Yes, Daniel will be okay. Louis knows this. There is steel in him, strength enough to survive the transformation. To weather the demands of vampiric life beyond this room, the mortals waiting insensate beyond the bedroom.
"I'm here," Louis promises, a soft repetition. "I ain't leaving you."
A promise skewing near to what he had once offered Claudia: As long as you walk the Earth, I'll never taste the fire, you understand me? Similar, but not the same. He and Daniel have suffered together, survived together. They are linked. They walk into rooms and emerge side by side. Daniel is alive. They will survive this too.
Louis is holding Daniel so tightly. His wound is healing, but not quickly enough to avoid trickles of blood soaking into the back of Daniel's shirt. Cradles Daniel's head, allows himself to shudder through the rush of relief, held in check while so much else demanded Louis' attention.
Daniel doesn't need a promise of togetherness, it's not really about him. He'll figure it out. He survived this long, drug addiction and his life being upended in divorce, kids when he didn't really want any, being fired over and fire. Being tortured for a fucking week. Armand. Louis, though, he worries about. Worries about feeling him, seeing his wrist like that. It shocks too close for him in this new and uneasy state, he feels too intensely.
But he can sense Louis' relief, and finds his own in how tightly they're clinging to each other. Louis doesn't feel like he's about to slip away over guilt. Fuck, this is ... a lot.
"This is—"
What is it? C'mon, Daniel, you're a writer.
"Fucking crazy," is what he ends up saying, teary laughter in his voice.
Though it doesn't quite compare. Lestat had rushed Louis, but he'd been present. He'd provided some kind of guide. He'd offered, Louis had accepted.
Daniel had none of that.
The guilt will come later. It waits, circling at the edges of Louis' mind, waylaid by all that requires his immediate attention. Holding on to Daniel, feeling his breathing, the lingering closeness that comes from Daniel's teeth in his skin.
"Do you need more?" softly, fingers playing gently with the curls at the nape of Daniel's neck. "Or do you need the blood washed away?"
No matter what happened after, Louis spoke with such reverence about his changing. He loved Lestat, he got at least the illusion of a choice. This seems fucking stupid in contrast, but Daniel's stubborn, he'll deal with it. Memories of 1973 were stranger— in a way, it's a relief to have this overwith, and stacking onto that, he's kind of annoyed that Armand didn't stick around so Daniel could yell at him.
Shit to think about later, when his head's not turning itself inside out.
"Probably both." Another weak laugh. Incredulous. "It doesn't... feel like hunger usually does."
Daniel's should have been better. Should have been a choice, should have been gentle. Should have been what Claudia had constructed once for Madeleine. Louis had been meditating on it, recalling how carefully he had caught her neck in his teeth.
Had thought of how gentle he would be with Daniel, who still wears the scars of Louis' fangs on his skin.
"It won't. We call it hunger, but it's something else," is a little lofty, even as Louis draws just slightly back. Cups Daniel's cheek with his hand. "Does it still burn you?"
Hunger so vast and overwhelming that it is like drowning. Like burning alive. Like suffocating.
His fingers hook into the front of Daniel's blood-sodden shirt. Remembers San Francisco. Daniel hooking off his own shirt, a single easy motion. Does he still move that way? Had age slowed him, and has that now been restored?
One of those jokes you see in tacky self-aware vampire fiction, about bloodlust. Oh, you're hungry? You're so hungry you have to murder people? I've wanted a sandwich before but not enough to kill somebody every night. But it doesn't feel like that at all. Louis' right, it's something else.
"It does. It is." But he doesn't feel as insane as he did before he drank from Louis. Not sure he wants to do it again, worrying too much about the despair he could feel in the other man. "I need to just— I need a minute, I think."
A glance down at his shirt, with Louis touching it. Gross. Great.
"I can change," he says. What else is there to do? "He supplemented my luggage like a considerate freak."
Unconsciously, Louis' fingers have undone one button, two, three. Nervous energy. Weeks and weeks of fear and worry, carried from country to country, and now here, where he is present but unable to do anything for Daniel. Louis can see him fed. Can be present. But he cannot take away what Daniel has lived through. Cannot make Daniel less of a vampire.
"Shower," Louis tells him softly. "Use hot water."
