The way Louis touches him feels vulnerable, and it makes something in Daniel want to crack open. There's a part of him that's shaped just like the other man, he thinks. A seam made from a wound that they managed to heal in Dubai, sitting in the room with his rocks, together.

"I had to know," he says, and he smiles a little, though he feels constricted with emotion. "Just about anything else I'd have let my editor or my doctor talk me out of. Louis du Lac. I've seen you in my dreams for fifty years."

Dreams. Don't.

"I just. Had to know. I was always going to come."

He's missed him for fifty years. Is that it? Is that the emotion that threatens to strangle him, sitting where with a hand on Louis' face, Louis' hand at his shirt collar?

"What are you thinking about?"