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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
—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.
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.
"It was a 'no' in San Fransisco, and then you laughed about it in Dubai," Daniel says. "I'm trying not to be a creep about it, but you're taking me in here, sitting in bed with you, kissing my hand. Are you fucking with me?"
"I'm not fucking with you," is so immediate, a little incredulous. Shakes some heavier weight loose from Louis' tone, rattles him loose from the encroaching sense of rejection.
Yes, maybe he had been fucking with Daniel in Dubai. In those first weeks. It had been meant to serve a purpose, and it had failed anyway. Louis lost control of the interview. His whole life came apart. It hadn't mattered that he'd sat Daniel down to watch him drink deep from Armand's throat, in the end. Daniel hadn't been wrong-footed in any meaningful way.
Daniel lays these things out. Louis had said no in San Francisco. He'd laughed in Dubai. And they are here now, after all those things, and Louis finds himself unsure if he should be touching Daniel at all.
Asks, "Do you think I don't want you?"
Semi-aware that the answer must be yes, given the question.
His voice goes up at the end, like it's a question, even though it shouldn't be. But apparently it is? Once again: what the fuck are we doing.
"Because you don't."
An echo, an internal flinch, He didn't even want me in the end, like that was somehow more wounding than being nearly violently murdered. But Daniel could be murdered by a car or a bad stumble down the stairs, the sexual rejection was somehow much worse.
"All that and— you spent weeks talking to me about Lestat, and now I know the guy, and he's obsessed with you, too. And maybe, maybe when I was a kid I was alright, but I know what I look like now. Which is fine. There are upsides." Rambling. Oh god, get him out of here. "I'm just— I'm saying, it's fine. You don't have to, whatever this is, you don't have to offer me table scraps, I understand the score."
A beat somewhere mid-ramble where Louis thinks of kissing him.
But he isn't certain Daniel would welcome it, wouldn't take offense, so the impulse is swept aside. Feels Daniel's heartbeat ticking up and up underneath his fingertips. Waits out the rush of words until Daniel pauses to take a breath.
"I want you."
Curbing the impulse to say a handful of other things first that Daniel might argue his way past.
"This isn't about me and Lestat. There are no table scraps," he presses on. And on and on to murmur, "You don't have to want me back. It's alright if you don't."
Because maybe Daniel doesn't. Louis won't touch his mind, doesn't cheat and look inwards to see if the answer rises to the surface.
Wry, but fond. Daniel's already told him point blank how he's thought of him. Friendzoned, ha ha, is a measure about respect, but about self-preservation, too. He doesn't want his heart broken. He doesn't know if he feels enough to be broken-hearted about the inevitable draw back together between Lestat and Louis (he isn't fucking stupid), but it's as close as anything, probably. Louis means so much to him.
What to do. Well.
Just fucking send it.
"I don't want to lose you, or fuck anything up. Will you talk to me about how you feel? I just... I don't really get it, not that I'm not flattered, but... you have to understand, I've had a fair amount of time to resign myself to dying alone and being full stop undesirable."
Things Louis can understand in the abstract, but has no lived frame of reference for. A lifetime spent in a thirty-three year old body, eternity stretching out before him. Having gone from his mother's house to Lestat, to Armand.
Louis alone now for the first time in his life. Has been in contemplation of it, and even that is nothing like what Daniel is speaking of.
Will you talk to me about how you feel? prompts a small smile, aware of his failings. Aware that he is uniquely unequipped to vocalize the things he feels. They are bigger than he is. Bigger than his body, bigger than any of the words he could speak aloud to try and tell Daniel what he feels for him.
"You'll never lose me."
As a side-note. A certainty offered casually off the cuff. There is no world in which Louis would cut himself off from Daniel.
But he is keeping a hand to himself, does not reach back for Daniel's face even as his opposite hand lingers, possessive in spite of how lightly his fingers are set, over the ringed bite at Daniel's throat.
"You don't get it? Why I feel the way I do for you?"
Hedging, a little. Stepping around the enormity of the emotion, the instinctive flinch away from the vulnerability of it.
Daniel talks to Lestat. It can't be a surprise, that Louis falters here.
Louis says this thing, and Daniel believes that Louis believes it, but Louis has never been married to Daniel, never gotten in a bad bad fight with him, never had his trust accidentally betrayed because Daniel is good at remembering details about cases and bad at remembering what hurts.
