Correcting the perception that Rachida is personally doing the packing seems like an uphill battle, when Lestat is already departing. Louis lets the matter drop. Permission has been secured for Rachida to direct the small army of staff to Lestat and Daniel's rooms. That's more than enough for the present moment.
(Better she starts sooner rather than later. Louis has glimpsed what lies in wait in Lestat's room.)
"She has options for me to review. I'll let you do that with her, Daniel," Louis says instead, attention half on Lestat, striding towards the door.
Louis has promised to text. He can refrain from hassling Lestat about what his own errands entail.
Reorienting, he asks, "Did you finish all you need to do?"
Hands of mild alarm when Lestat abducts the camera. Like. Hey! What happened to the plan. Plan is complete? No verbal comment, but wowee everyone sure is a critic around here.
"Catch you later I guess," instead. Why I never.
"Oh, uh—" back to Louis. "Sort of. I'll probably run down one last thing later since we're going tomorrow night, but mostly, yeah."
A non-suspicious Yeah. He's fine. And fortunately not on enough drugs that he thinks Louis will be able to notice. Alert, artificially free of sleep deprivation, but feeling significantly better. Probably better than if he'd actually gotten any sleep, in fact.
A beat of quiet, and then, genuinely relieved: "You look better."
A flicker of amusement as Daniel calls after him, as the door closes.
It settles, as Daniel looks at him. As Louis looks at him, studying.
"I'm alright," Louis says again, reassures. "I am."
Volunteers nothing else, though the taste of Lestat's blood hasn't faded away yet. Would assert that he's been alright. Might still, if this conversation turns into an argument, but it seems that the impulse towards a shouting match didn't rise with them this evening.
"Do you have time to sit with me? Tell me about your loose ends."
Smell of Lestat's blood in the air, Louis and Lestat together, Louis with a less grey tinge to his aura. Daniel isn't stupid, and moreover, Daniel has very recently had the matter of healing through an elder's blood illuminated for him. He's relieved, he hopes he didn't interrupt anything (wellllll, it'd be fine if he did, if only because it might be funny), he hopes it was less fucking bizarre than the experience he's still turning over and over in his head.
Which no longer hurts. Migraines cleared right up. Is Lestat old enough to make Louis feel euphoric for long? Is it just—
Stop thinking about it. Stop it.
And then Louis asks about further loose ends and Stop thinking about it becomes challenging, given the primary loose end dangling over him like a fucking noose.
"Sure."
Help.
But Daniel will sit with him, because it's Louis. He doesn't have it in him to say no.
"My assistant went to Providence on vacation, she's still out there, but she'll be along. The rest is just stuff I'm hoping to turn over about ... all this."
The question has not been asked, and so Louis is saved from the cratering disaster that would be comparison between Armand's blood and Lestat's.
Blood aside, there is much Armand taught Louis. (Always just enough, measured out just so.) He has stayed dutifully out of Daniel's head, but maybe Daniel should learn as Louis once did that the process of trying to curb an intrusive thought is as conspicuous as thinking solely of it.
It is only fortunate that Louis' first guess isn't: Daniel is trying not to think of Armand.
"All of this," he echoes, just to see if it changes the tenor and flex of thought beating along the surface of Daniel's mind. Louis has hitched an ankle up over his knee.
Springboards off assumption to ask, "Is it about the woman and the fledglings we dealt with last night? Or someone else?"
Helpfully, Daniel has become quickly adept at the mental aspects of having superpowers, and while he's not perfect, he's got pretty good privacy filters already. His flaws there are ordinary ones— he can be deceptive, but he's a bad active liar. Avoiding the subject of Armand is one thing, but asked directly and he'll look like a fumbling child.
And, as noted, he no longer feels that unpleasant psychic bruising. Thought patterns remain steady, about all of this. Quick, but Daniel always thinks fast.
"Some of them, yeah," he confirms. "But it's part of what we were already looking into. Why we're all here. The 'Conversion', the attention on you, and sometimes me, about the exposure from the book. It's an ongoing process figuring out who might be the biggest threat, and as fucked as last night was, it's opened a lot of avenues to pursue."
