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."
Louis moves so fast, but Daniel can see it. Not like when he would dart around, appearing in one place then the next like magic. His voice is richer, a different kind of reverberation finding Daniel's ears, almost painful. He is a thousand times more beautiful for the detail that Daniel can now see. He can smell him, a not-alive-not-dead thing, he can almost hear his heart.
"I'm sorry."
Sorrow. Shame. He didn't wait long enough, he couldn't find a way to talk Armand out of it. He'd asked for it at twenty, and he dismissed the mocking suggestion of it at seventy, but here he is. He should have just offed himself in a bathroom, or something. The worst of the transformation is over, but he feels on edge still, fucking crazy, a failure. He was already dying, already making end-of-life care plans, but a thousand little things suddenly overwhelm his head on the heels of the interview. Stupid. What does chewing gum taste like now? Did he look long enough at Venice in daylight?
It feels like a loss even though he was going to die anyway. Maybe it's just that Louis looks so fucking disappointed, and shattered. Daniel tries to steady him, but he's too unsteady, himself.
"No," Louis tells him, instant. Miserable. "No, Daniel."
Shattering too, hearing Daniel apologize. Apologize for being taken, dragged across the globe. Changed.
Between them, it's Louis who should be sorry. But what use is an apology? This can't be undone. Can't be rectified. Louis couldn't save him. He can take Daniel from this room, but it erases nothing.
And Daniel is covered in blood. Smells different. Eyes changed. Louis' hand lifts, a fretful slip of fingers across Daniel's neck. Seeking the scarring Louis left there, decades ago.
After a few failed attempts - nervous, everything is too different, even something as simple as moving his hands - Daniel manages to hold Louis a little, hands at his sides, like he's testing to see if he's actually here with him. He really hadn't expected anyone to come. Louis was the only potential, and he did come. He really did.
"I..."
How to even describe it. Daniel keeps blinking too fast, still adjusting. Pale blue-green eyes are darker now, denser, uncanny. Similar to Louis', but as he stands there they start to refract and turn amber. Reminiscent of the person who gave him the bite that's not visible on his neck. Armand had gone at the other side, as though the scar Louis left on him was too much of a condemnation to face. Still there, textured under Louis' fingers.
"Yes," is a whisper, unconscious agreement. Remembering.
But Louis had felt such joy. He remembers that. Lestat and him, laughing together. The moonlight catching in Lestat's hair, the blue of his eyes electric whenever their eyes met. They'd gone tearing through the night together. It had been all adrenaline and exultation and Louis' first staggering steps had been haphazardly shepherded along.
This is not anything like it.
An apology, choking Louis. Wanting to say over and over, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
"Sit," Louis coaxes instead. "You're half-finished."
Not quite true. The thing is done. Daniel is only acclimating to it. His body is only catching up. Daniel's eyes shifting and Louis' hands coming up to cup his face, watch the sharp flint-blue of them be swallowed by jeweled amber instead. Feels it like a loss.
"I think I already puked up half a spleen, is there more?"
As if the gothic romance vibes weren't already a lost cause. Too fast, all of it. Armand had only known what he was doing through textbook knowledge; Daniel saw, in the transfer of blood, that the too-old monster has no real memory of his own transformation besides pain. The last thing he'd said to Daniel, sitting on the edge of the bed with his head hung over, was You'll feel better now.
Fucking asshole.
Daniel doesn't know what his eyes are doing, can't see himself, obviously. Mood-ring bullshit, green-orange-yellow, shifting between a reflection of his own genetics and something borrowed.
But maybe there is nothing more. Maybe the strain of Armand hauling Daniel around the globe, whatever had passed between them in those long stretches where Louis could not hook into contact with them, couldn't get eyes on them, maybe that was enough to ease the transition. Louis had been young, healthy. There had been so much life to wring from his body.
But Daniel—
Maybe this is the only blessing. The only easy part of this.
Louis is already nudging him back towards the edge of the bed. Not letting go, only easing back.
"It's been..."
Too long. Too much time.
