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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-02 12:05 am (UTC)(link)
"I know."

Just as Louis doesn't have to be here at all. Didn't have to chase after Daniel. Didn't have to stay once Daniel was found.

His fingers lace through Daniel's.

"I want to be there with you," Louis murmurs. "I'll pull you back."

The mortals were there to drink, but Louis can make himself a tether. Keep Daniel from drowning.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-03 05:49 am (UTC)(link)
That thought hooks in Louis' head. San Francisco. Daniel, pale and bloody, face blank while Louis stood at the window.

(What Louis looked like? Like Daniel? Had there been any difference?)

But San Francisco is pushed from Louis' mind as Daniel falls to drinking. Louis remembers it. Remembers how desperate he had been. How inelegant he had been, scrabbling across the hardwood, biting for veins.

The mortal doesn't struggle. Daniel's mind is a blank, plunged into the necessity of feeding. Impenetrable, in a way. Louis allows himself to be drawn in alongside Daniel, fingers trailing across Daniel's shoulders. Grazes bare skin at the nape of his neck as Louis sinks into his mind.

Louis can feel the mortal going, going. Life draining away. The echoing taste of blood rich in Daniel's mouth, an absence on Louis' tongue. Louis' fingers slipping through Daniel's hair, soft silver beneath his palm as Louis reaches to temper that grasping urge towards the last drops.

Daniel, comes as a murmur. On to the next now.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-04 08:04 am (UTC)(link)
Four lives.

Louis would have drunk down four if he could have, that first night. He's drunk thousands since.

His fingers remain, Louis drawn along in Daniel's wake as he sinks teeth into the throat of this last mortal. Fingertips running along his scalp, grounding. Anchoring.

I'm here, whispers in the back of his head. Stay with me.

Drawing Daniel's attention, a step back from the life dwindling away between his jaws.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-06 03:27 am (UTC)(link)
There is blood at the corner of Daniel's mouth. His eyes gleam strange and unfamiliar.

And Daniel says this thing. Asks this question.

Louis' whole body flinches away from what he invokes.

"No," is so raw. Louis reaches for him again, hands lifting to bracket Daniel's face. "No, Daniel."

Thumb at the corner of Daniel's mouth, over that smear of blood. Holding on.

"Don't go."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-08 04:55 am (UTC)(link)
A moment where Louis simply looks back at him. Studying Daniel's face, fear in his own expression ebbing slowly into something near to relief. Breathes out.

In the coming days, weeks, he'll turn Daniel's question over and over in his head. In the moment though, Daniel touches him, and it is steadying. Eases the panic the had risen in him at the thought of Daniel walking into the sunlight.

"Stay," he repeats, soft. "We can figure all of it out, together."

Vampirism. The demands it was going to make of Daniel. How he'd answer them.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-09 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, the clean up.

Louis' thumbs stroke over and over Daniel's cheeks. Smooth away the traces of blood. Find reassurance in the warmth of him, breathing and alive, caught up between Louis' hands.

"I'll take care of it."

Penance, maybe, for the number of bodies Armand dealt with on Louis' behalf. His turn now, to clean up.

"I'm not so far out of practice that it's beyond me."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-12 12:58 am (UTC)(link)
Rote work, for Louis. He is practiced still, even if it has been long decades since he cleaned up after his own meals. His patient, gentle direction guides Daniel through the most immediate aspects of the process. Wrapping, tying, obscuring. Corpses vanishing into rolled carpet and bedding, explanation and advice given while sending a handful of text messages. Security cameras, service lifts, all things Louis' staff knows to manage and Louis imparts to Daniel for whenever he might need to manage the process alone.

Which does beg the question—

"Whatever you want," is the truth, even if it sounds regretful in Louis' mouth.

He knows what he wants. To stay near to Daniel. Never let him out of sight again, never endure the frantic search while he slips farther and farther away.

They could go to Dubai. They could go to the States. They could go anywhere.

"You'll need to sleep," is true too. "And eat again before any prolonged travel."

Softer: "I would pay your ticket, wherever you wished to go."

Because Please stay close sticks in his throat. Uncertain. What does Daniel want? To never see Louis again? To go be a vampire where it pleases him, keep his own company?
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-13 03:58 am (UTC)(link)
A perk for Daniel, perhaps, is first hand experience of the way Louis shields his mind.

Which is to say, rarely. Which is to say, with only Daniel in the room, not at all.

