damnedest | shotgun.

"Even an Uber." Alright, alright, he will drink the blood, even though it's gross. "Uber drivers know all kinds of shit."

A proper taxi driver would be better, but they're not in a big city. Daniel does his best not to pull a face while drinking. It tastes worse than usual, somehow, and he just tries to chug it and get it overwith. No thinking about it, or the way he feels slightly queasy after.

Something has to be wrong. Something besides the in-a-vacuum fact of Lestat being absent. But is the fact that he feels like shit related? He sets the mug down and stares at it, and thinks about the way that Armand's very presence pings people as overly powerful. Could there be someone else around, sending out... brain fucky puke waves?

Christ.

He sighs, shakes his head, and calls the police station. Operation: looking for my daughter / son-in-law / assistant, commence.

"I'll put a few in an Uber," Louis agrees.

Privately earmarks one to canvas for something fast and obscene. What did that even look like in Vermont?

Rachida enters, collects the tablet, Louis' mug. Louis relays their decisions. Rachida asks after the next hotel reservation, and Louis shakes his head. Not today. Maybe later tonight, to be managed tomorrow.

And while Rachida delegates and Louis' staff descend upon a quiet little town that has done nothing at all wrong, Louis leans his head back against the couch, closes his eyes, and splits his attention between listening for vampires and listening to Daniel start corralling some lowly beat-cop unlucky enough to pick up the phone.

Daniel talks, and talks, because he is good at that; he listens, because he's better at that. He continues to reach out with his mind, and poke gently at the block that is Lestat. That he hopes is Lestat. He tells himself it has to be, that if something has done so awry as to leave Louis without him, it's just too cruel of the universe. Not even worried about being next, or whatever. It just seems way too fucking mean.

Not much from the police station, but he ends up being given the number for the next closest one, in South Burlington, which is apparently an entirely separate town. Alright, sure. He enters the number, stares at it, thumbs over to his contacts instead.

'A', still there. Are you still in New York? Send. Fine.

He calls the police station, talks. This dispatch person is slightly less good at their job, and flubs up by asking Daniel if his missing person might have been near 'the weird meteor or whatever' by the harbor. The guy just thinks somebody tried to drop a safe from a crane, or something equally bizarre, but had heard that an ambulance was out around five AM, so maybe he could try calling the hospital.

Which he does. More talking. More listening. What if Lestat is in a room in the ER, a burn victim not responding to treatment, playing along until nightfall? It would at least be funny.

Sitting quietly alongside Daniel, Louis leans his head back against the sofa cushions. He keeps a measuring sort of tab on the patter of Daniel's conversation, a tethering link like a finger set to the edge of Daniel's mind.

Louis has put his own phone down on the coffee table in front of them. A necessary measure, so Louis does not break it. He has sent messages, over and over. There has been no answer.

Part of him wants to simply ask. Say, Daniel, is he dead? Ask, Are we playing fools?

It is a helplessly destructive part of Louis. It is the part of him that wants to cross the room to play his fingertips along the edge of the curtain.

"Would you tell me if he were leaving?" is what Louis eventually settles on. Whether this is better or worse is a toss up, surely.

Aware of Louis' presence. He has to stop thinking about Armand. And yet, he suspects Louis is also sometimes thinking about Armand, today. Not quite an elephant in the room, because it's fucking ridiculous to think that he'd help find Lestat, but a mutual pain point. Louis, conditioned for almost a century, and Daniel, subject to the beckoning comfort of the bond.

But Armand helped before when Daniel asked. Sort of. Answered questions, met up. That counts, right? ... Maybe. But he wouldn't, over Lestat.

Why does he feel like he's going to throw up all that fridged blood, though.

Lost in thought, staring at his phone, the next number to call half tapped into the screen—

"What?"

Head snaps up, stares at Louis with a knitted brow. What a dismal fucking question. Something about it is so vulnerable, so worst-case-scenario, it almost catches his breath.

