followups | so, when you come back

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.

He is going 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.

"Bitter, at first."

Sounds like a quote. No.

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.

A dream.

A dream.

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.

How blank Daniel's eyes had been.

And after—

"This is fucking ridiculous."

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."

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."

Even as a human.

"It's your gift."

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.

Baby steps. He's not actively dying anymore, and Louis is free, and Daniel does have a worry in the back of his head that if Lestat found them making out, he'd do worse than just make them forget. He's pretty sure if Lestat had found Louis and Daniel giggling at each other in a bar in 1973, that he'd have just killed Daniel right there, and saved everybody the trouble.

And doesn't Louis deserve that kind of devotion, no matter how fucked it is? Yeah. He wishes it could come without the danger of intimate violence, though. It makes his heart ache.

Louis says—

That.

Doesn't know why it touches him so tenderly, but it does. A disarming fantasy, to be wanted so sincerely. Maybe that's why he has such an irritating kernel of understanding for Lestat. They both run people off by being themselves.

"We can do fifty years easy, now." Another forehead kiss. At this point he's just venting the desire for something else, and not subtly. Restless, conflicted. "I wish... I could remember it normally."

It's not teasing, but it feels like a kind of tease. Being wound up, each time Daniel leans in closer. Letting out a breath each time Daniel kisses him somewhere other than his mouth.

Fifty years. A hundred. Two hundred. Louis can imagine these things, dreamy possibility. The ways they'd keep each other busy, the war that would burn itself out and whatever new thing would occupy them. Whatever they were to each other. Whatever Louis and Lestat became. All these pieces easy to align now that Louis isn't looking at Daniel and seeing time and life slip away from him.

(Seeing his eyes, and knowing, inescapably, who they have to thank for it.)

Louis winds fingers into the front of Daniel's t-shirt. Knuckles against his chest, a restless kneading sort of contact. Impulse restrained. Wanting, wanting, wanting. Reluctant to overstep.

"What do you remember now?"

As if they're taking accounting still.

Though it's inevitable that they'll drift back at some point, Daniel's eyes have settled to green, for now, like Louis and his feelings for him have taken hold over the bloodline that makes them twist yellow-orange. Not the clear tinted water of his mortal life, but sea glass now, dense and unearthly. Perhaps a downgrade, but he'll take it, an easy swap for kicking Parkinson's.

(Still. Over him, like a shroud. Armand, Armand, Armand.)

"I remember we were talking. About getting out of the penthouse, the tower, just doing something. It felt like... kids sneaking out past curfew."

Even though it wasn't going to happen, and maybe Daniel knew that even then. Intuition telling him that the next time he saw Louis, he'd be placid again, having shaken off his restlessness and be ready to gently decline. Now he knows getting out just for the fuck of it would have been the thing Louis wanted most.

"And then you came over to me. And I couldn't really believe it, but I just. Wanted you too much to argue about it, even if you were fucking with me. Even though I couldn't do anything but that."

A fragment: Have Rashid arrange it.

Careless, as if it were so easy. Maybe it had felt easy. Like Louis had forgotten how contained he was.

"I like when you argue with me," is barely a surprise. They've been trading jabs since the beginning. Daniel, irreverent from the start, still dismissing Louis blithely while inhaling a line of Louis' cocaine. He'd liked that so much. Too much to fuck Daniel just inside the door the way he had any of the others.

A breath. Shallow, eyes moving from Daniel's mouth to his eyes, telling him, "I remember touching you here."

Fingers tracing a circle around the bite. Offering this fragment while he tries to drag the whole of it out of the haze in his mind. What Daniel's face had looked like. What his pulse had done.

"I picked that up."

Except for now, he could say, but there's a lopsided smile that covers it. Daniel likes it, too. Likes that Louis likes it. Likes that he puts up with it, getting poked about how serious and dour he can be. Likes, too, how serious and dour he can be. I like you better this way, all...

"You did." And Daniel shivers. Had he then? His eyes flutter closed, remembering then, enjoying now, and open again. "I've had to make up so much weird shit over the years to explain it. But I never got scar revision done, even when a dermatologist tried to sell me on it."

Easy cosmetic fix, these days. But he couldn't.

"You kept it."

The scar Louis gave him. Bit into him.

