How quickly it had passed, that liminal space between the interview's end and Daniel's call. A moment of possibility. Lestat in his arms, a promise to speak more and regularly. The thought of Daniel's friendship, because it felt like that is what they parted with. Color stealing into the townhouse, piece by piece of art and furniture. Possibility, blooming and clipped in record time.
Does he need anything else?
A room. The penthouse suite will do. No need to worry after his luggage, he has staff, but if his American friend returns, please, he would like to be notified immediately.
Door closed, staff dispersed to the airports to gather what information possible about departures, Louis removes his shoes and coat. Drains a blood bag. Answers Lestat's three text messages. He will need to sleep, cannot put it off forever.
But not yet.
Smooths Daniel's letter across one knee, and reads it again. Lets his fear give way to anger, lets the anger become fuel.
Reaches out, falling into the flow of thought swirling in the air, vampire and human alike, touching all the overlapping, intertwining threads, until the familiarity of Daniel snags him like a hook on a line.
Daniel, as a whisper. So, so tentative. Aware of the risk inherent in this.
Still here in Istanbul, in an old church, one of the Byzantine ruins; Daniel is sitting in a windowless room with stone walls, waiting for something. He is exhausted, contemplating the edges of chronic pain, contemplating his exact location (not sure, and furthermore not sure if that's because of the exhaustion and chronic pain, or if his mind was fogged), contemplating Armand, and the contested validity of Stockholm syndrome, because he's actually starting to feel slightly bad for the guy, who is clearly profoundly mentally ill in a way he's kept camouflaged around being an ancient monster.
He hears his name, and it sounds like Louis.
Is he losing it?? Maybe. Daniel looks over his shoulder—?
No psychic powers, no ability to say anything back, but he's listening.
Peel back, Louis had called it in New Orleans, when he was a days-old fledgling and learning the extent of his power.
Does it now, to the extent he is able, venturing further into Daniel's mind. Louis touches that exhaustion, that pain. Finds the marvel of Daniel's empathy, and feels his heart turn over in his chest.
I have your letter, Louis tells him. More importantly: I'm not going to leave you with him.
Louis understands the threat. Knows he simply can't live with it.
Can you envision anything that would help me make my way to you?
The sensation of Louis winding closer. A presence in Daniel's mind, warmth, sunlight, rich color at the edges of Daniel's thoughts. Gentle contact, a clasped hand. Here. He's here.
Louis. It really is Louis. Daniel experiences a surge of relief and wonder, clutching onto that sensation like grasping his hand. Louis actually came for him? —And then that sinks in, Louis actually came for him, and a dark thread of worry slips through. Louis is finally free from this stupid shit, and he's risking an altercation for him?
Not worth it. A dying old man. He wanted a book, he wanted to get out alive. Neither of those look like they're going to happen. He'll take getting Louis out and staying out.
Scattered memories. Armand talking to him about faith, his struggle with it, resentment and revulsion and terror, the way he wishes he could saw it out of himself; Daniel struggles to look anywhere but the floor of the car they're in as they end up wherever they are right now. Regular asphalt parking lot, to a sidewalk, to ancient cobblestones. He doesn't glimpse the exterior. His attention is fixed on his hand in Armand's. Armand has been holding his hand quite a lot on this journey. If he tries to remove his hand, nothing will happen. The grip is gentle, the grip is fucking iron.
He doesn't know what Armand is looking for in here, if anything. Daniel thinks there must be tombs beneath it. A church that seems like it used to be a mosque, and used to be something else before that.
Questions pile up. None that helpfully serve the goal of extricating Daniel from Armand's clutches, and are rightfully deferred.
Louis makes himself a blanketing presence inside Daniel's mind. The impression of his atrium, the scent of earth. Warmth. Faint notes, piano, perhaps. Pebbles and stone rolling underfoot.
I'm coming, words like a melody. Words like a decree from on high.
It is enough. What he has from Daniel will be enough. Louis will put it into the head of someone who knows. Who can direct him.
Sleep can wait. Louis can't afford the delay. All things sacrificed in this pursuit, money, humans drained dry, and perhaps Louis' newly gained freedom, it is all deemed necessary. Essential.
Daniel doesn't have much of a choice about holding on or not. If Armand walks back in and decides they're leaving, they're leaving. But Louis is in the same city, they're miles from an airport, it's the middle of the night.
He sits there as though Louis is holding him, and Daniel is tucking his hands into the arms around him, and it's all very strange and surreal. He doesn't know if he feels safe (no such thing), but he feels better, even though there's still a churn of unease in him about Louis taking this risk. And an even stranger feeling about Armand, who Daniel had been so angry at (is still angry at), but despite that, couldn't scrape together any satisfaction for when Louis chucked him across the penthouse in Dubai.
