Rashid says something so vulgar that Daniel thinks he hallucinates it. Weird, honestly, which thing he's currently experiencing that he assumes is a hallucination.
Sure, he thinks, watching Lestat abduct an on-fire vampire.
'Car's gonna hit something in ten seconds,' he sends to Louis, and says it out loud at the same time, which prompts Rashid to start trying to slow down. Daniel thinks please hear me please be awake please let the fire be a sign you are awake and not dying from whatever was in there, is that a fucking chain, what the fuck—
A door handle smacks into the windshield, sending a spiderweb crack through it, but it holds. Is this a Toyota?
The van doesn't stop, and though it begins to lose speed as dead weight is finally lifted off the gas pedal, it's not soon enough. Daniel is off, it's more like twelve seconds, but the van does collide with the limo, no squeal of tires, no attempt at braking, BAM, a bomb-like noise of the hit and shattered glass everywhere. The t-boned vehicles skid further down the road for a few meters and grind to a halt, and Daniel hears sirens before Rashid will be able to, and he repeats the extremely vulgar thing.
Not for long. Up, out, to the ruined mangle of van-limo-hybrid creature.
"Louis?!"
There are still two guys in the front. The limo driver (technically, the limo thief) is still going at a dead sprint, though she's starting to feel very lightheaded.
Alert, for the moment, entire body singing with adrenaline and flayed raw by Eimear's tinkering with his nervous system, Louis has a brief glimpse of Lestat, and then he is abruptly alone in the back of the van. Dangling from the side of the box truck's interior, Louis lets himself sag, exhausted, right up until—
A voice. Daniel.
Ten seconds isn't not good information to have. Louis is only lacking much ability to act on it. The paralytic is burning out of his system, but not fast enough that Louis can meaningfully brace for impact.
The impact must coincide with whatever success Lestat is having. Louis is flung forward, cratering into the divider between the interior of the truck and the cab. Has movement enough to kick himself free of the debris. Can hear pained groans from beneath the crumpled metal, and takes some vicious satisfaction in it.
I'm okay. projected into Daniel's head, words like a hand pressing to Daniel's cheek, moments before Louis realizes he can see Daniel looking at him from the gap left by the missing door. Had banked, maybe, on a few minutes to assess how presentable he looked, but here they are, apparently.
"There's two still alive," Louis reports, from within the mangle of the truck's interior. "One only just. Where's Lestat?"
A streak of light, first, where fire trails in their wake, before this is extinguished into a smear of smoke, and they vanish into the sky, obscured by looming city buildings from anyone's position on the street.
Vicious, this fight, both of them locked together like two feral cats unwilling to break apart and cede territory or opportunity. Claws dig, jaws bite, and some maddened scramble of psychic wrestling transpiring on another plane of existence entirely. But Eimear's pain is easier to access than Lestat's, her body freshly immolated, her mind ablaze with fury, and even beyond these elements—
Muscle and bone crumbles beneath a hand at her side. Another snaps her neck. Easy in a way it should not be, not against her, even injured, even as his fangs find her neck and pulls blood from her heart, barely even drinking it where it flows past his mouth. In that moment of frantic connection, she might sense it, like seeing the larger, monstrous shadow that he should not be able to cast, and understand that victory was never possible.
He will deposit pieces of her into the water from on high, with the lazy apathy of a shark now swimming away from its own frenzy.
Daniel's expression is a clash of terror-adrenaline-relief, Louis is alright, and the force of that reveal is powerful enough to make him forget how fucking pissed off he is at him for right now. He rips a piece of metal from the car frame, a bit separating the front window from the bulk of the van cavity.
"He's—"
Up, potentially about to drop a vampire to the ground? It sticks in Daniel's throat, but only for a second.
"Fine. Come on, we have to move."
"Mr du Lac?"
Hey, Rashid is here, by the way. Daniel scrambles around to the crushed front end so he can drive his makeshift stick through the living, but dazed, vampire's head. No idea if this will cause death, but it will cause a stop for now.
"Law enforcement and fucking Tiktok! Very fucking soon, move!"
"Rashid?" echoes only slightly from the mangle of the van. Louis' tone is somewhere between amused and pleased and faintly irritated. Talamasca in his home, Louis has yet to truly measure that transgression among all the rest that he's been accounting for recently.
Now, however, is not the time.
Louis kicks his way from the interior, emerging with a tangled clanking of titanium chain. Bloody, ash-streaked, tired. Louis is all of these things, but he is upright. Briskly hooks the loop of the chain on some remaining, jagged bit of the van to use as leverage to break the loops of chain from his body.
Amid the creaking and cracking of chain link and metal, Louis questions, "Is that the car we'll be leaving in?"
Rashid doesn't even have enough shame to look sheepish. Daniel assumes he's been partially lobotomized by the spook librarians.