"Months," Louis answers. "I'm sorry," breaks loose at last, his chest cracking apart as he watches Daniel's eyes.
"My body has been dying," he says, sharp and brittle in response to the sledgehammer reminder that now he's cursed like this, some fucking old man, being tended to by an impossibly handsome 200 year old who could have been a supermodel if he were a youthful millennial. What a fucking joke, being seventy and suddenly becoming frozen in time.
Maybe more complaining would come, layers on layers of reality sinking in, but as he sits down he hears Months and it shocks him.
Months? He thought weeks. Nobody caught him in customs on any of these airports, nobody noticed he was gone, huh. Well that's. Kind of fucked, but not surprising. Louis only noticed because he called him.
Louis. Daniel looks at him, and his own face falls, seeing how sad the other man looks. He gets a hold of him again.
"Don't do that. Just don't. I shouldn't have called, I should have just let you move on. It's okay, alright? I'm okay."
A sharp shake of his head, dismissive. Louis won't hear this.
"You were right to call."
As Louis lowers himself too, until he is looking up into Daniel's face. He can't stomach the idea of it, of never knowing.
"I thought," goes nowhere, stops abruptly. Things Louis doesn't need to say because they only excuse him, won't be a comfort to Daniel. "I called," he says instead. "I missed you."
Did Daniel think he was so easily forgotten?
Louis pushes past the uncertainty of it, asking, "How do you feel?"
Hedging around the necessity of hunger. Of pain. Trying to gauge well-being when Louis has so little understanding of how Armand had done about this. Louis had wanted to make it near-painless. He had learned from Claudia, what it could be. He wanted that for Daniel, suspects it is no what came to pass.
That shocks him, too, and it shows on his face. Daniel really didn't expect to be missed. He understands why Louis left with such immediacy and never looked back, and doesn't hold it against him: Daniel blew his life up. It was the truth, it freed him, but it was still destructive. The kind of thing therapists would probably urge a slow introduction to. Instead, Daniel set an unpinned grenade on the table in front of him.
So it makes sense for Louis to have bailed, and it would have made sense to not care at all about Daniel after. He said his goodbyes, he lit his fucking laptop on fire (the guy who doesn't have a TV doesn't know about cloud storage), he maybe wired him some money. The end. Hearing him say he called, he missed him, makes red swim in Daniel's vision.
Red?
Christ.
"Disoriented. I don't know."
It's a lot. Daniel squeezes Louis' forearm where he's holding onto him, like a lifeline.
"Is this." Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. His voice cracks with emotion. "Is this really happening."
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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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"I'm sorry."
Sorrow. Shame. He didn't wait long enough, he couldn't find a way to talk Armand out of it. He'd asked for it at twenty, and he dismissed the mocking suggestion of it at seventy, but here he is. He should have just offed himself in a bathroom, or something. The worst of the transformation is over, but he feels on edge still, fucking crazy, a failure. He was already dying, already making end-of-life care plans, but a thousand little things suddenly overwhelm his head on the heels of the interview. Stupid. What does chewing gum taste like now? Did he look long enough at Venice in daylight?
It feels like a loss even though he was going to die anyway. Maybe it's just that Louis looks so fucking disappointed, and shattered. Daniel tries to steady him, but he's too unsteady, himself.
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Shattering too, hearing Daniel apologize. Apologize for being taken, dragged across the globe. Changed.
Between them, it's Louis who should be sorry. But what use is an apology? This can't be undone. Can't be rectified. Louis couldn't save him. He can take Daniel from this room, but it erases nothing.
And Daniel is covered in blood. Smells different. Eyes changed. Louis' hand lifts, a fretful slip of fingers across Daniel's neck. Seeking the scarring Louis left there, decades ago.
"What do you feel?"
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"I..."
How to even describe it. Daniel keeps blinking too fast, still adjusting. Pale blue-green eyes are darker now, denser, uncanny. Similar to Louis', but as he stands there they start to refract and turn amber. Reminiscent of the person who gave him the bite that's not visible on his neck. Armand had gone at the other side, as though the scar Louis left on him was too much of a condemnation to face. Still there, textured under Louis' fingers.