"Yeah, I would rat him out fucking instantly," be says. "But he isn't. He wouldn't. I don't think he'd tell me if he was, obviously I would tell you. But he isn't."

It's a terrible, insidious thought. Once given even that minor inch of ground, it puts down roots. Louis can only think of the possibility, of Lestat growing bored, walking into the night, and leaving Louis to the absurdity of this search. Seeking and seeking someone who is certainly not present to be found. It would be like a terrible kind of joke.

He doesn't say anything, not immediately. Daniel says these things, says he isn't with such conviction, and Louis has to wrestle with doubt. (Daniel had said, you wouldn't with the same conviction, and Armand later had presented all the plausible ways in which Louis would, actually, have sought just what Daniel said he did not.)

(Amid the many messages and calls to Lestat, there is one outlier. A rarely used number, sporadic messages comprising largely of tangible items: links, pdfs, things that suffer when transmitted between minds. Into this thread, a single word phrased as a question: Armand?

Grasping at air. Reaching into a void.)

"I can't feel him," can mean any number of things. "He's shutting me out."

Laying these things out for inspection. Maybe it would be better if they weren't trapped in a room, could walk and talk, and Louis could outpace this dread. He feels sick. Lost. He can't shake it away.

Maybe it's time for Louis to put a personal embargo on believing Armand, Daniel might say. He might also say do as I say not as I do, do not inspect anything about Armand that I'm dealing with. But he doesn't know all that anyway, and they have more important things to grapple with, like, still, where the fuck is Lestat.

"He could be." Daniel reaches out for Louis' hand. "He could also be asleep, or hurt, or muffled by somebody else. And, look, I really do not believe for a minute he'd bail, but if he did."

If he did. Daniel sighs, thoughts on how to word it. Or if he should, if he's just steamrolling assumptions about someone he doesn't really know that well. Probably, but also, he spent all this time dissecting these people for the book, and Daniel thinks very highly of his own opinions, right or wrong, so steamrolling it is.

"I think he'd just want you to chase him. I think he'd only dramatically fling himself overboard so you'd run to look, you know? This is hurting you, though, and I don't think he'd want that."

Is this flattering or insulting to Lestat?? B..oth??

They've forgiven each other, he and Lestat. Louis had said that to Daniel before he ever set foot on a plane to New York. He believes it to be true.

But Lestat is gone. There is so much room in his absence for doubts. Maybe he left. Maybe he was taken. Both come back around to Louis, feeling himself an igniting point regardless.

Daniel takes his hand. Louis permits this, lets long moments pass before tangling their fingers. Engaging this small comfort. Waiting out the kneejerk of feeling that comes of Daniel naming a feeling Louis is having: This is hurting you. Bites down on the urge to deflect away.

"How many hours until we can make a real run at chasing him?" Louis queries. Daniel has his phone. These days, sunset is triangulated via app.

Easier questions than trying to put voice to all the fears swirling in his head.

Do his hands feel different to other people, now that he's a vampire? Less offputting, leathery, unsupple skin given new life? He doesn't tremble where he squeezes Louis back once he finally reaches back. He's still grateful. He'd rather be like this, spared so much suffering, able to do whatever the fuck he wants.

Except go outside right now.

"Three hours, give or take," he answers. His internal sense of it is getting better, and a quick glance at the time on his phone confirms it.

"Let's go over what we've got, so we're ready to right away."

Smash-cut to: Out?

A block away from the harbour, unnoticed by brief flurries of police activity, roving plainclothes personal security in Ubers, or the potential arrival of British librarian-spies, is a dumpster in an alleyway that contains a two-hundred and sixty-two year old monster. Who is also having a stressful day.

Around three in the afternoon, a young man exits one of the nearby buildings, hauling a black trash bag. He gets about five feet from the dumpster he is aiming for before his vision goes white at the edges, and he comes to on the sidewalk of the street, off-balance and bleeding from the nose, trash abandoned on the floor of the alleyway. Later, an unhoused individual with the aim to peek beneath the lid finds himself staggering backwards into the opposite wall at great force, clutched with unnamed fear.

