followups | so, when you come back

It may be unfair, too, for Daniel to have demolished Louis' life. He never asked him if he wanted out, if he wanted the truth. It's only Daniel who thinks the truth is paramount even when it's made of nothing but pain and suffering. Maybe that's the love of his live. Truth, all the horrible parts of it.

So this is where he says, I also had this other dream, right, because truth.

Of course not, that would be weird.

"What do you want to do, for right now?"

A smile bending into Louis' expression. Some private amusement. What does he want to do? Many things that are perhaps a poor idea, impulsive and reckless in ways Louis hasn't been in years. Had sheared away over time and is surprised to find the roots have survived deep in his body.

"Come lay down with me," is not exactly a clear answer as to what Louis wants or wishes to do. His palm lays softly, briefly, across Daniel's cheek, before his hand drops and Louis uses the tether of their fingers to draw Daniel to his feet as he rises.

The request is so unexpected that it manages to short-circuit Daniel long enough that he stands without resistance. Staring at Louis in a way that makes it clear he's trying to process whether or not he actually heard what he thinks he heard. Replaying it in his head, he realizes: yes, Louis did say that.

Hey what!

What!!

The expression on his face is comically youthful, eyes wide and scandalized. 'Kiddo' jokes not clearing after all.

"Are you tired?"

The dumbest question in the world.

Rare to ever truly stun Daniel. Daniel who had been talking and talking through the first reveal of Louis' fangs. Who had received the entirety of Louis' story nearly in stride.

"No," is mostly true. Louis is tired, but not the kind of tired that requires a nap. He is tired of the business of piecing together his own mind, his own history.

But that's nothing to do with his request, not really.

"I want to lay down with you."

Half an intention. Maybe it goes no farther than the two of them in the lavishly appointed guest bedroom, because Louis closed the door to the one he'd shared with Armand when he'd emerged at dusk, and has no desire to lead Daniel over the threshold now.

"Is that alright?"

Daniel has a say in this, of course.

He thinks, well, he had offered a hug, meant obviously as comfort for the bad weather in Louis' head. Despite that, it does feel like mixed messages— cold dismissal in San Fransisco, a mocking offer in Dubai. But this doesn't have to be anything more than a hug, somewhere else. Even if it's strange. Daniel supposes there's going to be quite a lot of strange things between them, undefined as they are. Louis hasn't been human in a century, Louis has been living in a psychic dollhouse for nearly as long.

There aren't established boundaries for connections like this. No playbook. Maybe not even between vampires. How often does this happen?

"Yeah, it's alright."

Daniel silently vows to try not to embarrass himself. Confidence in avoiding it entirely is low, but might as well give it a shot.

This structure is smaller than the Dubai penthouse. Quieter, lacking the mournful groan that had become so much a part of Louis' nights that he'd ceased to notice it.

Of course, until Daniel had arrived. And then he had noticed Daniel's noticing, and the sound had been made new to him again.

Here, Louis leads Daniel by the link of their fingers from the main room with its lovely windows and tastefully worn furniture. More color in this place than Dubai as well, though the beginnings of its absence can be seen. Walls washed clean, stripped of natural woods, a blank canvas upon which paintings must once have been displayed.

They leave Louis' paperwork, financial touchstones from decades ago, in Daniel's assortment on the table. Louis pushes open the door to the guest bedroom. Brings Daniel along with him to the sprawl of bed.

"I can have a coffin brought for you, while you stay, if you didn't bring your own." Louis murmurs, loosening his grasp only so he might recline, settle himself onto pillows against the headboard. This too, not so far removed from the understated luxury of Dubai. The markings of a shift in shared design sensibilities. He reaches a hand back out to Daniel, inviting.

Asks, "Will you tell me about your dream?"

A little like asking to see a puzzle piece. A little like asking for permission to test its fit.

"I bought one online ahead of time and had it delivered to my hotel," Daniel says, about coffins. He'd dragged one around a bit for the book tour until he realized he was being a fucking idiot. He's rich now, he can have five hundred coffins wherever he goes and he can have custom enclosures built at home. Working smarter.

Trying not to appear so cautious as to be offputting, Daniel is peeling off his jacket - suboptimal for whatever's going on here - when Louis questions him.

"More about my dreams of San Fransisco?"

He hasn't mentioned any others. A thread of nervousness. Has Louis been...

