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."
Unfortunate facts, and please. Shit has to get way more traumatic than dying for Daniel Molloy to not want to know something. There's no fucking way Louis' going to magic anything else away while Daniel sits quietly in the other room.
So. The clean up.
Having something to do, no matter how gruesome, centers him. A project to work on, take mental notes on, even as he occasionally spaces out due to sensory overload, or looks spooked because his hands are steady and it's starting to sink in how much pain he isn't in anymore. Neurons repairing themselves, or the elusive, half-theoretical lifelong neurogenesis is happening now, erasing or otherwise outpacing the flawed ones. Armand gave Daniel his blood instead of medication, while they were traveling, and maybe it kept Daniel slightly more stable than nothing, but it hadn't healed him like this. A mortal can't properly benefit from death. The damned work best with the damned.
By the time they're finished he's nearing the ability to say I'm okay and mean it.
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?
The idea of home feels daunting. His apartment is far from sun-proof. What if he shows up thirty minutes before dawn? He's got blackout curtains, but how good are they? Has his editor reported him missing? Fucking declared him dead? Has anyone besides Louis noticed? Should he just 'die' now, or go work on the book?
Because
he's still going to write the book. Obviously.
The impression he got is that Louis is no longer as enthusiastic about the idea of publishing it (the whole laptop fire and whore number thing), but yeah, no, he's not complying with that, and figures Louis owes him for leaving him with Armand anyway, so it's fine. They'll be even.
Speaking of Louis, Daniel looks at him, and wonders if the longing he thinks he hears in him is imaginary, or... fucking mind reading. What's that about.
"What if I wanted you to keep me company for a while because I'm fucking lost?"
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.
It's going to take a while for Daniel to really understand what he's experiencing, in his head. The feelings and senses manifesting in him now are indistinguishable from being able to read Louis in a new way, particularly while he's still half-grappling with half-willfully ignoring the fact that he can feel Armand in his head.
He doesn't know why - he's not a touchy person, neither is Louis, he doesn't think - but he reaches out and grabs the other man's hand again.
Not totally to support the older vampire. Daniel is also freefalling a little still.
"Let's get the fuck out of here first, then."
Staying can come after. Daniel crams everything he has left into his abused suitcase, startles a little at picking it up (! weighs nothing ? cool), and then they can just... get out, and away, and he will try not to stop every three feet and stare up at the sky or out at the ocean.
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.
"I have to, if not immediately, then sooner rather than later. Even if only to get my shit out of the mail room."
Because Armand sent everything back there, apparently. Bought him a different suitcase and clothes on the fly. He's not one hundred percent sure what all is in the shit that Armand (allegedly) sent off to his Brooklyn apartment— the ruins of his laptop, at least, but who knows what else. A part of him is itching to know. Did Armand post a dead cat in there? It could be fucking anything, the guy's got every mental illness known to humanity and probably a few extra ones no clinician has ever been confronted with.
"I don't think New Orleans is practical," he says. "I know you're an almost-billionaire, but the infrastructure from flooding and bad politics basically ensures you're exposed or stuck on a floating piece of driftwood at high noon within a year."
No awareness of where he picked up thoughts about New Orleans from, or that Louis hasn't said any of that out loud. Has not quite fished out Lestat, but they aren't talking about people, they're talking about where to go.
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.
Daniel has heard about the tricks of vampire 'gifts' (focus on the mind like a bodily sound, find the flaw in something to set aflame), and Daniel is pretty fucking quick, and Daniel is the only fledgling of a half-millennia old vampire. It's definitely an oops, stumbling into things and people and heads he's not meaning to, and the minute he notices he'll reel it in. Or try to.
(That'll be the thing, probably. Hunger he can cope with, to a degree, with his experience in the trenches of addiction. But the cascade of variables - power plus a potentially inherited knack plus curiosity plus his inherent journalistic aggression - will equal a harder impulse to control.)
If he gets an impression of Lestat as he looks back over at Louis, he doesn't realize what it is; doesn't even realize what he's doing. There are other people out at night, wandering in the late hours and scoping out scenery or heading towards early shifts at bakeries and so on— one of them is thinking loudly about a fight with her husband that turned violent, and Daniel flinches and looks over his shoulder, trying to sort out what jumped into his head.
"I, uh."
Christ. What the fuck. (Tired of thinking What the fuck.)
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."