"Or Vermont won't have any wifi," Vermont is fine, it's a real place, there are cities, we're all just being mean, "but yeah, best to just get outta Dodge for a while. Whether she's connected or not, it was... noticeable."
Forgiven, always, but there's a chill in Daniel still when he thinks of it. So fucking angry, it was so fucking stupid, and Louis had wanted to die so often. It chokes something to silence in Daniel for a moment, and he looks up at the question. No immediate answer, but soon enough—
Yes, it was very noticeable. Even diminished down to action movie cover story, Louis isn't foolish enough to try and tell himself the rest of the world beyond humanity won't recognize what it had truly been.
Or that the pause between his question and Daniel's answer can be brushed off. Or that the potential affirmative is enough.
Louis reaches to catch Daniel's hand in his own. Lace their fingers together, draw Daniel's hand to him. Anchoring himself. Maybe anchoring Daniel here, though between them Louis is the one given to walking away. Daniel doesn't flee.
"I'm not sorry," he says quietly. "I couldn't risk it."
He'd gamble with his own life, but not Daniel's. Not ever again.
Or: Daniel can let Louis take his hand, he can squeeze a return of the touch when Louis pulls it over, he can take a bracing breath. He thinks sometimes about Alice, and all the thing she did to try and draw emotional availability out of him, and how rarely he let it work. She'd deck him if she ever saw any of this, and he'd deserve it. Maybe he should have met her at sixty-five, not twenty-one.
"Look."
Look, what? What the fuck is Daniel going to say, dumbass tough guy. No, he means it, he fucking care too much.
"I don't want to die, I don't have a death wish. But if it's me or you, it's gonna fucking kill me anyway to lose you, so. You just scared me really, really bad."
They're still more or less inside twenty-four hours of that moment on the rooftop. Louis making a choice, looking between Lestat and Daniel and deciding he'd rather walk into a trap than see either of them hurt any more than they had been.
Maybe they should have argued last night. Screamed at each other. It might have felt less delicate than it does now, Daniel saying this thing.
And Louis can say what he likes now about certainty, about being so sure they would have come, retrieved him. But there had been a moment where that had not been clear. And Louis had accepted it.
He knows that won't ease any of Daniel's fears.
Tightens his grip on Daniel's hand, tells him softly, "I don't want to die."
Today. Right now. But Daniel is intimately aware of the ways Louis has wanted that, before. Maybe it makes all of this worse for him and Lestat both, knowing the exact shape of this thing in Louis that runs towards the last dregs of his own mortality. That wants to die.
"But I need you alive, and safe. I'll choose you, always. Do you think I could go on living if she burned you in front of me?"
She'd have taken Louis anyway, after. He'd have let her. It would not have gone so well, in this series of events, Louis thinks.
Daniel leans in, puts his other hand on Louis' shoulder, bracing. Horrible to pitch something like 'Hey man you've lost so much already and I'm just some guy, buck up', so he doesn't, but the facts are that Daniel is the weakest link here, the one most prone to walking into bear traps because it looked like an interesting angle, the one doing public interviews on TV stations and controversial podcasts, and he will be in danger, just like Louis will be in danger because he keeps threatening to kick every vampire's ass for some reason.
"You have the truth, you have Lestat back, you have everything ahead of you. You're a light, okay? You have to keep a reasonable grip on things because we can't control each other, and we can't just throw ourselves out the window with the bathwater or whatever. We have to think about things at least a little, and not just immediately cave to terrorist demands and make your friends throw up out of panic. I promise to try if you will."
Fortunate (unfortunate?) that Louis decides not to quibble about you have Lestat back, not to rules lawyer about the nature of what they are to each other, how Lestat calls him mon ami and leaves him to wake up alone. They are different, maybe Lestat will choose another companion, and Louis will go on as he has been.
This isn't a moment for sorting through the complicated snarl of Louis's romantic endeavors. Daniel has suffered enough of it already.
He takes Daniel's face in his hands.
"I'll never be careless with you again."
