followups | so, when you come back

What are they, to each other? Difficult to conceptualize friends, after living so long without any. Daniel can't even blame bitterness with old age, or illness— he's never been any good at maintaining friendships. He treats people like puzzles, he forgets to be emotionally present, he can't prioritize anyone over work. And now, no longer human, it's even stranger.

Not companions, not coven, not family, not tied by the bonds of shared blood. Maybe friend is a good fit. The only real one Daniel's ever had. Louis is singular enough in the world already without that dubious honor, but all the same.

"To everyone's great horror, the tour is being filmed."

Daniel sounds almost fond, despite himself. Lestat does not qualify as a friend, but he's fucking something. Every once in a while they even get along.

"It'll be a great documentary and you'll be off the hook about a sequel, if any of us live. But if you want early spoilers..."

In short: Louis gets to pick, tour or dreams. Whatever he's most comfortable hearing about.

Everyone's horror? Louis has his doubts. Surely it's the sort of thing that might appeal to Lestat, or would have, once.

Louis worries. Struggles over to how ask without being invasive, whether Lestat is still as fragile as Louis had found him. If Daniel might be just a little gentle, just this once. A late request, but maybe Daniel would indulge him.

Put aside anyway, because Louis had promised himself not to interfere.

"No," Louis decides. "He shouldn't have to worry about my reactions to your work together."

Which is what Louis really means when he considers privacy. Lestat allowed to say whatever it is he feels, and Louis will absorb it all whenever it becomes available on streaming. Or whatever medium Daniel chooses.

The papers are shuffled, stacked. Louis occupies the seat diagonal, an echo of their interview. Elegant still in how he settles himself, crosses one leg over his knee. Color in his wardrobe, deep oxblood cardigan tonight laying bare his collarbones, sleeves rolled back off his wrists.

A weighing moment. Does Louis want to be off the hook?

"Tell me about the rest then."

The rest. Not the interview. The dreams. The raucous nights out that keep making it into articles that Rashid inserts in Louis' workflow. Dealer's choice.

Edited 2024-11-03 16:51 (UTC)

Little sparks of curiosity, not all of it innocent (curiosity isn't inherently good, or anything). But Daniel isn't here to prod at Louis' seams— that's behind them, and the road ahead is still... whatever they make of it. And there's a road ahead for Louis and Lestat, too. Which is, despite the meddling he's neck-deep in most days, not actually any of his business.

"Maybe I'm going nuts," is what he ends up saying. Decides for dreaming, instead of anything else. Tales of partying are kind of a whatever, and holding their own potential for memory issues, though granted, for far more mundane, self-inflicted reasons. Turns out vampires can still get blackout drunk. "Just imagining things, my brain trying to fill in the gaps. I try not to think about San Fransisco, but sometimes I go through the whole thing again while I'm asleep."

As though sleeping during the day has had some kind of additional supernatural effect on him, conjuring up the past that his mortal mind had forced to forget. Or maybe being severed from Armand telepathically has made it freer, more accessible, but requiring subconscious contact first.

Or, and this is the most likely explanation, these new edits are simply not real.

"Blank, in places where it was always blank, but sometimes..." Daniel shrugs.

Louis' attention sharpens as Daniel speaks. Daniel holds his focus, will always hold his focus, just as Daniel will always have permission to pry at his seams, to turn up unannounced, to crowd in to Louis' life because there always is and always will be space for him. There will always be some honesty between them that has been hard won and fifty years in the making.

Daniel describes this and Louis says:

"I understand."

Sometimes, there is a hazy shape of something. A memory. Something Louis has no names for and only the blurriest recollection of. A thing he can guess at but can't grasp.

"Maybe it's a benefit of your transportation," is only a guess. "Your mind repairing itself the way your body has."

Or maybe just something intrinsic in Daniel, a human gift made stronger in death.

"You don't have to describe it to me," is meant as a kindness. Nothing in that room would be easy to recover. What they pieced together between the two of them was a horror. Louis suppresses the urge to pry after what Daniel has, what only he and Armand could ever know. No one but the three of them in a room. All of it recovered only because of Daniel, tugging at loose threads.