The floor slants to the north. Something they should have taken care of before selling. He wonders if that's more Armand's style; flipping and reselling. Not a landlord. Not a capitalist. Louis became one and Armand started eating them. He can hear him saying it, he can see, in a muddy, disoriented blink of recall, the vampire who is now his maker leaning down and touching fingertips to a blood puddle that's been slowly oozing Oregonward. He doesn't know if it's a real part of a memory or just a fabrication when his gaze moves up to watch Armand put his fingers in his mouth as he stared blankly at the tape recorder.
So
having a normal time, tonight.
"That's funny."
He still has it. Daniel can go see it. Check if it's haunted or not. (With what? The ghost of things he can't remember? A poltergeist made of the junkie who should have died in the 70s?)
"What were you doing before this?"
New Orleans, something about New Orleans. Something about having to get home before the baby wakes up, but something something, he doesn't speak Italian. What? Daniel rubs the bridge of his nose.
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.
Is it surprising? A little, despite the fact that Armand had made it clear that's where Louis was, had berated Daniel for sending Louis back to someone who will eventually beat Louis half-dead again. Despite that, it's almost uplifting. Louis got to put some things together, get a resolution, for good or ill.
"Is he okay?"
This question comes out slower than is normal, for Daniel. He feels like he's speaking underwater, suddenly, trying to be heard over a crowd. Voices, thoughts, impressions trickle in, then flood, then stop, then surge up again like a wave, and the water is too loud, and a woman walking by is thinking in Spanish which means he actually understands her, and Louis is worried about being exasperating but Daniel doesn't know why he'd say that, and, and, and,
his hand over his forehead, now. He wants to know about Lestat, but also:
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.
Daniel goes where Louis leads him, barely aware of it. Everything is too fucking loud. Funny that it's this tripping him up so badly. Dying was a whatever, but then, Daniel had been making plans to die for months already. Psychologically braced. Thoughts roll around in him, and as Louis connects their minds to protect him, the other vampire might see Daniel thinking about his own relationship with death as he tries to sort it out— a wry memory, sitting in a restaurant in Dubai, relating his desire to get out of the city alive to a grey-haired man. Fucking moron. Daniel was already functionally dead, but saying so had gotten him more interesting information out of the agent.
Who cares about dying. Wasn't scared of Armand threatening him. What are you going to do, kill me, but that would have been easier than Armand's psychic tentacles in his head.
These thoughts bump into others, spinning around and outward, hearing, feeling, observing. It takes a second for him to find balance, using Louis as a fixed point, but he gets there.
Stay here, Louis says, and Daniel finally manages to get a decent grip on him.
'Think I'm gonna puke,' he warns Louis, though this is not the case. He might pass out, though.
Louis' heart aches for it, for this resignation. For Daniel thinking he is going to die and accepting it, dispassionate. Still unable to consider a world without Daniel in it, even now that Louis is assured it will never come to pass. (Is this Armand's idea of a gift?) His fingers bracket Daniel's face, stood so close their breath mingles, noses brush, Louis disregarding personal space on the far side of the fountain.
Breathe, Louis instructs. They are no longer in a blood-soaked hotel room. The air is clean, the fountain behind them a waterfall of sound. Louis' mind opening up, steady. Familiar terrain, perhaps. There are only two others who might claim to know Louis as well or better than Daniel does.
Called it peeling back, when I first started out hearing them all around me, comes this murmur. I didn't think it'd come to you so fast. Peel back on me. I'll keep it quiet.
Louis, who wished for death so differently than Daniel did. Who turns the face of a gray-haired man in Daniel's mind back and forth, lets it drift beneath the surface of his thoughts.
Says aloud, "Use me to orient yourself, while you get your bearings."
While Louis tries to pluck up some relevant memory, something like instruction. Here is Lestat, pivoting round on a lamp-lit New Orleans street. Here is Armand, lounging in bed, eyes alert. Lessons overlapping, linked in Louis' mind.
Nothing else has come so fast, so chaotic. Dying already, when Armand turned him; maybe it was the disease, maybe it was Armand feeding him his blood for weeks. (Months, Louis said. Fucking months.) But Daniel's entire being has always been centered in his mind. Sharp and unyielding, resilient in the face of all the shit he put himself through. Of course it's an element of his mind that wants to go wild at the first inkling of unchecked power and newness.
Thoughts of death and negotiation around it filter away. He stays with Louis, thinks of peeling — doesn't really work, someone nearby is thinking about potatoes and preparing them — tries something else. Then something else, then something else, and he sees Lestat, like he's there walking alongside them, disoriented and out of place, and he sees Armand—
Sitting with him in Dubai, aware Louis is asleep in the next room, talking to Daniel about solar power. It's a completely normal conversation, except for the way Armand is looking at him.