Violence just sucks. Is it going to be bad, when Louis shows up? If he makes it?
What the fuck is Armand even doing here. Daniel doesn't want to die in a fucking church, he doesn't believe in any of this bullshit. He stands up. Maybe he can just... leave. Just walk out. Armand's been gone for a while, and Daniel can't hear anything from outside.
Daniel, prickling with anxiety. Not dissimilar to Louis' voice whispering Lunch is almost over. Try. Fearful. A sense of the intention forming within Daniel's mind.
Don't tempt him to chase you.
Armand's favored way of feeding, giving chase. Measuring himself against his meal.
Would he reverse his assertions, the ones he made Daniel put to the paper pinned beneath his palm? If given the chance, would Armand pursue and devour Daniel and leave Louis nothing but a husk as punishment and warning both?
Daniel pauses before the door, a hand laid on the push bar. It's a metal thing, probably installed in the 90s; before regulatory bodies started to think that old places like these should be restored and maintained as-is, not retrofitted. There's a sticker on the bar warning of steps outside of it.
He thinks of the other times he's tried to walk away before now— getting lost in a crowd in the first major airport, bailing out of the hotel in Islamabad. Armand every time showing up and collecting him, disapproval on his face. Was Daniel punished? If he was, he doesn't remember.
But he trusts Louis, and so he drops his hand away from the door. Thinks of the Talamasca next, and wondering if they've been tracking this at all, but Armand had turned Rashid away with an ease that made mind control obvious, and that fucking organization thinks Armand isn't a threat. A docile housewife looking after younger, more volatile creatures. They might not have even been bothered by the sight of Armand escorting Daniel out of Dubai.
Images forming in Daniel's mind. A door, stairs. An empty room.
Louis collects them, as he rises slowly to his feet. Not as effortless as it would be for Armand, this multitasking, but essential. Slipping the note into his pocket.
I'm coming to you, he promises again, the echo of spoken words reverberating behind this murmur. (I need a car, and the smuggler, Fayiz, I don't care how busy he claims to be—) The connection holds, Louis' presence clinging close, a hand on Daniel's cheek.
Daniel does not know where Armand went. He deposited Daniel in this room, squeezed his shoulder, and then left. The door shut behind him, and he hasn't seen or heard anything since.
Thinking about it like that, it does feel an awful lot like he was left here on purpose, and that begins to fill him with uneasy worry again. Maybe he should just bail, even if Armand might give chase. They'd know where he is, and maybe it'd force Armand's hand. Something, anything.
But these thoughts pass through him and he begins to settle. Armand wouldn't actually do that. He's been extremely courteous to Daniel so far— he was in Dubai, too, despite the way they sniped at each other. He'd overreacted in San Fransisco, and Daniel of course holds a grudge about that, but why wouldn't he. It's reasonable. It's also reasonable to recognize that Louis was the biggest threat to him in that penthouse. Louis who triggered his tremor into violence, Louis who mocked him viciously about Alice. Louis threw things, Louis lost his temper with Armand. What's Louis going to do if Daniel doesn't comply, right now?
Daniel is a sharp and clever human, but he's still a human. He doesn't realize what's happening to his own head, sitting in this room where Armand left him, like a fucking cupcake out on a counter at child-height.
At a distance, Louis is reduced to circling, an anxious guard dog too far removed from his charge. Reduced to hurried preparation, conversations echoing down to Daniel as Louis shudders through the reflective sense memory of Armand's hand.
Louis had thrown Armand so hard. A delineating moment, reframing all that came before, all that would come after.
A slamming door. A hasty conversation, descriptions shared back and forth. Hemming and hawing, the exchange of currency. Louis' voice sharpening towards violence at the perception of further delay.
But he is told where he must go. It is night. Louis has a vehicle.
Daniel, like a tug of a sleeve. Daniel, I know where.
A reassurance dropped into Daniel's mind amidst these recollections and reasonings.
I'm coming.
No further plea. No other information, no divulging the people waiting at the airport to observe and follow if Armand is too quick to move. No mention of preparations, of what lives were drunk down to even the catastrophic imbalance between Louis and Armand.
No need to let Daniel try to convince him of anything other than this: Louis will come to him. He will take Daniel away from this place. It will not happen again.
I'm coming, and Daniel tries to reach for that in this ocean of confusion. Difficult to focus on what's real when his head is being flooded with a perspective he's never actually held, but that he could have held, if he were someone else. Raglan tells him he should be afraid of Louis, and Daniel nods, a concerned agreement. He folds his napkin in half, into quarters, in half again, a nervous tick, as they speak about the hundreds of people Louis killed.
This conversation never happened. But it feels like it did, inside of Daniel's head.