"I can get it halfway, probably," he says. Trying to be the straight shooter since it seems like Louis is stuck in mysterious mode. "And I don't just mean 'emotionally yes, physically no', because emotionally I know where your bed is made, we spent weeks dissecting it."
Yes, Daniel talks to Lestat. The man that appears to be the north star on Louis' emotional compass. In turn, it can't be a surprise that Daniel is incredulous that Louis is offering up this reveal.
"And... it." Ok. Okokok. He can articulate this, he's a professional writer. "I'm lucky. Some guys get old and they can only get off thinking about girls that look like they did when they were in high school. That was never me. There's never been a decade where I didn't think Jane Fonda was hot. I'd give Mark Hamill a handjob in an airport bathroom today, he's still a cute twink as far as I'm concerned. My tastes expanded with me, aged with me. It's not that I think people who look younger than me are offputting now, but there's definitely a disconnect that I've cultivated on purpose. My oldest daughter is 40."
..ish? 40ish? Is she 38? Ah fuck. Well anyway
Perspective. Wordvomit.
"I felt guilty thinking about you, thinking about fake 'Rashid' and his Sharia French maid outfit, whatever else. Not as guilty as I should have, probably, but still. And I've fucked some women that are way too young for me because they're freaks into old men, now that I can. Same thing. But you're not that, you're not a lunatic in line to get a book signed who I'll never see again. So—"
Where the fuck is he going with this.
"You're right, I don't really get it. I get me about you. You about me, I don't get."
A twinge of guilt in Louis, remembering. Remembering that sliver of guilt in Daniel, the performance they had put on the exacerbate it. Not all things are excused by how combative they'd been then. A little restless shift of his fingers along Daniel's neck.
It's late, for an apology. Maybe a smaller harm when set alongside the many other ways Louis has failed Daniel.
Maybe an apology, when Daniel will let him give one. Later.
In the moment, Louis' eyes move over Daniel's face. Watches him. Takes in all these things he's saying.
"Daniel," Louis murmurs, voice low into the space between them. "I've been thinking of you for fifty years."
Every book. Every article. Interviews. TV appearances. The only threads of connection Louis could maintain, keeping his distance because he'd thought he'd almost killed him. Daniel. The fascinating boy. Louis had wanted him from the start, sitting at the bar with his clunky tape recorder and eager fumbling. Had wanted him in Dubai, with his sleek laptop and needling questions.
Daniel, honing the thing that made him different all those years ago. Daniel looks at a person, and he sees the truth. Has learned how to dig it out, arguing all the while. As appealing now as it had been then.
Voice edging raw as he admits, "I still remember what you taste like."
Are these things enough? Louis, hyperaware of all the places Daniel is touching him. Of his fingers on Daniel's skin. Louis says these things and they're only half, because the rest is overwhelming. Too much to say.
And waiting until I look like this was the best bet? You couldn't have asked me to dinner at age fifty-five? Fifty-five was a pretty good year. You paid attention that whole time and I never annoyed the shit out of you? My Twitter account is so bad. My second wife published all of our angry emails and I look like a psychopath in them.
He has all of that, incredulous and insecure defense mechanisms, a rocket barrage as always, covering his escape. Good at reading people, and Louis didn't want him, and Daniel was hurt, stupidly hurt, and for some fucking reason there's still a bruise, even though he knows - especially now, he knows - that if Louis had fucked him he'd have killed him. No interview, no mood turn, just the routine like all the other boys.
What's death beside the next trophy, though. Maybe Daniel didn't think he'd die.
And look. He didn't. Armand killed him and he's fine, and this train of thought is going places because Daniel's mind is still whirring, until, until—
What?
He's going to say all that, but he doesn't, because Louis says something he's said before, but he hasn't. Has he? Daniel is staring at him in a different way, a sharp frown on his face. A jolt. Reality, shifting.
And Louis looks taken aback. Something like dread digging claws into his chest, tightening as Louis looks back at Daniel, register his expression.
They're laying down, but Louis feels unsteady anyway, hearing Daniel—
Did Daniel pluck this from his head? Unlikely. Uncharacteristic. If he'd been prodding around Louis' mind already, he'd hardly have needed to coax Louis into saying anything aloud.