Gone, and it's just Louis and Daniel, in Venice, by a fountain. Daniel manages to close the fucking box around himself, and he takes a shuddering breath. Realizes he's holding on to Louis' sides again, probably clinging a little too intensely, but he can't make himself let go. He feels like he'll sink into the fucking abyss if he does.
A glimpse, displaced memory. Not his, Daniel's, slipping past. Louis lets it go. Daniel is vulnerable enough as it is without Louis prying after any given fragment of thought that catches his interest.
But he is aware of the process. How Daniel tries, tries again, troubleshooting. Something innate, skill Daniel has already in his possession, that severs himself from the drowning flood of mortal thought.
Louis' hands have shifted into his hair. Set their foreheads together. Daniel's hands are gripping tight at his waist, and Louis has not dislodged him. Senses Daniel to be steadier but not steady, and so remains. Their noses brush. Their breath rises and falls in time. A passing awareness of too close, set to the side.
"I got you," comes soft, reassuring. "And you got hold of it. You're still here."
Still here. Alive-but-not. Daniel finally, properly, understands what's happening, and manages to get a grasp on it. Wrangle it down. He's so used to paying attention to everything and everyone around him, picking up on details and patterns and tells. He will have to do all of that differently, learn to calibrate his passive observation so that it isn't this.
The prospect is as daunting as it is interesting.
Puking up his liver (or whatever) was much easier.
A shaky breath, then another, steadier one. So close to Louis, closer than he's been to anyone in... years, definitely. That thought is there, in the shelter of Louis' mind, and it's somewhat of a marvel until Daniel realizes what they must look like, Louis cradling some decrepit old man out in public in a fucking tourist hot spot, and he winces. Embarrassment colors his relief, and Daniel withdraws with a wry feeling of apology.
"I'm okay," he says, straightening up. Convincing himself that it's the truth, that he's okay. Repeats it. "I'm okay."
Maybe. Crosses his arms, self-soothing.
"If we could just. I dunno, get the fuck outta here, I guess."
Louis must contend with the instinct he has now, which is to hold fast. To fold Daniel in against himself, clinging and close like that can dispel all the unsteadiness of transformation. Of walking into the world as something new.
Of how Daniel was vulnerable for so long, hurting for so long, alone with Armand.
Armand, who is now silent.
Louis lets go. (Recognizes, in some way, the thing that had lived in Daniel's face when Louis had made an offer to him months back, mid-interview.) Touches Daniel's cheek briefly, fingers light at his cheek before Louis too straightens. Finds some composure, so he might look less split open by their present circumstances.
"We can go."
Softly.
You don't have to be okay, as a whisper in the back of Daniel's mind. Louis' voice, private, just for Daniel, as they begin to walk once more. You don't have to be okay with me.
New Rashid is already collecting what little luggage Daniel has. Louis' hotel is not a far walk. (Lavish, old building, beautiful artwork upon the walls, a breath-taking view from the window.) They'll need only spend a few hours, long enough for a flight to New York to be arranged. They can simply go. Louis has so much money. It makes all things possible.
To that whisper. No way for him to know how to only send it in his mind, and so he says it out loud, despite hearing Louis internally.
"I just need to be okay."
For as much as he can, he trusts Louis. And he's grateful beyond expression for this rescue— because that's what it is. He's not sure that Armand would have ever let him go if they hadn't been followed. If there was no pressure, he expects he'd have just died of his illness, probably had a stroke from anxiety, or Armand would have lost his temper. The end.
Different end, now.
Louis is a safe haven. Daniel wants to cling to him, too. Doesn't know how. So: the hotel, and he thinks of getting on a flight, but realizes he ... can't. Not for logistical reasons. For other reasons, one that don't fit together right in his head. Flight, drive, escape, hotel, fleeing, arguing, flight, hotel. Does he have anything to go back to? Is there a point to New York?
"I think I'm having a panic attack," Daniel observes, tone mild.
A twinned flutter of alarm and concern in Louis' mind, on his face, as he turns towards Daniel. The tablet in Louis' hand is set aside, a light clack of contact as Louis discards it on the glass tabletop. New Rashid seamlessly gathers it, taking up whatever Louis had left off. (Money, moving from place to place, easing the way.) Footsteps, as Rashid heeds some unspoken directive and exits into a side room of the suite.
Privacy, for the moment.
"That's normal."
Maybe. The concept of a panic attack is relatively new. Louis had been turned under vastly different circumstance.
