log: louis/daniel Who: Louis and Daniel What: Louis brings Daniel tea, snarking ensues. Where: Sam's place in Vegas. When: Backdated to when Daniel was recovering at Sam's, before Louis moved out. Warnings/Rating: None.
Louis was under strict instructions to make sure Daniel was well, not that he needed much coaxing.
It was strange, meeting the man for the first time in person under such circumstances. The circumstances themselves might not be so unusual, not for Daniel, from what he knew, but it was odd that they had never been face to face before. After all that time Lin had been seeing him, after whatever Sam’s relationship with him had been in the past, and here Louis was, walking in with a cup of tea and a sandwich on a plate to make sure Daniel was fed and watered. It was like he’d been left a surly, well-read plant to take care of.
He wasn’t a fool. One or two positive, interesting engagements on the journals didn’t wipe away the months and years of Lin’s sadness over the direction his relationship with Daniel had taken. It wasn’t even clear to him if the two were together anymore - Daniel had been surprised by the suggestion they were broken up, even if Lin, when he last spoke to him, seemed sure that was what had happened. It wasn’t a conflict he was interested in inserting himself in the middle of - after the fiasco at the hospital, he had resolved never to get in the middle of other people’s relationships every again, if it could be helped. But talking to Daniel had made him curious, and it had softened previously calcified opinions of the man, built over subsequent barbed conversations that had cut off quickly and gone mostly nowhere.
Now, here he was, knocking once and then nudging the door open to the bedroom. Call it a strong suspicion, but this didn’t feel like ‘Sam’s’ bedroom anymore. He didn’t think she was going to come back to this place again, not after what Cris had said. As for himself, once Daniel was in better health, he would be gone too. It saddened him to think of it empty, all Sam’s paintings in the boathouse, the little rowboat, the water. She had been happy here, and he had helped to ruin it.
“I hope strong black tea and ham on sourdough aren’t too disappointing after all your travels,” he said, setting the tray on a small table. He was dressed, for him, in unusually casual attire, grey lounge pants and a borrowed t-shirt, blonde curls askew from lack of product. Healthier, though, than he’d been, with only pale smudges of blue under the eyes. He slept now, after that insomniac year, and he’d only just woken himself. “We’re short on jamón ibérico, but I expect it will still taste properly like pig.”
Daniel was not well, but Louis had to know that coming in. Sam knew it, Louis had to know it, and Daniel sure as fuck knew it. He had reached a point where he almost was not sorry for it, the state of not-well having completely overcome everything else. He had lost count of the number of times he had tried to give up his growing number of addictions, and maybe this was his crowning achievement, but he felt himself sliding down the dank rough stones at the bottom of a deep, deep well. The sun-filled cottage didn’t lend itself toward that reality, but Daniel could feel the truth in his bones and his molars. He wasn’t going to last the day.
When Louis entered the room, Daniel rolled off of one shoulder to see who it was. His face was an ugly bleach white under the cold sweat, but Daniel had a soft, unassuming set of features that shrugged off age and even some of the deeper, more haggard lines of the hard year behind him. The drunk and the junkie were not in the skin, though, not really. It was in the width of his wrist and the color of his eyes, the dull set of his tangled curls. He moved like a puppet with its strings cut, at the joints, without strength. He shivered for a second, but he was certainly sharp, and on edge.
Daniel watched the new entrance, pegged him for wealthy, noted the accent, and saw nothing in his features that related Louis to Sam in his mind. “Which one are you?” he asked, as if he actually had an interest. He certainly didn’t want the food, and made no effort to sit up.
Louis knew Daniel wasn’t well, but apparently he’d underestimated just how unwell he actually was. Sam seemed confident there was no need to bring him to the hospital, but when he turned round and got a good look at him, the cold sweats and pale, flat face pinned his condition and his troubles very neatly. He looked like a pale doll, figured as a person. His eyes, though, were sharp enough. Bleary, maybe, but reassuringly present despite everything else, and that was something.
He left the sandwich where it was. The man had to eat sometime, and he might want it at one point or another. Instead, he picked up the tea and set it on the end table beside the bed. A few wisps of steam rose up from the surface, but it would swiftly cool.
He was a little surprised that Daniel didn’t recognize him, but he could ascribe that to his current state. Usually the accent and his resemblance to Sam pinned him neatly. “Louis,” he said. “Can you sit up a little? You should at least drink something.”