Daniel needs a minute. Louis understands this as, perhaps, his cue to step away.
He is finding that difficult.
"You'll feel better afterwards," is true. "You can feed again. We can decide what to do."
How much privacy had Armand given him? None, Louis would guess. So he owes Daniel this. A closed door. A few minutes.
Only it is very hard to convince the animal instinct kicking in the back of his head to let go.
Daniel doesn't need supernatural powers to see how strung out Louis is, and it's understandable. A large part of Daniel doesn't want to pull away either, even though he's still reeling from fucking everything. A week ago—
Months ago?
Doesn't matter. It's all different. He doesn't have the same priorities, he doesn't have the same life.
"Come here," he ends up saying, and pulls Louis into a hug again. A shuddered exhale, and he stays like that for a while. Longer than necessary, probably. His own nerves feel fried and tangled, and Louis' presence, despite being part of the aforementioned fucking everything, is grounding.
After a while, he brings his hands up to hold Louis' face, and looks at him. Silently checking in.
"Help me pick something out, yeah?"
A task to do besides sit and wait. Best he's got. Unless Louis wants to come scrub blood off of him, insert bleak laugh.
Daniel pulls and Louis goes, folds in against him. A brief moment leaning bonelessly into Daniel before Louis' arms tighten around him. Holds him, clutched close, palm flattening across Daniel's back, sliding up to his nape. Breathing against Daniel's neck, where the scarring from Louis' teeth still rests after all this time.
Had Daniel tasted despair? Guilt? What had lingered in Louis' blood, what pieces of the long, frantic chase had been there for Daniel to taste?
A passing concern. Dispelled, momentarily, by Daniel's offering. (Louis wouldn't not remain, but—) It sparks up some deep tenderness in him, undeserving as he is. Daniel, taking care of him still.
"Don't rush," Louis tells him. "I don't mind waiting on you."
It makes him feel itchy with anxiety being even a room away. But Daniel deserves privacy. A closed door. A chance to gather himself without an audience.
He doesn't leave right away. Still holding on to Louis, feeling like they both need it. A far cry from the stoic handshake they shared before he'd left the penthouse, and Daniel experienced a thirty minute alternate universe fantasy where he was going to just pack and leave and Armand was going to sulk silently and never interfere.
"Thank you," he says, before stepping back. "For being here. I don't know what I'd have done. Today or— with any of it."
Get eaten, probably. Failing that, panic and accidentally torch himself. Nothing good. But Louis came after him, and that means everything. Daniel squeezes his hands, the reluctance tangible - especially now that there's a sympathetic telepathic echo possible between them - but he does step away. Ultimately he decides to leave the bathroom door half open, in case he ... what? He doesn't know. Passes out, or something. It leaves Louis with a view of the vanity, nothing scandalous, and Daniel spends an unknown amount of time (to him) staring at blood running off of him. 'Hunger' continues to gnaw at him, and his senses make him feel like he's on another fucking planet, but he manages not to do anything embarrassing.
Mummified in towels when he emerges. Daniel has been thin and wiry his whole life, he's not especially ashamed of what he looks like naked, being seventy. In decent shape all things considered; the most impactful years have been the last few, disease catching up to him at last. But in front of Louis it's a big ask.
"You better not have found a clown suit in there," he says. Look, he's got shitty jokes, he'll be okay.
Louis takes Daniel's thanks into the next room with him, where he can feel some quiet anguish for it. For arriving late. For this being the best he can offer. He sits with it, while water runs in the next room. While Daniel washes off the doused blood of his transformation.
Swathed in towels, emerging in a cloud of steam, Daniel can almost be mistaken for the mortal he'd been in Dubai.
But his eyes. His eyes cannot be masked.
Louis had loved Daniel's eyes. He has been thinking of this, sat at the foot of the bed, task put to him completed. Louis has had so much time to think of all the ways he was fond of Daniel, all the things that appealed. He is thinking of them now, taking stock the way a man standing in the remnants of a scorched building might anxiously put fingers to what's most valuable.
Daniel is himself still. But his eyes—
Is this what Grace had felt, when she'd taken Louis' glasses from him and found not their shared brown but gleaming green?
"No clown suit," Louis reassures. "Only your usual fare, without the addition of spilled blood."