Stubborn. Always stubborn, even without the running loop of Armand's voice paying guilty dividends out in the back of his mind, constantly reminding Louis that he'd left Daniel behind. That it didn't matter what he had thought Armand would do, that he'd trusted Armand's disgust for the concept of making a fledgling. He'd miscalculated.
"I need you alive too. That's what I need."
An incomplete list. Louis refusing to budge on this line item.
Louis and Lestat are morons. Daniel likes them, though.
Careless. Daniel is always a little surprised when he's reached for, not used to such open affection still, but he lets Louis touch him. There's no grudges held, Daniel has told him again and again. He doesn't know if Louis will ever believe him, or if it's that his belief doesn't make a difference— if he'll just always shoulder it, even if Daniel doesn't feel weighed down.
"I'm not trying to get out of being alive."
And he still doesn't think that bitch was going to do it. He thinks Louis walked off the ledge too fucking fast. He can get why, but it still hurts, it felt like a mortal wound, it was infuriating and terrifying.
It occurs to him—
He could say: Don't leave me behind again.
Fuck. It feels low even thinking it, and so he sets it aside. Slightly guilty.
"I want to see what another two hundred years looks like on you. I want to actually write a book with you, someday. If it takes a millennia. If we publish it on alien ooze brainwaves or some other fucking thing. I need you to live, too."
Daniel could say that. It is probably (definitely) for the best he says this other thing instead. This other, less soul-destroying thing.
Louis thumbs across Daniel's cheeks, feels the words as much as hears them. A little thaw for the prospect of another book, of two hundreds years, of a millennia, whatever that time makes of them.
"I ain't going anywhere," Louis says, despite having gambled on doing just that. Despite picking a fight with the greater vampire population.
And stays there, quietly looking at Daniel, seemingly leaving off there before:
"I picked this fight. I wanna see it through. But someone threatens you, threatens Lestat, I'll do what I have to do to make sure you aren't hurt," is just the truth, inescapable. Softened by, "I can walk off the ledge because I know you and he will catch me after. I know that. It's what you did."
"It was a miracle I didn't accidentally trip somebody and get us all killed," is a bit more heated. Daniel is clearly still flustered about this.
(About killing a vampire, possibly multiple. Feels weird still. Feels shitty in a way that it shouldn't. He should feel bad about humans. He should feel bad about all killing. Hamburgers and sushi and bloodtype B drug addicts. Is Daniel a violent person, after all? Is his discomfort hypocritical, because words are violent, too, and he's used them to destroy? He killed humans for food, and vampires weren't, and then Armand fed him, and then he killed vampires. All of this, locked in a box.)
"I don't know if we're going to find a clear-cut resolution." An admittance. But one Louis surely knows as well. "It's sort of stupid, us arguing over who gives more of a fuck. I get that we're being irrational. Still. I want you to be safe. I want us all to be safe. I don't know if that's even possible but it's there."
He has all these pieces now. All the ways in which he failed Daniel, courtesy of Armand. He knows what he left him to. Knows he can't leave Daniel to be hurt any other way.
"All things are possible," clarified to, "You should know, you tend to make them so."
Impossible to extricate Louis from his gilded cage, and yet look. Here they are. Both free.
Louis' fingers are gentle, adjusting his grip but not letting go just yet. Searching his face.
"I'm sorry I scared you," is the thing that really should be said. "I'm sorry I put you in that position on the roof, and outside the van."
Having to get Lestat up. Having to kill vampires with swords.
"Thank you for coming to get me."
Maybe not what Daniel wants to hear. But something Louis wants to say still. They saved him. Daniel keeps saving him.
"Magical thinking is the very opposite of safe. I'm an annoying investigator, and we worked through something together."
He didn't just make it happen. He almost didn't. Louis was part of it, Daniel isn't a miracle that came in to change Louis' life any more than he was a talisman to symbolize a lasting relationship with Armand. He's just a person, like Louis is a person, and they can work through shit.
Like this, talking about their feelings instead of yelling.
Daniel closes his eyes and takes a slow breath. Accepting what Louis says, and forcing himself not to fill in the unspoken But, but, but, I will still do this and that and be reckless, because it's not relevant. This is the relevant part, the part they're working through. Eyes opened again, he reaches out to put his hands on Louis' knees, a circuit.