He thinks: Please fucking stop, I'll stay if you fucking stop, and there's apparently magic in that concession.
Armand has, of course, being doing nothing but standing on the other side of the door and observing Daniel's mind for the past hour. That door finally opens and he crosses the small room to take Daniel's face in his hands, and look into his eyes, and look directly at Louis.
Then it ends. A blanket draped over the mind of the mortal he's absconded with, completely obscured.
The instant it happens, Louis knows. Their eyes meet through Daniel's mind and then it ends, and it won't matter how fast Louis pushes the motorcycle he's been loaned. The room is empty. They are gone.
Daniel is gone.
A matter of thirty minutes. Twenty. Such a short sliver of time. Louis had let himself hope, find comfort in the contact with Daniel's mind and what felt like an increasingly real possibility of success.
Louis breaks the metal door. The chair. Daniel's scent hangs in the room, mingled with Armand's, a reminder of how near he'd been.
Reaches out, trying again, finds nothing.
Feels the urge to fall to the ground.
Boxes it away. He promised Daniel. He knows what Daniel would have to say. He can almost hear him, succinct summation of Self-defeating bullshit.
So he returns to the hotel. Is buoyed in he smallest way by what waits for him; all the eyes scattered through the city have something for Louis. Three of his people, observing Armand, Daniel caught at his side. A flight number, a destination.
So Louis goes. Spends the travel time alternating between reaching out for Armand and reaching out for Daniel, seeking any form of contac.
A rescue was a nice thought while it lasted; Daniel holds the fact that Louis actually came and tried close, like a lifeline. Like the words he burned into his head and that they both forgot about, but still felt. He and Armand move around, and Daniel is eventually allowed to leave Louis another letter. A similar delivery method as the first, with a similarly shaky hand.
In it, he apologizes. He doesn't want Armand to fuck with his memories, and remembering Louis as it all really happened is more important than getting away. Please look after yourself, he closes it with, and wonders when he stopped thinking about his own fucking children. Maybe a long time ago, actually. Christ.
He and Armand do a lot of talking. Most of it veers between points of miserable and hostile, but some of it's alright. They have a kind of rapport about some things, and static about others. Daniel drinks an awful lot of his blood, and by the time they do make it to Italy, he's sure he's going to die. Probably not even by Armand's hand, because Armand mentioned (seemingly by accident) having mailed all of Daniel's things back to his apartment in New York. It's the fucking sickness, and stress. He's in pain a lot. Sleep is elusive, he has trouble wanting to eat anything. Moving around like this is difficult. Armand holds his hands on flights and train rides, and he hates that it's comforting, but hates that he's with him more.
Louis had relayed this dispassionately to Lestat. They speak often. Lestat worries. Argues sometimes, but worries more.
Louis chases Armand to some final, terrible confrontation and Louis has stopped thinking very rationally about it. This terrible game of keep-away while Daniel suffers and Louis pours money into his pursuit and thinks about passing days, hours minutes.
Begs sometimes, into the absence that is Armand. Please, I'll do anything.
Does he mean it? Some days, yes.
But Venice is promising. Louis has friends in Venice. He has eyes in Venice. Enough eyes to see Daniel before Louis ever reaches to touch his mind. This time, Louis is waiting nearby, no distance to travel, reasonably sure that he's been led to the right place when he tries to reach out, hook a finger like he could snag Daniel by the collar. Catch his attention, call him away.
A slow, strange slide towards something. Daniel thinks of Heart of Darkness, not for any specific notes of the story itself, but the fact that it's cursed; adaptations are doomed to kill. He doesn't know where they're going. Upriver, upriver, that's all. There is a sense of stoppage in Venice, and Armand has turned into a darker and darker thing, and maybe the curse is going to kick in any second now.
I'm here, the faintest echo.
Is Daniel here? He supposes he is. He feels exhausted, irritable, and roiling with resigned pity and hostility towards his captor, who has poured out so much of himself. So much that may or may not be true. Difficult for Daniel to judge— it has become increasingly difficult for him to read Armand. He's never needed telepathy for anything like that, just intuition and attention to detail, but they've hit the point where Armand isn't sure if he's telling the truth, or not.
He thinks he's going to die. It's not a sentiment he allows Louis to eavesdrop on to scare him or rush him. It's just there, a strange feeling of certainty. His blood pressure is through the roof, his vision is constantly glassy. He is fucking tired in a way he's never experienced before. He doesn't want Louis to feel bad about it. Daniel was always going to die, he's old and he has a very annoying disease. It'll be okay.
The sense of Louis drawing closer. A feeling of circling arms, an embrace.