Spoken aloud knowing that Daniel is hungry still. Louis had been hungry. Claudia had been hungry. (Had Madeleine? Louis had felt her, but she had been gone from him so quickly. Claudia would have known.)
"Better?" Louis questions, a slight smile on his face signaling some awareness of how absurd the question is.
No more clear blue-green, the strange density of a preternatural create has set in, occasionally shifting the way his maker's shift— ten times more obvious for him, starting from blueish, instead of Armand's deep amber. Daniel barely looked at himself in the mirror. Too surreal for now.
"Thanks." Wry. Blood seems like it's going to be a reoccurring theme, from now on. Speaking of: "Do you want a shirt?"
He's not sure how much transfer Louis got stuck with via sad hugs. He collects his change of clothes and goes to get dressed, still leaving the bathroom door partly open so they can talk.
"I have no idea what that word means," is almost a laugh. Better. "I feel sort of like I'm on acid. I'm distracted by the thought of— eating."
Eating.
"Am I going to go batshit crazy if I don't get something?"
What the fuck is wrong with Armand. (A lot. A lot of things that Daniel knows specifically, now.) Why did he do this? He pokes at the thing in his head, inelegant, but nothing happens; no return rush of feeling, no shift, no closure. A new phantom limb, in addition to everything else.
He re-appears, dressed and with one remaining towel that he rubs over his hair, glasses clipped to a shirt pocket. He doesn't seem to need them, suddenly, but it feels weird to discard them.
"You tasted miserable," he says bluntly. "Which of those options is going to make you feel the least like shit?"
Daniel can fucking cope, he's not the one with suicidal tendencies. He's the Actually I'm busy this weekend in the face of an eldritch monster coaxing him into sleep one.
Apology flexes across Louis' face, a slight grimace. Not regret, only worry. Daniel shouldn't have to account for Louis. For Louis' miseries, his private self-flagellation.
"It's not about me," Louis says frankly, though he isn't certain that's true. Maybe in the most immediate sense, this is not about Louis. But Daniel is a vampire. Armand had dragged him from their home, all across the world for weeks, had made Daniel write letters.
Maybe some part of it is about Louis.
But Louis is leaving that aside.
"It's about what you can live with," Louis cautions. "I want to make this easy for you."
And so had Armand, apparently. Louis is certain that's what those mind-broken mortals were meant for. An easy hunt. An easy first kill.
A fair bit of it is probably about Louis, even though Armand did not specifically say so. Daniel is hyper-aware of the fact that Louis had, in their stolen memories, made the survival of a junkie journalist a condition of their companionship. Cynicism (and a lot of logic) says this is purely about Armand trying to set up a return, and that Daniel is coincidental; he could be anyone. A 500 year old having a panicked tantrum in slow motion.
(Armand had explained himself, in bits and pieces, concerning the trial, but Daniel doesn't know how to feel about any of that. Maybe he'll relate those pieces to Louis sometime, but it feels like taking an axe to trauma, and so, maybe he won't.)
He considers saying something like What would be easy is clear guidance, but it feels pedantic. Daniel hadn't had a choice in transforming, but he has choices now. He should take the luxury while he has it.
"Do they have to die? Is it... am I not going to be able to stop? Are they going to be fucked up forever even if I do?"
It barely has time to register before Louis is taking Daniel by the hands. The lines are all blurry. Who is standing on ceremony now? They'd had something like professional boundaries, and now everything is in pieces.
Louis draws him down, coaxing Daniel to sit alongside him.
"I think Armand broke their minds. I think they will never be as they were. They are alive only to preserve their blood for you."
A guess. Armand has had hundred of years to hone his gift. Louis is outclassed. (They needn't invoke their own personal experience of Armand's gifts.)
Louis has not let go of his hand. He imparted his own story. He had relayed the things that had made sense to him, Lestat's tutelage, his personal experience. But Daniel asked.
"It is hard to take only a sip. It took me a long time to master."
To be safe enough that Damek is an employee rather than a corpse.
"You can learn to stop. But you're very new. Your hunger will be strong, and that will make it hard to stop while they are alive."
