followups | so, when you come back

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."

"Will you tell me?" softly, the whisper of expensive fabric as Louis shifts nearer across the coverlet. Their knees bump. His grip on Daniel has eased in counterpoint, always seeking to leave Daniel an escape.

"I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours."

Are their nightmares the same?

Where does this foggy impression come from: Daniel, asking Do you feel real, here?

"Louis."

A quiet plea. He hasn't looked up. Show you mine if you show me yours. Both vulgar and innocent, and Daniel is still grappling with messages that weren't mixed until now. His palm itches. His mind doesn't reel, but it digs into embarrassment, the same kind that made his face turn red with frustrated retroactive shame when flogging himself over the 'cheer up' routine to Louis in 1973.

Get a grip, Molloy. He has to.

So much for not doing anything excruciating.

"You know what I thought about you. What I kept being reminded of, with the performances you were putting on in the first week out there."

It feels like an eternity since Louis has touched his mind in any serious way. Light connection, voices bouncing back and forth, but never delving beneath the surface. He doesn't reach for his mind now, even if he might find clarity there. He remembers then, what had bloomed in Daniel's mind. How Louis had been performing, how he had felt revulsion and desire and fear blooming in Daniel in turns.

He sets fingers beneath Daniel's chin, silent coaxing. Look at me.

Wanting to see him, even as Louis asks, "Am I a nightmare?"

Louis had been—was a monster. Had failed Daniel. Maybe he's a nightmare too.

Stay out of my head Daniel had snapped at him, sharp and angry. Afraid but it never tempered anything, never curbed Daniel's instincts, never made him pull his punches. Louis had admired that.

Daniel lets himself be urged back up, and he's glad he does, because it means Louis gets to see how honest and immediate his flinch of denial is.

"No." Emphatic, real. "Never."

As insane as that sounds. Never, not even then, not even when Louis was trying to kill him. A technicality maybe— Daniel was too high to really understand what was happening, and it was fucking crazy, but there was also an expected element. Daniel was always out rolling the dice, his life had been threatened before, but his addictions, desires, needs, were stronger than fear.

But it's not the 70s. They're here, now, and Louis is not a nightmare.

"I see your reading room a lot. The fake atrium light. I don't know why, maybe... because so much went on in there."

A breath in, and out. Armand's reveal, the diaries introduced, Louis' rocks, their memories dredged up, the end. And it was where he and Armand had the majority of their daytime interactions when Louis was sleep. Of all the recordings he has of them one-on-one, they're all there, under the artificial light.

"I see my daughters there sometimes. It's just nonsense."

Yes, Louis' reading room. It had been his. It was his now. Touched inevitably, inescapably, by the minimalism and monochromatic aesthetic that had marked their shared Dubai penthouse, housed Armand's tree reaching up towards the filtered light. But it has been Louis', always.

"Sometimes I see her there. Claudia."

Claudia. Claudia, burning to ash beneath the light. Sometimes, lately, Claudia sitting, smiling, looking at him.

"Sometimes I dream you there."

Maybe nonsense. Maybe. His fingers remain there, thumb at Daniel's chin, knuckles brushing Daniel's throat. He can feel the inhale, exhale of his breath. The beat of his pulse. Daniel, alive. Indulging Louis in this conversation, in this stolen closeness.

"I changed some things," he murmurs. "Could show you, next time you got a couple weeks to spare."

Assuming Daniel ever wanted to set foot in that penthouse again.

Claudia. Harsh. Daniel gives Louis a bracing touch wherever his other hand last was. knee?? maybe. im a good rper

"I see you sometimes. Never as a nightmare."

It seems safe to admit. Dodging admissions of shamefully daydreamed intimacy. That Louis didn't press after You know what I thought about you tells him he was worried for nothing, and that Louis isn't about to open that door. Daniel thought they'd had a sexual encounter and Louis laughed; Daniel had been on the defensive foot with the fetish roleplay Louis and Armand had been acting out when Armand was still disguised.

Louis not wanting to hear more makes sense. It doesn't disappoint Daniel, because Daniel doesn't actually want to be exposed to new depths of shame, and he doesn't like men that way anyway. Just transactional. Louis isn't transactional.

"I'd like that, sometime. Give my subconscious a clean slate."