Daniel feels muted. It scares Louis, feeling even this implication of decline. Daniel is sharp and sarcastic and insightful and smart, had retained all things even with the disease. The sense of Daniel dwindling, exhausted and remote, it is just—
It cannot be permitted.
Louis has a cigarette in hand, the first time in a long time. He grinds it out. Listening, eyes closed, to Daniel. To the hum of the pedestrians and city around him.
Close. They're close to an end to this. Louis holds that thought like truth, a ward against panicky fear building in his chest.
A bedroom in an ornate home; old, it's clean, but it has a certain smell to it that suggests it hasn't been lived-in for years. Rare in an area caught in constant combat between residents and tourists. Nightfall obscures his view, but during the day, a window showed green water and edges of other buildings, but nothing close enough to make out.
Daniel doesn't want to give up, but he doesn't want Louis to end up hurt. To his knowledge, Armand hadn't fed at all since that fateful lunch out in Dubai, but this morning he drained three people in front of Daniel, who could do nothing but offer deadpan commentary on his technique. He doesn't know where the corpses went.
Is Louis alright?
Talk to me, he thinks. He can't really formulate replies, but he just wants to think about something besides what's happening.
But Daniel isn't asking, so Louis needn't do anything with that truth other than hold it in check. He isn't alright. He can indulge that when Daniel is safe.
I loved Venice, Louis tells him. Loved it the first time we came, been back every couple of years since.
Does Armand love Venice? Louis isn't sure. He is unsure of so much now. Has he known anything of Armand? What parts of their lives together are true and which were only cultivated for Louis' sake?
Louis is in motion. That comes through alongside the words.
I'll show you the best of it tomorrow, Louis promises. Mind wound so close in beside Daniel, anchoring. Tethering. Be here. Don't go away. There's a place I think you'd like.
Louis doesn't say where. Just in case.
Armand could likely guess. The house by the sea is in Louis' name, but they have shared everything. Everything. Armand will guess.
Daniel has been to Italy before, but not to Venice. His impression of it now is through Armand, his pieced-together stories that seem parts impossibly fantastical and in others harrowing. At one point, horribly disjointed, Armand attempted to produce a question, and it had taken long minutes after the vampire had given up and left for Daniel to understand that he was trying to ask if he'd ever had any traumatic experiences while selling sexual favors for drugs. A child's inarticulate fumbling, reaching in the dark for understanding, trapped under centuries of repression. Breaking through because Daniel smashed his life apart. He nearly threw up.
I don't understand why we're here. A thought that makes it through. Inelegant, a mortal's artless effort.
He doesn't know if he wants to like Venice.
Armand is in the room with him again, now. Surely he notices Louis. He's been in Daniel's head like he belongs there, for weeks. He sits across from Daniel and looks at him, and neither of them say anything.
Until:
"I'll give him to you."
Armand breaks the silence, and Daniel isn't sure if those amber eyes are looking at him or through him.
Armand's presence in the room had quieted Louis, but hadn't dispelled him. Stubborn. Clinging harder in the back of Daniel's head.
They don't need to talk through Daniel. Armand is not his maker. (Armand made him into something else, transformed him over nearly eighty years of attention.) They could forgo Daniel. Speak directly.
Louis doesn't withdraw. Doesn't blank Daniel from the conversation, from his response.
Please, Armand.
A tremor carrying through.
This offer laid out like a bear trap, waiting to break Louis' wrist when he reaches for it. Knowing he'll reach, because he cannot leave Daniel there.
Moving. Running. Faster, watching Armand through Daniel's mind.
It takes Daniel a second to notice the red on Armand's face. Tears. His reddened eyes aren't just from increasingly erratic moments of stress; the vampire has been earnestly crying. Dread and adrenaline slice through him, realizing, and Armand watches him realize, and reaches to hold his face in his hands.
"Wait," Daniel says, but Armand doesn't.
He doesn't know how to scramble for Louis. His pulse kicks up, a surge of panic, Armand looming close, so close, and then—
Nothing, because Armand kicks Louis out.
It doesn't take long. Daniel's surprised. Doesn't know why. With the right injury, an adult human can bleed to death in a matter of minutes. This isn't getting stuck in the thigh and left to bleed out, though, and so minute becomes hours, for the whole ordeal. Which is still too short a span of time for Louis to search all of Venice and find him. But what would he do? Interrupt? Does it even work when it's half and half, the whole way? Or would Daniel just not take? He thinks about it, staring at a baroque ceiling in need of restoration; he thinks of not taking. But there's nothing for it. Armand is too old, too powerful. It takes like a sharp knife sinking in through the softest flesh, inescapable, smooth, fatal.
In the end, Armand just turns his phone on and texts Louis an address.
