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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
Not something Louis is considering at this exact moment, unwilling to test the alchemy of Lestat and heights in this context. They have a lovely view to contemplate, one that Louis imagines will inspire less disagreement.
The city sprawls, bustling and glowing and ever-living, ever alert. Louis had loved New York, he remembers. He had liked their time spent here.
Armand ghosts at the edges of Louis' mind. Their time here, together. The apartment building, burned to the ground.
Louis turns away from the cityscape to observe Lestat's wandering, draw near to Daniel's side.
"Do you know any constellations?" is a little teasing, a nudge of an elbow knocking against Daniel's. Inviting attention upwards to the heavens rather than down at the busy streets below.
Go team fire escapes. Lestat can fly around by himself if he wants.
The architecture of the building looks even more interesting from this angle, wandering around in between the domes and points of decor. Evidence of employee hangouts sit here and there, a few folding chairs, an ash tray. Normalcy amongst something so fancy is always charming. The lit-up cityscape backdrop is as dazzling as it ever is— now and then, he marvels about being here, making it from a glorified farming town on the opposite coast.
A huff of a laugh for Louis. He bumps him back, and looks up.
"Not a one," he says, smiling. No fucking clue. "Orion, I guess. And it's crazy to get to see anything, you know? Did you ever a really visit a city before, notice you couldn't see the stars because of all the light pollution?"
Lestat turns, placing his hands back against the concrete edge and leaning there to consider them. A glance up at the sky.
He considers saying: sometimes you stay in the same city, and remember to go outside after a decade or so, and you see the sky is brighter than it was. Considers his memory of what the sky was like in Auvergne, with the past so easily recalled tonight, a door cracked open. Decides this would not be very socially adept at him, and says instead, "Humanity's price for bringing the galaxies down to earth," with a gesture to indicate the glittering city behind him.
"I think you can see the bear one all the time," less poetic, distracted with finding his cigarettes. The little nest of chairs and ashtrays planting the mood in him for dry smoke in the cold air.
The bear one, the combined effect of Lestat and Daniel's irreverent approach to the cosmos, draws a laugh out of Louis. A laugh, a smile. A pluck of fingers at Daniel's sleeve so they might trail Lestat over to the collection of sun-bleached folding chairs.
Louis lifts an palm-sized ash tray, examines this little chipped novelty. The Statue of Liberty gleaming green from beneath a light film of ash and rain water. Gauche. Oddly lovely.
"See a bottle anywhere?" Louis questions.
Cheap liquor, certainly, if there is any. But the thought of it appeals to him. A nice interlude for their outing, sharing cigarettes and sharp-tasting liquor. Arguing about heavenly bodies, perhaps.
The stars aren't clear to him like they might be in the middle of nowhere, but he can see them now, faded points above his head, when before the night sky in this city was a violet haze over billions of lights. It was striking, and beautiful, and this is beautiful too. The lights are brighter if he focuses too long, the colors are more intense, everything dazzling and still there are stars, a predator's keen gaze adapting to runaway industrial progress.
It's honestly very cool.
"Do you know any constellations?" If Louis' going to laugh at them!
He looks around, peering about like maybe there's a hidden supply cache like in one of the video games his youngest spent the entirety of her community college years pursuing instead of coursework. If I were a very serious art museum's sneaky booze stash, where would I be. Well. Probably in the curator's office, they're like that.
"Alas, gentrification. No more porn theaters and the closest shitty bodega to a prestigious art institution is a shameful three blocks away."
More occupied with retrieving his little crumpled pack of Marlboros than hunting for opened bottles of vodka, Lestat summons a flare of the fire gift. A little ribbon of fire, more enthusiastic than a lighter, scorching the end of his cigarette.
Meets them that short distance, offering the pack out in a general way. Heckles as well;
"Can you even find the bear one?"
Not that he minds Louis laughing at him, and never has. Whether from some on purpose witticism or because he didn't mind sounding foolish and oblivious in the moment, it's all the same, and all worth the effort.