With almost expert disdain, Daniel refused to sit up. He tracked Louis around the room with distant, disrespectful interest, eyes sweeping down his body, focusing then on the funny explosion of his blonde curls, and then eying his face, which he felt was too sharp for any sort of resemblance to Sam. He was being stubborn about resemblance to Sam, in all cases. He felt it gave people an unfair advantage. Daniel was used to disconcerting people with his frank disregard for civility, particularly in the Victorian period, and only really accomplished attention-hogs like Lin enjoyed it. (He was nicer to Sam, because she was squishy and broken, but we’ll set that aside for now.)
One of the sidelong glances went to the tea and the food, and frankly neither looked appetizing. His mouth compressed in an unconscious effort to avoid both. He appreciated Louis’ timely appearance, which at least might provide some distraction. It wasn’t lobbing insults at Neil, but you couldn’t have everything.
Daniel smiled a distinctly nasty smile, and it pressed back into his pale face, iced over with fast-fading resistance. “Had enough to drink lately.”
Louis watched Daniel eye the food with disgust and mistrust, apparently, for any food or any drink. "Hilarious," he intoned, and, shockingly, without a hint of laughter. "It's only tea. There isn't even honey in it."
He sat down in the chair beside the bed. Yes, he was going to stay until Daniel at least drank tea, which was only really a ploy to get some water in him anyway. He would not have the man die of dehydration on his watch. Perhaps he was no good at solving the problems of his family anymore, but he could handle keeping someone from dying of starvation. Odds were he'd eat the sandwich out of desperation once Louis left the room anyway. Daniel seemed to him the 'defiant until convenient' type.
"Read any good books recently?"
Daniel looked at the ceiling and swallowed a dry, scraping swallow. He accompanied it with a very shallow breath and a badly suppressed tremor. “I don’t want tea.”
At the corner of his eye, he saw Louis taking a seat with an air of purpose, and he hid his surprise and bitter gratitude (yes, a very possible emotion for one such as Daniel). Blinking with a deliberately fabricated somnolence, Daniel would have starved the conversation with a resistance silence, except Louis brought up something he couldn’t quite resist.
The ice blue eyes came open in slits, and Daniel turned sideways to scrape sweat off onto the pillow and present Louis with two eyes. “No. What’s published this year, here? I don’t know the years of the doors well enough.” Louis looked more likely to know than Sam, and he’d only found art books in the cottage.
"Everyone wants tea," he said, with all the authority of a kindly Scottish grandmother nursing an alcoholic, rather than a man in his thirties doing the same.
The joke had been facetious in part, but Daniel's reluctant response to it was satisfying, in its way. "I saw 'The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants' at the bookstore recently. Relevant to your interests? No, I suppose not. It's 2001 here. I don't know if it stays that year or if this place will catch us up eventually, but I know I saw Atonement. I never bothered to read it before the film came out, so I bought it to read. I don't go in for fantasy much, but American Gods, I think." He had a vague memory of reading the book when he was younger, before he'd ever come to the country. For a book that purported to chronicle the fantastical version of one English author's travels of the United States, it spent a godawful amount of time in cold midwestern places Louis had personally never bothered to visit.
"Someone on National Public Radio this morning was discussing a book by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the first important ones. Blink, that's it. And there's one called The Eyre Affair. Saw it on the bookshelf, haven't read it yet. Clerk said it was lovely and she couldn't put it down. You know they still have bookstores, here? It's charming as a country town, being in a world without a strong foothold into the internet."
Daniel scowled. “I don’t want tea,” he retorted, with all the authority of an angry child with a fever, rather than a man in his thirties with withdrawal.
Daniel’s eyes gleamed at the mention of bookstores. Heaving a hoarse breath, Daniel rolled over and smashed his face into the pillow, cooling his face before rolling back over and heaving himself upright in a huff of dry, stale air. It didn’t take that much effort, because there wasn’t much of him to heave. It took him a moment to ride out the spinning as the room whirled around him, evidenced by an extended pause in which he visibly suppressed nausea. Then, abruptly, he said, “I read Gladwell. Pretentious bastard, but a well-deserved reputation, and a decent read. Thank God I never wrote reviews, I’m shit at them. Read that other one, too, that one I liked, very exotic, imaginative, a lot of literary references. It was witty, and didn’t bother to explain itself. Needs patience, not necessarily brains--in the reader.” He paused for breath, and then went on, “I don’t know if I’d call it ‘lovely.’ Nobody uses that word, Louis, knock it off.”