And that is all, really.

Within metal walls, there's no healing sleep. The occasional stretch of trance-like fugue state interspersed with heightened animal awareness, curled up against one side on a bed of mainly cardboard boxes and enclosed plastic bags, small mercies. Starving without motivation to feed. Bleeding from wounds that have no reason to close. If Lestat is aware of Daniel's attempts to make contact, the slab of psychic concrete he has pulled over himself is too indiscriminate to allow anyone near, friend or foe.

The sun sets. He feels himself more awake, more aware. It is safe to leave. Instead, new found cognizance is used to remember all the reasons he feels bad and dissolve into weeping, head beneath the fold of his arms. Nothing of value awaits him beyond this place, so why should he leave it?

As if, perhaps, to prove this is so, that steel door that closes his mind off from the Many opens by a sliver of a crack.

It itches to be out so soon. The soonest Daniel has made an attempt— only that one evening just before they left, when he needed some hours to himself, had cut it closer. The very edge of the horizon is still ombre, no stars yet making their way past the memory of sunlight, but the car door slams and they're out of the garage, GPS programmed to help them go around points of interest.

Because of course very little had come of sending Louis' people around, even with Daniel's fiddly requests. Filling time. Wasting gas money. Confusing his employees.

The best lead is whatever-it-was, near the harbor, coincidentally on the other side of Lestat's phone's last location. They go, and Daniel drives, and thinks You stupid fucking asshole if you really have run off and crushed his heart I'm going to be so disappointed.

He has texted Armand again. Asking after illnesses. He doesn't know what else to ask, he doesn't know how to force his maker to respond. He still feels uneasy and off-kilter, and Armand hasn't responded. Not that he has to. Not that the other night has to mean anything. Daniel wonders if he really did get hosed, if this is him being one-upped by somebody half a millennia old, or if it's just going to be that his prediction about being totally incidental was right after all. Of course Armand bailed. He hates everyone Daniel is spending time with, and probably hates Daniel, too.

(Meanwhile: voicemail backlog? Does it exist, for psychic intrusions? A hundred pebbles chucked at his window all day, Lestat, Lestat, Lestat, Armand's favorite word.)

"Do you think you'd know if you were close to him? Physically?"

Quiet in the passenger seat while they drive, thumbing back and forth across the screen of his phone. No answers, no messages, nothing. Turning over two different options in his mind, testing the quality of the pain each of them carries.

Staff released, sent back to their beds while Daniel and Louis set out to try their hand at tracking down one wayward vampire. A day of phone calls and increasingly obscure directives yielding only knowledge of where Lestat isn't. Awareness of vampires in the area going about their business, no sign of heightened activity from here.

Pulled from his reverie by the question Daniel puts to him, and Louis has to consider it. Turns towards his face towards Daniel, catching his face in the fading light.

Finds his way, pensively, to: "Yes."

Memories that run first towards the trial, the terrible thrill that stabbed through his chest as Lestat approached. He's here, he's here, he's here beating in his body, heartbeat reorienting around Lestat's even before he appeared on the stage.

"I don't know if that can be blocked," Louis admits after. A gap in his own knowledge, something he'd never asked Armand and Lestat had never explained.

There is no clawing in, no wrenching open, no sudden inpouring of smoke or cold ocean into his mind. No Armand. Of course there isn't. If Armand were strong enough to come for him now (if Armand were not rendered into psychic paste), if he had any inclination to do so, there was the whole daytime to do it in.

It isn't wholly what he is afraid of finding. Of happening.

His own mind feels heavy, hurt, wild. Power just that little bit beyond his ability to contain, to control, a little like he is a coin toss between exploding any mind he touches or imploding his own from the effort. Fingernails dig a little into his own scalp.

Here, maybe the sense of scuff marks at his defenses. Lestat, Lestat, Lestat.