Collecting a cigarette, Louis offers a lofty: "Can find it just fine, thank you."
It's been over a hundred years since he and Paul were boys together, looking up at the sky from the rooftop. Louis feels out the edges of the memory. There is pain still, but it is isn't blinding. Doesn't steal his breath.
More than capable of lighting his own cigarette, Louis still lets it dangle, looking expectant. Someone can volunteer, surely.
"And I can't even test you, because you could make anything up and I wouldn't know."
Daniel is also more than capable of lighting his own cigarette ('thanks', at Lestat, as he frees one), because he has a lighter. Behold, the miracle of fire. And because of tag turn order, despite the reluctance to engage in any meta cuddling due to not being quite oblivious enough tonight, he gets to engage in some incidentally sexually coded visual language. Clickclack, easy, a Zippo that looks as old as he is, leaning over with it and its tiny flame for Louis' cigarette.
Lights his own after. Nice to not worry about lung disease, with these. A wonder he didn't die of cancer or literal brain rot or a million other things years ago.
A quick scope of the seats to check they're not full of rainwater and filth before Lestat sits down, kicking his feet up, all elegance in spite of the surroundings.
"So we should never go sailing," a sigh, like it was a possibility, "or else spend eternity hopelessly adrift, drinking the blood of porpoises and sea turtles."
Terrible fate. He tips his head to consider the current subject of conversation.
"Two centuries," he says, "and I think I am used to it, but only because I don't remember seeing how it was before." Indicates with a loose gesture, the night sky rendered in phosphorescent galactic colours that only vampiric eyes can see. As pretty and as wildly abstract as any painting beneath their feet. "But those first nights, I remember clearly. When the horror lifts its veil, and everything is beautiful beneath."
A little flick of a glance to Louis, as if to assess whether or not he agrees, but a shift to Daniel. "Has the charm worn off yet, fledgling?"
Louis, inhaling a deep drag off his cigarette, circling to lean against the ledge. Watch Lestat. Watch Daniel.
Let his own thoughts wander to that first night. The descriptions he'd given to Daniel, a heady rush through experience after experience after experience. Lestat's face, silhouetted against the moon, impossibly beautiful. He'd glowed, Louis recalls. They'd been laughing, Louis stumbing, Lestat's hands steadying him as Louis tripped through the night.
Warmth in his expression, a reserved smile, but the silence maintains. It's for Daniel to answer. Louis flicks ash. Blows a ring of smoke. Waits.
Kind of amused, kind of eyerolling. Weirdest terminology, though he supposes they're as un-insulting as it can get.
"I'm kind of fucked if it has, right?"
No take-backs. He is stuck this way, unless he opens the curtains at high noon. Uninterested in romanticizing his experience, he has no words, even fake ones, for his first nights, and for whatever moment he was supposed to have realizing the world looked difference and being entranced by it. Daniel had other things to worry about at the time.
With no irony: it's fine. He figured it out. He likes this better than dying of Parkinson's. He likes this better than a lot of things.
"I have plenty of time to get bored of it all, eventually. Not in a hurry to get there."
A beat, a head tip, a miscalculation? Maybe? Not that Lestat was fishing for an answer in specific so much as he had anticipated a different one and finds what he gets instead differently interesting as a result—an evasion, of kinds, even as he confirms that the charm continues. Agreement, but held in reservation.
Is it because of Louis, standing here, rather than them alone? Some other thing? He could beam these queries or an impression of them into Daniel's head, past the constant veil he has pulled over his own mind, but perhaps there will be a better time to draw it out of him.
Very gently works the filtered end of his cigarette between his teeth with the quirk of a smile. "We can all keep each other entertained," Lestat says, "I'm sure."
Louis is looking at Daniel, recalling Dubai, his balcony, the profession: The vampire is bored.
Louis had been speaking of the collective.
Louis had been speaking of himself.
Daniel is omitting. Louis searches his face, but he too does not press. Does not reach after whatever it was Daniel found when he opened his eyes that first time.
