Coaxed, Daniel goes, his expression curious. Eyebrows knitted just a little as he lets Louis direct where he ends up. Are they friends like this, more contact than just a touch to his face, the occasional hug? He wouldn't mind. Some traitorous little part of him tries to flicker to life, thinking about it, but he puts that away. A hundred reasons.
(Louis is worth getting his heart broken over, yes, but still, he'd prefer not to get his heart broken.)
"Hey," he huffs a laugh, "Interview's over. This is regular, consequence-of-knowing-me blunt busybody shit."
"And I'm telling you the blunt busybody bullshit is okay with me."
Even when it's annoying. Even when Daniel jabs at sensitive, tender parts of him. Even when Daniel pries past Louis' instincts to deflect and hide.
It's Daniel. Daniel has permission, always. Always.
Invited now to lean into Louis, to tangle chastely over the coverlet. They hadn't done this before, not in Dubai, not in San Francisco. (Not that Louis can remember, a thing that is always a question now.) But Louis invites him in now, head tipped back on the pillow to draw in a deep breath of smoke and hold it as Daniel settles.
"I'll remember you said that," is both fond and threatening.
Maybe it's not all the way new. Maybe Daniel really did lay next to him in that bed in Louis' shitty flop house of an apartment, but Louis would have been burned, and miserable, and they wouldn't have touched. Daniel would have looked at him and tried to say something helpful, and maybe they smiled at each other, mutual hostages; Louis shouldn't have picked him up, Daniel shouldn't have gone with him, but they each made a choice, and so, there they were, together.
Much more comfortable here. Stupid movie on, the last third of a rolled-up joint scored off some college kids. Lestat, somewhere on a business call, but still welcome to fling the door open and join them. Their mortal gang, asleep. (Armand, hopefully still in New York.)
"I didn't realize you were quite that hands-off with your staff."
Since Rachida through him under the bus, he might as well ask.
Louis dreams sometimes, vivid distortions that might be memory might be something else. Daniel lays beside him now and there is no pain. Louis' fingers skimmed his face, now toy with the curls at Daniel's nape. Comfortable. No one is burning, no one is bleeding.
Louis yields the joint.
Whatever question he'd been expecting, it hadn't been this. Daniel has had a long time to ask after his staff. Had thought the interest passed after Armand had been revealed, after Rashid had tipped his hand.
"They're my employees," is a little questioning, words wreathed in smoke. "We have a professional relationship."
Daniel takes a hit. Nearly done. They have a few more joints, and maybe they'll go through them, maybe they won't. In no hurry. They have eternity.
"Well,"
Well. The interview is over, but Daniel is still Daniel, and there's still so much about Louis to investigate. Daniel would like to be on Vampire Wikipedia and ask one million questions, forever. Did his previous canines fall out? Did his old fingernails fall out? Are you sure you can't turn into a bat?
(Are you sure you're okay? Will you be okay? Is it my fault?)
"Some of them seemed to live with you, and they know your most terrifying, compromising secrets. But you were not into karaoke with the help."
Enough so that there is no tension in Louis' body, still loose-limbed alongside Daniel, fingers steady in his hair. Amused, and letting Daniel see it.
"We don't socialize."
Obviously.
"Does that bother you?"
Confuse might be the better word. Or no, not that. Louis is trying to work it out, to decide if Daniel finds this incongruous or if he simply objects. Or both. Or if it is the difference in their lifestyles, their age. Louis with a handful of decades maintaining staff, choosing what was necessary to organize his life and maintain his businesses, what was a good use of his fortune and what was a foolish risk.
"It surprised me a little," he corrects. "Not that I think everybody needs to be as overlapped as writers with editors and assistants. This whole writing gig, it's stupid, it's a lot of disemboweling yourself creatively in public, so." Daniel shrugs. Gets a little personal. Work from home on hell.
But—
"A funny incident, somebody drunk at a Christmas party, I dunno. I figured you'd have had something. You, at least. You like people. You're not just this scary vampire. I didn't know they hadn't seen... you."
Louis lets them stay there, quiet. Daniel will wait for him. Louis knows that. Daniel will pry relentlessly after answers, yes, but he's given Louis room to breathe. Maybe led him, kited Louis towards answers Daniel sensed before Louis could parse them out.
