What was it like? Daniel doesn't remember. He sees only snippets of the last of it— the haze of Armand's hypnosis is too powerful, his exhaustion was too overwhelming, and the reality of the flophouse asserts itself. He doesn't know if he was a zombie, left in there, if they dumped him onto a soiled mattress and left him there, limp and barely breathing, or if he stared up at Louis with half-fogged eyes and their hands were connected until the last moment.

Little things, lost. But he held onto Louis.

"In the room..."

which he pronounces like a fucking fraud that's not how californians says room, eric

They weren't sat like this. They were laying down, side by side, and then at some point they'd each turned to look at the other. Daniel... had he reached out? Touched a little patch of skin that didn't look too burned, trying to conceptualize what had happened to him?

"I said 'I don't think your boyfriend was cool with it after all', and you made a noise, like. I don't know. Maybe I imagined it, since I was trying to lighten shit up. I don't know why. Maybe you did laugh, or maybe you were trying to tell me to put a sock in it. I told you I didn't have enough strength to get away. That was probably true, I was exhausted, but looking back on it I know it was because Armand told me not to get up."