Daniel absorbs this, sat there, one hand clutching Louis'. Thinks about how dire being an accessory to murder in Dubai felt, watching Armand skip out of the tower to hunt down some idiot crypto kid, feeling nothing for the individual but leaning into the obligatory moral outrage. He'd done it several times over the course of the interview, and it was meaningless, because he was only using it as a tactic to prod the monsters whose house he was staying in.
What now? Those people aren't carefully curated, there's no way. Just random individuals with lives. Does he care? Is it worse if he doesn't? Was he a monster before, worse for not having an excuse? Daniel's other hand presses to his face, pinching either side of his eyes, tries to center himself through a long breath.
His hands don't shake. Steady.
"I'll just do it." Quiet. "You don't have to watch."
Louis has already pulled from some, he's said as much. He shouldn't have to cycle through more and feel like shit just for Daniel, just because Armand is an asshole.
Okay. Okay. He squeezes Louis' hand, tries to focus. Dead blood, right. All that.
Daniel stays where he is for a long moment, just getting his shit together. Coping with the things he can feel, and hear. Trying not to spiral thinking too hard about his future, his kids, getting back to New York without getting turned into a pile of ash. He needs to drink blood, and he needs to do it soon, or he'll go fucking bonkers.
Soon enough: they're out in the other room, and Daniel is contending with the sight of people Armand left. A strange feeling lances through him, perverse relief that they aren't tied up and terrified. The ancient vampire must have lobotomized them— Louis can probably hear the ragged thought, bordering on hysterical, Is this how I looked in that fucking apartment?
Daniel survived San Fransisco, these people aren't surviving Venice. Bad luck.
He's going to say something. Ask a philosophical question. Work it out. At the very least, point out it was stupid to put a clean shirt on before this. It flies out of his head, and he's not thinking, there's nothing, nothing but fangs in flesh and blood on his tongue, hot and horrible and alive.
That thought hooks in Louis' head. San Francisco. Daniel, pale and bloody, face blank while Louis stood at the window.
(What Louis looked like? Like Daniel? Had there been any difference?)
But San Francisco is pushed from Louis' mind as Daniel falls to drinking. Louis remembers it. Remembers how desperate he had been. How inelegant he had been, scrabbling across the hardwood, biting for veins.
The mortal doesn't struggle. Daniel's mind is a blank, plunged into the necessity of feeding. Impenetrable, in a way. Louis allows himself to be drawn in alongside Daniel, fingers trailing across Daniel's shoulders. Grazes bare skin at the nape of his neck as Louis sinks into his mind.
Louis can feel the mortal going, going. Life draining away. The echoing taste of blood rich in Daniel's mouth, an absence on Louis' tongue. Louis' fingers slipping through Daniel's hair, soft silver beneath his palm as Louis reaches to temper that grasping urge towards the last drops.
The drive to consume is too overwhelming to notice anything about the person he's killing— flashes he pays no mind to, they could be anything, skimming past him like spots in the distance on the highway. He gave a fuck about Louis, and that made it different. Daniel doesn't care about these people and just wants to get it overwith. That it feels good, filling him in an unearthly way, is something he can process later.
Louis' hand on him, strange, surreal. That soft voice in his head jolts him and he feels embarrassed about it for a moment, pulling away and—
Whatever he might have thought (laughing at him to put his shirt back on in '73, a mocking offer months ago) is gone, staring down at a person who he has now killed. The man - a human, a mortal, something Daniel isn't anymore - is fading away, greyish already. How much fucking blood did he have to take, to make someone lose color?
One person left, still alive. They sit there and see nothing, like a reformatted drive, blank. Daniel is more aware this time as he pushes their head back and leans down, but wishes he wasn't.
Louis would have drunk down four if he could have, that first night. He's drunk thousands since.
His fingers remain, Louis drawn along in Daniel's wake as he sinks teeth into the throat of this last mortal. Fingertips running along his scalp, grounding. Anchoring.
I'm here, whispers in the back of his head. Stay with me.
Drawing Daniel's attention, a step back from the life dwindling away between his jaws.
The last person drops and Daniel staggers back, this time feeling more sparks of their life— dull, bitter, a middling career in tourism customer service, a relationship that never resulted in marriage, a horrible feeling of a lifetime wasted and then, finally, a calming call to rest. The satisfaction of Finally, this rolls into him and Daniel can't help but feel an echo of it, even as something else takes over.