The amusement goes. Turns pensive. Feels their breath, rising and falling in time.
"I didn't want them to see me," Louis says at last. Corrects himself: "I don't want them to see me."
A thing Louis hasn't looked directly at in twenty years, at least.
He gives Louis proverbial space. No carrot this time. He just wants to know, because Louis is his friend; that Daniel is bad at not driving all of his friends away because he's annoying and over-curious and pushy is just a part of knowing Daniel. He thinks this is lowkey.
That answer gives him pause. It makes sense, but it also makes something in Daniel ache. Bittersweet. Louis deserves to be seen, but Louis' relationship with his own identity has been profoundly fucked over.
Daniel lays a hand on his chest. Returning the affectionate touch to his own face.
Daniel, giving him a pass. Louis tips a small smile up at the ceiling.
"You see me."
And it's enough. Enough that Daniel sees him, Louis as he is now.
It's a fear Louis has sometimes, when it is him and Lestat in a room together. They are both vastly different people than they'd been, and they are still very much the same. Easy to worry that Lestat looks at Louis and wishes for the person Louis had been once. That he finds the man he is now wanting.
Hey, man, it's not a pass, it's real acceptance. He can't bulldoze Louis into being completely healed with full self-esteem overnight. He'd have done it by now otherwise.
"I'd like to think I do," he says, of seeing Louis. "I hope so. I like that you let me."
Daniel cares about him so much.
And importantly:
"I see you. I like you. The person you are. The person I saw a little bit here and there, and get to see all the time now."
A careless oops, but a well-meaning one. (You know, sort of. Jeannie getting away blameless. Daniel is still curious.) Daniel loves Louis, he thinks he's great. Why wouldn't his employees think that? They basically live with him.
But of course. Louis hasn't been himself. And maybe not everyone sees as sharply as Daniel does. Which sucks, honestly. Louis deserves to be free from all of this— but he knows it'll take time.
Daniel will always seen him. Louis will always let him.
He's been twirling the gray curls at Daniel's nape between his fingers. Lifts his free hand to lay over Daniel's on his chest. Promising eternity. A clearer, less guilt-soaked assurance. Louis will be here. He isn't going anywhere.
Right now, he does not want to die.
"You gonna let me see you too?"
Louis could touch his mind. But he doesn't want to hunt for anything. He wants whatever Daniel is giving.
The promise washes over Daniel, warm. He's been disillusioned, about relationships. Platonic, romantic, familial. They don't last. In some fucked up way, it gives him hope seeing Louis reconnect with Lestat. Daniel screws everything up, but he might not ever screw up that bad. He can hope, anyway.
(This is positive about Lestat!! Shhh!!)
He wants Louis to stick around. He wants to be his friend, for that whole eternity.
"Don't you?" Maybe it sucks trying to figure people out, after Armand. (Armand. Who Daniel promised to spend time with.) "I dunno how mysterious I am. My employees all know way too much about me. Almost as much as you do."
"Fifty years is a long time," is a funny thing for a vampire to say.
Louis, alive for over a century, still young enough to weigh the passing years. Still young enough to look at nearly eighty years and feel the full weight of it rather than shrug it off easy.
"I was far away while you grew up."
So much of Daniel's life is on pages and television screens, yes. But Louis cannot believe that there were not things left out. That Daniel kept things for himself as Louis tried to keep things for himself.
And maybe Louis is entitled to none of it. Maybe he should simply be grateful. (He is. He is grateful for Daniel, always.)
Maybe it is only some quiet, anxious fear that Daniel is holding something obscured and away to avoid burdening Louis with it.
"Didn't feel like it. Felt like it went by pretty fast."
A blink. One minute he's signing divorce papers, handing them over to Alice, the next minute he's arguing with his youngest daughter about the car she wrecked. When did his knees start hurting? He didn't get enough time with knees that didn't hurt.
Until now.
"You'd have just watched me make stupid mistakes, over and over. You got the highlights. Everything about me that's worthwhile comes out best in writing, even if it's about other people. Probably especially thing."
Louis doesn't like it, the way Daniel says this about himself. Doesn't like the way he devalues his story, himself alongside it.