"I know you don't have a TV in here to throw a movie on, but that's kind of a bleak alternative."

"We'll have it brought here," delivered in a kind of easy dismissal of Daniel staying in a hotel. Yes, yes, he's very rich, but he's here because of Louis. Louis can offer him the guest room.

The unspoken query: why be apart at all?

Because Daniel will go back to Lestat and the tour and the interview and Louis will go back to his search, to the war he's started. They have two weeks.

Louis hitches an ankle up. Watches Daniel, intent.

"I know," doesn't contradict. It is hardly light conversation. "But I want to hear what you dreamed. I want to see if we can remember it together. You only told me part of it, earlier."

Something occurs to him. He's glad he came out here, and now. Louis' readiness for his privacy to be invaded suggests he could really use the company, and it calms something in Daniel. Washing away some of the insecurity. He's still uncertain about what's going on, here, but willing to forge ahead.

He wants—

Is he allowed? Is it a good idea?

Daniel sits on the edge of the bed. Louis watches him, and Daniel watches him back.

"Some of it... you wouldn't have seen. Maybe heard a little."

This will be a pattern: Armand, that person-shaped wound they share, which is far worse for Louis when it's agitated. He listened to the tapes again and again. He eventually remembered Daniel would need food and water. He waited until his body had made enough new blood cells before he attempted to drain him.

Louis is still, listening. Watching.

Remembering.

A moment where a memory of a dream of Lestat comes to his mind, the sweet encouragement of Tell me, mon cher. Tender in a way Louis feels now, as Daniel looks at him, begins this recitation.

"I wasn't all there sometimes. It was harder during the day."

To be lucid. To stay in his body when he was burning and burning and burning, agony exacerbated by laying beneath windows papered in nothing but newspaper to block the sun.

"Sometimes I heard you."

Because Daniel would be screaming, agony loud enough to carry through the door that was sometimes open, often closed. Armand had stopped screaming, by then.

Louis' hand stretches along the coverlet, maintaining the invitation. A silent Come here open, for Daniel to bend towards to whatever extent he feels inclined to indulge.

"I know."

About daytime. Daniel remembers - has been remembering, over the time they've been apart - the feeling of dawn, how it turned from Will it be over now? to I'm alone with him now, aware that it meant Louis would fall silent. Just him and the boyfriend and his horrible eyes.

Daniel has the same eyes, now.

He toes his shoes off, and moves up onto the bed properly. Accepting the invitation and sitting close to Louis, hand going to his.

"I felt like it was my fault. I think I apologized to you."

"You were very young."

Words almost to himself, even as Louis feels some specific attachment to the thing Daniel is putting voice to. How an argument within a marriage could feel like it was his fault, his responsibility to fix.

Of course, this is very different from the du Lac household. This was not Daniel's fault. It has been Louis'.

His eyes open. Louis had closed them as Daniel turned attention to his shoes, as he levered up into the bed. Let himself feel it. See what the sensation shook loose.

"It wasn't your fault," Louis tells him now. "Did I tell you that?"

How could Daniel even have known that Louis ran into the sun? He'd been bleeding out. A gap of time that existed only on the tapes: Daniel, unconscious and bleeding on the floor. Daniel, hauled upright while Louis screamed from the next room.

Things got heated with a boy, it's morning, the tapes, wake the boy and you go, then becoming a talisman meant to preserve a companionship. Maitre, a horrible, fragile voice that made Daniel wake up from the hypnosis Armand had finally managed to lure him down into (he was so fucking tired, he didn't want to agree, but it had been days by then, he was so tired). Louis, sitting there instead, and he was burned and he was the one who'd ripped his throat out but Daniel was so, so relieved to see him.

"I don't remember what you told me."

Not an admission he's happy to make, but—

"It was later. I remember.. pieces of us walking. I don't remember what I was thinking. Probably nothing. You were on one side of me, and I felt like shit, and I knew you felt like shit."

Armand was carrying most of their combined weight, no matter that Louis was on Daniel's other side. They were both shattered, still, and the sense-memory of it is that they were clinging to each other to a degree that was mismatched for the situation. Daniel was out of his mind, but he still... He thinks he still tipped his head down against Louis', whispered, Hey, I'm sorry.

And Louis...?

He doesn't know. He was so far under, then, about to be deposited in the crack house, with the rest of the trash.