Fuck you, Armand.
Louis' hand on him feels crazy. All of this is making him cognizant of how long it's been since anyone's touched him in a way that hasn't been medical, or, recently thanks to Armand, gently threatening. He blames the resentful misery of this last victim.
Too many fucking emotions. He's dead, he's not dead, this can't be happening, this is very much happening.
Staring down at four bodies, the final one shivering their last. Blood on his mouth, a bit on the shirt, but it's not so bad. Too hungry to let anything go to waste. At least he feels more grounded, now, the thing inside of him demanding more, now, more, has shut up. He can still sense it, a creature that's grafted into himself like a fucked up horror movie monster, but it's been temporarily tamed.
"Okay."
Okay??? Tries again.
"Okay." A breath. "I have a question, and I want to preface it with saying that I don't want to, and that I'm asking from a purely practical standpoint, considering the logistics and morals of it all. Given that there's no fucking reason to have turned me into a vampire, and how many people I will apparently have to eat, and there's apparently thousands more vampires around today than at any time in history— should I just torch myself? Or sit in a locked room and starve? I was dying anyway. I had a lot set up to just go."
Again, he doesn't want to, but it might be a decent fuck you to Armand. Oh yeah, jerk?
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"I'm here," Louis promises, a soft repetition. "I ain't leaving you."
A promise skewing near to what he had once offered Claudia: As long as you walk the Earth, I'll never taste the fire, you understand me? Similar, but not the same. He and Daniel have suffered together, survived together. They are linked. They walk into rooms and emerge side by side. Daniel is alive. They will survive this too.
Louis is holding Daniel so tightly. His wound is healing, but not quickly enough to avoid trickles of blood soaking into the back of Daniel's shirt. Cradles Daniel's head, allows himself to shudder through the rush of relief, held in check while so much else demanded Louis' attention.
"You aren't doing this alone. I got you."
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But he can sense Louis' relief, and finds his own in how tightly they're clinging to each other. Louis doesn't feel like he's about to slip away over guilt. Fuck, this is ... a lot.
"This is—"
What is it? C'mon, Daniel, you're a writer.
"Fucking crazy," is what he ends up saying, teary laughter in his voice.
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Though it doesn't quite compare. Lestat had rushed Louis, but he'd been present. He'd provided some kind of guide. He'd offered, Louis had accepted.
Daniel had none of that.
The guilt will come later. It waits, circling at the edges of Louis' mind, waylaid by all that requires his immediate attention. Holding on to Daniel, feeling his breathing, the lingering closeness that comes from Daniel's teeth in his skin.
"Do you need more?" softly, fingers playing gently with the curls at the nape of Daniel's neck. "Or do you need the blood washed away?"
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No matter what happened after, Louis spoke with such reverence about his changing. He loved Lestat, he got at least the illusion of a choice. This seems fucking stupid in contrast, but Daniel's stubborn, he'll deal with it. Memories of 1973 were stranger— in a way, it's a relief to have this overwith, and stacking onto that, he's kind of annoyed that Armand didn't stick around so Daniel could yell at him.
Shit to think about later, when his head's not turning itself inside out.
"Probably both." Another weak laugh. Incredulous. "It doesn't... feel like hunger usually does."
Feels, again: fucking crazy.
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Had thought of how gentle he would be with Daniel, who still wears the scars of Louis' fangs on his skin.
"It won't. We call it hunger, but it's something else," is a little lofty, even as Louis draws just slightly back. Cups Daniel's cheek with his hand. "Does it still burn you?"
Hunger so vast and overwhelming that it is like drowning. Like burning alive. Like suffocating.
His fingers hook into the front of Daniel's blood-sodden shirt. Remembers San Francisco. Daniel hooking off his own shirt, a single easy motion. Does he still move that way? Had age slowed him, and has that now been restored?
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"It does. It is." But he doesn't feel as insane as he did before he drank from Louis. Not sure he wants to do it again, worrying too much about the despair he could feel in the other man. "I need to just— I need a minute, I think."
A glance down at his shirt, with Louis touching it. Gross. Great.
"I can change," he says. What else is there to do? "He supplemented my luggage like a considerate freak."