"Saying that like you ain't listened to me making the same mistakes over and over," Louis points out.
Daniel knows everything. Saw everything, even when Louis hadn't. But Louis can't exactly boast that kind of insight. Can't pretend he'd offer anything other than his own desires, the wish to know Daniel as Daniel knows him.
Nothing else, for a beat after that. Louis' eyes trace the crack in the ceiling, the shadows cast by the light.
"I don't want you to forget it all," he whispers. "I know you gonna be your own vampire, but don't lose the rest."
"You went through some shit, Louis, I was just an idiot."
Daniel sounds surprised. He is surprised. Louis had met him! Louis nearly killed him! Because Daniel was just an idiot. His own pause is one with widened eyes, trying to understand the moodiness of this topic. What does Louis think he was doing? Definitely not struggling against societal racism in the aftermath of slavery, or going across the country in the middle of a global war in search of safety and freedom, or dealing with what he dealt with in Paris.
Louis may have made mistakes, but it wasn't in a vacuum. He did the best he could, coped the only ways he was able.
"Hey." He rubs his chest, a little faux-shake. "Hey. I was a weird human. You know that. I'm not going to forget, I just... I lived it. I'm not a student at Berkley anymore, but I still was. Same with being somebody's husband. Working at the New York Times. Those things have been behind me for a long while. Doesn't mean they're gone."
His hand is still where it's laid on Louis' chest. No tremor. He's not sick and dying anymore. And Louis...
"You're still yourself. I know you are. Everyone changes, even people who aren't vampires with their heads fucked by some jerk."
What a gift, the way Daniel gives Louis these things. He speaks with such conviction. Daniel has had a lifetime in which he helped shape the world. He used that gift to reshape Louis' entire life, shatter his present into a new form. He says these things now with weight behind them, and Louis is so fond of that quality in him. Pleased, just as he is pleased each time he takes a step back and observes all the familiar pieces of Daniel, still intact despite what Armand had done.
"I'm not trying to get you to comfort me," is a little rueful, a little embarrassed for having provoked this response.
Daniel's hand pressed down over Louis' dead heart, Louis watching the unfamiliar bloom of color in his eyes.
"Just want you to know you were always something, even when we met. I saw it in you."
Which must be true, or else Louis would have just eaten him rather than messing around with the tape recorder. There had been something there, something so immediate and vital that Louis couldn't do anything but respond to the spark of it.
And see what Daniel made of that spark, fifty years on.
It's all something. All important. Pieces of foundation that a millennia of life can be built upon. The vampire Daniel will become rising from the human he'd been.
It matters more to Louis. Louis, who cares so much about a history. Who was driven to restless disquiet when he sensed the wrongness of his own recollection, fearful of missing pieces and events wrenched out of joint.
"Tough shit, I'm making the executive decision to offer comfort anyway, because you're my friend."
Cope. Not that Daniel has had friends who are just friends who hold on to each other in bed like this, but that's fine, too. He's not a university student anymore, he's not a reporter for a newspaper anymore, he's not human anymore. He's the same person, just here, now, like this, learning to do new things, with new people. Not just having superpowers. This part, this is the most special. It's beyond anything he's experienced before. Maybe he couldn't, before being transformed.
(Yes he could have he's just a closeted literal boomer, but look.)
"I know you did. I believe you. Even if I think you were a little preemptively loopy."
Teasing, along with this comfort. So curious as to why Louis thinks he's a vampire. So curious as to why Louis thinks there was anything but a total dumbass happening with 20 year old Daniel Molloy. See. He's the same guy. Sass.
"We'd been drinking," Louis offers, prim for a split second before he breaks into a grin.
No, it wasn't the alcohol.
It had just been the giddy high of their connection, and the electric, adrenaline of anticipation. Of knowing that they could speak to each other, that Louis could say all the things he'd kept locked up in his chest and Daniel would hear him, understand him. Would ask questions, listen when Louis answered.
All things Daniel must know, so Louis says none of them. Instead:
"You wanna come see New Orleans with us after all this?"
All this spanning anywhere from "the end of the book tour" to "the end of this war." Us operating on the foregone conclusion that Lestat would agree to accomapny them.
New Orleans was a likely place for angry vampires to look. Louis knows it. The tour at least puts them on the move, keeps Louis out of sight.