Louis and the historical documents, trying to put together all his missing pieces. A comedy.

He lets out a breath. A relief to have someone who understands, and further that Louis doesn't clam up. He'd be well within his rights to say he doesn't want to talk about any of it, that he wants to just move on. Daniel has felt that way sometimes, and wrestled with it. But here he is, having come to the conclusion that he just hasn't unpacked it enough, and he'll probably have to. With or without Louis.

Though with would be nice.

"You know, in some vampire fiction, vampire blood makes them physically younger. Speaking of my body repairing itself."

Raw deal!! He still looks old!! No fair at all. But he offers this with dry humor, not about to actively complain about anything to Louis. Heaven fucking forbid he get caught in the riptide of guilt.

"But I don't know. Am I seeing newly recovered snippets, a picture starting to fill itself in, or am I making shit up in my sleep because I spend so much time while I'm awake ... worrying about you, worrying about Armand, even. Differently, of course. But still."

"You don't need to be worrying about me."

No one has even taken a run at him this week.

Of course, no word on what kind of worry should be directed at Armand. There is a ragged tear in Louis where Armand came away from him, a wound that inspired pain and anger and regret by turns, but never quiets.

Daniel doesn't need to hear about that though.

Louis moves on, suggesting, "I don't know. Lestat might. I'm limited in my understanding of the mind gift."

Of how its workings may deteriorate over time. Whether Daniel's curiosity alone is enough to wear at the edges until he can gather glimpses of what was obscured or altered.

"Does it feel real, what you've been dreaming?"

"Well, I care about you, and my other methods of caring about people are leaving them alone for their own good, or bribery."

So, worry it is. Mirrors in their own ways. Louis' wounds from Armand are significantly worse than Daniel's, so much that Daniel can't conceptualize them, not really, not the depth. And yet he's still got these fucked up entry wounds in his soul from the guy, so here he is, circling the drain infinitely about what the fuck do I do about it.

Then he pulls a face, about the idea of telling Lestat. Absolutely not, apparently.

"Sometimes." He knows that word isn't helpful, but it's all he's got. "As much as dreams can, where it just could be, and other times I forget it's a dream at all, until I wake up. I mostly see you. We're both fucked up and I'm trying to make you laugh. I think I'm going to die, I think you're probably going to die. You've told me to hang on but there are moments when I'm not being actively hypnotized and it's, you know."

He's in a shitty apartment with a dying monster and a very alive one who wants to kill him.

"I think Armand left to get me a sandwich, at one point. I was probably going to die from lack of nutrients after the blood loss after a few days. So I was locked in the room with you. Does that sound real?"

Does that sound real?

Louis' expression has lost all of the easy warmth with which they began this conversation. The look he wears now must be familiar; it is the same expression he wore in Dubai, across the table, listening as Daniel methodically laid out which pieces he had, what he had made of them, looked to Louis to fill in the rest. Tension and focus and a flex of worry. Not for himself.

Daniel is still so young. Young for a vampire. Young even in comparison to Louis, who had lived out lifetimes before Daniel had ever grown old.

But they are not in that room. There is no one who will stop them piecing through what's been lost but them.

Louis draws a breath. A little restless tic of movement works through his body. Readjusting the cross of his legs, his perch on the edge of the cushion, drawn unconsciously closer as Daniel speaks.

"I haven't dreamt that."

Only enough to know his fears of missing pieces are real. To know that things have been lost, or taken from him, and that Daniel and his tapes won't recover them.

Daniel is asking him about that room. Louis closes his eyes.

"But it sounds real," comes softly, slowly. "I remember..."

A door closing. A hand rattling at the lock. Sunlight filtering through newspaper. An agonized groan that could have been him, might have been Daniel.

"I remember your voice," Louis admits. "Closer than I thought you should be."

Acclimated to Daniel in the main room, his screams and moans of pain carrying through the sometimes locked, sometimes open door. But the discrepancy Louis worries at now, like plucking at a loosened thread, rolling it between fingers.

"I dreamed you were blocking the sun."

