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.
Sinking. Disorienting. Just a self indulgent fantasy seeping into dreams, dreams he surely has while he'd been there that he forgot— and even in thinking that line of rationale, something tips. Had it then, but not then? Somehow it feels like a knife twist. It could have been ruinous and explosive, it could have killed the whole interview, isn't that what, isn't it—
"It was a dream," sounds uncertain. A plea. Let it be a dream. "That you'd look at a dying old man. Not something that would actually happen. And you said that, in the dream. And you told me, because I asked you."
And Louis had touched him, the scars he's still fascinated with, and come so close, even closer than they are right now.
Louis touching him now, feeling the world tilt. Expression on his face familiar because he'd worn it before sitting alongside Daniel, no longer at the opposite end of the long dining table but near. Near enough that Daniel could see so clearly how Louis' face crumpled into hurt, into confusion. Memory coming slow to him, all things colored by betrayal.
He'd wondered what else he was missing. What more had been neatly pruned out of his head.
A dream, Daniel says. Louis' breath coming too fast, unsteady, heartbeat loud in his ears as he says, "Bitter, at first. I could taste the drugs, and the beer."
Disorienting, yes. Words that echo into an absence. Watching Daniel's face. Saying this aloud, unable to stop.
"You were underneath," as Louis' thumb draws up and then down Daniel's throat. "Black licorice. Tea like Grace'd make me when I lived in our mama's house."
A flashpaper memory of Daniel straightening beneath his fingers, looking up at him. Detached. A dream. Watching Daniel for recognition, for a repetition of something they have already done together, once.
Daniel touches Louis' face, cradles it. Trying to comfort him while he can hear his heart go faster in distress. It's fucked. This is fucked. His eyes close in denial at how familiar it is, black licorice and tea. It's what Louis said in the dream, and he'd had no dismissive comment about it in response, he'd just let—
"What'd I ask you to do?" Eyes open again, staring at Louis. It couldn't have been real. "Before you got up,"
like there's a sequence of events in dreams, come on
"I asked you to do something."
Don't. It can't be real, Armand was in the room, wasn't he? Louis wouldn't have done anything with Armand standing in the entryway, watching them, like he watches everything in all of Daniel's dreams, a glow-eyed grim reaper.
Not the same as remembering San Francisco. No recording. Daniel hasn't worked his theory out in advance. He isn't seated adjacent to Louis with all his notes and his evidence, steady even as Louis falters.
And Louis does falter.
Not because he doesn't know the answer to the question. He has it, brow creasing into a frown as he thinks back. The memory comes hazily into focus, soft-edged, fogged even as Louis says, "A movie."
Half a thought, answer pared down to bare bones, while Louis' mind races ahead of the question. Dreamy flashbulb pops of recollection, the afterimage burning behind his eyes.
Armand looking down at him, his fingers in Daniel's hair.
A shaky breath. Daniel feels anger wash up and over him, because he's seen Armand, seen him several times, and it's fucked up, sure, everything between them is a mess, and Daniel has always assumed there's more just because Armand is a minefield of bullshit, but are you kidding him.
"In the dream, there's like— it's two layers. What I'm dreaming of, you, and my separate awareness of it being ad ream, and Armand is there the whole time. It had to have been a dream."
Where Daniel moves onwards to anger, Louis is still mired in the memory as it comes to him in parts and pieces, starts and stops. Out of order. Flashes of Daniel's face tipped up to him, Daniel's hand setting down the aluminum can on the table, Daniel asking him if he felt real.
Daniel kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him.
And then Armand.
Armand with his hand in Daniel's hair.
Armand holding Louis' gaze as his own flared bright as Louis asks quietly, steady in spite of the look on Armand's face, Don't hurt him, Armand, and Armand touched his cheek, claws pricking skin, as Armand told Louis, Rest, Louis.
Here and now, Daniel is touching him. The only thing anchoring him to his body.
"He didn't leave me anything."
So he remembers it now. Daniel brings the memory back to him, just as he'd done before.
"But I..." a trailing pause. "I have some of it now."
And then, "He wasn't there, at first. He was in our bed."
Until he wasn't. Until he was touching Daniel, his fingers at Louis' jaw drawing him up and out of their kiss.
"He was in your bed, and you were... You're nuts, you know that."