He leaves Daniel alone, barricaded in a bedroom, with several mortals waiting in the lounge area. Docile and glassy, they sit obediently where they've been told, no thoughts in their heads. Sacrifices as his last goodbye to a fledgling he hadn't even been able to look in the eye after.
As if they are all three of them back in that apartment. As if Louis hadn't thrown Armand through the wall. They are all three locked together again, and Louis can feel Daniel's fear, Daniel's panic, before Armand simply expels him. Doesn't matter how tightly Louis dug in to Daniel's mind. Armand wills it, and Louis is simply gone.
Left alone with his panic, his terror. The understanding of what Armand means to do and his own inability to stop it.
Armand's mind is closed to him. Daniel is an absence.
The address is a knife twist. Louis had been close.
The scent of him is still lingering in the room when Louis opens the door. Moving too fast, made single-minded by his panic.
"Daniel," like a plea.
Not a single mortal reacts. But they are not the only occupants of this place.
He sees different. Hears different. Disoriented and starving and in— pain? Not quite. He was. Daniel's head swims and he tries to right himself, looking for something still in a stormy sea. Intellectually, he understands what's happening, but actually feeling it is worlds different than hearing it described.
He hears his name, and recognizes—
"Louis?"
Fuck. He's glad he's already puked up blood all over himself.
Daniel is still in this back bedroom, collapsed between the bad and the far wall, but he makes himself get up. Woozy, everything spins. Processing everything so much faster than his brain is used to.
The door shudders open, yanked too hard. Louis moving too fast. Mortals abandoned in the front room, insensate and doomed, as Louis blurs towards Daniel's voice.
The scent of blood is so heavy in this room. Overwhelming, the mingling of Daniel's and Armand's. A fundamental shift in Daniel's scent, only one marker of what had been made clear to Louis the minute he'd opened the door.
"Daniel," sounds like a sob. Relief. Agony.
Louis tries almost instantly to reel that overwhelming flow of emotion back. Control himself.
"Daniel," again, hands catching and releasing and catching again, fretful points of contact as Louis tries to reassure himself, tries to avoid overwhelming Daniel. "Go slow. It's alright."
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Does he need anything else?
A room. The penthouse suite will do. No need to worry after his luggage, he has staff, but if his American friend returns, please, he would like to be notified immediately.
Door closed, staff dispersed to the airports to gather what information possible about departures, Louis removes his shoes and coat. Drains a blood bag. Answers Lestat's three text messages. He will need to sleep, cannot put it off forever.
But not yet.
Smooths Daniel's letter across one knee, and reads it again. Lets his fear give way to anger, lets the anger become fuel.
Reaches out, falling into the flow of thought swirling in the air, vampire and human alike, touching all the overlapping, intertwining threads, until the familiarity of Daniel snags him like a hook on a line.
Daniel, as a whisper. So, so tentative. Aware of the risk inherent in this.
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He hears his name, and it sounds like Louis.
Is he losing it?? Maybe. Daniel looks over his shoulder—?
No psychic powers, no ability to say anything back, but he's listening.
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Does it now, to the extent he is able, venturing further into Daniel's mind. Louis touches that exhaustion, that pain. Finds the marvel of Daniel's empathy, and feels his heart turn over in his chest.
I have your letter, Louis tells him. More importantly: I'm not going to leave you with him.
Louis understands the threat. Knows he simply can't live with it.
Can you envision anything that would help me make my way to you?
The sensation of Louis winding closer. A presence in Daniel's mind, warmth, sunlight, rich color at the edges of Daniel's thoughts. Gentle contact, a clasped hand. Here. He's here.
Show me.
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Not worth it. A dying old man. He wanted a book, he wanted to get out alive. Neither of those look like they're going to happen. He'll take getting Louis out and staying out.
Scattered memories. Armand talking to him about faith, his struggle with it, resentment and revulsion and terror, the way he wishes he could saw it out of himself; Daniel struggles to look anywhere but the floor of the car they're in as they end up wherever they are right now. Regular asphalt parking lot, to a sidewalk, to ancient cobblestones. He doesn't glimpse the exterior. His attention is fixed on his hand in Armand's. Armand has been holding his hand quite a lot on this journey. If he tries to remove his hand, nothing will happen. The grip is gentle, the grip is fucking iron.
He doesn't know what Armand is looking for in here, if anything. Daniel thinks there must be tombs beneath it. A church that seems like it used to be a mosque, and used to be something else before that.
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Louis makes himself a blanketing presence inside Daniel's mind. The impression of his atrium, the scent of earth. Warmth. Faint notes, piano, perhaps. Pebbles and stone rolling underfoot.
I'm coming, words like a melody. Words like a decree from on high.
It is enough. What he has from Daniel will be enough. Louis will put it into the head of someone who knows. Who can direct him.