Out of nowhere, the sensation for Daniel might be a little like if a fast-moving car winged out from a blindspot and clipped him across the front with the attitude of a snipping: 'what.' Taillights disappearing off in the distance and all.

Edited 2025-02-21 02:19 (UTC)

"Okay," he says, and finds himself wanting to think about Armand again. He doesn't let himself. "Good."

Louis should be able to find Lestat, if he's still in the city. And he has to be, doesn't he? Nevermind how easy it would be to just put a vampire into the back of a van and take off, totally safe from retribution until sundown. Lestat could be in a box in a moving truck in fucking Quebec right now.

No. They can't believe that, they have to—

Daniel swears and startles, tapping the brakes too hard. Someone behind them lays on their horn and Daniel swears again, awkwardly pulls to the side of the road along a strip of narrow sidewalk that is clearly not meant to be parked by. Angry autopilot slamming the car into park and scrambling out of it entirely, feeling uncomfortably like someone's poked him.

"Don't fucking what me after nothing all fucking—"

Daniel gets back into the car. Slams the door closed. Begins to move away from the curb.

"Where are you?"

Echoed in his head. 'Where are you?' He looks at Louis. Relief, and a new headache.

Louis, with a finger hooked still into the edge of Daniel's mind, startles at the abruptness of feeling that surges up in him. Startles, and then has to throw out a hand to brace himself against the dashboard as the car jolts to a stop.

"Daniel, what—"

Cut off by the slam of the car door.

Louis' seatbelt clicks, reeled in as Louis leans across the car to follow Daniel out the driver's side door. And then he abruptly has to retreat as the door opens and Daniel clambers back in.

"Daniel?"

Echoed by Louis winding closer, as if leaning bodily in against Daniel's shoulder. Complicating things, surely, by letting the question bleed into his mind: What's happening?

It's odd, the way two minds who can't touch each other other might feel it, when conversing with one that can. A shadow on the wall without shape, an invisible presence, Daniel's thoughts whirling around an absence. Louis, near, saying something, or saying nothing, he cannot know for sure. Remembers reaching into that void, saying I love you, and scraped aside.

An overwhelming urge of feeling, scattering all coherent thought. Louis, whom he wants so badly. Whom he has hurt so badly, and failed so often.

Daniel has asked him a question, but Lestat is gone from his mind, leaving behind only a fading pang of distress.

(Somewhere, renewed crying echoing in rusted metal.)

"Lestat, for a second."

'Are you there? Are you okay?' Shouting at him, bolting after the psychic dust trail, come back you jerk!!

Daniel makes an attempt to bridge the sensation with Louis, but it's a slippery thing, like some screwy non-Newtonian fluid, but telepathic. Non-Newtonian Brain Power. It makes him feel like he's tipping sideways, inner ear turned inside out, so he stops, flinching away from the sensation. Christ, fuck this.

"Okay, I'm just—" pulling into a sidestreet, so they can wind around things without worrying too badly about getting into a car accident if Daniel gets jumpscared again. "Start looking. And 'looking'."

Pushes, harder— 'Lestat.'

Louis' expression shutters.

What does it mean, Lestat, only for a second?

It's proof of life. That's something.

"Don't hurt yourself," Louis cautions. He's experienced car crashes, yes. But he isn't eager for Daniel to experience one, or to see how well his car would weather one.

Doesn't bother with the seatbelt. Hand still on the dashboard, body turned to watch Daniel as Daniel drives. As Daniel tries to reach for Lestat. Louis is tucked into the back of his mind, a compact presence held neatly out of the way. Linked, because Louis needs to be, a point of connection while they drive and Louis tamps down any kind of feeling rising up within him.

Lestat closes off his mind. Or he thinks he does. It is less effective this time now that Daniel has any confidence in his nearness, his aliveness, and it's more akin to a turtle shrinking stubborn in its shell than confronting some gigantic impenetrable barrier. Some sense that Daniel could crack it open if he tried, and that it would hurt.