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"Shower," Louis tells him softly. "Use hot water."
Daniel needs a minute. Louis understands this as, perhaps, his cue to step away.
He is finding that difficult.
"You'll feel better afterwards," is true. "You can feed again. We can decide what to do."
How much privacy had Armand given him? None, Louis would guess. So he owes Daniel this. A closed door. A few minutes.
Only it is very hard to convince the animal instinct kicking in the back of his head to let go.
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Months ago?
Doesn't matter. It's all different. He doesn't have the same priorities, he doesn't have the same life.
"Come here," he ends up saying, and pulls Louis into a hug again. A shuddered exhale, and he stays like that for a while. Longer than necessary, probably. His own nerves feel fried and tangled, and Louis' presence, despite being part of the aforementioned fucking everything, is grounding.
After a while, he brings his hands up to hold Louis' face, and looks at him. Silently checking in.
"Help me pick something out, yeah?"
A task to do besides sit and wait. Best he's got. Unless Louis wants to come scrub blood off of him, insert bleak laugh.
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Had Daniel tasted despair? Guilt? What had lingered in Louis' blood, what pieces of the long, frantic chase had been there for Daniel to taste?
A passing concern. Dispelled, momentarily, by Daniel's offering. (Louis wouldn't not remain, but—) It sparks up some deep tenderness in him, undeserving as he is. Daniel, taking care of him still.
"Don't rush," Louis tells him. "I don't mind waiting on you."
It makes him feel itchy with anxiety being even a room away. But Daniel deserves privacy. A closed door. A chance to gather himself without an audience.
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"Thank you," he says, before stepping back. "For being here. I don't know what I'd have done. Today or— with any of it."
Get eaten, probably. Failing that, panic and accidentally torch himself. Nothing good. But Louis came after him, and that means everything. Daniel squeezes his hands, the reluctance tangible - especially now that there's a sympathetic telepathic echo possible between them - but he does step away. Ultimately he decides to leave the bathroom door half open, in case he ... what? He doesn't know. Passes out, or something. It leaves Louis with a view of the vanity, nothing scandalous, and Daniel spends an unknown amount of time (to him) staring at blood running off of him. 'Hunger' continues to gnaw at him, and his senses make him feel like he's on another fucking planet, but he manages not to do anything embarrassing.
Mummified in towels when he emerges. Daniel has been thin and wiry his whole life, he's not especially ashamed of what he looks like naked, being seventy. In decent shape all things considered; the most impactful years have been the last few, disease catching up to him at last. But in front of Louis it's a big ask.
"You better not have found a clown suit in there," he says. Look, he's got shitty jokes, he'll be okay.
no subject
Swathed in towels, emerging in a cloud of steam, Daniel can almost be mistaken for the mortal he'd been in Dubai.
But his eyes. His eyes cannot be masked.
Louis had loved Daniel's eyes. He has been thinking of this, sat at the foot of the bed, task put to him completed. Louis has had so much time to think of all the ways he was fond of Daniel, all the things that appealed. He is thinking of them now, taking stock the way a man standing in the remnants of a scorched building might anxiously put fingers to what's most valuable.
Daniel is himself still. But his eyes—
Is this what Grace had felt, when she'd taken Louis' glasses from him and found not their shared brown but gleaming green?
"No clown suit," Louis reassures. "Only your usual fare, without the addition of spilled blood."
Spoken aloud knowing that Daniel is hungry still. Louis had been hungry. Claudia had been hungry. (Had Madeleine? Louis had felt her, but she had been gone from him so quickly. Claudia would have known.)
"Better?" Louis questions, a slight smile on his face signaling some awareness of how absurd the question is.
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"Thanks." Wry. Blood seems like it's going to be a reoccurring theme, from now on. Speaking of: "Do you want a shirt?"
He's not sure how much transfer Louis got stuck with via sad hugs. He collects his change of clothes and goes to get dressed, still leaving the bathroom door partly open so they can talk.
"I have no idea what that word means," is almost a laugh. Better. "I feel sort of like I'm on acid. I'm distracted by the thought of— eating."
Eating.
"Am I going to go batshit crazy if I don't get something?"