Sleep can wait. Louis can't afford the delay. All things sacrificed in this pursuit, money, humans drained dry, and perhaps Louis' newly gained freedom, it is all deemed necessary. Essential.
Hold on a little longer for me. I'm coming.
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He sits there as though Louis is holding him, and Daniel is tucking his hands into the arms around him, and it's all very strange and surreal. He doesn't know if he feels safe (no such thing), but he feels better, even though there's still a churn of unease in him about Louis taking this risk. And an even stranger feeling about Armand, who Daniel had been so angry at (is still angry at), but despite that, couldn't scrape together any satisfaction for when Louis chucked him across the penthouse in Dubai.
Violence just sucks. Is it going to be bad, when Louis shows up? If he makes it?
What the fuck is Armand even doing here. Daniel doesn't want to die in a fucking church, he doesn't believe in any of this bullshit. He stands up. Maybe he can just... leave. Just walk out. Armand's been gone for a while, and Daniel can't hear anything from outside.
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Don't tempt him to chase you.
Armand's favored way of feeding, giving chase. Measuring himself against his meal.
Would he reverse his assertions, the ones he made Daniel put to the paper pinned beneath his palm? If given the chance, would Armand pursue and devour Daniel and leave Louis nothing but a husk as punishment and warning both?
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Well that, uh. That sounds bad.
Daniel pauses before the door, a hand laid on the push bar. It's a metal thing, probably installed in the 90s; before regulatory bodies started to think that old places like these should be restored and maintained as-is, not retrofitted. There's a sticker on the bar warning of steps outside of it.
He thinks of the other times he's tried to walk away before now— getting lost in a crowd in the first major airport, bailing out of the hotel in Islamabad. Armand every time showing up and collecting him, disapproval on his face. Was Daniel punished? If he was, he doesn't remember.
But he trusts Louis, and so he drops his hand away from the door. Thinks of the Talamasca next, and wondering if they've been tracking this at all, but Armand had turned Rashid away with an ease that made mind control obvious, and that fucking organization thinks Armand isn't a threat. A docile housewife looking after younger, more volatile creatures. They might not have even been bothered by the sight of Armand escorting Daniel out of Dubai.
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Louis collects them, as he rises slowly to his feet. Not as effortless as it would be for Armand, this multitasking, but essential. Slipping the note into his pocket.
I'm coming to you, he promises again, the echo of spoken words reverberating behind this murmur. (I need a car, and the smuggler, Fayiz, I don't care how busy he claims to be—) The connection holds, Louis' presence clinging close, a hand on Daniel's cheek.
A pause, then:
Do you know where he went?
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Thinking about it like that, it does feel an awful lot like he was left here on purpose, and that begins to fill him with uneasy worry again. Maybe he should just bail, even if Armand might give chase. They'd know where he is, and maybe it'd force Armand's hand. Something, anything.
But these thoughts pass through him and he begins to settle. Armand wouldn't actually do that. He's been extremely courteous to Daniel so far— he was in Dubai, too, despite the way they sniped at each other. He'd overreacted in San Fransisco, and Daniel of course holds a grudge about that, but why wouldn't he. It's reasonable. It's also reasonable to recognize that Louis was the biggest threat to him in that penthouse. Louis who triggered his tremor into violence, Louis who mocked him viciously about Alice. Louis threw things, Louis lost his temper with Armand. What's Louis going to do if Daniel doesn't comply, right now?
Daniel is a sharp and clever human, but he's still a human. He doesn't realize what's happening to his own head, sitting in this room where Armand left him, like a fucking cupcake out on a counter at child-height.
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Louis had thrown Armand so hard. A delineating moment, reframing all that came before, all that would come after.
A slamming door. A hasty conversation, descriptions shared back and forth. Hemming and hawing, the exchange of currency. Louis' voice sharpening towards violence at the perception of further delay.
But he is told where he must go. It is night. Louis has a vehicle.
Daniel, like a tug of a sleeve. Daniel, I know where.
A reassurance dropped into Daniel's mind amidst these recollections and reasonings.
I'm coming.
No further plea. No other information, no divulging the people waiting at the airport to observe and follow if Armand is too quick to move. No mention of preparations, of what lives were drunk down to even the catastrophic imbalance between Louis and Armand.
No need to let Daniel try to convince him of anything other than this: Louis will come to him. He will take Daniel away from this place. It will not happen again.
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This conversation never happened. But it feels like it did, inside of Daniel's head.
He thinks: Please fucking stop, I'll stay if you fucking stop, and there's apparently magic in that concession.
Armand has, of course, being doing nothing but standing on the other side of the door and observing Daniel's mind for the past hour. That door finally opens and he crosses the small room to take Daniel's face in his hands, and look into his eyes, and look directly at Louis.