Are these crippled vampires dead? Daniel doesn't think so— heads kind of on, if mangled, not burned even though there's so much smoke and ash from Louis' pyrowhatever. Should he, just. Well. He does what he thinks he should, which is shove his hand into the cavity he's created in the passenger vampire's head and yank so that it detaches from his body. It thunks back into the wreckage, flopping against the barely-alive driver.
He feels far away.
"Yeah," he hears himself say, about the car with the cracked windshield. He watches himself walk back around and look at Louis.
"Are you okay?"
Daniel doesn't feel any urgency from his distant vantage point, dizzy and greyish, but Rashid must, because he ushers them towards it with all the precision he had used to delivery drinks and newspapers.
The looming threat of law enforcement and TikTok is apparently motivation enough for Rashid to risk Louis' thin patience, hustling him into the backseat. A glimpse back as Rashid accelerates the car into a three-point turn and Louis can see a clutch of agents circling the remains of the wreckage. Louis doesn't let that hold his attention. That can certainly become the Talamasca's project.
A narrowed look from the backseat at Rashid, measuring the amount of years Rashid had moved within the penthouse. Considering what he wishes to do about the invasion of privacy involved in it.
But most immediately: Daniel.
Daniel, who has been robbed of the front seat by Louis' latched grip on his wrist. A split second of recognition, seeing something in Daniel's face that Louis knows very well, and wanting to keep him close more than he wants Daniel wielding an abandoned Talamasca agent's laptop.
Daniel's Are you okay? left by the wayside as Louis looks into his face. Touches his cheek, briefly. The titanium cuffs still gleaming on his wrists, ignored for the moment.
Boxes Rashid out of the conversation entirely by touching Daniel's mind, asking Are you with me?
Daniel has been alright as separating himself as he is now from mortals, from food, even during excursions with Lestat— he has to, there's no point starving to death, and the world is overpopulated anyway, full of soulless fucks, Daniel knows better than anyone, he sees to much in people, understands too much, has no problem deleting people.
Doesn't he? He just killed two vampires in grotesquely violent ways, and he had only recently struggled to communicate to Armand the ethical facade he's put up in himself to be alright with murder. Accepting blood from his maker to repair his head the rest of the way had tripped it, because he's only ever taken blood from mortals, and following that, until tonight, had only ever been violent with mortals, and something about the veil is shredded now, forcing him into looking at how he's existing.
A startle, when Louis touches his mind.
"Yeah," out loud, in-mind. The bad yeah, the lying one. He looks at him, looks down at their hands, frowns.
'You shouldn't have done that.'
Still not-quite-present. Freaking out, but quietly. He slides fingers around Louis' wrist and beneath the cuff, hating it.
'Help me with this,' he implores. He can tell it's made to be a pain in the ass, that it'll cut into Louis if he just yanks it, but they can probably do it without any damage with three hands. C'mon.
It would make Daniel very angry if Louis offered up the first thing that came to mind: You shouldn't have come after me.
Even if it feels true. If Louis is more concerned with how Daniel might have been hurt than about the cuffs on his wrist, about Eimear plucking at his nervous system until Louis screamed, about what might have waited for them at the end of the truck's route. Maybe nothing. Maybe just a quiet place for Eimear and her fledglings to strip the flesh from Louis' bones until here was nothing more of him.
Doesn't believe Daniel's Yeah, so refrains from asking if he can touch Lestat's mind. Has to content himself with fine as a placeholder for all his fears as Daniel fidgets with the cuff.
Rashid catches Louis' eye in the rearview mirror, and Louis' lip curls back off the silent threat of a sharp fang. Eyes front.
Touches Daniel's cheek again, eyes searching. Daniel, largely unharmed. Daniel, who did a fair share of violence tonight, and should have been spared it all. Louis' thumb runs along his cheek. He breathes out. Nods.
Alright, let's try, Louis acquiesces, hooking two fingers beneath the cuff alongside Daniel. Try because he is exhausted. Try because Eimear turned his pain receptors on at full force and as adrenaline begins to ebb, the shuddery after effect of that is gaining purchase.
Pisses him off that Louis was so ready to just volunteer himself, because he doesn't see it as a kind gesture to spare him, he sees it as Louis being careless about his own life. Even now, even with Daniel and Lestat here, he was just going to go and, what? Die? He continued to fight, sure, but he was happy to walk off the fucking edge, right into it.
Hurts to see Louis in chains, but he can tell in an instant what the problem is, so he stops, covers the cuff and Louis' hand with his own.
They're driving fast, but not action movie fast. Rashid is just getting them away, and probably won't start looping them back around to anyplace familiar until he's certain they're no longer being observed. Daniel stays like that for a long moment, just holding Louis' hand, somewhere being angry and dissociative.
Instead of communicating anything else to Louis, he tries Lestat.
'Told him you're fine, so you'd better be. Can you find us?'
'I'm fine,' sounds very peaceful, as a bloodied torso is dropped into the East River.