He snares Daniel's hand in his own, draws him down to sit. No stones here beneath their feet, nothing but solid wood floors and Louis himself, playing tether.
"Talk to me. I'm here."
Shorthand for You're safe.
Or maybe, Everyone around us is safe from you.
Dual worries, things Louis would guess at but can't be certain are at the forefront of Daniel's mind without touching his thoughts. Is reluctant to do so without invitation or dire necessity, after Daniel has likely gone so long living with casual intrusion into his head at Armand's whims.
Daniel doesn't panic often. Not in his nature. Doesn't scare easy, responds well to stress. But his pulse has been slowly but steadily ticking up ever since leaving the place where Armand killed him, and now, trying to conceptualize returning to Brooklyn, it's a frantic beat like a thrashing bird's wings, and he's breathing too deep without exhaling for long enough, and his vision is starting to tunnel.
Classic signs. He attempts to identify the source so he can confront it. But, well.
The source seems to be everything.
"Maybe," he sounds unsteady, uncertain, "we could wait a day or two before leaving."
"Hey," soft, using a hand to reel Daniel in closer. Physical boundaries mutable in this moment, ever-evolving as they weather the toll this change is taking on Daniel. "We can stay."
Louis' hand finding the center of Daniel's back, smoothing slow circles there.
"I got a place," implies more comfort, more privacy, maybe better equipped for care and feeding of vampires than a lavish hotel. "Could post up there, send someone on ahead."
Though Louis isn't entirely sure it's the not knowing. But offers this, sweeping contact across Daniel's back, a murmur in his mind: Breathe. I got you.
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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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Unfortunate facts, and please. Shit has to get way more traumatic than dying for Daniel Molloy to not want to know something. There's no fucking way Louis' going to magic anything else away while Daniel sits quietly in the other room.
So. The clean up.
Having something to do, no matter how gruesome, centers him. A project to work on, take mental notes on, even as he occasionally spaces out due to sensory overload, or looks spooked because his hands are steady and it's starting to sink in how much pain he isn't in anymore. Neurons repairing themselves, or the elusive, half-theoretical lifelong neurogenesis is happening now, erasing or otherwise outpacing the flawed ones. Armand gave Daniel his blood instead of medication, while they were traveling, and maybe it kept Daniel slightly more stable than nothing, but it hadn't healed him like this. A mortal can't properly benefit from death. The damned work best with the damned.
By the time they're finished he's nearing the ability to say I'm okay and mean it.
A deep breath.
"What now?"
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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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The idea of home feels daunting. His apartment is far from sun-proof. What if he shows up thirty minutes before dawn? He's got blackout curtains, but how good are they? Has his editor reported him missing? Fucking declared him dead? Has anyone besides Louis noticed? Should he just 'die' now, or go work on the book?
Because
he's still going to write the book. Obviously.
The impression he got is that Louis is no longer as enthusiastic about the idea of publishing it (the whole laptop fire and whore number thing), but yeah, no, he's not complying with that, and figures Louis owes him for leaving him with Armand anyway, so it's fine. They'll be even.
Speaking of Louis, Daniel looks at him, and wonders if the longing he thinks he hears in him is imaginary, or... fucking mind reading. What's that about.
"What if I wanted you to keep me company for a while because I'm fucking lost?"
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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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He doesn't know why - he's not a touchy person, neither is Louis, he doesn't think - but he reaches out and grabs the other man's hand again.
Not totally to support the older vampire. Daniel is also freefalling a little still.
"Let's get the fuck out of here first, then."
Staying can come after. Daniel crams everything he has left into his abused suitcase, startles a little at picking it up (! weighs nothing ? cool), and then they can just... get out, and away, and he will try not to stop every three feet and stare up at the sky or out at the ocean.
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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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Because Armand sent everything back there, apparently. Bought him a different suitcase and clothes on the fly. He's not one hundred percent sure what all is in the shit that Armand (allegedly) sent off to his Brooklyn apartment— the ruins of his laptop, at least, but who knows what else. A part of him is itching to know. Did Armand post a dead cat in there? It could be fucking anything, the guy's got every mental illness known to humanity and probably a few extra ones no clinician has ever been confronted with.
"I don't think New Orleans is practical," he says. "I know you're an almost-billionaire, but the infrastructure from flooding and bad politics basically ensures you're exposed or stuck on a floating piece of driftwood at high noon within a year."