Louis watched Daniel roll and readjust himself after spitting back the offer of tea. He had absolutely no doubt that Daniel would glare at the mug until the tea was room temperature and saturated with dust from the room, and he was too thirsty to care.
Of more genuine concern was the look on his face as he pressed down nausea and sickness. "I didn't say lovely. I was only repeating the clerk's words to me when I asked her about it - but I will keep your advice in mind."
His voice quieted a little after watching Daniel wait out his stomach. "I asked about Daniel Webster books, and there weren't any. Had you written one yet?" The other obvious answer was that they didn't exist here at all, which was a shame. The more he talked to Daniel, the more he wanted to see how the other man expressed himself through the written word. Would it be surprisingly self-effacing and witty, kind and insightful, the epitome of the author who is rough in life but charming in their work? No one would accuse Daniel of having no wit or no insight in life, but the charming needed work. Despite the slight hushing of his voice in reaction to Daniel’s physical distress, his tone retained the same dryness as ever. "Do your books require as much patience as you do?"
The long speech took the breath out of Daniel. He obviously didn’t rattle on often, and the sudden burst of words left him temporarily without coherent thought. Instead he shoved awkwardly at the pillows with the first evidence of a pride he thought had long since gone to the bottom of a glass, avoiding Louis’ concerned gaze.
A spasm of real pain moved over his mouth, which suddenly twisted in vulnerability in a genuine expression so abrupt, it took him by surprise. “Several. Not here.” Daniel’s fingers wound up in the sheets, and he shoved at the blanket in a strange sweeping gesture that did nothing but lay it precisely where it had been before he picked it up.
Daniel hesitated, prodding the sore tooth, wondering if he wanted to have this conversation or not. In the end, he decided anything that could keep his mind off the hangover would be a godsend, so he took a very shallow breath and dropped back on the poorly-propped pillows. “Depends on how you read them, and what you want to get out of the experience.” It was an honest answer, obvious because Daniel evaded any direct eye contact and actually inspected the tea from the distance between himself and the mug.
Louis watched Daniel's fingers. The man had nice hands, the kind he associated with writers, or imagined that they ought to have. "I'm sorry to hear it," he said. It was true. He'd get his hands on one of Daniel's books one way or another, though he was starting to think a quest would be required.
Under the curls and above the almost too-sharp cheekbones, Louis' blue eyes were close in hue to his sister's, sharp and observant. He watched Daniel think, watched how his hands lay on the bedspread, and listened attentively when Daniel spoke. He also noticed the way his eyes fixed on the tea, the avoided eye contact. It was just the same thing suspects did when they didn't want to be confronted with potential judgement in the eye of the confessor.
His tone did soften a tic this time. “What did you want the readers to get out of them? Did you have something in mind?”
Indeed, with Daniel’s world (the “real” world? hard to say) so far out of reach, managing to find one of his books in the normal way would be incredibly difficult. Of course, Lin had said once that he had copies. Maybe the only copies in existence, and should he think it through properly, Daniel would think that fitting. Daniel had such scorn for the popular taste of his time that it was sometimes difficult for him to reconcile the commercial success of his work with the ongoing opinion that few people knew good literature from bad these days.
Daniel tipped his head into a new angle to catch the edge of Louis’ assessing gaze. For the first time he saw Sam in the attentive direction of the blue eyes, and though lacking in some of the unconscious naivete he often saw in the girl, they were certainly familiar. It was a small thing to soften his resolve, but it worked. He held out one of the pale hands, unmarked by the weight of many bottles and unstained by the exotic mists of old London. “Give me the fucking tea.”
“Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t,” Daniel admitted. “The good ones, I did.”
When Daniel demanded the tea, Louis did smile a little. It had a good effect on his otherwise harsh, thin features. "Who am I to deny a man something he craves so terribly?"
He got to his feet, moving over to the table where he'd set the mug. He handed it carefully to Daniel, propping it upright to prevent it from spilling. It wasn't hot anymore, but it would be warm, at least. "No sugar," he said. "I didn't know how you took yours." Sugar couldn't be subtracted, after all, only added.
There wasn't much left about Louis that was naive, though there was a certain unschooled intensity that had only really found direction in the last few years, the same that built quietly until he absolutely exploded on someone, as was unfortunately becoming a habit every few months or so, when the latest travesty to strike them all washed over and he appointed himself ship's captain.