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Maybe. Less an objection to the splotches of blood on his own, more of a balm for the inevitability of Daniel's scent on the fabric.
Louis gives himself time to turn it over. Listens to Daniel shedding towels, dressing himself. Considers the question.
"Maybe," he admits. "You'll need to drink often, these first days."
And Daniel knows everything about what it was like for Louis at the start. About the tractor salesman. About Louis' reluctance.
"I don't mind, Daniel. If you'd prefer to drink from me until it's more manageable."
Until Daniel can better control the fate of his prey. Decide to take a life, rather than his hunger dictating what comes of their meals.
"He left others. Enough to blunt the worst of it for now."
What did it matter, what Daniel could glean from Louis in the process? Daniel has everything already. All that he is, it's already in Daniels hands.
"Or we can try together. If you like."
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What the fuck is wrong with Armand. (A lot. A lot of things that Daniel knows specifically, now.) Why did he do this? He pokes at the thing in his head, inelegant, but nothing happens; no return rush of feeling, no shift, no closure. A new phantom limb, in addition to everything else.
He re-appears, dressed and with one remaining towel that he rubs over his hair, glasses clipped to a shirt pocket. He doesn't seem to need them, suddenly, but it feels weird to discard them.
"You tasted miserable," he says bluntly. "Which of those options is going to make you feel the least like shit?"
Daniel can fucking cope, he's not the one with suicidal tendencies. He's the Actually I'm busy this weekend in the face of an eldritch monster coaxing him into sleep one.
no subject
"It's not about me," Louis says frankly, though he isn't certain that's true. Maybe in the most immediate sense, this is not about Louis. But Daniel is a vampire. Armand had dragged him from their home, all across the world for weeks, had made Daniel write letters.
Maybe some part of it is about Louis.
But Louis is leaving that aside.
"It's about what you can live with," Louis cautions. "I want to make this easy for you."
And so had Armand, apparently. Louis is certain that's what those mind-broken mortals were meant for. An easy hunt. An easy first kill.
no subject
(Armand had explained himself, in bits and pieces, concerning the trial, but Daniel doesn't know how to feel about any of that. Maybe he'll relate those pieces to Louis sometime, but it feels like taking an axe to trauma, and so, maybe he won't.)
He considers saying something like What would be easy is clear guidance, but it feels pedantic. Daniel hadn't had a choice in transforming, but he has choices now. He should take the luxury while he has it.
"Do they have to die? Is it... am I not going to be able to stop? Are they going to be fucked up forever even if I do?"
no subject
It barely has time to register before Louis is taking Daniel by the hands. The lines are all blurry. Who is standing on ceremony now? They'd had something like professional boundaries, and now everything is in pieces.
Louis draws him down, coaxing Daniel to sit alongside him.
"I think Armand broke their minds. I think they will never be as they were. They are alive only to preserve their blood for you."
A guess. Armand has had hundred of years to hone his gift. Louis is outclassed. (They needn't invoke their own personal experience of Armand's gifts.)
Louis has not let go of his hand. He imparted his own story. He had relayed the things that had made sense to him, Lestat's tutelage, his personal experience. But Daniel asked.
"It is hard to take only a sip. It took me a long time to master."
To be safe enough that Damek is an employee rather than a corpse.
"You can learn to stop. But you're very new. Your hunger will be strong, and that will make it hard to stop while they are alive."
Does not add: I'm sorry.
no subject
What now? Those people aren't carefully curated, there's no way. Just random individuals with lives. Does he care? Is it worse if he doesn't? Was he a monster before, worse for not having an excuse? Daniel's other hand presses to his face, pinching either side of his eyes, tries to center himself through a long breath.
His hands don't shake. Steady.
"I'll just do it." Quiet. "You don't have to watch."
Louis has already pulled from some, he's said as much. He shouldn't have to cycle through more and feel like shit just for Daniel, just because Armand is an asshole.
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Just as Louis doesn't have to be here at all. Didn't have to chase after Daniel. Didn't have to stay once Daniel was found.
His fingers lace through Daniel's.
"I want to be there with you," Louis murmurs. "I'll pull you back."
The mortals were there to drink, but Louis can make himself a tether. Keep Daniel from drowning.