No awareness of where he picked up thoughts about New Orleans from, or that Louis hasn't said any of that out loud. Has not quite fished out Lestat, but they aren't talking about people, they're talking about where to go.
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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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(That'll be the thing, probably. Hunger he can cope with, to a degree, with his experience in the trenches of addiction. But the cascade of variables - power plus a potentially inherited knack plus curiosity plus his inherent journalistic aggression - will equal a harder impulse to control.)
If he gets an impression of Lestat as he looks back over at Louis, he doesn't realize what it is; doesn't even realize what he's doing. There are other people out at night, wandering in the late hours and scoping out scenery or heading towards early shifts at bakeries and so on— one of them is thinking loudly about a fight with her husband that turned violent, and Daniel flinches and looks over his shoulder, trying to sort out what jumped into his head.
"I, uh."
Christ. What the fuck. (Tired of thinking What the fuck.)
"You didn't keep that shitty apartment, did you?"
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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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So
having a normal time, tonight.
"That's funny."
He still has it. Daniel can go see it. Check if it's haunted or not. (With what? The ghost of things he can't remember? A poltergeist made of the junkie who should have died in the 70s?)
"What were you doing before this?"
New Orleans, something about New Orleans. Something about having to get home before the baby wakes up, but something something, he doesn't speak Italian. What? Daniel rubs the bridge of his nose.
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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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Is it surprising? A little, despite the fact that Armand had made it clear that's where Louis was, had berated Daniel for sending Louis back to someone who will eventually beat Louis half-dead again. Despite that, it's almost uplifting. Louis got to put some things together, get a resolution, for good or ill.
"Is he okay?"
This question comes out slower than is normal, for Daniel. He feels like he's speaking underwater, suddenly, trying to be heard over a crowd. Voices, thoughts, impressions trickle in, then flood, then stop, then surge up again like a wave, and the water is too loud, and a woman walking by is thinking in Spanish which means he actually understands her, and Louis is worried about being exasperating but Daniel doesn't know why he'd say that, and, and, and,
his hand over his forehead, now. He wants to know about Lestat, but also:
"How do I turn my head off?"
A weak question. Lost, exhausted, disoriented.
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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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Who cares about dying. Wasn't scared of Armand threatening him. What are you going to do, kill me, but that would have been easier than Armand's psychic tentacles in his head.
These thoughts bump into others, spinning around and outward, hearing, feeling, observing. It takes a second for him to find balance, using Louis as a fixed point, but he gets there.
Stay here, Louis says, and Daniel finally manages to get a decent grip on him.
'Think I'm gonna puke,' he warns Louis, though this is not the case. He might pass out, though.
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Louis' heart aches for it, for this resignation. For Daniel thinking he is going to die and accepting it, dispassionate. Still unable to consider a world without Daniel in it, even now that Louis is assured it will never come to pass. (Is this Armand's idea of a gift?) His fingers bracket Daniel's face, stood so close their breath mingles, noses brush, Louis disregarding personal space on the far side of the fountain.
Breathe, Louis instructs. They are no longer in a blood-soaked hotel room. The air is clean, the fountain behind them a waterfall of sound. Louis' mind opening up, steady. Familiar terrain, perhaps. There are only two others who might claim to know Louis as well or better than Daniel does.
Called it peeling back, when I first started out hearing them all around me, comes this murmur. I didn't think it'd come to you so fast. Peel back on me. I'll keep it quiet.
Louis, who wished for death so differently than Daniel did. Who turns the face of a gray-haired man in Daniel's mind back and forth, lets it drift beneath the surface of his thoughts.
Says aloud, "Use me to orient yourself, while you get your bearings."
While Louis tries to pluck up some relevant memory, something like instruction. Here is Lestat, pivoting round on a lamp-lit New Orleans street. Here is Armand, lounging in bed, eyes alert. Lessons overlapping, linked in Louis' mind.
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Thoughts of death and negotiation around it filter away. He stays with Louis, thinks of peeling — doesn't really work, someone nearby is thinking about potatoes and preparing them — tries something else. Then something else, then something else, and he sees Lestat, like he's there walking alongside them, disoriented and out of place, and he sees Armand—
Sitting with him in Dubai, aware Louis is asleep in the next room, talking to Daniel about solar power. It's a completely normal conversation, except for the way Armand is looking at him.
Gone, and it's just Louis and Daniel, in Venice, by a fountain. Daniel manages to close the fucking box around himself, and he takes a shuddering breath. Realizes he's holding on to Louis' sides again, probably clinging a little too intensely, but he can't make himself let go. He feels like he'll sink into the fucking abyss if he does.