A spark. Something. Daniel isn't so sure about it, honestly, but he doesn't hold his own uncertainty against Louis. The way he sees it, Louis did desperately need someone to talk to. It had been a long time, decades, since Miss Lily. But he wasn't going to genuinely pursue her any more than he was Daniel.
Despite that, he's glad they met. Despite all of it, he's glad they met. He can't tell Armand he'd endure it again just to get here, Armand would take it the wrong way, but he can trust Louis with it. Unspoken, just felt. It was worth it.
Eyebrows go up.
"I'd love to visit New Orleans with you, but no way am I third wheeling an emotionally significant revisit. You two deserve that time to yourselves."
'Us', they've clearly talked about it. C'mon. Bro code. He can't do that to Lestat. Speaking of—
(No, Louis has not spoken this whim aloud to anyone else.)
"You're not third wheeling," is maybe an early tell for how Louis is going to answer the latter question.
But he does mean it. Daniel has a place, always, with Louis. And he suspects the same is true for Lestat. Daniel belongs with them. Louis' fingers lay over Daniel's, holding his hand there at his chest, pressing down a little harder, instructive. Yes, he means this.
And Louis misses New Orleans, as much as he believes he should be moving farther and farther from it. That he should be putting himself together in new surroundings, circle back when he is certain he's something like whole.
Louis isn't sure what that will feel like. It's been a long time.
"I'm not complaining," Daniel assures him, as he flexes his fingers up briefly into that hand-hold. Reassuring. "I'm just saying."
Sometimes a third wheel is a third wheel. Daniel isn't sore about it, he's an old man who's done plenty of third wheeling, chaperoning, date-crashing, wing-manning. Don't worry about it. He wants to make it clear that it's a fine distinction, and that he doesn't feel left out, preemptively or otherwise.
If Louis needs an old man security blanket to go on a date, well... maybe. He's not the best 'leave room for Jesus' enforcer.
"Yes, you seem alright. I'm not asking about alright, I'm asking for gossip. I didn't give you my cigarettes so you could stand awkwardly in the cold for fifteen minutes, did I?"
A century removed from Grace, rolling her eyes at him over Lestat. Who else has Louis truly gossiped about him with? Who else that would name their association for what it was and say it without scorn in their voice?
Never. No one. Not even his sister.
Louis is a long way away from gossiping, even as a recipient of Bricktop's complaints or the way his girls sighed after this and that gentleman.
"We ain't been awkward," Louis protests. "We're friends. We do like friends do, these days."
Louis has had a lot of time to consider it. He wasn't ready. Still isn't ready. No one's to blame for it. Lestat isn't obligated to wait on Louis. Louis can't ask.
"We smoked, we talked. We came back in so he could watch Jeannie. He likes her. The singing helps it along."
Probably useful for that to be the case, if Daniel interviews Lestat. Jeannie would surely be helping in that process.
"That's very sweet about Jeannie," he says. "But friends? I don't think I've ever had a friend who I looked at the way you two look at each other. Every time one of you turns your head, the other one's staring like you're cartoon characters with big, wet, heart-shaped eyes."
Yeah he said wet. Lestat cries a lot.
"I know you've got serious things to work through with him. But it... I dunno, I just hope for good things, for you guys. And fun things, too, even if you're apparently squandering all the alone time I'm trying to give you like nerds."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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(Louis is worth getting his heart broken over, yes, but still, he'd prefer not to get his heart broken.)
"Hey," he huffs a laugh, "Interview's over. This is regular, consequence-of-knowing-me blunt busybody shit."
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Even when it's annoying. Even when Daniel jabs at sensitive, tender parts of him. Even when Daniel pries past Louis' instincts to deflect and hide.
It's Daniel. Daniel has permission, always. Always.
Invited now to lean into Louis, to tangle chastely over the coverlet. They hadn't done this before, not in Dubai, not in San Francisco. (Not that Louis can remember, a thing that is always a question now.) But Louis invites him in now, head tipped back on the pillow to draw in a deep breath of smoke and hold it as Daniel settles.
