Re: [log: antique store - daniel/claire/louis]
Definitions mattered very little to Daniel. He suspected that the old god in Louis was speaking on one level and Temperance another, their respective faiths (Temperance's Catholic and the old god's, merely itself) contrasting too strongly for either to understand the other. The sting of Temperance's perspiration in the air was growing stronger, but it had no flavor of fear and Daniel, by contrast, felt himself growing ever more parched. With every passing moment Daniel grew more impatient for the finale of this little farce, finding discomfort diminished his patience. His anger faded, leaving that itchy irritation and annoyance with the words going back and forth. Whenever Temperance said that what she wanted did not matter, or she spoke of her ending as an inevitable certainty at a fixed point in time, Daniel wanted to gnash his teeth. Fatalistic children, you had to protect them from themselves half the time. He switched his attention back to Louis' face, his gaze sobering and the brown returning to the unholy blackness that had taken it over before. He lamented the departure of trust that the old god standing there meant.
Daniel put his fingernail into his teeth, behind an eyetooth, which had receded to something closer to usual size, though there was still something of a needle-mouthed wolf about the draw of his lips. He no longer seemed so angry. "We won't let you carry on this way. And you are so predictable, so needy, with your small circles for attention. Your sacrifices." He made a noise of distaste, as if someone had presented him with a chunk of old bubble gum and expected him to chew it. "So if you need those, we deprive you, and box you up without your attention you like so much. Maybe I will wait until you have left Louis, so I will care less about the state of the body you're in. Maybe we will take Louis from this body and put him in another; I have seen it done. Then we will trap you in that one and wait for you to rot in an old hole, like some of your ilk left outside of Cairo."
Daniel heaved a sigh of annoyance, as if let down by the whole proceeding. "You are a bug, an infection. We need only contain you, and then wait for you to wither. Or simply wait, and perhaps you will consume yourself with boredom. I would." Daniel turned and paced the edge of the room, following his nose and finding the cabinet with a glass bottle that sloshed. Taking this out and pouring himself some into whatever antique thing Louis had stashed next to it, Daniel turned and leaned against the counter. "If it won't go," he said to Claire, "then we trap it, or move it, or geld it. Something will work."