And Louis has all this dread. This disorienting sense of retreading, recognition attached to nothing, no structure to hang this thought upon.
"Yes," Louis says slowly, thumb coming to rest in the hollow of Daniel's throat. "Are you listening to me?"
Listening as shorthand. As in: are you touching my mind?
A question that Louis knows has a single answer.
A question that leads them to a different question, harder to map out.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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?"
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"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.
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—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.
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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?"
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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."
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"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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Does he—
What the fuck are we doing.
"It was a 'no' in San Fransisco, and then you laughed about it in Dubai," Daniel says. "I'm trying not to be a creep about it, but you're taking me in here, sitting in bed with you, kissing my hand. Are you fucking with me?"
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Yes, maybe he had been fucking with Daniel in Dubai. In those first weeks. It had been meant to serve a purpose, and it had failed anyway. Louis lost control of the interview. His whole life came apart. It hadn't mattered that he'd sat Daniel down to watch him drink deep from Armand's throat, in the end. Daniel hadn't been wrong-footed in any meaningful way.
Daniel lays these things out. Louis had said no in San Francisco. He'd laughed in Dubai. And they are here now, after all those things, and Louis finds himself unsure if he should be touching Daniel at all.
Asks, "Do you think I don't want you?"
Semi-aware that the answer must be yes, given the question.
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His voice goes up at the end, like it's a question, even though it shouldn't be. But apparently it is? Once again: what the fuck are we doing.
"Because you don't."
An echo, an internal flinch, He didn't even want me in the end, like that was somehow more wounding than being nearly violently murdered. But Daniel could be murdered by a car or a bad stumble down the stairs, the sexual rejection was somehow much worse.
"All that and— you spent weeks talking to me about Lestat, and now I know the guy, and he's obsessed with you, too. And maybe, maybe when I was a kid I was alright, but I know what I look like now. Which is fine. There are upsides." Rambling. Oh god, get him out of here. "I'm just— I'm saying, it's fine. You don't have to, whatever this is, you don't have to offer me table scraps, I understand the score."
no subject
But he isn't certain Daniel would welcome it, wouldn't take offense, so the impulse is swept aside. Feels Daniel's heartbeat ticking up and up underneath his fingertips. Waits out the rush of words until Daniel pauses to take a breath.
"I want you."
Curbing the impulse to say a handful of other things first that Daniel might argue his way past.
"This isn't about me and Lestat. There are no table scraps," he presses on. And on and on to murmur, "You don't have to want me back. It's alright if you don't."
Because maybe Daniel doesn't. Louis won't touch his mind, doesn't cheat and look inwards to see if the answer rises to the surface.
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Wry, but fond. Daniel's already told him point blank how he's thought of him. Friendzoned, ha ha, is a measure about respect, but about self-preservation, too. He doesn't want his heart broken. He doesn't know if he feels enough to be broken-hearted about the inevitable draw back together between Lestat and Louis (he isn't fucking stupid), but it's as close as anything, probably. Louis means so much to him.
What to do. Well.
Just fucking send it.
"I don't want to lose you, or fuck anything up. Will you talk to me about how you feel? I just... I don't really get it, not that I'm not flattered, but... you have to understand, I've had a fair amount of time to resign myself to dying alone and being full stop undesirable."
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Louis alone now for the first time in his life. Has been in contemplation of it, and even that is nothing like what Daniel is speaking of.
Will you talk to me about how you feel? prompts a small smile, aware of his failings. Aware that he is uniquely unequipped to vocalize the things he feels. They are bigger than he is. Bigger than his body, bigger than any of the words he could speak aloud to try and tell Daniel what he feels for him.
"You'll never lose me."
As a side-note. A certainty offered casually off the cuff. There is no world in which Louis would cut himself off from Daniel.
But he is keeping a hand to himself, does not reach back for Daniel's face even as his opposite hand lingers, possessive in spite of how lightly his fingers are set, over the ringed bite at Daniel's throat.
"You don't get it? Why I feel the way I do for you?"
Hedging, a little. Stepping around the enormity of the emotion, the instinctive flinch away from the vulnerability of it.
Daniel talks to Lestat. It can't be a surprise, that Louis falters here.