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Maybe it's not all the way new. Maybe Daniel really did lay next to him in that bed in Louis' shitty flop house of an apartment, but Louis would have been burned, and miserable, and they wouldn't have touched. Daniel would have looked at him and tried to say something helpful, and maybe they smiled at each other, mutual hostages; Louis shouldn't have picked him up, Daniel shouldn't have gone with him, but they each made a choice, and so, there they were, together.
Much more comfortable here. Stupid movie on, the last third of a rolled-up joint scored off some college kids. Lestat, somewhere on a business call, but still welcome to fling the door open and join them. Their mortal gang, asleep. (Armand, hopefully still in New York.)
"I didn't realize you were quite that hands-off with your staff."
Since Rachida through him under the bus, he might as well ask.
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Louis dreams sometimes, vivid distortions that might be memory might be something else. Daniel lays beside him now and there is no pain. Louis' fingers skimmed his face, now toy with the curls at Daniel's nape. Comfortable. No one is burning, no one is bleeding.
Louis yields the joint.
Whatever question he'd been expecting, it hadn't been this. Daniel has had a long time to ask after his staff. Had thought the interest passed after Armand had been revealed, after Rashid had tipped his hand.
"They're my employees," is a little questioning, words wreathed in smoke. "We have a professional relationship."
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"Well,"
Well. The interview is over, but Daniel is still Daniel, and there's still so much about Louis to investigate. Daniel would like to be on Vampire Wikipedia and ask one million questions, forever. Did his previous canines fall out? Did his old fingernails fall out? Are you sure you can't turn into a bat?
(Are you sure you're okay? Will you be okay? Is it my fault?)
"Some of them seemed to live with you, and they know your most terrifying, compromising secrets. But you were not into karaoke with the help."
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Enough so that there is no tension in Louis' body, still loose-limbed alongside Daniel, fingers steady in his hair. Amused, and letting Daniel see it.
"We don't socialize."
Obviously.
"Does that bother you?"
Confuse might be the better word. Or no, not that. Louis is trying to work it out, to decide if Daniel finds this incongruous or if he simply objects. Or both. Or if it is the difference in their lifestyles, their age. Louis with a handful of decades maintaining staff, choosing what was necessary to organize his life and maintain his businesses, what was a good use of his fortune and what was a foolish risk.
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But—
"A funny incident, somebody drunk at a Christmas party, I dunno. I figured you'd have had something. You, at least. You like people. You're not just this scary vampire. I didn't know they hadn't seen... you."
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Nothing, right away.
Louis lets them stay there, quiet. Daniel will wait for him. Louis knows that. Daniel will pry relentlessly after answers, yes, but he's given Louis room to breathe. Maybe led him, kited Louis towards answers Daniel sensed before Louis could parse them out.
The amusement goes. Turns pensive. Feels their breath, rising and falling in time.
"I didn't want them to see me," Louis says at last. Corrects himself: "I don't want them to see me."
A thing Louis hasn't looked directly at in twenty years, at least.
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That answer gives him pause. It makes sense, but it also makes something in Daniel ache. Bittersweet. Louis deserves to be seen, but Louis' relationship with his own identity has been profoundly fucked over.
Daniel lays a hand on his chest. Returning the affectionate touch to his own face.
"Alright," he says softly. Accepting.
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"You see me."
And it's enough. Enough that Daniel sees him, Louis as he is now.
It's a fear Louis has sometimes, when it is him and Lestat in a room together. They are both vastly different people than they'd been, and they are still very much the same. Easy to worry that Lestat looks at Louis and wishes for the person Louis had been once. That he finds the man he is now wanting.
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"I'd like to think I do," he says, of seeing Louis. "I hope so. I like that you let me."
Daniel cares about him so much.
And importantly:
"I see you. I like you. The person you are. The person I saw a little bit here and there, and get to see all the time now."
A careless oops, but a well-meaning one. (You know, sort of. Jeannie getting away blameless. Daniel is still curious.) Daniel loves Louis, he thinks he's great. Why wouldn't his employees think that? They basically live with him.
But of course. Louis hasn't been himself. And maybe not everyone sees as sharply as Daniel does. Which sucks, honestly. Louis deserves to be free from all of this— but he knows it'll take time.
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Daniel will always seen him. Louis will always let him.