Maybe Louis hadn't said anything. Couldn't say anything. He'd played all the cards he'd had to play, turning Armand from Daniel's throat and the promise of an easy death. Maybe Daniel had said this thing and Louis had said nothing back.

He'd like to think he'd murmured something. But he just doesn't know.

A slight shift, setting hip to hip without disturbing the relaxed sprawl of his limbs across the bedding. The dig of heel against the coverlet. His thumb strokes over and over Daniel's knuckles, listening. Thinking.

"It hurt to carry you."

Clarity. Memory, not conjecture. Louis barely healed, still a horrendous sight beneath the hooded sweatshirt he'd tugged up over his healing face. Every step had jostled Daniel between them. All Louis' breaths had been sharp hisses of pain, but he'd clung tighter as they'd walked.

"Hurt more when I let you go."

Harder to tell if this is a memory or only what Louis knows to be true of himself, reasoned through with what he has of that night and knowing it to be a likely outcome.

"Tell me about when he left. What you dreamed of us in a room."

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."

Louis had been so badly burned. Exquisite, Armand had correctly described the pain. But Daniel says this and shakes loose a little sense memory: cool fingers, hesitantly set to his face.

"I'm not sure I realized you were really there at first."

The combination of the daytime, the newspaper-filtered light exacerbating his pain, lending a layer of unreality to the sense of Daniel on the bed beside him. It had taken everything in him to turn on the mattress towards him.

"I wanted you to run," slowly, feeling out the words. Truth. "I remember your blood, and how hurt you felt."

The scent of him had lingered, even when Daniel had been extricated from the bed and bidden to eat, drink. To live, so Armand could continue on with their sentence.

"I think I told you to try to sleep."

And maybe it would have felt like a joke too, offering Daniel actual sleep instead of what Armand had been pushing onto him. Rest like a sledgehammer, like a hand forcing Daniel's head down beneath the sea of his own exhaustion. Louis had been in too much pain to sleep, had been too overcome with the selfish comfort of Daniel laid alongside him in the ash-flecked sheets, but Daniel could have slept. Might have. Louis has trouble recalling what came next.

"You didn't even know me, I imagine it was pretty weird, on top of everything else."

Some kid from a bar. Louis had taken 'home' so many. Suddenly one was still there, was brutalized, while Louis was slowly burning to death. Daniel remembers the smell, and the heat of him. Once he'd finally figured out what had happened, he thought—

"I couldn't sleep," he says. "I was too terrified. I think I asked you why you weren't in the shower in an ice bath, or something, but you were asleep then, I'm sure. Maybe I was blocking the light well enough."

Just a little from the newspaper-gauze windows, but Daniel had still between between Louis and the wall, shielding him. He thought of safety PSAs in school. You were supposed to hold a burn under running water, because it might still be burning inside your skin. But Armand had just left Louis there.

"I'm glad you survived." Daniel reaches out, touches Louis' cheek in a mirror of how he'd touched Daniel on the sofa. "I know you know. I hope you know. But I might not have ever said."

A half-settled thought coming together in Louis' mind: not asleep, he had never been able to sleep in that bed, but drowsing; there was just the barest relief in Daniel's body blocking even a fraction of the light coming in and the way he was touching Louis, the sound of his voice and his heartbeat, how near he was, unmistakably alive.

Then Daniel says this thing, and it takes Louis by surprise.

What a complicated sentiment. Complicated for its in-betweenness. Had Daniel been glad then that the monster that had dragged him into danger was still alive then? Maybe. Maybe because Louis had been able to save him, in the end. Maybe because they are something to each other now, because it is clearer that those days in that apartment linked them in ways more intrinsic than they could have known when Louis invited Daniel to leave the bar together.

Had Louis known Daniel felt this? Maybe. But it is different, hearing it said aloud.

Louis watches him silently, taking in the familiarity of his face, the newness of his eyes. Reaches up to cover Daniel's hand with his own, turn his head to kiss the center of his palm.

"Because—"

Does he need a reason? Is he lifting Louis' surprise, or is it just that Daniel is incapable of shutting up for long? The latter, probably.

"You're you. And now that I know you, now that I remember everything." His breath catches when Louis kisses his palm. He doesn't know what that means. It's not a platonic, friendly move, but he still has these incidents in his mind: banished to putting his shirt back on, the completely untenable 'offer' at the dining room table. And a dream is just a dream.