After a minute of watching Louis' drawn face, and suddenly feeling quite bad for barging in here and dumping this on him (Daniel has been more wound up about it than he realizes, unable to slow his roll with verbal puke about it), he reaches out. A warning touch first, a brush of fingers against Louis', before he squeezes his hand.

Comfort, apology.

"So have I just implanted a false memory in you?"

The trouble with this kind of shit, is that there is so much trouble with this kind of shit.

"I don't know if I'd have known to do that. I'd like to think so, though. I'd do it now."

"I don't think you meant to do it," Louis says slowly, lacing their fingers together. Taking that small touch and turning it into a link, holding on as he explains, "Or that I was able to think to ask you. You were standing beside the bed, and you cast a shadow across me."

Is it all a dream? A story they're telling themselves?

It feels real. The shape of a thing that fits into the pain-blurred voids they hadn't managed to parse out in the span of a single lunch break.

Louis turns Daniel's fingers in his own, thumb moving across his knuckles, grip tightening and loosening by turns. Familiar. Tethering, while Louis' thoughts turn inwards by degrees.

"I don't know if it's false. It feels real."

And then:

"You're the only other person in the world who would know. And you're better at this. Putting together what we lost."

"Yeah. He probably just told me to go in there and stay."

No conscious positioning, everything incidental, until Daniel laid down because the Lovecraft monster was no longer controlling his body, but he was too exhausted and in pain to do anything else. Desperately in need of actual rest, and not the kind that came from invisible tentacles in his fucking brain.

Daniel's hand feels inelegant, next to Louis'. Thick fingers warped with age, nimble again now but no more attractive for it; nails a little longer than he'd like, but he supposes they echo his fangs. Strange, all of it. Not unwelcome. Nothing's perfect, especially not death, but it beats the way life was.

"I just have perspective. You didn't know there was any other way to look at it."

Inhale, exhale.

"If you don't want to be bogged down by all this..."

A tightening of Louis' fingers around Daniels. Uses their fingers as a link, levering himself closer, head shaking.

"You aren't bogging me down."

No hesitation. Firm over the words, intending to dispel any instinct Daniel might have to withhold.

"I want to be here with you."

Even when here required them to be there. Who else had this perspective? Who else could understand even a fraction of what Louis is struggling with? Pieces of him, missing. Pieces of him simply gone, excised over decades. He'd never known. He wants to know now.

"It's good to be here. With you. To see you here."

And not just in that apartment, in that room, in his dreams and invasive flashes now and again as he tries to go about his nightly life. Louis is real, he's alright, he's not a charred corpse, he's not back under Armand's thumb, he doesn't have to hear him scream and beg from the other side of a closed door.

Whatever happened, more or less or whatever they remember or don't, it's behind them, and they're here. Daniel squeezes his hand. His lifeline, since then.

"I promise I'll eventually get over needing to check in with you in person. No ETA on when, though."

Maybe it'll take a hundred years. Louis' stuck with him.

"I'm not complaining," Louis promises. "I like to see you."

Missed you, Daniel had said. Louis hadn't said it back. He should. Daniel is intuitive, but Louis has learned not to leave some sentiments to the intuition of others.

And now he has this memory, coming into clearer focus. Daniel, on the bed beside him. Agony and comfort mingling together at his closeness, the nearness of his body jostling Louis' charred limbs but too much of a comfort to forgo. Real. It's real. Louis knows it in his body, truth like it had been truth in Dubai when Daniel dragged the reality of that week out of the dark.

"How long can you stay before the tour beckons you back?" Louis asks. "Long enough to sort through a few more dreams with me?"

He doesn't know why he needs to know about those liminal spaces in his memory concerning that week. He should probably want to forget the awful details, at least, and leave himself armed with just the awareness. But he can't stop digging. Even when it turns into harm, he just can't fucking let things go.

Trying to, for the moment. This surprise attack on Louis' peace is enough, and Daniel feels like some strange pressure has been bled out of him for it. He's left feeling grateful, but definitely sheepish.