His actual reaction should be fierce relief that Daniel's words imply that Louis is alive, perhaps even well, but this information is absorbed as something that is good and correct, as expected. There is still a head to dispose of, and he drifts out a little further. Stops.
Evaluates the very grim, gory sight in his hands, this creature rent to meat. Butchery. It takes a moment to remember why he has done this thing, and when he does, it's easy to let decapitated head slip from his hands and plummet into the water below. 'Is,' Lestat starts, reaching for Daniel once more. 'Is he alright? Where are you both?'
He needs to go back, needs to find them, needs to see for himself that Louis is well, a tide of feeling that could shock him out of the sky if he let it.
'Tell me where to go.'
He could, probably, find them, but it would take longer without a clue.
"Hey," out loud, to the stone-faced driver whose existence continues to be an anomaly for many reasons, "Pull over. Don't argue, just, as soon as you can."
Rashid's attention flickers a little before he exchanges a look with Daniel in the rear-view mirror, apparently torn between leaning on the secret rapport they had during the interview (sorry Louis) and detached fear about the journalist's nature now. But he nods, and turns to pull them over into a residential area out of any major traffic crossings.
'Here.' Shown as best he can, offering a mental beacon. 'He's shaken, I don't know how bad, but in one piece. Help me get these fucking things off of him.'
A brief, shared image of Louis' hands. It unsettles Daniel in a major way. He just wants all traces of his bullshit gone. Doesn't ask if the woman is dead. He has complete faith in Lestat in that respect.
Having been content, momentarily, to lean into Daniel and let Daniel's hand cover his own. Turn his palm up, eventually, and tangle their fingers together. Let Rashid drive. Let the passing minutes without any new opposition manifesting lower the thud of adrenaline speeding Louis' heartbeat.
"Is he coming?" Louis asks, a question with an answer so clear that Louis doesn't bother to wait for one. Moves past it, winding into Daniel's mind as the car comes to a stop. As Louis straightens, slowly, from the heavy slouch he'd fallen into as they'd sped through the streets in silence.
Were you hurt?
Louis' impression is that Eimear had stayed her hand. That Daniel was not touched by whatever violence that followed.
It's only that he needs to hear it, he thinks. Needs to hear it while they wait for Lestat to reappear, so Louis can put aside at least one set of fears.
It doesn't take long. Moments, really, after the car has stopped, and the intuitive sense of his presence (more oppressive than it usually is, some aspect of himself still being tidied back between the lines) follows the sight of a figure landing on the road in front of the car. Elegant, dramatic—
Less dignity in the jog around to the door that would lead him to Louis. He is a sight since they last saw him, absolutely drenched in blood, soaked into his nice suit, hands gloved in drying gore, crimson up to his ears, higher in spatters. Wrenches open the door and enters with the uncomfortably bullish energy of a dog that doesn't realise it's about to get mud everywhere jumping in, oblivious.
Still a little glassily black eyed, fangs present, and this backseat is not designed to comfortably house three fully grown men which is why Louis has to take a knee to the thigh as Lestat insists on an embrace.
"Why did you do that," sounds agonised, angry, despite this tangle of limbs.
This doesn't sound like some badass, delusional assertion. There's tired, frustrated logic to it. But before any conversation can manifest, a big bloody mastiff is pawing into the car, and Daniel feels incredible relief that he hasn't lied to either of them, or himself. Everyone is fine.
Daniel knows why Louis did it but he keeps his mouth shut, because hollering at him is not going to help. Instead he looks forward, seeing the statue stillness of the mortal still in the driver's seat, expression a mask of blankness but knuckles very white on the wheel.
Yeah, makes sense.
"Out," Daniel tells him, and Rashid wastes no time. Daniel follows him, leaving Lestat and Louis in the car. Hopefully it looks enough like he's mind controlling a random jerk that it doesn't draw any attention— not that he thinks there's much of a chance of pulling Lestat away from what he's doing right this minute anyway.
(A few paces out,
"You're free, Double-oh-sixty-nine, fucking get out of here." A beat, and Rashid finally looks shaken. Daniel tells him, sincerely, Thank you, and agrees to talk to Raglan, and soon. Rashid has enough self-preservation not to glance back at the laptop as he makes his escape, handing the beat up car's keys to Daniel as he does.
All Louis' best intentions, all his exhaustion, is tested by Daniel's assertion. The impossibility of the gamble. The cost of guessing wrong. All of Louis recoiling against the thought of Daniel going up in flames.
Unbearable.
But Louis is saved from the impulse to argue the point by the appearance of Lestat, soaked in gore but unhurt, alive, tearful. Louis straightens up from Daniel's shoulder to facilitate the embrace, weather the dig of knee to thigh as he draws Lestat in close. Cradles a hand to the back of his head, cold titanium held carefully away from Lestat's nape.
Daniel is out of the car. Louis has an ear attuned to them, attentive to Daniel's movement on the other side of the door as he breathes out, relieved. Lestat is alright. Daniel is alright.