He nods.
"Somehow, you're the most emotionally significant relationship I've had in my life. I'll always go after you. Even if there's not actually anything I can do."
Watches him, observing Daniel processing what's been said. Has a moment, looking into his face, where Louis is reminded how much he misses the blue of his eyes. It's only a passing thought, useless. Louis lets it go.
"You did plenty," Louis says, soft acknowledgement. "And I know it cost you something."
Daniel, who doesn't like violence. Hadn't liked witnessing it, and Louis is certain he'd liked participating in it even less.
No, Louis isn't going to step back from what's been started. Can't. The book has been published. Louis has drawn attention, made his challenge. Vampire society has answered him. All things set in motion, nothing left to do but deal with them as they come.
He doesn't need to say these things. Daniel knows.
So instead, Louis smiles a little, teases, "Try to let me save you once or twice, just so you don't get sick of coming to my rescue all the time."
Not a denial, not a dismissal. But he'll be alright. Louis is worth the cost, even if Daniel feels fucked up about it. Even if he doesn't want to talk about it. This is close enough— acknowledging it, allowing it to be acknowledged, in turn.
Daniel hunts. He kills people. And now he's in the midst of the conflict he insisted on kickstarting because he can't keep his mouth shut. He has to fucking get over it.
"So you admit I didn't need saving when you volunteered."
GOTTEM. Nononono before Louis can— "I'm kidding, I'm kidding."
He's the worst, sorry.
"We'll both try not to get fucking exploded or whatever. Yeah?"
The swiftness of the backtracking heads off a more strident protest. Louis doesn't like it, how quick Daniel is to diminish himself. To deem himself extraneous. As if he is easy to cast off.
Louis' study holds, intent, thumbs running across Daniel's cheeks, before he lets out a breath. Maybe decides to argue this particular point later, another day, when they're a little farther out from the near possibility of Daniel burning alive in front of him.
"Yeah," he relents. Then, tone lighter, "I want to see what two hundred years looks like on you too, Daniel."
To make himself clear in this, in what feels like the smallest way.
Maybe if he weren't so supportive of Louis and Lestat getting their shit together, he'd go for another hug, or lean in to press a kiss to Louis' forehead. Conscious of it, currently. Hopeful that it's safe, and comfortable. And so: he offers Louis a feeling instead, his affection, the warmth of it, his protectiveness.
Daniel offers him this, the wordless flow of emotion and Louis feels it in his chest. Their hearts don't beat in time, his and Daniel's, but they compliment, they parallel. Daniel gives him this and Louis feels it, lets it dispel the seriousness from his expression, lets himself smile in response to it.
They make a neat circuit. Louis' hands on Daniel's face, Daniel's hands on his knees. Daniel doesn't hug him, but Louis doesn't break the link without an embrace, hands leaving his face only to sling around his shoulders.
Brief. Louis has so rarely instigated this, an actual hug, in spite of all the other ways he reaches for Daniel.
"Okay," a murmur at Daniel's ear, Louis' grip tightening before Daniel is released. "Okay."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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(Better she starts sooner rather than later. Louis has glimpsed what lies in wait in Lestat's room.)
"She has options for me to review. I'll let you do that with her, Daniel," Louis says instead, attention half on Lestat, striding towards the door.
Louis has promised to text. He can refrain from hassling Lestat about what his own errands entail.
Reorienting, he asks, "Did you finish all you need to do?"
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"Catch you later I guess," instead. Why I never.
"Oh, uh—" back to Louis. "Sort of. I'll probably run down one last thing later since we're going tomorrow night, but mostly, yeah."
A non-suspicious Yeah. He's fine. And fortunately not on enough drugs that he thinks Louis will be able to notice. Alert, artificially free of sleep deprivation, but feeling significantly better. Probably better than if he'd actually gotten any sleep, in fact.
A beat of quiet, and then, genuinely relieved: "You look better."
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It settles, as Daniel looks at him. As Louis looks at him, studying.