"A few weeks." Maybe more. Maybe less, if he gets a hysterical phone call, but that'll only happen if Lestat figures out who he's with. "What are you doing here, anyway? — Should have been what I led with, probably."

"I wondered if you already knew."

It wouldn't have surprised Louis if Daniel had guessed at what he had been working on.

His thumb runs along Daniel's knuckles, fidgets lightly with the hand caught in his grasp. Should let go. Holds on anyway.

"I've been looking for the pieces I'm missing," Louis admits. "In my mind, there's..."

A trailing shrug of an implication. Maybe Daniel knows. Maybe it's the same for Louis as it is for Daniel, thinking of that room in San Francisco and feeling places where the story lapses. Where they cobbled together enough, but not everything.

"I think there's memories that are gone. I've been trying to recover them."

And then, a smile, head tipping slightly as Louis adds, "Lestat thinks it's a kind of vacation. I haven't corrected him."

Doesn't want to worry him, distract from the interview, the tour. It's Louis' problem to fix. Lestat has his own to occupy him.

"Oh."

Real surprise. Daniel wonders at it. Coincidence alone, or was there some subconscious call between them, drawn to the same missing pieces? Well. It's not like there will be memories of Daniel anywhere besides San Fransisco, so probably coincidence. He doesn't have anyone else to go to about it (except Armand, but he's out of the question).

Louis might, he realizes. He could uncover any number of people. A slightly sick thought, and probably nothing compared to how Louis feels about it.

"He misses you. He'll live, though."

Sentimentality and assurance offered at once. Daniel does not mention that Lestat loathes his association with Louis and passionately hates that they have a past connection, because there's no point. He gets it, anyway. And as dangerous as Lestat is, as fucked up as his relationship with Louis was (is), there's a part of him that wonders if either of his marriages would have lasted longer if one of them went really, really crazy over it. If it wouldn't have been romantic.

"What brought you here specifically?"

"I miss him."

What does it cost him to say this to Daniel? Daniel, who cut through all the stories Louis told himself for almost eighty years to find this truth.

A little smile, head tipping as he contemplates Daniel. Daniel who Louis doesn't need to miss, because he is here. Who Louis will miss when he goes, because he doesn't expect Daniel to stay when he is a newly made vampire and the entire world is laid open at his feet.

Contemplations Louis moves past to devote himself to Daniel's question.

"We lived here, for a time," Louis tells him. Something he guesses Daniel knows, because he found his way here. "I thought I would find something left behind."

Something. Someone. Louis keeps the feeling to himself, the terrible, aching swoop as he contemplates what's been taken from him. How he was kept, things excised from him over the passing years.

"I've been looking at documents. It hasn't been very enlightening," he admits. "So you're a welcome interruption."

Yeah no shit

would not be a nice thing to say, even with a fond smile, and so he doesn't. Significant to hear Louis admit it out loud. He spent the entirety of two interviews talking about Lestat, for good or ill. A mutual obsession. Daniel wants Louis to be happy and safe. He wonders if those are mutually exclusive things, but he hopes not.

"Do you have day to day, or night to night would be a better way to put it, recollection of things tied to the papers you're going through?"

He leans in to see what Louis is looking at. Sorting out gothic romances is beyond him. But this. Getting the story straight is something he can help with.

Yielding his grasp on Daniel's hand, the contact lingering before Louis accepts that they are breaking fully from each other. Contenting himself to the way Daniel leans closer, interested in something Louis is certain is of limited interest.

"No," he admits. "I have...pieces. And these are financials, not diaries."

A boon, maybe. Armand might have doctored a diary, but the record of where Louis' money had been going seems more or less untouched.

"I thought I'd look through local archives. Hope for something to jog my memory."

Body counts. Extravagance. The kind of tragedies tailored to cover up a vampire who had lost control.

"Or for your friends to make an appearance."

A sly, needling look. Invoking the Talamasca.

"Unobjective paper trails are better."

No wishy washy nonsense like does this feel real. Does Louis remember buying this thing, on that day? Can he remember the circumstances? Who worked for him at the time, how long were they on payroll, at what point did staff change, were they discharged and mindwiped, forced into NDAs, killed? Did they pay taxes?