"I'm okay," he murmurs. "I'm fine."
Does not say: She was threatening you both.
"She's finished. You finished it."
Daniel hadn't said, but Louis doesn't need it spelled out for him. He'd lit her on fire. Lestat had ripped out of the truck and into the air. There are no mysteries as to what followed.
Drawn in closer, Lestat indulges in this full-bodied embrace for some several moments, letting relief shock through his system. The reality of Louis' heart beating, felt against him, the rise and fall of his breathing, the strength in his arms as he holds him in return. He is fine, and she is finished. Wills these things to be true. Pays zero mind to the human thrall that Daniel is shooing away outside.
Slowly eases back. That momentary flash of vision of the metal cuffs returning to him, and Lestat settles on the seat as he goes and collects Louis' wrists to look at. Jaw set, angry, as he carefully feels them over.
Some strange locking mechanism that evades his ability to simply snap them open with his mind. Magnetic, electronic. The material itself, chosen to be resisted by most vampires. Fortunately, Lestat is the world's most special vampire, and he sets about carefully testing the weak points, the hinges.
"I should have finished it slower," he mutters, almost sulky, as if tearing her limb from limb was not punishment enough for this indignity.
Louis gives over to this inspection, hands loose in Lestat's grip. Breath coming easier, even as Louis makes an effort to mask his own exhaustion. Aware of how he'd flexed his power, considering that he might expand on his own limitations. Grow stronger, faster.
But not tonight.
"I'm not sorry you finished and came back to us quickly," Louis counters, pragmatic. Easier to be so when the worst is behind them. He can consider how indignant he feels, how vengeful, tomorrow.
Attention halved, the focus of his concern like a hand pressed to the center of Daniel's back. Some part of Louis fretful at having Daniel out of the car at all. Louis voices dips quieter, hands turning to interrupt Lestat's inspection.
"Are you hurt?" bypasses all the logistical questions that would be better discussed with Daniel in the car.
"No," is honest, if not accurate. It's hard to make out in the blood soaked rumpled state of his clothing, but there are tears here and there, evidence of scratches and bites, a pattern in the blood staining his face where she managed to get him across the cheek with some claws, but even a quick study will show the skin has healed already.
Superficial, unimportant. Lestat indulges the gesture by gripping Louis' hands, impressing upon him the truth of his words. "I'm alright, Louis. She wasn't much of a challenge after you were done with her."
Fond. Pleased, even. A formidable fledgling. His children are all great, actually, contrary to popular belief.
"We make a good team, non?"
See, isn't it so, the wisdom of all of them together? There is still a little glitch in him fretting that Louis was left alone for even this brief moment in time, that Louis went to it so willingly, but for now, Lestat can lift their tangled hands and smear a bloodied little kiss against Louis' knuckles, before he sets on the shackles in earnest.
"Hold still, now," as he gets his fingers beneath the metal. Focuses, and a sharp crack of breaking metal parts chimes brightly in the limited space. Lestat lets out a relieved breath, going for the second.
Newly freed, Louis' hand lifts to the blood on Lestat's face. Fingertips skimming Lestat's cheek, contenting himself with the certainty of healed skin beneath the blood.
"Thank you," a moment later, for the shattering of the cuff. The skin beneath is swollen, but already ebbing away. Not worth remarking upon. Lestat is permitted custody of the remaining shackle, Louis' fingers lingering, moving to map the most obvious topography of their scuffle.
A swirl of other things Louis could say. An apology. For the ruined suit. For dragging Lestat into all of this.
"I didn't think to collect the sword," is what Louis settles on. A little humor as Lestat attends the cuff.
A few minutes is probably already pushing it, and so Daniel is coming back to the car soon enough. He pokes his head in the back to make sure no one's exploded since he looked away, then closes the doors and moves around to the driver's seat.
In, door closed, seat belt on - the car will just make annoying ding sounds on a loop if he doesn't - engine started. They start rolling and he reaches out to close the abandoned laptop and set it on the floor. Talamasca is probably trying to remotely lock and wipe it already, but he's sure his guy will be able to crack it. Hah. His now.
Being a chauffeur is annoying, but. Here they are.
"Nobody wants anything from the drive-thru while we're out, right?"
A little humour is rewarded with a little laugh, Lestat slipping fingers beneath the metal once more, an uncomfortable tightness as he begins to apply pressure.
"A pity," he says, "it was going to go over my mantle."
Daniel, in the front seat, the car in motion. As anxious and fussed as Lestat might be at any given time for their being a little group of three rather than simply putting Louis over his shoulder and vanishing into the night, they have lingered in each other's company long enough for him to find something comforting in it. Some stupid coven-adjacent instinct, maybe, or perhaps it is just them, who they are, who he is, what each little configuration means.
Gross. He snaps open the second cuff, rattles it carelessly, drops it in the front seat. "These are quite particular," he tells Daniel, before listing back into his seat. Keeping Louis' hand. "For your sleuthing."