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Daniel stays where he is for a long moment, just getting his shit together. Coping with the things he can feel, and hear. Trying not to spiral thinking too hard about his future, his kids, getting back to New York without getting turned into a pile of ash. He needs to drink blood, and he needs to do it soon, or he'll go fucking bonkers.
Soon enough: they're out in the other room, and Daniel is contending with the sight of people Armand left. A strange feeling lances through him, perverse relief that they aren't tied up and terrified. The ancient vampire must have lobotomized them— Louis can probably hear the ragged thought, bordering on hysterical, Is this how I looked in that fucking apartment?
Daniel survived San Fransisco, these people aren't surviving Venice. Bad luck.
He's going to say something. Ask a philosophical question. Work it out. At the very least, point out it was stupid to put a clean shirt on before this. It flies out of his head, and he's not thinking, there's nothing, nothing but fangs in flesh and blood on his tongue, hot and horrible and alive.
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(What Louis looked like? Like Daniel? Had there been any difference?)
But San Francisco is pushed from Louis' mind as Daniel falls to drinking. Louis remembers it. Remembers how desperate he had been. How inelegant he had been, scrabbling across the hardwood, biting for veins.
The mortal doesn't struggle. Daniel's mind is a blank, plunged into the necessity of feeding. Impenetrable, in a way. Louis allows himself to be drawn in alongside Daniel, fingers trailing across Daniel's shoulders. Grazes bare skin at the nape of his neck as Louis sinks into his mind.
Louis can feel the mortal going, going. Life draining away. The echoing taste of blood rich in Daniel's mouth, an absence on Louis' tongue. Louis' fingers slipping through Daniel's hair, soft silver beneath his palm as Louis reaches to temper that grasping urge towards the last drops.
Daniel, comes as a murmur. On to the next now.
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Louis' hand on him, strange, surreal. That soft voice in his head jolts him and he feels embarrassed about it for a moment, pulling away and—
Whatever he might have thought (laughing at him to put his shirt back on in '73, a mocking offer months ago) is gone, staring down at a person who he has now killed. The man - a human, a mortal, something Daniel isn't anymore - is fading away, greyish already. How much fucking blood did he have to take, to make someone lose color?
One person left, still alive. They sit there and see nothing, like a reformatted drive, blank. Daniel is more aware this time as he pushes their head back and leans down, but wishes he wasn't.
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Louis would have drunk down four if he could have, that first night. He's drunk thousands since.
His fingers remain, Louis drawn along in Daniel's wake as he sinks teeth into the throat of this last mortal. Fingertips running along his scalp, grounding. Anchoring.
I'm here, whispers in the back of his head. Stay with me.
Drawing Daniel's attention, a step back from the life dwindling away between his jaws.
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Fuck you, Armand.
Louis' hand on him feels crazy. All of this is making him cognizant of how long it's been since anyone's touched him in a way that hasn't been medical, or, recently thanks to Armand, gently threatening. He blames the resentful misery of this last victim.
Too many fucking emotions. He's dead, he's not dead, this can't be happening, this is very much happening.
Staring down at four bodies, the final one shivering their last. Blood on his mouth, a bit on the shirt, but it's not so bad. Too hungry to let anything go to waste. At least he feels more grounded, now, the thing inside of him demanding more, now, more, has shut up. He can still sense it, a creature that's grafted into himself like a fucked up horror movie monster, but it's been temporarily tamed.
"Okay."
Okay??? Tries again.
"Okay." A breath. "I have a question, and I want to preface it with saying that I don't want to, and that I'm asking from a purely practical standpoint, considering the logistics and morals of it all. Given that there's no fucking reason to have turned me into a vampire, and how many people I will apparently have to eat, and there's apparently thousands more vampires around today than at any time in history— should I just torch myself? Or sit in a locked room and starve? I was dying anyway. I had a lot set up to just go."
Again, he doesn't want to, but it might be a decent fuck you to Armand. Oh yeah, jerk?
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And Daniel says this thing. Asks this question.
Louis' whole body flinches away from what he invokes.
"No," is so raw. Louis reaches for him again, hands lifting to bracket Daniel's face. "No, Daniel."
Thumb at the corner of Daniel's mouth, over that smear of blood. Holding on.
"Don't go."
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🎀 territory?? unless you had further desires