Then it ends. A blanket draped over the mind of the mortal he's absconded with, completely obscured.
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Daniel is gone.
A matter of thirty minutes. Twenty. Such a short sliver of time. Louis had let himself hope, find comfort in the contact with Daniel's mind and what felt like an increasingly real possibility of success.
Louis breaks the metal door. The chair. Daniel's scent hangs in the room, mingled with Armand's, a reminder of how near he'd been.
Reaches out, trying again, finds nothing.
Feels the urge to fall to the ground.
Boxes it away. He promised Daniel. He knows what Daniel would have to say. He can almost hear him, succinct summation of Self-defeating bullshit.
So he returns to the hotel. Is buoyed in he smallest way by what waits for him; all the eyes scattered through the city have something for Louis. Three of his people, observing Armand, Daniel caught at his side. A flight number, a destination.
So Louis goes. Spends the travel time alternating between reaching out for Armand and reaching out for Daniel, seeking any form of contac.
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A rescue was a nice thought while it lasted; Daniel holds the fact that Louis actually came and tried close, like a lifeline. Like the words he burned into his head and that they both forgot about, but still felt. He and Armand move around, and Daniel is eventually allowed to leave Louis another letter. A similar delivery method as the first, with a similarly shaky hand.
In it, he apologizes. He doesn't want Armand to fuck with his memories, and remembering Louis as it all really happened is more important than getting away. Please look after yourself, he closes it with, and wonders when he stopped thinking about his own fucking children. Maybe a long time ago, actually. Christ.
He and Armand do a lot of talking. Most of it veers between points of miserable and hostile, but some of it's alright. They have a kind of rapport about some things, and static about others. Daniel drinks an awful lot of his blood, and by the time they do make it to Italy, he's sure he's going to die. Probably not even by Armand's hand, because Armand mentioned (seemingly by accident) having mailed all of Daniel's things back to his apartment in New York. It's the fucking sickness, and stress. He's in pain a lot. Sleep is elusive, he has trouble wanting to eat anything. Moving around like this is difficult. Armand holds his hands on flights and train rides, and he hates that it's comforting, but hates that he's with him more.
Venice is beautiful. He doesn't notice.
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Louis had relayed this dispassionately to Lestat. They speak often. Lestat worries. Argues sometimes, but worries more.
Louis chases Armand to some final, terrible confrontation and Louis has stopped thinking very rationally about it. This terrible game of keep-away while Daniel suffers and Louis pours money into his pursuit and thinks about passing days, hours minutes.
Begs sometimes, into the absence that is Armand. Please, I'll do anything.
Does he mean it? Some days, yes.
But Venice is promising. Louis has friends in Venice. He has eyes in Venice. Enough eyes to see Daniel before Louis ever reaches to touch his mind. This time, Louis is waiting nearby, no distance to travel, reasonably sure that he's been led to the right place when he tries to reach out, hook a finger like he could snag Daniel by the collar. Catch his attention, call him away.
I'm here.
Unspoken: are you?
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I'm here, the faintest echo.
Is Daniel here? He supposes he is. He feels exhausted, irritable, and roiling with resigned pity and hostility towards his captor, who has poured out so much of himself. So much that may or may not be true. Difficult for Daniel to judge— it has become increasingly difficult for him to read Armand. He's never needed telepathy for anything like that, just intuition and attention to detail, but they've hit the point where Armand isn't sure if he's telling the truth, or not.
He thinks he's going to die. It's not a sentiment he allows Louis to eavesdrop on to scare him or rush him. It's just there, a strange feeling of certainty. His blood pressure is through the roof, his vision is constantly glassy. He is fucking tired in a way he's never experienced before. He doesn't want Louis to feel bad about it. Daniel was always going to die, he's old and he has a very annoying disease. It'll be okay.
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The sense of Louis drawing closer. A feeling of circling arms, an embrace.
Daniel feels muted. It scares Louis, feeling even this implication of decline. Daniel is sharp and sarcastic and insightful and smart, had retained all things even with the disease. The sense of Daniel dwindling, exhausted and remote, it is just—
It cannot be permitted.
Louis has a cigarette in hand, the first time in a long time. He grinds it out. Listening, eyes closed, to Daniel. To the hum of the pedestrians and city around him.
Close. They're close to an end to this. Louis holds that thought like truth, a ward against panicky fear building in his chest.
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Daniel doesn't want to give up, but he doesn't want Louis to end up hurt. To his knowledge, Armand hadn't fed at all since that fateful lunch out in Dubai, but this morning he drained three people in front of Daniel, who could do nothing but offer deadpan commentary on his technique. He doesn't know where the corpses went.
Is Louis alright?
Talk to me, he thinks. He can't really formulate replies, but he just wants to think about something besides what's happening.