He's been twirling the gray curls at Daniel's nape between his fingers. Lifts his free hand to lay over Daniel's on his chest. Promising eternity. A clearer, less guilt-soaked assurance. Louis will be here. He isn't going anywhere.
Right now, he does not want to die.
"You gonna let me see you too?"
Louis could touch his mind. But he doesn't want to hunt for anything. He wants whatever Daniel is giving.
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(This is positive about Lestat!! Shhh!!)
He wants Louis to stick around. He wants to be his friend, for that whole eternity.
"Don't you?" Maybe it sucks trying to figure people out, after Armand. (Armand. Who Daniel promised to spend time with.) "I dunno how mysterious I am. My employees all know way too much about me. Almost as much as you do."
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Louis, alive for over a century, still young enough to weigh the passing years. Still young enough to look at nearly eighty years and feel the full weight of it rather than shrug it off easy.
"I was far away while you grew up."
So much of Daniel's life is on pages and television screens, yes. But Louis cannot believe that there were not things left out. That Daniel kept things for himself as Louis tried to keep things for himself.
And maybe Louis is entitled to none of it. Maybe he should simply be grateful. (He is. He is grateful for Daniel, always.)
Maybe it is only some quiet, anxious fear that Daniel is holding something obscured and away to avoid burdening Louis with it.
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A blink. One minute he's signing divorce papers, handing them over to Alice, the next minute he's arguing with his youngest daughter about the car she wrecked. When did his knees start hurting? He didn't get enough time with knees that didn't hurt.
Until now.
"You'd have just watched me make stupid mistakes, over and over. You got the highlights. Everything about me that's worthwhile comes out best in writing, even if it's about other people. Probably especially thing."
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Louis doesn't like it, the way Daniel says this about himself. Doesn't like the way he devalues his story, himself alongside it.
"Saying that like you ain't listened to me making the same mistakes over and over," Louis points out.
Daniel knows everything. Saw everything, even when Louis hadn't. But Louis can't exactly boast that kind of insight. Can't pretend he'd offer anything other than his own desires, the wish to know Daniel as Daniel knows him.
Nothing else, for a beat after that. Louis' eyes trace the crack in the ceiling, the shadows cast by the light.
"I don't want you to forget it all," he whispers. "I know you gonna be your own vampire, but don't lose the rest."
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Daniel sounds surprised. He is surprised. Louis had met him! Louis nearly killed him! Because Daniel was just an idiot. His own pause is one with widened eyes, trying to understand the moodiness of this topic. What does Louis think he was doing? Definitely not struggling against societal racism in the aftermath of slavery, or going across the country in the middle of a global war in search of safety and freedom, or dealing with what he dealt with in Paris.
Louis may have made mistakes, but it wasn't in a vacuum. He did the best he could, coped the only ways he was able.
"Hey." He rubs his chest, a little faux-shake. "Hey. I was a weird human. You know that. I'm not going to forget, I just... I lived it. I'm not a student at Berkley anymore, but I still was. Same with being somebody's husband. Working at the New York Times. Those things have been behind me for a long while. Doesn't mean they're gone."
His hand is still where it's laid on Louis' chest. No tremor. He's not sick and dying anymore. And Louis...
"You're still yourself. I know you are. Everyone changes, even people who aren't vampires with their heads fucked by some jerk."
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"I'm not trying to get you to comfort me," is a little rueful, a little embarrassed for having provoked this response.
Daniel's hand pressed down over Louis' dead heart, Louis watching the unfamiliar bloom of color in his eyes.
"Just want you to know you were always something, even when we met. I saw it in you."
Which must be true, or else Louis would have just eaten him rather than messing around with the tape recorder. There had been something there, something so immediate and vital that Louis couldn't do anything but respond to the spark of it.
And see what Daniel made of that spark, fifty years on.
It's all something. All important. Pieces of foundation that a millennia of life can be built upon. The vampire Daniel will become rising from the human he'd been.
It matters more to Louis. Louis, who cares so much about a history. Who was driven to restless disquiet when he sensed the wrongness of his own recollection, fearful of missing pieces and events wrenched out of joint.