He liked Daniel's hands. They weren't marred, as he might have thought they might be. They were clean, and did somehow make him think of writers and what their hands should be like, but that perhaps was a revision, knowing what he knew. Objectively, then, he liked them. "Do you play any instruments?" he asked, once the tea was safely passed off.
He sat down beside the bed again. "What were the good ones about?" Perhaps this conversation had started as a pretense to get Daniel to drink something, or to engage him in conversation that would distract him from what his body was going through, but now he was genuinely curious.
Daniel shot Louis a nasty look at his taunting about cravings, a frosted glare under the fringe of weakened lashes and rimed lids. “The fuck you think you know about craving? Not what you think you know.” Daniel made a grab for the tea, forgetting that he wasn’t exactly at his best, and his grip failed him, sending the mug askew in the cushion of the mattress. He swore, a single word in Italian in the hiss of his breath under his front teeth, and took his hand back, not bothering to try to right the situation.
“Can’t make music,” he snapped, pushing his hands down under the covers, sliding them flat under the sheets and twisting them there. “No coordination, no rhythm.” The energy waned quickly as it had come, and he dropped his head back again, weathering a quick shudder.
Daniel had weathered the prying questions of countless interviewers, inquisitive letters, suggestive articles, and he hadn’t given one inch. No one got a hint about the true identity of that character, or the metaphorical echoes of that plot. The books stood on their own. “You want to know what the book’s about, you read it. You’re not getting hints from me.”
Louis was a little surprised at the outburst, though he of course shouldn’t have been. As soon as the mug fell and spilled, he picked it up again, set it aside, and moved to the bathroom to get a towel. “No, I suppose I don’t,” he said, mildly enough. From the bathroom - and not entirely expecting to be heard - he added, “But I do know what it is to be controlled.”
He stepped back in and pressed a clean towel to the spreading tea stain on the comforter. He’d wash it in a little while and try to get the stain out. The snapping didn’t ruffle him. He sat down on the edge of the bed, pressing the towel in, turning it, pressing in the other side. He didn’t pretend he didn’t see the shudder, watching Daniel for a moment. “One bestselling talent is, I suppose, fair enough,” he said.
Louis didn’t know if he ever had found the thing he excelled at. He had found things he poured his life into, surely - police work, before he came to Las Vegas. Since then, he had spent more time on the project of protecting his family than any other, and, if he was honest with himself, he had shown no more of a knack for that than he had in any other occupation. He was diligent, and hardworking, and obsessive to a degree. He was skilled. But talented? Perhaps not that.
“But I can’t read the book,” he said, flattening out the towel and leaving it to rest for a few minutes on the stain. He sought Daniel’s eye. “So do I never know?”
Daniel didn’t know what Louis meant by “controlled.” He suspected it was something like a jealous lover, unsure of what conversations floating through the ephemera of his memory were real, and which imagined. If his head hadn’t been pounding, perhaps he would have taken a closer look at the other man, measured his expression, because Daniel liked knowing how other people ticked. He was the kind that liked to cultivate the weaknesses of others, not to exploit them, but purely for his own entertainment. A mild cruelty, to be sure.
Daniel pulled his hands and body as far away from the tea and the towel as possible, preferring to pretend neither existed, and disliking Louis’ role as nurse more and more as the minutes dragged on. If he was going to be this pathetic and disgusting, he’d prefer not to have an audience. Louis was somehow worse than even Lin, a near-stranger with more of an idea of what “normal” should look like. Uncomfortable with the sense of shame that came more immediate to mind, Daniel slid lower into sheets and pillows, smaller and darker in his self-inflicted suffering.
Deliberately, Daniel turned over, avoiding Louis’ curious gaze and shutting his eyes with almost fierce intention. “So you never know. The book is a sum-total, an experience. I won’t write series, I won’t write any fucking Cliff Notes. Now go away. I’m tired.”
Louis wanted to press him, but there was a point when any person, particularly a sick and withdrawing one, did deserve some privacy. He would have liked to pry, to learn more - but he could recognize Daniel's growing distaste for his presence, and the slow slide into the pillows, signifying his disengagement. He could understand that, considering the circumstances.
"I'll bring a glass of water in," he said. "You get your rest." Perhaps there would be another time, a better time, to get to know Daniel Webster beyond the cursory. At least he could now say he had met the man in person who’d had such an impact on Sam and Lin’s lives, and found a little, he thought, of what had made that so.