A wealth of information and potential reminders. Good call, Louis. Daniel is busy looking at his financials when he realizes he's being looked at, glances up, laughs a little.

"Hey, you had the chief butler as a spy long before they tried to rope in my inept ass. I was so bad at it that Armand noticed me, thought I had maybe been contacted by them, but then after he looked into it, decided I was just fumbling like a moron and he was imagining things."

Fun.

"But, I do have a bunch of their shit, still, if you want me to look up any dates in particular."

Difficult, hearing Armand invoked. Pressure upon bruising, pain that comes from within the body.

Louis is here partly because of Armand. What Armand neatly snipped out of his mind. (What Louis willingly discarded, perhaps.) They shared a life for seventy-seven years. Louis chose him. Louis had believed him, when he had said Yes in answer to that fateful question.

Daniel is smiling. Daniel laughed, and Louis likes hearing him laugh very much. He lets these things offset the spiraling cascade of thoughts in his head, circuitous and guilt-drenched and angry, and draw him back.

"I could make a list," is only a stop on the way to: "Are they still hoping to rope you in?"

Or is it disqualifying, the vampirism?

Armand is a sore spot for Daniel, too, differently. Little needles of it, like one of those inner ear headaches, adn sometimes literal nightmares. He has a re-occurring one of Armand in his wine-colored shirt in the 'reading room' of the Dubai penthouse, sitting calmly across from Daniel, not letting him turn his head to the sight of his youngest daughter being immolated; all he can do, in the dream, is see the flames in peripheral, and hear her scream.

But he pokes at it anyway. A constant source of low-level stress. A permanent tether.

"A list would be a great start." Because he actually will look it up for Louis. Then, hm. He shrugs. "Sometimes. They've made pitches."

Attempts at begging, attempts at intimidation. But Daniel was almost impossible to wrangle into cooperation as a mortal, and now, it's basically impossible. He will do whatever he wants to do.

"It's interesting to me, their whole gig. I just hate the secrecy and I hate the drama."

"The drama," Louis echoes. Amused. Fond.

Watches Daniel's fingers on documents containing years of Louis' money, moving in and out of accounts. Assets multiplying. The accounts of this household, the accounts of what it cost when Louis and Armand lived here and hunted here and careened wildly through the streets.

"What will you do instead?"

Louis won't hold his attention forever. Even this, the piecing together Louis is attempting, is limited in scope for a man who can do as he wishes, seek answers more incisively than he had ever done as a mortal. The quiet pleasure at his company is limited, Louis reminds himself. Daniel will return, first to Lestat's tour, and then to whatever work draws his attention.

Louis will be pleased to read it all, as he has for long years.

"Yeah, the spy drama." Sifting papers. Already putting them in a different order. "Spies are only good to talk to after they've retired. The active ones all suck. The one they sent to finesse me in Dubai is still sending me sad 'hey baby' messages like I'm an idiot."

Like Daniel did not spend a year literally embedded with 'ex' KGB. Please, Raglan.

"Finish projects I'd stopped working on because I got sick. Still got a limited window."

Maybe he should fuck Raglan. A guy might shake things up, particularly given Daniel is still adamantly heterosexual. Being able to have sex again has been great, even though fucking humans while inhuman is a sometimes-dicey situation, already tipping towards a pattern he recognizes. Less and less fulfilling each time, like every hit of something really bad is less and less good with each high. Be with your own kind, some nagging animal instinct calls, and to that he says Fuck off. Because: no. He's not doing the companion thing, and he's not seeking out anyone who might want to take his head off for publishing the book.

If he thinks about things sometimes—

Daniel misses Louis, Louis misses Lestat.

It's not that Louis wouldn't be worth the attempt. But Daniel would lose, and badly, and he knows that. Sometimes dreams aren't memories, they're just dreams. Armand in the reading room, looking at him. Armand in the reading room, a touch sliding over his shoulder that's sensual for a moment before it turns. His daughter burning, and Louis, reaching for him.

Just dreams.

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