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"I can get it halfway, probably," he says. Trying to be the straight shooter since it seems like Louis is stuck in mysterious mode. "And I don't just mean 'emotionally yes, physically no', because emotionally I know where your bed is made, we spent weeks dissecting it."
Yes, Daniel talks to Lestat. The man that appears to be the north star on Louis' emotional compass. In turn, it can't be a surprise that Daniel is incredulous that Louis is offering up this reveal.
"And... it." Ok. Okokok. He can articulate this, he's a professional writer. "I'm lucky. Some guys get old and they can only get off thinking about girls that look like they did when they were in high school. That was never me. There's never been a decade where I didn't think Jane Fonda was hot. I'd give Mark Hamill a handjob in an airport bathroom today, he's still a cute twink as far as I'm concerned. My tastes expanded with me, aged with me. It's not that I think people who look younger than me are offputting now, but there's definitely a disconnect that I've cultivated on purpose. My oldest daughter is 40."
..ish? 40ish? Is she 38? Ah fuck. Well anyway
Perspective. Wordvomit.
"I felt guilty thinking about you, thinking about fake 'Rashid' and his Sharia French maid outfit, whatever else. Not as guilty as I should have, probably, but still. And I've fucked some women that are way too young for me because they're freaks into old men, now that I can. Same thing. But you're not that, you're not a lunatic in line to get a book signed who I'll never see again. So—"
Where the fuck is he going with this.
"You're right, I don't really get it. I get me about you. You about me, I don't get."
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It's late, for an apology. Maybe a smaller harm when set alongside the many other ways Louis has failed Daniel.
Maybe an apology, when Daniel will let him give one. Later.
In the moment, Louis' eyes move over Daniel's face. Watches him. Takes in all these things he's saying.
"Daniel," Louis murmurs, voice low into the space between them. "I've been thinking of you for fifty years."
Every book. Every article. Interviews. TV appearances. The only threads of connection Louis could maintain, keeping his distance because he'd thought he'd almost killed him. Daniel. The fascinating boy. Louis had wanted him from the start, sitting at the bar with his clunky tape recorder and eager fumbling. Had wanted him in Dubai, with his sleek laptop and needling questions.
Daniel, honing the thing that made him different all those years ago. Daniel looks at a person, and he sees the truth. Has learned how to dig it out, arguing all the while. As appealing now as it had been then.
Voice edging raw as he admits, "I still remember what you taste like."
Are these things enough? Louis, hyperaware of all the places Daniel is touching him. Of his fingers on Daniel's skin. Louis says these things and they're only half, because the rest is overwhelming. Too much to say.
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And waiting until I look like this was the best bet? You couldn't have asked me to dinner at age fifty-five? Fifty-five was a pretty good year. You paid attention that whole time and I never annoyed the shit out of you? My Twitter account is so bad. My second wife published all of our angry emails and I look like a psychopath in them.
He has all of that, incredulous and insecure defense mechanisms, a rocket barrage as always, covering his escape. Good at reading people, and Louis didn't want him, and Daniel was hurt, stupidly hurt, and for some fucking reason there's still a bruise, even though he knows - especially now, he knows - that if Louis had fucked him he'd have killed him. No interview, no mood turn, just the routine like all the other boys.
What's death beside the next trophy, though. Maybe Daniel didn't think he'd die.
And look. He didn't. Armand killed him and he's fine, and this train of thought is going places because Daniel's mind is still whirring, until, until—
What?
He's going to say all that, but he doesn't, because Louis says something he's said before, but he hasn't. Has he? Daniel is staring at him in a different way, a sharp frown on his face. A jolt. Reality, shifting.
"Bitter, at first."
Sounds like a quote. No.
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They're laying down, but Louis feels unsteady anyway, hearing Daniel—
Did Daniel pluck this from his head? Unlikely. Uncharacteristic. If he'd been prodding around Louis' mind already, he'd hardly have needed to coax Louis into saying anything aloud.
And Louis has all this dread. This disorienting sense of retreading, recognition attached to nothing, no structure to hang this thought upon.
"Yes," Louis says slowly, thumb coming to rest in the hollow of Daniel's throat. "Are you listening to me?"
Listening as shorthand. As in: are you touching my mind?
A question that Louis knows has a single answer.
A question that leads them to a different question, harder to map out.
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