Daniel would like that. Louis holds that, draws it close to his chest. Daniel would come back to Dubai.

A thing which only matters in small ways. Louis would come to him. He has already promised to come to Lestat. He would travel, carefully, covertly, to see Daniel wherever he wished. But he wants Daniel to see the changes he'd made. Paul's portrait. Claudia's dress. New paintings. Color in places where there had been none.

"How do you see me?" he asks, contented with the latter, circling back to pluck at the former.

Not any direct question about what Daniel thought, but near to it. Skimming towards a similar topic, adjacent if not identical.

"Is it different now? Changed?"

Edited 2024-11-10 23:49 (UTC)

Dubai kind of sucks, a fake place for hidden people, but Louis makes a kind of sense there. The first vampire capitalist, in his tower. And now it's a tower to watch the world from, instead of being locked away inside of it. No longer a prison, a beacon, a lighthouse.

Mm. Almost dodged the topic, apparently. Daniel looks at him, quiet for a moment.

"I'm having a difficult time figuring out the boundaries of what's happening here," he ends up saying. Might as well just spit it out.

It shouldn't be a surprise, Daniel's directness. Pushing Louis to consider what they're doing, dwelling in the blurry quality of the intimacy they've cultivated.

Daniel touching him, his face, his hip I have decided you can't stop me. Louis' hand on his chin, knuckles grazing his throat. This nearness. The way Louis dreams him, dreams San Francisco and Dubai. Holds this new piece of the latter close, the two of them together in a shared bed, Daniel blocking the light, talking while Louis drifted and burned in a haze of agony.

The first two impulses towards deflection are discarded. Louis looks into his face, trying to feel his way to a clear answer, though he is not exactly certain of where he's leading them either. Only that he wants Daniel here.

Steps past the question, failing to come up with a clear answer as his eyes hold Daniel's. Stalls out, quiet stretching between them as Louis' fingers move along his skin, seeking the raised scarring his teeth left in Daniel's throat.

His breath catches, more obvious this time. Louis touching there and—

It's happened before? Louis leaning over him, the reading room made dim for the evening, not yet cycled into its dawn hours. Louis, looking at him, and there's a can of Coke with Arabic script on the branding on the table, before, before—

Just a dream.

"Louis."

A pleading note, starting to sound lost. Daniel doesn't want to shove him away, but he doesn't want to be fucked with, either.

A relief, selfish and terrible, to find the mark there still. Not gone, not healed. It remains, the ugly raised edges of the scar Louis bit into them that night.

He's jolted back from contemplation of it by Daniel, saying his name. Sounding this way. Something in his voice that makes Louis want to put arms around him.

"I'm sorry," sounds lost too. Louis is sorry to do anything that makes Daniel sound this way, sorry to be so uncertain himself.

"I..." Louis begins, trails off. Fingers following the near-circle of his own teeth in Daniel's throat. His heartbeat rising. Uncertain of what feels familiar in this moment, no connective tissue to hook into between now and—

When? San Francisco?

Daniel didn't have a scar yet, in San Francisco.

Takes a breath.

"I wanted," he starts and stops again. His finger catches on the low edge of the bite. Says, "I missed you," even though it isn't an answer. "I keep dreaming you."

Daniel. Lestat. Claudia. Fragments coming together easier in his subconscious than with conscious effort in his waking hours.

The scars are sensitive, sometimes. Skin texture and nerve endings that were mangled enough to regrow in odd ways; over the years he's felt the area go numb, tingle, itch, it's been nothing, it's been pleasant to touch. He had forgotten about it for a while, once his skin started to sag enough to camouflage it. Just a scar on his memory.

Louis' touch seems to connect a circuit. Does funny things to him.

"What are we doing, when you dream about me?"

Pushing. He has to know. He was always going to come to Dubai.

Disorienting, finding an incongruity. A sick swoop of a feeling, trying to walk down well-trod steps and finding one missing.

Daniel didn't have this in San Francisco. Had the raw, ripped open mess Louis bit into him and Armand had begrudgingly healed, late enough with little enough effort that the scar remained under the crusting blood. Louis hadn't touched Daniel at all in Dubai, not until he was leaving.

But he's touched him here. Remembers. Daniel's breath had hitched just this way. It could only have happened in the near present.