"I wanted to take a little," he admits, hushed. "A small drink, before you went. I thought maybe you'd let me, if I asked."

Because that had been the half-formed thought already. He wouldn't kill Daniel. Daniel would live. It wasn't even about hunger. Louis had wanted so badly to taste him.

"But I lost control."

Daniel had pissed him off. Louis regrets it.

"I'm sorry. I don't think I was able to say it then."

Maybe he had, somewhere in that stretch of time with Daniel laid alongside him on that little bed. Louis, delirious with pain and exhaustion, saying things into the slip of space between them as he drifted in and out of awareness. Maybe he had apologized.

Maybe he should apologize now for how much he likes the scar that remains.

"I would have let you. I'd have let you do anything, Louis. You know that."

Considering the insane thing that Daniel asked. An awful part of him wonders what Louis thinks of that now— Daniel, immortal, through someone else's blood. But though he's got a nasty insecure streak about it having happened at 69 (nice), twenty would have been too fucking stupid, and in the world where he's Louis mortal gopher as they wait for him to be 'ready'... well, that sounds like a disaster.

"I forgave you ages ago."

He rubs Louis' cheek with his thumb. Starts to say something, stops. Thinks about it, as he watches Louis closely.

"You can, now, if you want to."

Hearing this offer is a little like flicking a spark onto dry kindling. Louis' whole body flushes hot, breath catching in his throat.

If he wants to, Daniel says. He wants. He wants so much, so deeply. Has this soft-edged memory in his mind that is porous and detached. Daniel is touching him, has kissed his face, says this thing while his eyes shift green and Louis is overwhelmed by all of it in combination.

"I want to kiss you," Louis whispers, despairing. "I want to taste you again."

Has the presence of mind to wonder if Daniel tastes different. Would that shatter Louis in some way, to drink from him and taste traces of Armand?

"I don't want this to be a dream anymore."

This, the way they want each other. The way Louis has kept so many of his desires this century. Hidden, compressed.

Like in Dubai (not a dream, but why, would Armand even fucking answer if he asked), Daniel finds himself unable to put up the resistance that he thinks he probably should. Stupid of him, to want someone this much, someone he knows is destined elsewhere. But Louis says he wants to kiss him, and taste him, and have it be real, like Daniel always wanted him to feel real, and what the fuck is he supposed to do?

What's the point of a heart if you don't break it every so often. Who better to shatter it against, than the person he cares for most in the whole goddamn world.

"Okay," is soft, and tense with emotion. "Yeah. Louis. Come here."

Smooth? No. He's never going to be.

But this time when he leans in, the kiss lands on Louis' mouth.

Daniel kisses him this time. (A piece of a memory: asking, receiving permission, leaning in to catch Daniel's mouth in a kiss.) Daniel says, Come here and Louis slides across the coverlet even as Daniel leans in.

Eager. Wound up, more than he'd realized before Daniel put hands on him and drew him into a kiss.

Louis makes a low, ragged sound against Daniel's mouth. A relief, to be kissed. To feel Daniel's hands on his face, holding him as they kiss. There is a creak of mattress and whisper of fabric as Louis closes the space between them. Hooks an ankle around Daniel's knee, tangling them together.

They kiss. The memory snaps together, grows clearer as Daniel holds him. As Louis' nails scrape so lightly across Daniel's nape beneath the soft collar of his cardigan. Idle wandering; his fingers always return to the mark his teeth left.

They break for breath. Barely enough time between one moment and the next for Louis to murmur, "Was it like this?"

Prompting. Tell him, Daniel. Say what you remember.

It makes everything in him jolt. Kissing Louis, electric and revelatory but familiar, which cases an ache like a wound, knowing it happened and it wasn't a dream, it was pulled away from them.

What else? Can't think of it now, it's too fucking much. He has Louis, feels him, smells him, everything is just Louis, the itch in the scar on his neck, the beat of dead hearts. A thought starts to surface, if Armand will know, if Armand will make him answer for this, how bad the fight will be— but he sends it away. Fuck off, all of that.

"This is probably better. I'm not half-hoping you aren't serious so I don't embarrass myself further."

Poetry. But what do you want, his dick literally did not work, then.

"You sat on my lap. I didn't care about it," (because it was uncomfortable, because Daniel was in constant pain, but Louis sapped it out of him), "I wanted you too much."

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