"I couldn't go through with this vampire shit if I didn't at least know you were out here. Everything else is screwing around. Being able to bother you in the middle of the night makes it real. I hope you feel real, too, now."

Words that chime against something in the back of his head, stir loose memory like silt. Real. Does he feel real?

Louis' head lifts.

"I'm always here, when it's you. You're always welcome in my head."

No small offer. Who else can say the same? Claudia, gone. Lestat, unable. Armand, who had once been trusted above all others, now barred.

But Daniel—

"You help me feel real again. I felt like I wasn't. So much was missing..."

San Francisco, yes. But emotion. Color. Daniel brought all of those things back to him. Shattered Louis back into the world, disrupted long decades of stasis.

Real. Louis holds that in his palm. Let's it unspool there, a memory of a mid-morning, of a conversation Louis only half recalls.

"You're real. We are. It happened and we know now, and the rest— You'll find it."

Earnest. Daniel believes this. If they can shake loose 1973, then Louis can find anything, everything he's looking for— even if it just turns out to be that nothing is missing, and he gains proof of that, and peace of mind. Daniel rubs Louis' cheek with his thumb. (Thinks about the kiss pressed to him, searing the center of his palm. Thinks about dreams.)

"And I'm not going to ever let you go quiet. I'll always be around to annoy the shit out of you and make sure you're here, and not reading our book, and rolling your eyes at me from afar. Or this."

Whether it's shouting at him from the other side of the planet or tracking him down. Stuck with each other. Forged in stupid ideas and drugs and misery and this lifeline they've drawn. Louis who prevented Daniel from dying in the next crack house, Daniel who prevented Louis from losing his free will permanently.

I was lost, Louis had told Lestat. He is still a little lost, unmoored in the vast possibility of the future sprawling out before him. (The worst days: when he feels so alone within it that he misses Armand. Misses what had been good between them, amidst the problems that had been slowly diminished and diminished until Louis couldn't have named them.) Daniel's fingers are warm, and their hearts don't beat in time but it is a complimentary rhythm all the same.

Or this, Daniel says, and Louis' expression softens, looking back at him across the pillow. Real fondness for Daniel, annoying and insightful and just as stubborn as Louis. Fondness for the promise of having these things always.

"I'm glad you came," Louis tells him. "I'm glad you're here."

And even in the deep, painful snarl of emotion that surrounds the circumstances of Daniel's turning, Louis can appreciate this: the thing he'd hoped for, Daniel's long life extended, his illness erased. Eternity in which they might know each other.

A pause. A breath drawn beneath the sweep of Daniel's thumb.

"I have been so," a break. A small smile, Louis' hand hooking restlessly at Daniel's lapel. "I have been so glad you're alive. That you didn't throw away my letter and ignore my invitation."

Daniel would have been entitled to that. Louis would have accepted it, felt the disappointment like a knife until he stopped feeling anything at all. You're real, Daniel reminds him, quieter here than he had been—

Than he had been there, Louis remembers. A fragment of something turning over in his head.

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?"

Louis glad he did. He is sorry he did. Both by turns, depending on how near the reality of what Armand must have done in his absence is to Louis' thoughts. It lingers now, as Daniel smiles a wavering little smile back at him.

Feels it in his chest, this thing Daniel tells him. Fifty years. Fifty years of Daniel dreaming him. Fifty years of Louis missing him, following him through paper and ink and never considering anything more.

"You."

And then, more specifically:

"Did you ask me..."

A trailing quiet, Louis ordering his thoughts. Circling around a soft spot in his mind, an incision so neat Louis may never have realized it was there.

"Did you ask me before, if I felt real?"

Stops and starts. Daniel wants to pull him closer and hold him. Daniel wants to get up and put distance between them. This feels good and it feels confusing, too. (Lestat, in one of his spirals, firing until he hits something, asks Are you in love with him? and Daniel makes himself say No, and Lestat laughs at him. It's spiteful and mocking but it's afraid, too, and it just makes Daniel ashamed.)

Did he?

Daniel's gaze darts away. Confusion and something else, embarrassment?

"I think I really am implanting false memories," he says. "I have nightmares about—"

Armand, killing my kids

"Doesn't matter. Impossible shit that I know never happened."

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