"I'm alright," Louis says again, reassures. "I am."
Volunteers nothing else, though the taste of Lestat's blood hasn't faded away yet. Would assert that he's been alright. Might still, if this conversation turns into an argument, but it seems that the impulse towards a shouting match didn't rise with them this evening.
"Do you have time to sit with me? Tell me about your loose ends."
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Which no longer hurts. Migraines cleared right up. Is Lestat old enough to make Louis feel euphoric for long? Is it just—
Stop thinking about it. Stop it.
And then Louis asks about further loose ends and Stop thinking about it becomes challenging, given the primary loose end dangling over him like a fucking noose.
"Sure."
Help.
But Daniel will sit with him, because it's Louis. He doesn't have it in him to say no.
"My assistant went to Providence on vacation, she's still out there, but she'll be along. The rest is just stuff I'm hoping to turn over about ... all this."
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Blood aside, there is much Armand taught Louis. (Always just enough, measured out just so.) He has stayed dutifully out of Daniel's head, but maybe Daniel should learn as Louis once did that the process of trying to curb an intrusive thought is as conspicuous as thinking solely of it.
It is only fortunate that Louis' first guess isn't: Daniel is trying not to think of Armand.
"All of this," he echoes, just to see if it changes the tenor and flex of thought beating along the surface of Daniel's mind. Louis has hitched an ankle up over his knee.
Springboards off assumption to ask, "Is it about the woman and the fledglings we dealt with last night? Or someone else?"
A winding route to: Are you still angry?
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Helpfully, Daniel has become quickly adept at the mental aspects of having superpowers, and while he's not perfect, he's got pretty good privacy filters already. His flaws there are ordinary ones— he can be deceptive, but he's a bad active liar. Avoiding the subject of Armand is one thing, but asked directly and he'll look like a fumbling child.
And, as noted, he no longer feels that unpleasant psychic bruising. Thought patterns remain steady, about all of this. Quick, but Daniel always thinks fast.
"Some of them, yeah," he confirms. "But it's part of what we were already looking into. Why we're all here. The 'Conversion', the attention on you, and sometimes me, about the exposure from the book. It's an ongoing process figuring out who might be the biggest threat, and as fucked as last night was, it's opened a lot of avenues to pursue."
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"Her failure will be noticed."
Because vampires gossip. Because they killed most but not all of her fledglings.
"Vermont will give us a better point from which to observe what effect that has."
For Louis to listen, quietly. Maybe to stir the pot. Maybe not. He hasn't decided. No one has asked him directly if he intends to do so.
"Are you alright?" is what Louis asks instead.
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Forgiven, always, but there's a chill in Daniel still when he thinks of it. So fucking angry, it was so fucking stupid, and Louis had wanted to die so often. It chokes something to silence in Daniel for a moment, and he looks up at the question. No immediate answer, but soon enough—
"Yeah. I think so. I will be."
As much honesty as he can offer.
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Or that the pause between his question and Daniel's answer can be brushed off. Or that the potential affirmative is enough.
Louis reaches to catch Daniel's hand in his own. Lace their fingers together, draw Daniel's hand to him. Anchoring himself. Maybe anchoring Daniel here, though between them Louis is the one given to walking away. Daniel doesn't flee.
"I'm not sorry," he says quietly. "I couldn't risk it."
He'd gamble with his own life, but not Daniel's. Not ever again.
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Or: Daniel can let Louis take his hand, he can squeeze a return of the touch when Louis pulls it over, he can take a bracing breath. He thinks sometimes about Alice, and all the thing she did to try and draw emotional availability out of him, and how rarely he let it work. She'd deck him if she ever saw any of this, and he'd deserve it. Maybe he should have met her at sixty-five, not twenty-one.
"Look."
Look, what? What the fuck is Daniel going to say, dumbass tough guy. No, he means it, he fucking care too much.
"I don't want to die, I don't have a death wish. But if it's me or you, it's gonna fucking kill me anyway to lose you, so. You just scared me really, really bad."
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Maybe they should have argued last night. Screamed at each other. It might have felt less delicate than it does now, Daniel saying this thing.