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Cope. Not that Daniel has had friends who are just friends who hold on to each other in bed like this, but that's fine, too. He's not a university student anymore, he's not a reporter for a newspaper anymore, he's not human anymore. He's the same person, just here, now, like this, learning to do new things, with new people. Not just having superpowers. This part, this is the most special. It's beyond anything he's experienced before. Maybe he couldn't, before being transformed.
(Yes he could have he's just a closeted literal boomer, but look.)
"I know you did. I believe you. Even if I think you were a little preemptively loopy."
Teasing, along with this comfort. So curious as to why Louis thinks he's a vampire. So curious as to why Louis thinks there was anything but a total dumbass happening with 20 year old Daniel Molloy. See. He's the same guy. Sass.
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No, it wasn't the alcohol.
It had just been the giddy high of their connection, and the electric, adrenaline of anticipation. Of knowing that they could speak to each other, that Louis could say all the things he'd kept locked up in his chest and Daniel would hear him, understand him. Would ask questions, listen when Louis answered.
All things Daniel must know, so Louis says none of them. Instead:
"You wanna come see New Orleans with us after all this?"
All this spanning anywhere from "the end of the book tour" to "the end of this war." Us operating on the foregone conclusion that Lestat would agree to accomapny them.
New Orleans was a likely place for angry vampires to look. Louis knows it. The tour at least puts them on the move, keeps Louis out of sight.
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Despite that, he's glad they met. Despite all of it, he's glad they met. He can't tell Armand he'd endure it again just to get here, Armand would take it the wrong way, but he can trust Louis with it. Unspoken, just felt. It was worth it.
Eyebrows go up.
"I'd love to visit New Orleans with you, but no way am I third wheeling an emotionally significant revisit. You two deserve that time to yourselves."
'Us', they've clearly talked about it. C'mon. Bro code. He can't do that to Lestat. Speaking of—
"How are you guys? Honestly."
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"You're not third wheeling," is maybe an early tell for how Louis is going to answer the latter question.
But he does mean it. Daniel has a place, always, with Louis. And he suspects the same is true for Lestat. Daniel belongs with them. Louis' fingers lay over Daniel's, holding his hand there at his chest, pressing down a little harder, instructive. Yes, he means this.
And Louis misses New Orleans, as much as he believes he should be moving farther and farther from it. That he should be putting himself together in new surroundings, circle back when he is certain he's something like whole.
Louis isn't sure what that will feel like. It's been a long time.
"He and I, we're alright. Don't we seem alright?"
Inviting the opinion Daniel might give anyway.
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Sometimes a third wheel is a third wheel. Daniel isn't sore about it, he's an old man who's done plenty of third wheeling, chaperoning, date-crashing, wing-manning. Don't worry about it. He wants to make it clear that it's a fine distinction, and that he doesn't feel left out, preemptively or otherwise.
If Louis needs an old man security blanket to go on a date, well... maybe. He's not the best 'leave room for Jesus' enforcer.
"Yes, you seem alright. I'm not asking about alright, I'm asking for gossip. I didn't give you my cigarettes so you could stand awkwardly in the cold for fifteen minutes, did I?"
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A century removed from Grace, rolling her eyes at him over Lestat. Who else has Louis truly gossiped about him with? Who else that would name their association for what it was and say it without scorn in their voice?
Never. No one. Not even his sister.
Louis is a long way away from gossiping, even as a recipient of Bricktop's complaints or the way his girls sighed after this and that gentleman.
"We ain't been awkward," Louis protests. "We're friends. We do like friends do, these days."
Louis has had a lot of time to consider it. He wasn't ready. Still isn't ready. No one's to blame for it. Lestat isn't obligated to wait on Louis. Louis can't ask.
"We smoked, we talked. We came back in so he could watch Jeannie. He likes her. The singing helps it along."
Probably useful for that to be the case, if Daniel interviews Lestat. Jeannie would surely be helping in that process.
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Eyebrows go up higher.
"That's very sweet about Jeannie," he says. "But friends? I don't think I've ever had a friend who I looked at the way you two look at each other. Every time one of you turns your head, the other one's staring like you're cartoon characters with big, wet, heart-shaped eyes."
Yeah he said wet. Lestat cries a lot.
"I know you've got serious things to work through with him. But it... I dunno, I just hope for good things, for you guys. And fun things, too, even if you're apparently squandering all the alone time I'm trying to give you like nerds."
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