"Daniel still intends a sequel, I assume," Louis offers. "So yes, I imagine we will keep each other busy for some time to the come."
Maybe Daniel still banks on the possibility that Louis likes him, likes talking to him. That perhaps a second book follows the first because Louis is starting fires, picking fights. Because the first book had been edited and a second book may not be.
You were still in the building, reminds Armand's voice in Louis' head. He flicks ash into the dark. Tucks this too away deep in his chest.
Dramatic old people. Daniel is fine, and he did mean both micro and macro, anyway. (It's not that it's traumatic, it's that it's his business, is all.) Having fun not dying, and having fun hanging out.
"Oh, I'm definitely putting out a purely fictionalized one as a sequel," he says, even though this is not true, because Daniel would explode and die, he cannot let any little obfuscation go, the most annoying kind of investigator, "just to confuse all the very angry vampires further."
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"Yes," he says. "I love it, I think."
He sounds very close to tears.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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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Not something Louis is considering at this exact moment, unwilling to test the alchemy of Lestat and heights in this context. They have a lovely view to contemplate, one that Louis imagines will inspire less disagreement.
The city sprawls, bustling and glowing and ever-living, ever alert. Louis had loved New York, he remembers. He had liked their time spent here.
Armand ghosts at the edges of Louis' mind. Their time here, together. The apartment building, burned to the ground.
Louis turns away from the cityscape to observe Lestat's wandering, draw near to Daniel's side.
"Do you know any constellations?" is a little teasing, a nudge of an elbow knocking against Daniel's. Inviting attention upwards to the heavens rather than down at the busy streets below.
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The architecture of the building looks even more interesting from this angle, wandering around in between the domes and points of decor. Evidence of employee hangouts sit here and there, a few folding chairs, an ash tray. Normalcy amongst something so fancy is always charming. The lit-up cityscape backdrop is as dazzling as it ever is— now and then, he marvels about being here, making it from a glorified farming town on the opposite coast.
A huff of a laugh for Louis. He bumps him back, and looks up.
"Not a one," he says, smiling. No fucking clue. "Orion, I guess. And it's crazy to get to see anything, you know? Did you ever a really visit a city before, notice you couldn't see the stars because of all the light pollution?"
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He considers saying: sometimes you stay in the same city, and remember to go outside after a decade or so, and you see the sky is brighter than it was. Considers his memory of what the sky was like in Auvergne, with the past so easily recalled tonight, a door cracked open. Decides this would not be very socially adept at him, and says instead, "Humanity's price for bringing the galaxies down to earth," with a gesture to indicate the glittering city behind him.
"I think you can see the bear one all the time," less poetic, distracted with finding his cigarettes. The little nest of chairs and ashtrays planting the mood in him for dry smoke in the cold air.
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Louis lifts an palm-sized ash tray, examines this little chipped novelty. The Statue of Liberty gleaming green from beneath a light film of ash and rain water. Gauche. Oddly lovely.
"See a bottle anywhere?" Louis questions.
Cheap liquor, certainly, if there is any. But the thought of it appeals to him. A nice interlude for their outing, sharing cigarettes and sharp-tasting liquor. Arguing about heavenly bodies, perhaps.
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It's honestly very cool.
"Do you know any constellations?" If Louis' going to laugh at them!
He looks around, peering about like maybe there's a hidden supply cache like in one of the video games his youngest spent the entirety of her community college years pursuing instead of coursework. If I were a very serious art museum's sneaky booze stash, where would I be. Well. Probably in the curator's office, they're like that.
"Alas, gentrification. No more porn theaters and the closest shitty bodega to a prestigious art institution is a shameful three blocks away."
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Meets them that short distance, offering the pack out in a general way. Heckles as well;
"Can you even find the bear one?"
Not that he minds Louis laughing at him, and never has. Whether from some on purpose witticism or because he didn't mind sounding foolish and oblivious in the moment, it's all the same, and all worth the effort.