And Louis can say what he likes now about certainty, about being so sure they would have come, retrieved him. But there had been a moment where that had not been clear. And Louis had accepted it.
He knows that won't ease any of Daniel's fears.
Tightens his grip on Daniel's hand, tells him softly, "I don't want to die."
Today. Right now. But Daniel is intimately aware of the ways Louis has wanted that, before. Maybe it makes all of this worse for him and Lestat both, knowing the exact shape of this thing in Louis that runs towards the last dregs of his own mortality. That wants to die.
"But I need you alive, and safe. I'll choose you, always. Do you think I could go on living if she burned you in front of me?"
She'd have taken Louis anyway, after. He'd have let her. It would not have gone so well, in this series of events, Louis thinks.
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Daniel leans in, puts his other hand on Louis' shoulder, bracing. Horrible to pitch something like 'Hey man you've lost so much already and I'm just some guy, buck up', so he doesn't, but the facts are that Daniel is the weakest link here, the one most prone to walking into bear traps because it looked like an interesting angle, the one doing public interviews on TV stations and controversial podcasts, and he will be in danger, just like Louis will be in danger because he keeps threatening to kick every vampire's ass for some reason.
"You have the truth, you have Lestat back, you have everything ahead of you. You're a light, okay? You have to keep a reasonable grip on things because we can't control each other, and we can't just throw ourselves out the window with the bathwater or whatever. We have to think about things at least a little, and not just immediately cave to terrorist demands and make your friends throw up out of panic. I promise to try if you will."
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This isn't a moment for sorting through the complicated snarl of Louis's romantic endeavors. Daniel has suffered enough of it already.
He takes Daniel's face in his hands.
"I'll never be careless with you again."
Stubborn. Always stubborn, even without the running loop of Armand's voice paying guilty dividends out in the back of his mind, constantly reminding Louis that he'd left Daniel behind. That it didn't matter what he had thought Armand would do, that he'd trusted Armand's disgust for the concept of making a fledgling. He'd miscalculated.
"I need you alive too. That's what I need."
An incomplete list. Louis refusing to budge on this line item.
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Careless. Daniel is always a little surprised when he's reached for, not used to such open affection still, but he lets Louis touch him. There's no grudges held, Daniel has told him again and again. He doesn't know if Louis will ever believe him, or if it's that his belief doesn't make a difference— if he'll just always shoulder it, even if Daniel doesn't feel weighed down.
"I'm not trying to get out of being alive."
And he still doesn't think that bitch was going to do it. He thinks Louis walked off the ledge too fucking fast. He can get why, but it still hurts, it felt like a mortal wound, it was infuriating and terrifying.
It occurs to him—
He could say: Don't leave me behind again.
Fuck. It feels low even thinking it, and so he sets it aside. Slightly guilty.
"I want to see what another two hundred years looks like on you. I want to actually write a book with you, someday. If it takes a millennia. If we publish it on alien ooze brainwaves or some other fucking thing. I need you to live, too."
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Louis thumbs across Daniel's cheeks, feels the words as much as hears them. A little thaw for the prospect of another book, of two hundreds years, of a millennia, whatever that time makes of them.
"I ain't going anywhere," Louis says, despite having gambled on doing just that. Despite picking a fight with the greater vampire population.
And stays there, quietly looking at Daniel, seemingly leaving off there before:
"I picked this fight. I wanna see it through. But someone threatens you, threatens Lestat, I'll do what I have to do to make sure you aren't hurt," is just the truth, inescapable. Softened by, "I can walk off the ledge because I know you and he will catch me after. I know that. It's what you did."
no subject
(About killing a vampire, possibly multiple. Feels weird still. Feels shitty in a way that it shouldn't. He should feel bad about humans. He should feel bad about all killing. Hamburgers and sushi and bloodtype B drug addicts. Is Daniel a violent person, after all? Is his discomfort hypocritical, because words are violent, too, and he's used them to destroy? He killed humans for food, and vampires weren't, and then Armand fed him, and then he killed vampires. All of this, locked in a box.)
