his hand playing against Louis' where it brushes his knuckles. And then continues on his way. Not, in this case, an instance of petty posturing, unable to cope without being the centre of attention, so much as simply being contrary. A little dance.

It's a big and empty hall, besides. They can hear each other just fine.

"Maybe it's irritating on purpose," on his way, regarding the draped canvas. He has a vested interest in this practice, after all. For now, his eye catches on another large display, moving to go consider it for himself.

"Unfortunately I'm as pedestrian as they come," is a lighthearted apology. "I've got things in frames, but it's all, you know, something very imperfect my grandmother did before immigrating, shitty photographs from weird beats I used to haunt, album covers. I always liked the artists themselves more. Or their assistants, you know?"

As usual, whoever was willing to talk. The weird ones. Following suit, Daniel has a weird apartment accursed hotel lobby yellow walls and ceilings painted like a lightly cloudy blue sky, with cluttered walls displaying mismatched pieces, a magpie collection of sentimentality and things he just thought were neat. Too tacky for Louis, he's sure.

A laugh. "Irritation is a feeling, and art's about feeling something."

Could be.

"It is," Louis agrees, though what does that say about the art that had hung in the penthouse? Louis' renewal, swapping this piece for that, doesn't entirely displace—

"I'd like to see," he tells Daniel. "Before we go."

His knuckles are tingling where Lestat's fingers grazed. Louis' eyes track Lestat's departure, as close a study for him as Louis has devoted to the exhibits on the walls. Opens and closes his hand idly, flexing into the sensation of that small touch.

"If you'd play host for a night."

Lestat in his hot and sexy clothes adorning his hot and sexy body lingers by his chosen painting, head tilted as he gives it his attention, only potentially aware of Louis' focus on him. The painting reminds him of—

Well, probably nothing the artist intended, judging by the title. But all the same, light and colour and oddness with tones of the eighteenth century ballroom, of the New Orleans opulence that reached for this history. Otherworldly, a little fey, and likely full of references that Lestat doesn't understand. But there's music in it, he thinks, familiar strains.

The colours are good here too. A tip of his head the other way indicates that he is listening to the conversation. Louis, ever tolerant of his philistine boyfriends.

Lestat thinks: boyfriendS.

Daniel thinks: Louis is going to jump Frenchie's hot and sexy body if they spend too long wandering around doing nothing.

"It's just an apartment, but you're both welcome any time."

A spare room where his youngest daughter spent weekends for a few years now filled with junk, an office in organized chaos, a mailbox downstairs in the common hallway that's apparently very easily infiltrated by agents of mysterious and wealthy vampires. The view isn't even ver good. Still. Mental note to get cleaners in just in case. He means it, they are welcome.

Of Lestat's find, "That's a neat one."

"It's one of four," Louis offers. Polite trivia, maybe polite invitation if Lestat's interest is piqued.

Takes Daniel's invitation away in his teeth as they drift towards Lestat. As Louis refrains from touching him, hands slid into trouser pockets.

Maybe it reminds Louis of New Orleans too. Maybe he thinks of their ball, that last night before their lavish attire was soaked in blood.

"But this one, I think, suits you best."

Airy. Light. Something that suggests all things Lestat would take pleasure in.

Airy and light, and then a dark figure in the middle, pale faced and draped in black. There is, all at once, much to see in what at a glance he might have dismissed as childish figures, crayon markings, and Lestat finds himself caught in his study of it, unmoving as the other two come nearer. Dreamy and nightmarish, this painting, and he feels his throat close. Overwhelmed, quite suddenly.

"Yes," he says. "I love it, I think."

He sounds very close to tears.

Obvious emotion. Daniel lingers behind the other two, regarding the way Lestat's posture has gone a certain way, and his voice. For a quick moment he considers the painting and compares it to what he knows of the vampire, and thinks he can make a few guesses.

So—

A ghost of a TOUCH to the back of Louis' shoulder, and Daniel extricates himself to look at something else, giving them a moment.

Edited 2024-09-26 01:59 (UTC)

Tracking Daniel's retreat, the light touch an indication of intention without anything spoken between them.