A split second where Louis thinks one of them should occupy the passenger. Recalls Daniel, at the airport. Settles for a little nudge of humor between their minds, a link of connection as Louis observes, "She was very prepared."
But surprised by Daniel. Underestimated Louis.
Fortunate that she's dead. Dead, and unable to carry news of Daniel throughout the vampiric grapevine.
His thumb runs circles over Lestat's knuckles, a small unconscious motion meant to soothe, though unclear if it's for Louis' beneath or Lestat's.
And then, suddenly: "We're going to have to smuggle Lestat back into the hotel."
Easier to be funny out loud than it is inside of his own head, right now, but he still manages to return the feeling to Louis, and then more, checking in, like squeezing his hand from afar. He had noticed his attention, when he was out of the car, and he gets it.
Clink. Weird shit. Sleuthing indeed.
"Employee parking elevator, noted."
Daniel sticks to side roads and loops around to avoid busy streets as best he can, not wanting to get pulled over for a fix-it ticket thanks to the windshield. None of them look pristine, though Daniel's bloody hands are minimal to Lestat's gore-bath look.
A few things he could say—
That wasn't so bad after all.
Why the fuck did you do that.
One of them came up in my research.
Daniel says none of it. Remains quiet, like a fucking taxi driver, still feeling distant from himself in his head, and lacking the motivation to pick a fight with Louis about a suicidal move. He's fine, Lestat's fine, everyone is fine, the hotel's not that far away, even if he suddenly has a pang of desire to go back to his apartment instead. It just means he's exhausted, is all.
"Well," when the hotel is around the corner, "I did like the Met, anyway."
Opens his mouth, closes it. He was going to say, he could fly his way to the balcony, they can let him in that way. Decides against it. He has had enough flying tonight.
Old instinct against appearing like too much of an alien, even now, having just flown all over the place, covered in gore, with Louis past a century, and Daniel suffering in bondage with a true eldritch creature. Still, the unease remains. Perhaps he is already that himself and doesn't know it.
Magnus, Marius, Armand. Maybe this Eimear, too, incapable of love, of being loved.
"Me too," about the Met. Squeezes Louis' hand. "All of it. Even the ladder."
It would be nice, to return to the state they were so rudely shaken from.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Sure, he thinks, watching Lestat abduct an on-fire vampire.
'Car's gonna hit something in ten seconds,' he sends to Louis, and says it out loud at the same time, which prompts Rashid to start trying to slow down. Daniel thinks please hear me please be awake please let the fire be a sign you are awake and not dying from whatever was in there, is that a fucking chain, what the fuck—
A door handle smacks into the windshield, sending a spiderweb crack through it, but it holds. Is this a Toyota?
The van doesn't stop, and though it begins to lose speed as dead weight is finally lifted off the gas pedal, it's not soon enough. Daniel is off, it's more like twelve seconds, but the van does collide with the limo, no squeal of tires, no attempt at braking, BAM, a bomb-like noise of the hit and shattered glass everywhere. The t-boned vehicles skid further down the road for a few meters and grind to a halt, and Daniel hears sirens before Rashid will be able to, and he repeats the extremely vulgar thing.
Not for long. Up, out, to the ruined mangle of van-limo-hybrid creature.
"Louis?!"
There are still two guys in the front. The limo driver (technically, the limo thief) is still going at a dead sprint, though she's starting to feel very lightheaded.
no subject
A voice. Daniel.
Ten seconds isn't not good information to have. Louis is only lacking much ability to act on it. The paralytic is burning out of his system, but not fast enough that Louis can meaningfully brace for impact.
The impact must coincide with whatever success Lestat is having. Louis is flung forward, cratering into the divider between the interior of the truck and the cab. Has movement enough to kick himself free of the debris. Can hear pained groans from beneath the crumpled metal, and takes some vicious satisfaction in it.
I'm okay. projected into Daniel's head, words like a hand pressing to Daniel's cheek, moments before Louis realizes he can see Daniel looking at him from the gap left by the missing door. Had banked, maybe, on a few minutes to assess how presentable he looked, but here they are, apparently.
"There's two still alive," Louis reports, from within the mangle of the truck's interior. "One only just. Where's Lestat?"
no subject
A streak of light, first, where fire trails in their wake, before this is extinguished into a smear of smoke, and they vanish into the sky, obscured by looming city buildings from anyone's position on the street.
Vicious, this fight, both of them locked together like two feral cats unwilling to break apart and cede territory or opportunity. Claws dig, jaws bite, and some maddened scramble of psychic wrestling transpiring on another plane of existence entirely. But Eimear's pain is easier to access than Lestat's, her body freshly immolated, her mind ablaze with fury, and even beyond these elements—
Muscle and bone crumbles beneath a hand at her side. Another snaps her neck. Easy in a way it should not be, not against her, even injured, even as his fangs find her neck and pulls blood from her heart, barely even drinking it where it flows past his mouth. In that moment of frantic connection, she might sense it, like seeing the larger, monstrous shadow that he should not be able to cast, and understand that victory was never possible.
