I did not think I was gonna continue the Felix shenanigans, but it looks like I'm continuing the Felix shenanigans. The original fic is here (a Loustat facetime call in Walmart from Felix POV), a snippet from the in progress new one is below.
I don't know what I was expecting, but this ain't it.
Louis knocked on my head some three weeks back. Surprised me about as much as Lestat shipping himself up to Canada in the U-Haul I had packed full of his other shit. Even more than the Tim Horton's souvenir travel mug that arrived full of his blood with a fuckass note attached with glittering ribbon: for your irregularly scheduled emergencies, bonne chance à toi. How that slipped through customs, I'll never wanna know. Probably Arturo's work. If that guy had a yelp page, I'd print it for toilet paper. Still a cheaper strat than the chuck chardonnay Lestat keeps trying to make happen.
Anyway. Louis knows I got the blood. Pretty green eyes lasered onto the duffel its stuffed in as soon as I got on his private plane at the NOLA Lakefront hangar. It's been about three hours since his Uber Black fished me up from the garden district and one since we hit sky. If I'd known we were Toledo bound, might've napped through the pickup, moneybag jet or no.
Either I think it too loud or Louis' doing some light reading, because he shrugs like the gesture could cost me a neat mil to witness and says, "Ohio wasn't my choice either."
I look around the plane. Light carpet so plush I'm kinda worried about what my nicest pair of boots might do to it. Posh leather couches in a warm, buttery sorta beige. Saffron and navy pillows pull color from a contemporary mural on the dividing wall. I'm no art mind, but the thing keeps dragging on my eyes despite everything else in the room. So it's gotta be some kinda compelling, right?
In short, this ain't the sorta gig owned by a guy who gets told what to do and when. But hey, I been wrong before. Wrong enough to become habit if I don't get careful soon.
"Don't you decide where this boat goes, Mr. du Lac?" I ask, tearing my attention from the mural to look at him proper. Louis in his understated brown and blue layers is as handsome as he looks taking up Lestat's iPad screen. Not shocked by none of that. In person though he's got a certain something else about him. An effortless charisma that two-finger curls you in one minute and leaves you shivering the next. Fuck me chic, fuck you chic.
He's enough to take in that I only now notice the double-pane jet windows. We'll reach Toledo before sunup, but could the rays find us earlier above the clouds? Not like I've been on a plane before to know. Didn't see any coffins or nothing on my way in. No painting's gonna protect us.
"The windows have UV filtering, Felix." Louis teeters between amusing himself with my concerns and comforting me of 'em. I'm mostly annoyed that the comforting works. Also annoyed to have a loud mind, apparently. Or a loud face. Kinda wish Louis would quit staring at it when I don't rightly know what he wants. Or when (if?) he stopped hating on me for the years existing closer to his maker than even he wanted to be. "Lestat's in Toledo."
Yeah, okay. I shoulda known this would be about him. You can schedule a U-Haul to drive haunted peepaw outta Louisiana, but whatever gravity rings him don't give a dead rat's ass. And we ain't even related.
I snort. "Uh huh. And because he decided to drive his bus through a corn maze, we gotta follow?"
"We have a meeting tomorrow evening," Louis says, like I should know why this is important. "At a hotel, not a corn maze."
All right, maybe Toledo is bigger than I thought. More charitably, I admit, "Okay, I don't know my capitals."
"Columbus is the capital of Ohio."
"…Yeah, like I said. Don't know my capitals."
Louis smiles, a closed lipped thing with a slice of real warmth. Maybe Lestat ain't the only one with a peculiar gravity. "Or much about the mind gift. He didn't teach you shielding either?"
"Basics, how to hear the head like an organ and all that. Findin' all the heartbeats on a street," I wave my hand, wishing I had a cigarette in it. I knew about shielding as a thing, sorta. I couldn't get anything from Lestat unless he wanted it or if he was in a real bad way. "Maybe he didn't wanna teach it, maybe he can't."
"Armand told me that he taught Lestat the mind gift," Louis says, pausing after. Fishing for something, maybe. But how would I know if he don't?
"Yeah, I remember that part in your book," I say slowly, looking at the mural instead of the vamp in front of me. I can't tell if the painting wants to come hither me into its whirling angles or swallow me up. I can't tell either, if any of the times the name Armand echoed around that garden district shack in some unholy combination of fear-longing-derision had anything to do with that teaching. Or just what came before and after.
"Not my book." Like that, his vibe sharpens. I wonder if he got a button under his seat to push all the air outta the plane. Feels like it.
"Right, uh. David…Mallory?" I guess, trying to placate my way through whatever the fuck is happening here. Why did I say yes when Louis came knocking? Another footprint to hide in seemed smart, what with all the new and gathering vamps clogging the bayou. Had a lot more close calls since Lestat took off north, and yeah, count me out for Canadian winters. So the cost of shelter outside the regional covens, from the regional covens, is cozying with a vamp at least as powerful as one.
"Daniel Molloy," Louis corrects, sitting back a bit on his couch by the plane window. He's still tense and tight lipped, but there's an apology in it for spooking me. Kinda wish he didn't know that he did. Because now he knows how easy he can do it again. Except — do he want that? Probably not. Someone like him don't fly halfway across the world to push around someone like me.
"Daniel Molloy's book," I repeat and let there be an apology in there, too. Didn't mean to get it wrong. By the look still on his face, there's a whole lotta people getting it wrong.