Maybe it will come to Louis in time. Recall that Daniel is a vampire. Recall that Daniel is a reporter. But in the moment, it is as open as Louis' face, looking at Daniel as he asks this thing. The Yes forms there before Louis says:

"I'll stay as long as you like."

Maybe there are better choices for touchstones, for teachers, than Louis. Louis who is newly returned to the world. Louis, who had been sequestered for decades.

Louis, who Daniel is intimately aware has been far from an adept vampire.

It's fine. They have Lestat for all that Louis is incapable of.

"I want to stay," Louis amends. Before Daniel can second-guess him.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-13 06:21 am (UTC)(link)
They go.

Louis does not relinquish his hold on Daniel's hand. The link of contact remains, soothing the fretful anxiety that Daniel might vanish. That Armand will simply take him, play keep away as effectively as he had before.

They've walked a little ways before Louis asks him, "Would you like to go back to New York?"

It would make sense to Louis, who couldn't bring himself to leave New Orleans for thirty years. May never have left New Orleans, if it had gone differently with Lestat then.

May go back still, because Lestat is in New Orleans. Might intend to stay in New Orleans, if not in the waterlogged cottage.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-18 01:47 am (UTC)(link)
It had taken Louis some time to develop the skill of delving in and out of people's minds. Longer to achieve any kind of mastery. (Whatever mastery Armand felt appropriate, felt permissible.) It does not immediately occur to him that Daniel can touch his mind as he pleases; isn't it overwhelming, the change?

Daniel hits a key combination anyway: New Orleans and infrastructure, New Orleans and flooding.

Triggers a flutter of memory:

Car window grinding down, Louis' face turning into the passing breeze.

A hurricane rattling shutters.

Lestat's eyes widening as Louis crosses a damp, low-lit little room.

In this present moment, Louis slanting a look sideways at Daniel. A twist in his chest, thinking so immediately of Armand. How Armand must have known and perhaps shared some opinion on it with Daniel.

"It still feels like home," Louis admits, before saying, more practically, "I still own property in New York. And California."

A healthy real estate portfolio is nothing to sneeze at.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-18 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
The uh draws attention. Louis is already keeping Daniel in his periphery, unable to quite look away. His presence still a miracle, still exceptional. Louis wants to hold fast to him, cling against the prospect of Daniel slipping away.

But there is a moment where Louis finds himself uncertain. Tests the porous edges of that memory, all that had come before or after now suspect.

"Yes," Louis says at last. Testing the answer, knowing it to be true. "The building's been renovated."

Modernized. Is now handled by a property manager.

The floor still slants to the north. Louis knows this without any reason to still have possession of that fact. He hasn't set foot there in years.

"I can have a direct flight for us to New York," hooked onto the tailed end of this. "We can make arrangements for things you'll need when we get there."
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-20 09:16 am (UTC)(link)
This little motion hooks Louis' attention. Remembered from the interview, the myriad of things it signaled. Exasperation, at Louis or at Armand. Headaches, sometimes. Pain, sometimes.

Is Louis being exasperating? Not at this exact moment. But the rest —

"I was in New Orleans," Louis answers, truthful because what reason does he have to obscure this? "I wanted to go home."

To open the car window, to turn his face out into the night and feel all things familiar carried to him on the air.

"I wanted to find Lestat," is true too. "And I did."

And now he is here. His fingers soft in the bend of Daniel's elbow, keeping him near as they navigate the ebb and flow of mortal foot traffic. As Louis draws him off to a small fountain, a place to sit. Watches Daniel's face, assessing. Worrying.
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[personal profile] divorcing 2024-10-20 08:45 pm (UTC)(link)
A moment where Louis doesn't understand.

It had been days for him, for this skill to manifest. Longer for it to become something that needed to be managed, curbed. (And then something that made feeding intolerable, much to Lestat's chagrin.) It has been hours, for Daniel.

The earlier question discarded for the moment. They can talk later about New Orleans, Lestat, anything Daniel likes.

Here, now, Louis takes Daniel's face in his heads.

"You can hear them?" Louis questions, worry creasing across his face as he draws them these last few steps. The fountain perhaps a mistake. There are others milling about here, humans enjoying the scenery, children playing, lovers chattering, an elderly couple with their little dog. Not ideal, but they are here.

Focus on me like a little tug at corner of Daniel's mind as Louis opens his own head to him. Makes himself an eclipse, all-encompassing, a shelter in which only there is only the quiet patter of his own thoughts, the subdued flow of emotion, running alongside Daniel's presence. Stay here.

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