Pretense at withholding dissipates, Louis withdrawing his hand from his pocket to reach for Lestat. Laces their fingers together. Stands close enough that their shoulders brush. Louis' face is angled up, observing the painting, allowing Lestat some privacy.

"What do you see?" he murmurs, soft invitation. Question open enough that Lestat can say anything he wishes or nothing at all. Can be moved by nothing more than the beauty of the colors, the arrangement of figures. Or it can be something else.

Lestat welcomes it, fingers gently fanning, then curling in. It feels secretive, nearly, this little point of contact, deniably hidden between them.

"The ballroom in Latrobe's. The foyer of the Salle Favart. Places of gold and light and beauty. The way it all looks the first time you see it. As a mortal, as a monster. Dazzling and strange." His voice has gotten less tight, evening out through the invitation to speak his mind, but helped along by the way he can murmur quietly and still be heard.

Squeezes Louis' hand. "Even this fellow," a nod to indicate the out of place robed figure, his heavy black robes, standing in the midst of it, "is overcome. A vampire, I think, looking at a chandelier as bright as the sun."

His explanation skews playful, there. Vampires in everything, when you are one. There is still a rose-hued mistiness in his eyes, but briefly leans his weight into Louis' shoulder. Balanced.

The impulse to trade their laced fingers for his hand at Lestat's neck, his shoulders. Tempers the urge, something that feels as if it treads inevitably past the delicate boundaries they've been maintaining.

"Would you like it?" Louis murmurs. An offer that does nothing to dispel Daniel's earlier allusions to who has participated in what heist at which point in time.

A little joke, traded back to Lestat. He leans into Louis, and Louis squeezes his hand back.

"Is that how you've felt yourself to be?" Louis asks softly. "A dark figure among so much light?"

Unexpected, if so.

This little joke is rewarded with a touch from Lestat's other hand, hooking against Louis' elbow, drawing his arm in closer.

"I have nowhere to hang it," as if this were the only reason why Louis might not make good on this offer. Most of the walls in his house in New Orleans are, after all, half wrecked, making interior decoration a challenge for anything that isn't natural plants pushing through waterlogged floorboards and crawling up his walls.

His hand squeezes. "No," easy. No, he does not picture himself as the menacing figure, out of place in this gallery. "Even at my worst, I was never so drab, es-tu d'accord avec ça?"

Well, he did dress in funeral colours for the trial, appropriately, but it was very chic all the same.

Aware, a little, that he is skipping past the point when he is being asked so gently, and a glance alongside Louis motivates him to add, "I see my maker. And I was the only one who did, as he appeared to me in all the colour and life churning around him. I see death," he adds, veering back to the painting. "While we dance together, a shadow in an open door, beckoning someone through it, unknown to us who it would be in the end. Always, some dark cloaked thing in the middle, no matter how lovely the room."

He speaks quietly, but perhaps doesn't truly mind that Daniel stepping away is the illusion of privacy rather than privacy itself. He knows everything. Knew more than the both of them, at one point.

And Lestat said he loved the painting, and this continues to be so, gazing at it with reverence.

The impulse to say, So we find you a place.

Tread all the same territory, a house, a place for them. Walls filled with art. Louis' expressions of love are always the same: security, money, enough that the worst of the world could never touch them. A beloved painting, a place to display it. He wants to give Lestat that.

Louis leans into him now, heeding the catch of hands. Closeness, a solid line of contact as Lestat speaks of his maker. Another piece to set alongside what Louis and Claudia had once pried out of Lestat, a condition of his reentry to their home.

Had he danced with Lestat, before he'd taken him? Had he haunted him, room after room?

Lestat is looking at the painting. Louis turns to look at him, his beautiful profile, his wet eyes, the shine of his hair.

"You weren't that to me."

Not even at the trial.

"I want to hear it," Louis offers. "The whole of it. When you're ready."

And Lestat might never be. Louis has thought about that.

Wet eyes become wetter, a less deniable crimson line as he looks Louis' way, as if to verify that this is so—that he was no nightmare figure dogging Louis' steps through New Orleans, plotting his destruction for his own selfish gain. A minor crumbling, some unmentioned hurt located and soothed without having anticipated it coming so easily.