"I don't know if we're going to find a clear-cut resolution." An admittance. But one Louis surely knows as well. "It's sort of stupid, us arguing over who gives more of a fuck. I get that we're being irrational. Still. I want you to be safe. I want us all to be safe. I don't know if that's even possible but it's there."
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He has all these pieces now. All the ways in which he failed Daniel, courtesy of Armand. He knows what he left him to. Knows he can't leave Daniel to be hurt any other way.
"All things are possible," clarified to, "You should know, you tend to make them so."
Impossible to extricate Louis from his gilded cage, and yet look. Here they are. Both free.
Louis' fingers are gentle, adjusting his grip but not letting go just yet. Searching his face.
"I'm sorry I scared you," is the thing that really should be said. "I'm sorry I put you in that position on the roof, and outside the van."
Having to get Lestat up. Having to kill vampires with swords.
"Thank you for coming to get me."
Maybe not what Daniel wants to hear. But something Louis wants to say still. They saved him. Daniel keeps saving him.
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He didn't just make it happen. He almost didn't. Louis was part of it, Daniel isn't a miracle that came in to change Louis' life any more than he was a talisman to symbolize a lasting relationship with Armand. He's just a person, like Louis is a person, and they can work through shit.
Like this, talking about their feelings instead of yelling.
Daniel closes his eyes and takes a slow breath. Accepting what Louis says, and forcing himself not to fill in the unspoken But, but, but, I will still do this and that and be reckless, because it's not relevant. This is the relevant part, the part they're working through. Eyes opened again, he reaches out to put his hands on Louis' knees, a circuit.
He nods.
"Somehow, you're the most emotionally significant relationship I've had in my life. I'll always go after you. Even if there's not actually anything I can do."
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"You did plenty," Louis says, soft acknowledgement. "And I know it cost you something."
Daniel, who doesn't like violence. Hadn't liked witnessing it, and Louis is certain he'd liked participating in it even less.
No, Louis isn't going to step back from what's been started. Can't. The book has been published. Louis has drawn attention, made his challenge. Vampire society has answered him. All things set in motion, nothing left to do but deal with them as they come.
He doesn't need to say these things. Daniel knows.
So instead, Louis smiles a little, teases, "Try to let me save you once or twice, just so you don't get sick of coming to my rescue all the time."
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Not a denial, not a dismissal. But he'll be alright. Louis is worth the cost, even if Daniel feels fucked up about it. Even if he doesn't want to talk about it. This is close enough— acknowledging it, allowing it to be acknowledged, in turn.
Daniel hunts. He kills people. And now he's in the midst of the conflict he insisted on kickstarting because he can't keep his mouth shut. He has to fucking get over it.
"So you admit I didn't need saving when you volunteered."
GOTTEM. Nononono before Louis can— "I'm kidding, I'm kidding."
He's the worst, sorry.
"We'll both try not to get fucking exploded or whatever. Yeah?"
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Louis' study holds, intent, thumbs running across Daniel's cheeks, before he lets out a breath. Maybe decides to argue this particular point later, another day, when they're a little farther out from the near possibility of Daniel burning alive in front of him.
"Yeah," he relents. Then, tone lighter, "I want to see what two hundred years looks like on you too, Daniel."
To make himself clear in this, in what feels like the smallest way.
no subject
Stuck with each other, hopefully.
Maybe if he weren't so supportive of Louis and Lestat getting their shit together, he'd go for another hug, or lean in to press a kiss to Louis' forehead. Conscious of it, currently. Hopeful that it's safe, and comfortable. And so: he offers Louis a feeling instead, his affection, the warmth of it, his protectiveness.
Two hundred years, at least.
bow territory i think
They make a neat circuit. Louis' hands on Daniel's face, Daniel's hands on his knees. Daniel doesn't hug him, but Louis doesn't break the link without an embrace, hands leaving his face only to sling around his shoulders.
Brief. Louis has so rarely instigated this, an actual hug, in spite of all the other ways he reaches for Daniel.
"Okay," a murmur at Daniel's ear, Louis' grip tightening before Daniel is released. "Okay."