He will deposit pieces of her into the water from on high, with the lazy apathy of a shark now swimming away from its own frenzy.
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"He's—"
Up, potentially about to drop a vampire to the ground? It sticks in Daniel's throat, but only for a second.
"Fine. Come on, we have to move."
"Mr du Lac?"
Hey, Rashid is here, by the way. Daniel scrambles around to the crushed front end so he can drive his makeshift stick through the living, but dazed, vampire's head. No idea if this will cause death, but it will cause a stop for now.
"Law enforcement and fucking Tiktok! Very fucking soon, move!"
"We have people—"
"For this?!"
Maybe not, says the wince.
no subject
Now, however, is not the time.
Louis kicks his way from the interior, emerging with a tangled clanking of titanium chain. Bloody, ash-streaked, tired. Louis is all of these things, but he is upright. Briskly hooks the loop of the chain on some remaining, jagged bit of the van to use as leverage to break the loops of chain from his body.
Amid the creaking and cracking of chain link and metal, Louis questions, "Is that the car we'll be leaving in?"
Theirs now, perhaps?
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Are these crippled vampires dead? Daniel doesn't think so— heads kind of on, if mangled, not burned even though there's so much smoke and ash from Louis' pyrowhatever. Should he, just. Well. He does what he thinks he should, which is shove his hand into the cavity he's created in the passenger vampire's head and yank so that it detaches from his body. It thunks back into the wreckage, flopping against the barely-alive driver.
He feels far away.
"Yeah," he hears himself say, about the car with the cracked windshield. He watches himself walk back around and look at Louis.
"Are you okay?"
Daniel doesn't feel any urgency from his distant vantage point, dizzy and greyish, but Rashid must, because he ushers them towards it with all the precision he had used to delivery drinks and newspapers.
no subject
A narrowed look from the backseat at Rashid, measuring the amount of years Rashid had moved within the penthouse. Considering what he wishes to do about the invasion of privacy involved in it.
But most immediately: Daniel.
Daniel, who has been robbed of the front seat by Louis' latched grip on his wrist. A split second of recognition, seeing something in Daniel's face that Louis knows very well, and wanting to keep him close more than he wants Daniel wielding an abandoned Talamasca agent's laptop.
Daniel's Are you okay? left by the wayside as Louis looks into his face. Touches his cheek, briefly. The titanium cuffs still gleaming on his wrists, ignored for the moment.
Boxes Rashid out of the conversation entirely by touching Daniel's mind, asking Are you with me?
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Doesn't he? He just killed two vampires in grotesquely violent ways, and he had only recently struggled to communicate to Armand the ethical facade he's put up in himself to be alright with murder. Accepting blood from his maker to repair his head the rest of the way had tripped it, because he's only ever taken blood from mortals, and following that, until tonight, had only ever been violent with mortals, and something about the veil is shredded now, forcing him into looking at how he's existing.
A startle, when Louis touches his mind.
"Yeah," out loud, in-mind. The bad yeah, the lying one. He looks at him, looks down at their hands, frowns.
'You shouldn't have done that.'
Still not-quite-present. Freaking out, but quietly. He slides fingers around Louis' wrist and beneath the cuff, hating it.
'Help me with this,' he implores. He can tell it's made to be a pain in the ass, that it'll cut into Louis if he just yanks it, but they can probably do it without any damage with three hands. C'mon.
no subject
Even if it feels true. If Louis is more concerned with how Daniel might have been hurt than about the cuffs on his wrist, about Eimear plucking at his nervous system until Louis screamed, about what might have waited for them at the end of the truck's route. Maybe nothing. Maybe just a quiet place for Eimear and her fledglings to strip the flesh from Louis' bones until here was nothing more of him.
Doesn't believe Daniel's Yeah, so refrains from asking if he can touch Lestat's mind. Has to content himself with fine as a placeholder for all his fears as Daniel fidgets with the cuff.
Rashid catches Louis' eye in the rearview mirror, and Louis' lip curls back off the silent threat of a sharp fang. Eyes front.
Touches Daniel's cheek again, eyes searching. Daniel, largely unharmed. Daniel, who did a fair share of violence tonight, and should have been spared it all. Louis' thumb runs along his cheek. He breathes out. Nods.
Alright, let's try, Louis acquiesces, hooking two fingers beneath the cuff alongside Daniel. Try because he is exhausted. Try because Eimear turned his pain receptors on at full force and as adrenaline begins to ebb, the shuddery after effect of that is gaining purchase.
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Hurts to see Louis in chains, but he can tell in an instant what the problem is, so he stops, covers the cuff and Louis' hand with his own.
They're driving fast, but not action movie fast. Rashid is just getting them away, and probably won't start looping them back around to anyplace familiar until he's certain they're no longer being observed. Daniel stays like that for a long moment, just holding Louis' hand, somewhere being angry and dissociative.