"Talking," comes slowly. "I dream of us talking so much."

Memories caught between two rooms, pastiches of burning and chilly serenity. Daniel old and young and old again, tape recorders and microphones and the slant of his smile a constant.

"Sometimes I—"

A pause. Louis' fingers continue their slow loop of progress around the bite.

"Sometimes you let me get close," Louis says quietly. "Sometimes."

Tempered with, "Sometimes you tell me I'm a monster. You leave."

But less, that last one. Less, since Armand had gone. Since Louis had left Dubai. Louis feels the chill of suspicion, of understanding.

"I'd let you get as close as you want."

A confession-that's-not, because Louis is already here, close. Daniel's smile is sheepish and self-deprecating, sitting practically tangled up with him. He could lean forward, press a kiss to his forehead. But why would he do that? They're not...

They're just not. Armand wasn't ever going to look at boats.

"But I'd never do the rest of that."

Louis had dreamed it, sometimes.

But he believes Daniel when he says it now.

"I know."

A dream that worked before. Before what they put together after. Before Daniel saved him.

"Will you tell me what you meant earlier?"

But Louis guesses anyway: "Did I remind you of San Francisco? Before it got away from us?"

Before it turned into a nightmare.

"Uh—"

Scans the past few minutes, but he's not sure what Louis means. Tips his head, brows knit together. Pretty sure they've got it all out, fumbling all the way, even though Louis has still not established any boundaries or given him a straight answer. Daniel's starting to feel like he might be permanently lost with this. But he supposes this is what he gets for trying to have a regular, meaningful conversation, and not an interview. Bad at acting like a real person.

"You'll have to be more specific?"

An apologetic shake of the head, at the abruptness of the backtracking.

"You said I should know what you thought of me. About my performances, when you first arrived."

Something left untouched at the moment, something Louis comes back for now.

"We can leave it," he offers, hand fanning across the bite mark on Daniel's neck. "I only wondered."

Not a complete thought. Louis comes to a stop, watching his face. Trying to get a grasp around an absence in his mind. A fragment, an outline where maybe Louis was touching him and maybe Daniel wasn't pulling away. Maybe a dream, nothing else, and he's embarrassing them both.

"Louis."

—Not pleading this time. Mildly exasperated. Louis will be able to feel the sudden flush that blooms on his neck, up to his cheekbones. A silent are you kidding me vibe.

"I thought we had sex. And you were putting on your weird kink thing like I wasn't going to notice it was a weird kink thing."

Armand was certainly aware that Daniel thought about him (them) sexually, even if he wasn't doing anything about it - couldn't, thanks to illness and medication. Just a creepy old man sitting about the past and then dying of mortification when Louis had laughed and said they'd never slept together.

A complicated tangle of emotions cross Louis' face. The misplaced urge to laugh. The bruising pang recalling Armand, drinking from him with Daniel on the far side of the table.

And something deeper, something in his chest turning over as he feels Daniel's skin warming under his fingers.

"You told me to stay out of your head."

A technicality. Ha ha.

"Is it different now?"

"And you didn't."

Louis had gone fishing a few more times after that Daniel knows of. Unreasonable to think he had never done it without remarking on anything— again, he knows Armand did, Armand has an itemized list of the nastier things Daniel idly thought of, and has informed him, in explicit detail, because Armand is insane.

Everyone was thinking about sex in that goddamn penthouse. Rashid was. Raglan wasn't even there except to look very startled in the hallway when collecting Daniel and he was.

"I friendzoned you," he says, forcibly deadpan. Just a little strain. "Try to contain your disappointment."

A split second where Louis can't. Doesn't. Where Daniel says this and Louis believes him, because he's asking about now, not then. Things change. Louis left him with Armand. Daniel is a vampire now. Some of the ease ebbs out of Louis' body, tension flowing in after.

"Okay," first, and then, "I see."

Recalibrating. Feeling Daniel's pulse beat beneath the scarring, the warmth of his skin. Fitting in friendzoned alongside everything else they've said, that Daniel's said.

Turns over a handful of things in his mind. Stalls on what to say, what to ask. So looks at Daniel instead, into his face, his fingers still at Daniel's neck even as he loosens his grip on Daniel's chin. A little compromise, while Louis finds his footing.

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