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But Daniel isn't asking, so Louis needn't do anything with that truth other than hold it in check. He isn't alright. He can indulge that when Daniel is safe.
I loved Venice, Louis tells him. Loved it the first time we came, been back every couple of years since.
Does Armand love Venice? Louis isn't sure. He is unsure of so much now. Has he known anything of Armand? What parts of their lives together are true and which were only cultivated for Louis' sake?
Louis is in motion. That comes through alongside the words.
I'll show you the best of it tomorrow, Louis promises. Mind wound so close in beside Daniel, anchoring. Tethering. Be here. Don't go away. There's a place I think you'd like.
Louis doesn't say where. Just in case.
Armand could likely guess. The house by the sea is in Louis' name, but they have shared everything. Everything. Armand will guess.
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I don't understand why we're here. A thought that makes it through. Inelegant, a mortal's artless effort.
He doesn't know if he wants to like Venice.
Armand is in the room with him again, now. Surely he notices Louis. He's been in Daniel's head like he belongs there, for weeks. He sits across from Daniel and looks at him, and neither of them say anything.
Until:
"I'll give him to you."
Armand breaks the silence, and Daniel isn't sure if those amber eyes are looking at him or through him.
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They don't need to talk through Daniel. Armand is not his maker. (Armand made him into something else, transformed him over nearly eighty years of attention.) They could forgo Daniel. Speak directly.
Louis doesn't withdraw. Doesn't blank Daniel from the conversation, from his response.
Please, Armand.
A tremor carrying through.
This offer laid out like a bear trap, waiting to break Louis' wrist when he reaches for it. Knowing he'll reach, because he cannot leave Daniel there.
Moving. Running. Faster, watching Armand through Daniel's mind.
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"Wait," Daniel says, but Armand doesn't.
He doesn't know how to scramble for Louis. His pulse kicks up, a surge of panic, Armand looming close, so close, and then—
Nothing, because Armand kicks Louis out.
It doesn't take long. Daniel's surprised. Doesn't know why. With the right injury, an adult human can bleed to death in a matter of minutes. This isn't getting stuck in the thigh and left to bleed out, though, and so minute becomes hours, for the whole ordeal. Which is still too short a span of time for Louis to search all of Venice and find him. But what would he do? Interrupt? Does it even work when it's half and half, the whole way? Or would Daniel just not take? He thinks about it, staring at a baroque ceiling in need of restoration; he thinks of not taking. But there's nothing for it. Armand is too old, too powerful. It takes like a sharp knife sinking in through the softest flesh, inescapable, smooth, fatal.
In the end, Armand just turns his phone on and texts Louis an address.
He leaves Daniel alone, barricaded in a bedroom, with several mortals waiting in the lounge area. Docile and glassy, they sit obediently where they've been told, no thoughts in their heads. Sacrifices as his last goodbye to a fledgling he hadn't even been able to look in the eye after.
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As if they are all three of them back in that apartment. As if Louis hadn't thrown Armand through the wall. They are all three locked together again, and Louis can feel Daniel's fear, Daniel's panic, before Armand simply expels him. Doesn't matter how tightly Louis dug in to Daniel's mind. Armand wills it, and Louis is simply gone.
Left alone with his panic, his terror. The understanding of what Armand means to do and his own inability to stop it.
Armand's mind is closed to him. Daniel is an absence.
The address is a knife twist. Louis had been close.
The scent of him is still lingering in the room when Louis opens the door. Moving too fast, made single-minded by his panic.
"Daniel," like a plea.
Not a single mortal reacts. But they are not the only occupants of this place.
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He sees different. Hears different. Disoriented and starving and in— pain? Not quite. He was. Daniel's head swims and he tries to right himself, looking for something still in a stormy sea. Intellectually, he understands what's happening, but actually feeling it is worlds different than hearing it described.
He hears his name, and recognizes—
"Louis?"
Fuck. He's glad he's already puked up blood all over himself.
Daniel is still in this back bedroom, collapsed between the bad and the far wall, but he makes himself get up. Woozy, everything spins. Processing everything so much faster than his brain is used to.
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The scent of blood is so heavy in this room. Overwhelming, the mingling of Daniel's and Armand's. A fundamental shift in Daniel's scent, only one marker of what had been made clear to Louis the minute he'd opened the door.
"Daniel," sounds like a sob. Relief. Agony.
Louis tries almost instantly to reel that overwhelming flow of emotion back. Control himself.
"Daniel," again, hands catching and releasing and catching again, fretful points of contact as Louis tries to reassure himself, tries to avoid overwhelming Daniel. "Go slow. It's alright."
It isn't. Louis knows that it isn't.
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🎀 territory?? unless you had further desires