And Louis is right. There is no blocking off that intuitive sense of one another, and eventually, Louis will feel it like a cold change in the wind when wind around the correct block of buildings, pass by the correct alleyway.

A thing that goes both ways, of course, Lestat's choking sobs slowing as he feels the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end.

"Just surprised me. I'm okay. I need you to play navigator."

Alright, maybe expressing his worry with frustration isn't helpful. When he tries next, reaching out against that closed door, banging on it like a nosy neighbor delivering missed mail and not taking no for an answer, 'We're on our way. If you can't talk, if you're hurt, just hold on.'

And it occurs to him this might be stupid of him. There might be someone else with Lestat, still. That possibility hasn't changed with the setting of the sun. He tries to keep his attention on driving, on Lestat, on listening to the Many. Spinning plates.

"Harbor, you think? By that disturbance?"

"Yes," Louis answers. Levered half over the console, hand on the driver's seat. And then, abruptly, "Turn here."

Courting more honking, inconsequential unless someone hits Daniel's car.

There is a brittle quality in Louis' body, tension wound so tight. Bracing, bracing, bracing. Uncertain if they are in pursuit or if they are honing in on a kidnapping. Maybe some echo of that refracts to Lestat, this anticipation of pain Louis carries with him as he and Daniel approach.

But he can feel Lestat. Something chilly, a kind of apprehension. Louis uses it as a guide, all the way to the point where they will inevitably need to exit the car.

Like words echoed down a long well, Daniel's call. Assurance, warning. He should tell Daniel he is alright, he doesn't need help, he doesn't need anyone to come for him, but cannot manage to string the thought together. Maybe because he is not alright, and would like help, and desperately wants someone to come for him. How many days, nights, did he spent after the masquerade wishing just that? Months and years, after a while.

What can Lestat say? Don't come here, he doesn't deserve it? The imagining almost breaks a laugh through the shuddered breathing, palms of his hands pressed over his eyes.

An indistinct hovel, this one. Flaking blue paint and rust. The scent of unpleasant amalgamated trash and then, that thing all vampires can detect, blood. And something else in the air, a kind of emanating sense of psychic fuck off that's been veering humans away all day, but can be likely brushed aside by sturdier creatures, easy as cobwebs.

A quick turn, but Daniel is locked in as the kids say, and getting better at applying new supernatural awareness to moving throughout the world. The doppler effect of an annoyed Subaru is forgotten as they go down an alley. Passing over some discarded fliers, a trash bag that didn't make it to a dumpster, a shoe.

Industrial offices, a few shitty apartments. He gets out and steps back to look up, doors and windows, seeing if there are any telltale breaks or pale faces peering out, if he can feel anyone unexpected watching them, hear any electronic hums. He smells car exhaust, and salty air, and garbage, and—

Blood? A stale, faint trace, cutting through the unease that makes his skin crawl.

Door, window, surely not the manhole?

Blood.

Louis scents it too. It winds the anxiety and fear that might higher, a winch turning and turning and turning in his chest.

"Lestat," he says aloud, into the air.

Inviting. Invoking. Come to me, the old call and response.

The babble of the Many goes on too. Louis feels no break in it, nothing malevolent spinning around to attend them. They are alone here.

Louis looks to Daniel, uncertain. Begins to walk. Maybe has similar thoughts about the manhole, considering his trajectory, or maybe Louis feels the need to be a moving target stood out in the open.

How many feelings can he possibly feel all at the same time? Louis' gentle voice, familiar, breaking the miserable silence. His heartbeat, so close. Lestat imagines that if he pressed a hand to the side of his prison, it would reverberate.

A matter of time, then. He feels sick with this knowledge. A wild, last ditch effort—

'Take him,' in Daniel's mind. Soft but loud, like God whispering. Too much. He is trying. 'Why haven't you? Just go with him. Leave me here and go.'

The sheer selflessness and beautiful tragedy of this action breaks through his breathing, which will definitely give away his location anyway.

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