Instead of communicating anything else to Louis, he tries Lestat.
'Told him you're fine, so you'd better be. Can you find us?'
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His actual reaction should be fierce relief that Daniel's words imply that Louis is alive, perhaps even well, but this information is absorbed as something that is good and correct, as expected. There is still a head to dispose of, and he drifts out a little further. Stops.
Evaluates the very grim, gory sight in his hands, this creature rent to meat. Butchery. It takes a moment to remember why he has done this thing, and when he does, it's easy to let decapitated head slip from his hands and plummet into the water below. 'Is,' Lestat starts, reaching for Daniel once more. 'Is he alright? Where are you both?'
He needs to go back, needs to find them, needs to see for himself that Louis is well, a tide of feeling that could shock him out of the sky if he let it.
'Tell me where to go.'
He could, probably, find them, but it would take longer without a clue.
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Rashid's attention flickers a little before he exchanges a look with Daniel in the rear-view mirror, apparently torn between leaning on the secret rapport they had during the interview (sorry Louis) and detached fear about the journalist's nature now. But he nods, and turns to pull them over into a residential area out of any major traffic crossings.
'Here.' Shown as best he can, offering a mental beacon. 'He's shaken, I don't know how bad, but in one piece. Help me get these fucking things off of him.'
A brief, shared image of Louis' hands. It unsettles Daniel in a major way. He just wants all traces of his bullshit gone. Doesn't ask if the woman is dead. He has complete faith in Lestat in that respect.
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"Is he coming?" Louis asks, a question with an answer so clear that Louis doesn't bother to wait for one. Moves past it, winding into Daniel's mind as the car comes to a stop. As Louis straightens, slowly, from the heavy slouch he'd fallen into as they'd sped through the streets in silence.
Were you hurt?
Louis' impression is that Eimear had stayed her hand. That Daniel was not touched by whatever violence that followed.
It's only that he needs to hear it, he thinks. Needs to hear it while they wait for Lestat to reappear, so Louis can put aside at least one set of fears.
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Less dignity in the jog around to the door that would lead him to Louis. He is a sight since they last saw him, absolutely drenched in blood, soaked into his nice suit, hands gloved in drying gore, crimson up to his ears, higher in spatters. Wrenches open the door and enters with the uncomfortably bullish energy of a dog that doesn't realise it's about to get mud everywhere jumping in, oblivious.
Still a little glassily black eyed, fangs present, and this backseat is not designed to comfortably house three fully grown men which is why Louis has to take a knee to the thigh as Lestat insists on an embrace.
"Why did you do that," sounds agonised, angry, despite this tangle of limbs.
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This doesn't sound like some badass, delusional assertion. There's tired, frustrated logic to it. But before any conversation can manifest, a big bloody mastiff is pawing into the car, and Daniel feels incredible relief that he hasn't lied to either of them, or himself. Everyone is fine.
Daniel knows why Louis did it but he keeps his mouth shut, because hollering at him is not going to help. Instead he looks forward, seeing the statue stillness of the mortal still in the driver's seat, expression a mask of blankness but knuckles very white on the wheel.
Yeah, makes sense.
"Out," Daniel tells him, and Rashid wastes no time. Daniel follows him, leaving Lestat and Louis in the car. Hopefully it looks enough like he's mind controlling a random jerk that it doesn't draw any attention— not that he thinks there's much of a chance of pulling Lestat away from what he's doing right this minute anyway.
(A few paces out,
"You're free, Double-oh-sixty-nine, fucking get out of here." A beat, and Rashid finally looks shaken. Daniel tells him, sincerely, Thank you, and agrees to talk to Raglan, and soon. Rashid has enough self-preservation not to glance back at the laptop as he makes his escape, handing the beat up car's keys to Daniel as he does.
Sigh.)
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Unbearable.
But Louis is saved from the impulse to argue the point by the appearance of Lestat, soaked in gore but unhurt, alive, tearful. Louis straightens up from Daniel's shoulder to facilitate the embrace, weather the dig of knee to thigh as he draws Lestat in close. Cradles a hand to the back of his head, cold titanium held carefully away from Lestat's nape.
Daniel is out of the car. Louis has an ear attuned to them, attentive to Daniel's movement on the other side of the door as he breathes out, relieved. Lestat is alright. Daniel is alright.
"I'm okay," he murmurs. "I'm fine."
Does not say: She was threatening you both.
"She's finished. You finished it."
Daniel hadn't said, but Louis doesn't need it spelled out for him. He'd lit her on fire. Lestat had ripped out of the truck and into the air. There are no mysteries as to what followed.
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Slowly eases back. That momentary flash of vision of the metal cuffs returning to him, and Lestat settles on the seat as he goes and collects Louis' wrists to look at. Jaw set, angry, as he carefully feels them over.