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It's been over a hundred years since he and Paul were boys together, looking up at the sky from the rooftop. Louis feels out the edges of the memory. There is pain still, but it is isn't blinding. Doesn't steal his breath.
More than capable of lighting his own cigarette, Louis still lets it dangle, looking expectant. Someone can volunteer, surely.
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Daniel is also more than capable of lighting his own cigarette ('thanks', at Lestat, as he frees one), because he has a lighter. Behold, the miracle of fire. And because of tag turn order, despite the reluctance to engage in any meta cuddling due to not being quite oblivious enough tonight, he gets to engage in some incidentally sexually coded visual language. Clickclack, easy, a Zippo that looks as old as he is, leaning over with it and its tiny flame for Louis' cigarette.
Lights his own after. Nice to not worry about lung disease, with these. A wonder he didn't die of cancer or literal brain rot or a million other things years ago.
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"So we should never go sailing," a sigh, like it was a possibility, "or else spend eternity hopelessly adrift, drinking the blood of porpoises and sea turtles."
Terrible fate. He tips his head to consider the current subject of conversation.
"Two centuries," he says, "and I think I am used to it, but only because I don't remember seeing how it was before." Indicates with a loose gesture, the night sky rendered in phosphorescent galactic colours that only vampiric eyes can see. As pretty and as wildly abstract as any painting beneath their feet. "But those first nights, I remember clearly. When the horror lifts its veil, and everything is beautiful beneath."
A little flick of a glance to Louis, as if to assess whether or not he agrees, but a shift to Daniel. "Has the charm worn off yet, fledgling?"
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Louis, inhaling a deep drag off his cigarette, circling to lean against the ledge. Watch Lestat. Watch Daniel.
Let his own thoughts wander to that first night. The descriptions he'd given to Daniel, a heady rush through experience after experience after experience. Lestat's face, silhouetted against the moon, impossibly beautiful. He'd glowed, Louis recalls. They'd been laughing, Louis stumbing, Lestat's hands steadying him as Louis tripped through the night.
Warmth in his expression, a reserved smile, but the silence maintains. It's for Daniel to answer. Louis flicks ash. Blows a ring of smoke. Waits.
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Kind of amused, kind of eyerolling. Weirdest terminology, though he supposes they're as un-insulting as it can get.
"I'm kind of fucked if it has, right?"
No take-backs. He is stuck this way, unless he opens the curtains at high noon. Uninterested in romanticizing his experience, he has no words, even fake ones, for his first nights, and for whatever moment he was supposed to have realizing the world looked difference and being entranced by it. Daniel had other things to worry about at the time.
With no irony: it's fine. He figured it out. He likes this better than dying of Parkinson's. He likes this better than a lot of things.
"I have plenty of time to get bored of it all, eventually. Not in a hurry to get there."
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Is it because of Louis, standing here, rather than them alone? Some other thing? He could beam these queries or an impression of them into Daniel's head, past the constant veil he has pulled over his own mind, but perhaps there will be a better time to draw it out of him.
Very gently works the filtered end of his cigarette between his teeth with the quirk of a smile. "We can all keep each other entertained," Lestat says, "I'm sure."
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Louis had been speaking of the collective.
Louis had been speaking of himself.
Daniel is omitting. Louis searches his face, but he too does not press. Does not reach after whatever it was Daniel found when he opened his eyes that first time.
"Daniel still intends a sequel, I assume," Louis offers. "So yes, I imagine we will keep each other busy for some time to the come."
Maybe Daniel still banks on the possibility that Louis likes him, likes talking to him. That perhaps a second book follows the first because Louis is starting fires, picking fights. Because the first book had been edited and a second book may not be.
You were still in the building, reminds Armand's voice in Louis' head. He flicks ash into the dark. Tucks this too away deep in his chest.
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"Oh, I'm definitely putting out a purely fictionalized one as a sequel," he says, even though this is not true, because Daniel would explode and die, he cannot let any little obfuscation go, the most annoying kind of investigator, "just to confuse all the very angry vampires further."
It'd be funny, though.
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ldpdl update.
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bow??
🎀