And he nods at this last thing. A different kind of request than being challenged to tell the truth, or else. A request he might never actually fulfill, because how can he know when he is ready—

But, you know. How kind, to be offered it. And perhaps it is Louis who is ready.

"I don't think of it often," he says, after a moment. Buying a little time to recover. "But when I do, it comes vividly. And I await some great clarifying thing within it, but, alas." His retreat into Magnus' lair, all those years ago. To have a think, he had said. He had left that place, eventually, without grand revelation. Punishment has never been very revelatory, for him.

Lestat unlinks their hands, but hooks their arms. "Come. Perhaps Daniel has found something baffling for us to disagree about."

Louis' fingers fold over Lestat's in the crook of his arm. Ceding their linked fingers but taking this as consolation, a different kind of closeness.

Marks the painting all the same. A gift, perhaps, when the moment is right. Lestat will have a wall to hang it upon eventually, Louis is certain.

"I should have brought the pair of you to the Museum of Modern Art," Louis admits as they turn, certain there would be plenty of exhibits Lestat and Daniel would have found baffling.

Something to do before they leave, maybe. Let Lestat and Daniel unite over criticism of experimental exhibits, give the pair of them a night where Louis could fondly despair of them both.

"But I'm sure he's found something here worth an objection."

Magnus can, for the moment, be left aside as they cross the hall to rejoin Daniel. If their intrepid reporter has his own questions, Louis can only hope he saves them for some other time.

Meanwhile:

Nosy and not especially apologetic about it, Daniel has no qualms with eavesdropping even if he's not actively concentrating on it. But as luck would have it, an AIDSGATE print from the Silence = Death Project is on display, and for a while he stands in front of it, captured by old thoughts. And, uncomfortably, a few recent ones. Roy Travis, out of some oppression Olympics guilt that he didn't catch it, worlds that Daniel has vacationed in but never committed to. Is it allyship, or is it predatory? Is he lying to himself, or everyone else?

Louis and Lestat are still talking when he moves on. Putting it out of his head like quickly shutting a door. An easy mercenary rationalization that it's not cowardly because it's not the time to be doing any self-indulgent wallowing. Maybe later.

He finally finds the Rauschenberg, which he opts to stare at for a while. By the time he's joined—

"I think I might be mixing this guy up with somebody else?" A thumb, towards the split painting-sculpture. "Or is this just one of his more sedate ones?"

(It's one of his more sedate ones.)

But no matter what, they should skedaddle to some other part of the museum. Overnight shift change will happen soon, and nobody wants to be glimpsed on a camera. A jaunt through another exhibit, and then, past the cluttered long-aforementioned mezzanine, is the seductive allure of a modest door marked both 1) employees only and 2) emergency roof access.

Recovered from his self-indulgent wallowing, Lestat is content to walk over arm in arm and toss a glance to the artwork being gestured at. "Oh, lovely," he says, before Louis can confirm. "Will this guy of yours be coming back to finish his painting and collect his ladder? Quite careless, if not."

Back to form.

Quick, too, to make himself central to the orbit of the three of them, unable to bear the idea of trailing along like a spiraling comet. He releases Louis' arm to clatter nearer to Daniel by the time they're on their way, pointing out the Warhol Mona Lisa print, disdain for the piece itself smoothing the way for querying if Daniel had ever met the man or his hangers on, professes to have seen a movie that definitely never escaped containment from private viewings, let alone reaching New Orleans—

He continues to be the most okay as they go, mood tempering back to an equilibrium through the next exhibit, the mezzanine, the door that leads out to the rooftop that only requires a little bit of tampering for them to escape through.

It is a brisk near-winter evening. The layers of his suit and waistcoat are barely enough to withstand it, but, we suffer for fashion, and he grew up in colder climes. Lestat wanders for where the view of the city stands stark and glittering under a night sky, and cloud cover is rendered in oil painting brushstrokes of deep grey.

Still breathtaking large, this city. And he had imagined Paris overwhelming, back then.

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