"Everything."
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But Louis had felt such joy. He remembers that. Lestat and him, laughing together. The moonlight catching in Lestat's hair, the blue of his eyes electric whenever their eyes met. They'd gone tearing through the night together. It had been all adrenaline and exultation and Louis' first staggering steps had been haphazardly shepherded along.
This is not anything like it.
An apology, choking Louis. Wanting to say over and over, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
"Sit," Louis coaxes instead. "You're half-finished."
Not quite true. The thing is done. Daniel is only acclimating to it. His body is only catching up. Daniel's eyes shifting and Louis' hands coming up to cup his face, watch the sharp flint-blue of them be swallowed by jeweled amber instead. Feels it like a loss.
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As if the gothic romance vibes weren't already a lost cause. Too fast, all of it. Armand had only known what he was doing through textbook knowledge; Daniel saw, in the transfer of blood, that the too-old monster has no real memory of his own transformation besides pain. The last thing he'd said to Daniel, sitting on the edge of the bed with his head hung over, was You'll feel better now.
Fucking asshole.
Daniel doesn't know what his eyes are doing, can't see himself, obviously. Mood-ring bullshit, green-orange-yellow, shifting between a reflection of his own genetics and something borrowed.
"Are you okay? How long has it been?"
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But maybe there is nothing more. Maybe the strain of Armand hauling Daniel around the globe, whatever had passed between them in those long stretches where Louis could not hook into contact with them, couldn't get eyes on them, maybe that was enough to ease the transition. Louis had been young, healthy. There had been so much life to wring from his body.
But Daniel—
Maybe this is the only blessing. The only easy part of this.
Louis is already nudging him back towards the edge of the bed. Not letting go, only easing back.
"It's been..."
Too long. Too much time.
"Months," Louis answers. "I'm sorry," breaks loose at last, his chest cracking apart as he watches Daniel's eyes.
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Maybe more complaining would come, layers on layers of reality sinking in, but as he sits down he hears Months and it shocks him.
Months? He thought weeks. Nobody caught him in customs on any of these airports, nobody noticed he was gone, huh. Well that's. Kind of fucked, but not surprising. Louis only noticed because he called him.
Louis. Daniel looks at him, and his own face falls, seeing how sad the other man looks. He gets a hold of him again.
"Don't do that. Just don't. I shouldn't have called, I should have just let you move on. It's okay, alright? I'm okay."
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"You were right to call."
As Louis lowers himself too, until he is looking up into Daniel's face. He can't stomach the idea of it, of never knowing.
"I thought," goes nowhere, stops abruptly. Things Louis doesn't need to say because they only excuse him, won't be a comfort to Daniel. "I called," he says instead. "I missed you."
Did Daniel think he was so easily forgotten?
Louis pushes past the uncertainty of it, asking, "How do you feel?"
Hedging around the necessity of hunger. Of pain. Trying to gauge well-being when Louis has so little understanding of how Armand had done about this. Louis had wanted to make it near-painless. He had learned from Claudia, what it could be. He wanted that for Daniel, suspects it is no what came to pass.
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So it makes sense for Louis to have bailed, and it would have made sense to not care at all about Daniel after. He said his goodbyes, he lit his fucking laptop on fire (the guy who doesn't have a TV doesn't know about cloud storage), he maybe wired him some money. The end. Hearing him say he called, he missed him, makes red swim in Daniel's vision.
Red?
Christ.
"Disoriented. I don't know."
It's a lot. Daniel squeezes Louis' forearm where he's holding onto him, like a lifeline.
"Is this." Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. His voice cracks with emotion. "Is this really happening."
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It is unfair.
It is worse, perhaps, that Louis is crying. Tears sluice down his cheeks, a miserable reflection of that crack in Daniel's voice.
"I'm sorry," again, because it is happening. Because Louis cannot make it stop.
Louis had wanted to give Daniel a choice. But they are here now, and it doesn't matter what he'd intended.
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🎀 territory?? unless you had further desires