A little horrified, but fond. Louis had been pacified into believing Armand was too docile of a creature to ever be a real threat, but Daniel had taken one look at him and knew it was a fucking megalodon. An old, old predator, made for nothing but hunger, and teeth. And Louis went and sat on Daniel's lap and made out with him while that thing was waiting in their marriage bed.
And Daniel let him. Encouraged it. Pulled him closer and kissed him back. Because he wanted Louis. In the 70s, in Dubai.
Now. He's tried to kill it, but he still does.
"I don't think I remembered - dreamed it again - until after." After dying. "Must have something to do with... getting patched up."
Last minute swerve away from Armand's blood. His blood, disintegrating the stitches on his own power left within his fledgling's mind. But then again, maybe it's just healing. Parkinson's isn't a brain disease quite like that, it hadn't left a mark there so literally, but the stress had.
Some prickling awareness of what's been omitted, but Louis lets it pass. Doesn't care to invoke how often he drank from Armand, how it hadn't seemed to make any difference at all. Years and years drinking from his throat, and still all that Armand sealed away in his mind remained securely veiled.
"We had an arrangement, for a while."
Louis says this almost too himself, a murmur spoken with his attention still turned inward. Remembering. A blur of recollection, holding all Louis' focus even as Daniel says these things.
Louis had wanted Daniel. Maybe wanted the argument too, something in his body clawing desperately out of the stasis he'd been held in so long. Living seventy-seven years and wanting the things Armand kept on a high shelf, pushed far to the back. Things Louis had never been allowed to touch unless they were fighting, and they hadn't fought in years.
(That he remembered.)
A little flutter of focus. Enough of a tug at the edges of his attention to draw out, "You've been better than me at it. Remembering."
There is surely a difference between vampires sharing blood, and someone being resurrected with it. Armand killed Daniel, and his blood brought him back into this unlife; they are bonded, Daniel can feel him. Something about it has shaken loose the worst of Armand's surgery to reveal hidden damage, or something about Daniel's inherent doggedness, or more likely, a combination.
"The Annoying Gift," he deadpans.
An arrangement. Oh, Louis. After a moment of hesitation, fighting with himself over the dumbest shit, he leans forward and presses a kiss to the older vampire-younger man's forehead.
"Gotta wonder if we're just crazy. For all of it."
Even in this moment, half-consumed with the revelation of what came before, what Armand took, what it is to recover it now, Louis' breath catches when Daniel leans in.
A kiss pressed to his forehead. Louis feels the strain of self-control, containing the impulse to lean up to catch Daniel's mouth as if he has any right to it at all. Daniel kisses his forehead. Louis shudders out a breath.
Says, "No."
Not crazy. No. Crazy is all the rest. The choices Louis made before. Daniel was something else entirely.
Or if it's crazy, it simply manifests the same in them both. Mirrored instincts, a choice that was so simple it was hardly a choice at all.
"Not crazy. It was crazy to spend fifty years away from you."
To say nothing of what else Louis had locked himself away from. What he had made of almost eighty years.
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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."
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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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"It was a dream," sounds uncertain. A plea. Let it be a dream. "That you'd look at a dying old man. Not something that would actually happen. And you said that, in the dream. And you told me, because I asked you."
And Louis had touched him, the scars he's still fascinated with, and come so close, even closer than they are right now.
A dream.
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Louis touching him now, feeling the world tilt. Expression on his face familiar because he'd worn it before sitting alongside Daniel, no longer at the opposite end of the long dining table but near. Near enough that Daniel could see so clearly how Louis' face crumpled into hurt, into confusion. Memory coming slow to him, all things colored by betrayal.
He'd wondered what else he was missing. What more had been neatly pruned out of his head.
A dream, Daniel says. Louis' breath coming too fast, unsteady, heartbeat loud in his ears as he says, "Bitter, at first. I could taste the drugs, and the beer."
Disorienting, yes. Words that echo into an absence. Watching Daniel's face. Saying this aloud, unable to stop.
"You were underneath," as Louis' thumb draws up and then down Daniel's throat. "Black licorice. Tea like Grace'd make me when I lived in our mama's house."
A flashpaper memory of Daniel straightening beneath his fingers, looking up at him. Detached. A dream. Watching Daniel for recognition, for a repetition of something they have already done together, once.
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"What'd I ask you to do?" Eyes open again, staring at Louis. It couldn't have been real. "Before you got up,"
like there's a sequence of events in dreams, come on
"I asked you to do something."