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But he is aware of the process. How Daniel tries, tries again, troubleshooting. Something innate, skill Daniel has already in his possession, that severs himself from the drowning flood of mortal thought.
Louis' hands have shifted into his hair. Set their foreheads together. Daniel's hands are gripping tight at his waist, and Louis has not dislodged him. Senses Daniel to be steadier but not steady, and so remains. Their noses brush. Their breath rises and falls in time. A passing awareness of too close, set to the side.
"I got you," comes soft, reassuring. "And you got hold of it. You're still here."
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The prospect is as daunting as it is interesting.
Puking up his liver (or whatever) was much easier.
A shaky breath, then another, steadier one. So close to Louis, closer than he's been to anyone in... years, definitely. That thought is there, in the shelter of Louis' mind, and it's somewhat of a marvel until Daniel realizes what they must look like, Louis cradling some decrepit old man out in public in a fucking tourist hot spot, and he winces. Embarrassment colors his relief, and Daniel withdraws with a wry feeling of apology.
"I'm okay," he says, straightening up. Convincing himself that it's the truth, that he's okay. Repeats it. "I'm okay."
Maybe. Crosses his arms, self-soothing.
"If we could just. I dunno, get the fuck outta here, I guess."
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Louis must contend with the instinct he has now, which is to hold fast. To fold Daniel in against himself, clinging and close like that can dispel all the unsteadiness of transformation. Of walking into the world as something new.
Of how Daniel was vulnerable for so long, hurting for so long, alone with Armand.
Armand, who is now silent.
Louis lets go. (Recognizes, in some way, the thing that had lived in Daniel's face when Louis had made an offer to him months back, mid-interview.) Touches Daniel's cheek briefly, fingers light at his cheek before Louis too straightens. Finds some composure, so he might look less split open by their present circumstances.
"We can go."
Softly.
You don't have to be okay, as a whisper in the back of Daniel's mind. Louis' voice, private, just for Daniel, as they begin to walk once more. You don't have to be okay with me.
New Rashid is already collecting what little luggage Daniel has. Louis' hotel is not a far walk. (Lavish, old building, beautiful artwork upon the walls, a breath-taking view from the window.) They'll need only spend a few hours, long enough for a flight to New York to be arranged. They can simply go. Louis has so much money. It makes all things possible.
Almost.
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To that whisper. No way for him to know how to only send it in his mind, and so he says it out loud, despite hearing Louis internally.
"I just need to be okay."
For as much as he can, he trusts Louis. And he's grateful beyond expression for this rescue— because that's what it is. He's not sure that Armand would have ever let him go if they hadn't been followed. If there was no pressure, he expects he'd have just died of his illness, probably had a stroke from anxiety, or Armand would have lost his temper. The end.
Different end, now.
Louis is a safe haven. Daniel wants to cling to him, too. Doesn't know how. So: the hotel, and he thinks of getting on a flight, but realizes he ... can't. Not for logistical reasons. For other reasons, one that don't fit together right in his head. Flight, drive, escape, hotel, fleeing, arguing, flight, hotel. Does he have anything to go back to? Is there a point to New York?
"I think I'm having a panic attack," Daniel observes, tone mild.
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Privacy, for the moment.
"That's normal."
Maybe. The concept of a panic attack is relatively new. Louis had been turned under vastly different circumstance.
He snares Daniel's hand in his own, draws him down to sit. No stones here beneath their feet, nothing but solid wood floors and Louis himself, playing tether.
"Talk to me. I'm here."
Shorthand for You're safe.
Or maybe, Everyone around us is safe from you.
Dual worries, things Louis would guess at but can't be certain are at the forefront of Daniel's mind without touching his thoughts. Is reluctant to do so without invitation or dire necessity, after Daniel has likely gone so long living with casual intrusion into his head at Armand's whims.
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Classic signs. He attempts to identify the source so he can confront it. But, well.
The source seems to be everything.
"Maybe," he sounds unsteady, uncertain, "we could wait a day or two before leaving."
To think. To not think. He grips Louis' hand.
"I don't know what I'm going back to."
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Louis' hand finding the center of Daniel's back, smoothing slow circles there.
"I got a place," implies more comfort, more privacy, maybe better equipped for care and feeding of vampires than a lavish hotel. "Could post up there, send someone on ahead."
Though Louis isn't entirely sure it's the not knowing. But offers this, sweeping contact across Daniel's back, a murmur in his mind: Breathe. I got you.
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🎀 territory?? unless you had further desires