Some strange locking mechanism that evades his ability to simply snap them open with his mind. Magnetic, electronic. The material itself, chosen to be resisted by most vampires. Fortunately, Lestat is the world's most special vampire, and he sets about carefully testing the weak points, the hinges.
"I should have finished it slower," he mutters, almost sulky, as if tearing her limb from limb was not punishment enough for this indignity.
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But not tonight.
"I'm not sorry you finished and came back to us quickly," Louis counters, pragmatic. Easier to be so when the worst is behind them. He can consider how indignant he feels, how vengeful, tomorrow.
Attention halved, the focus of his concern like a hand pressed to the center of Daniel's back. Some part of Louis fretful at having Daniel out of the car at all. Louis voices dips quieter, hands turning to interrupt Lestat's inspection.
"Are you hurt?" bypasses all the logistical questions that would be better discussed with Daniel in the car.
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Superficial, unimportant. Lestat indulges the gesture by gripping Louis' hands, impressing upon him the truth of his words. "I'm alright, Louis. She wasn't much of a challenge after you were done with her."
Fond. Pleased, even. A formidable fledgling. His children are all great, actually, contrary to popular belief.
"We make a good team, non?"
See, isn't it so, the wisdom of all of them together? There is still a little glitch in him fretting that Louis was left alone for even this brief moment in time, that Louis went to it so willingly, but for now, Lestat can lift their tangled hands and smear a bloodied little kiss against Louis' knuckles, before he sets on the shackles in earnest.
"Hold still, now," as he gets his fingers beneath the metal. Focuses, and a sharp crack of breaking metal parts chimes brightly in the limited space. Lestat lets out a relieved breath, going for the second.
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"Thank you," a moment later, for the shattering of the cuff. The skin beneath is swollen, but already ebbing away. Not worth remarking upon. Lestat is permitted custody of the remaining shackle, Louis' fingers lingering, moving to map the most obvious topography of their scuffle.
A swirl of other things Louis could say. An apology. For the ruined suit. For dragging Lestat into all of this.
"I didn't think to collect the sword," is what Louis settles on. A little humor as Lestat attends the cuff.
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In, door closed, seat belt on - the car will just make annoying ding sounds on a loop if he doesn't - engine started. They start rolling and he reaches out to close the abandoned laptop and set it on the floor. Talamasca is probably trying to remotely lock and wipe it already, but he's sure his guy will be able to crack it. Hah. His now.
Being a chauffeur is annoying, but. Here they are.
"Nobody wants anything from the drive-thru while we're out, right?"
Deadpan. Let's fucking get out of here.
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"A pity," he says, "it was going to go over my mantle."
Daniel, in the front seat, the car in motion. As anxious and fussed as Lestat might be at any given time for their being a little group of three rather than simply putting Louis over his shoulder and vanishing into the night, they have lingered in each other's company long enough for him to find something comforting in it. Some stupid coven-adjacent instinct, maybe, or perhaps it is just them, who they are, who he is, what each little configuration means.
Gross. He snaps open the second cuff, rattles it carelessly, drops it in the front seat. "These are quite particular," he tells Daniel, before listing back into his seat. Keeping Louis' hand. "For your sleuthing."
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But surprised by Daniel. Underestimated Louis.
Fortunate that she's dead. Dead, and unable to carry news of Daniel throughout the vampiric grapevine.
His thumb runs circles over Lestat's knuckles, a small unconscious motion meant to soothe, though unclear if it's for Louis' beneath or Lestat's.
And then, suddenly: "We're going to have to smuggle Lestat back into the hotel."
Though Louis is hardly inconspicuous himself.
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Clink. Weird shit. Sleuthing indeed.
"Employee parking elevator, noted."
Daniel sticks to side roads and loops around to avoid busy streets as best he can, not wanting to get pulled over for a fix-it ticket thanks to the windshield. None of them look pristine, though Daniel's bloody hands are minimal to Lestat's gore-bath look.
A few things he could say—
That wasn't so bad after all.
Why the fuck did you do that.
One of them came up in my research.
Daniel says none of it. Remains quiet, like a fucking taxi driver, still feeling distant from himself in his head, and lacking the motivation to pick a fight with Louis about a suicidal move. He's fine, Lestat's fine, everyone is fine, the hotel's not that far away, even if he suddenly has a pang of desire to go back to his apartment instead. It just means he's exhausted, is all.
"Well," when the hotel is around the corner, "I did like the Met, anyway."
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Old instinct against appearing like too much of an alien, even now, having just flown all over the place, covered in gore, with Louis past a century, and Daniel suffering in bondage with a true eldritch creature. Still, the unease remains. Perhaps he is already that himself and doesn't know it.
Magnus, Marius, Armand. Maybe this Eimear, too, incapable of love, of being loved.
"Me too," about the Met. Squeezes Louis' hand. "All of it. Even the ladder."
It would be nice, to return to the state they were so rudely shaken from.
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bow??
🎀