Don't. It can't be real, Armand was in the room, wasn't he? Louis wouldn't have done anything with Armand standing in the entryway, watching them, like he watches everything in all of Daniel's dreams, a glow-eyed grim reaper.
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And Louis does falter.
Not because he doesn't know the answer to the question. He has it, brow creasing into a frown as he thinks back. The memory comes hazily into focus, soft-edged, fogged even as Louis says, "A movie."
Half a thought, answer pared down to bare bones, while Louis' mind races ahead of the question. Dreamy flashbulb pops of recollection, the afterimage burning behind his eyes.
Armand looking down at him, his fingers in Daniel's hair.
How blank Daniel's eyes had been.
And after—
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Like Louis isn't aware of that.
"There? In Dubai, in real time."
A shaky breath. Daniel feels anger wash up and over him, because he's seen Armand, seen him several times, and it's fucked up, sure, everything between them is a mess, and Daniel has always assumed there's more just because Armand is a minefield of bullshit, but are you kidding him.
"In the dream, there's like— it's two layers. What I'm dreaming of, you, and my separate awareness of it being ad ream, and Armand is there the whole time. It had to have been a dream."
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Daniel kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him.
And then Armand.
Armand with his hand in Daniel's hair.
Armand holding Louis' gaze as his own flared bright as Louis asks quietly, steady in spite of the look on Armand's face, Don't hurt him, Armand, and Armand touched his cheek, claws pricking skin, as Armand told Louis, Rest, Louis.
Here and now, Daniel is touching him. The only thing anchoring him to his body.
"He didn't leave me anything."
So he remembers it now. Daniel brings the memory back to him, just as he'd done before.
"But I..." a trailing pause. "I have some of it now."
And then, "He wasn't there, at first. He was in our bed."
Until he wasn't. Until he was touching Daniel, his fingers at Louis' jaw drawing him up and out of their kiss.
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A little horrified, but fond. Louis had been pacified into believing Armand was too docile of a creature to ever be a real threat, but Daniel had taken one look at him and knew it was a fucking megalodon. An old, old predator, made for nothing but hunger, and teeth. And Louis went and sat on Daniel's lap and made out with him while that thing was waiting in their marriage bed.
And Daniel let him. Encouraged it. Pulled him closer and kissed him back. Because he wanted Louis. In the 70s, in Dubai.
Now. He's tried to kill it, but he still does.
"I don't think I remembered - dreamed it again - until after." After dying. "Must have something to do with... getting patched up."
Last minute swerve away from Armand's blood. His blood, disintegrating the stitches on his own power left within his fledgling's mind. But then again, maybe it's just healing. Parkinson's isn't a brain disease quite like that, it hadn't left a mark there so literally, but the stress had.
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"We had an arrangement, for a while."
Louis says this almost too himself, a murmur spoken with his attention still turned inward. Remembering. A blur of recollection, holding all Louis' focus even as Daniel says these things.
Louis had wanted Daniel. Maybe wanted the argument too, something in his body clawing desperately out of the stasis he'd been held in so long. Living seventy-seven years and wanting the things Armand kept on a high shelf, pushed far to the back. Things Louis had never been allowed to touch unless they were fighting, and they hadn't fought in years.
(That he remembered.)
A little flutter of focus. Enough of a tug at the edges of his attention to draw out, "You've been better than me at it. Remembering."
Even as a human.
"It's your gift."
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"The Annoying Gift," he deadpans.
An arrangement. Oh, Louis. After a moment of hesitation, fighting with himself over the dumbest shit, he leans forward and presses a kiss to the older vampire-younger man's forehead.
"Gotta wonder if we're just crazy. For all of it."
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A kiss pressed to his forehead. Louis feels the strain of self-control, containing the impulse to lean up to catch Daniel's mouth as if he has any right to it at all. Daniel kisses his forehead. Louis shudders out a breath.
Says, "No."
Not crazy. No. Crazy is all the rest. The choices Louis made before. Daniel was something else entirely.
Or if it's crazy, it simply manifests the same in them both. Mirrored instincts, a choice that was so simple it was hardly a choice at all.
"Not crazy. It was crazy to spend fifty years away from you."
To say nothing of what else Louis had locked himself away from. What he had made of almost eighty years.
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