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It’s day four of having Louis as his roommate post The Real Vampire Housewives of Dubai- esque divorce, and Daniel has once again demonstrated his uncanny ability to land himself in situations anybody else would have to fight tooth and nail to land in. These things just fall into his lap at this point.
Sometimes it’s a vampire buying him a drink at a bar in San Francisco, sometimes it’s a cardboard box of kittens outside of his apartment building. Expect the unexpected.
Against his sturdy ambivalence toward animals, Daniel crouches despite the hunger pounding through his veins and counts the warm bundles. There’s seven, three tortoiseshell, one orange, one black, and two vaguely tabby. No mother. No note, nothing. Jackshit. Despite his paper trail of cruelty, he’s not actually heartless, so he kicks open the door and hefts the box into his arms.
Louis breaks his concentration parsing his way through Daniel’s bookshelf to look up with a startled hum. Today he’s got Jericho Brown’s The New Testament in his hands, which Daniel thinks is good. Better than when he’d slammed Stag’s Leap onto Daniel’s coffee table and wept blood tears into his couch cushions for two hours. That had been a night.
His eyes go wide as he moves smoothly off the couch in Daniel’s shirt. “Daniel,” he says, slowly. “What’s this?”
Right. Louis had a cat… thing. “Not to eat,” he says quickly. “They were outside. It’s gonna snow soon. That’s… even I’m not that shitty. I’ll call a shelter, see if they can take em off our hands.”
“Hm.” Louis slides a bookmark— a receipt, actually, from what’s likely a decade-old coffee purchase, striding over slowly and peering into the box. On a blanket that reminds Daniel of the ones in hospitals, crunchy and white, the kittens absently squirm and mew, all collapsed in on each other like to part would be a egregious offense. “Cute,” Louis says.
“Just for the night,” Daniel says. “Stay here. I’m gonna see if they’ve got fleas. Don’t want that in my apartment,” he adds briskly, brushing past Louis into the bathroom.
He hears more than sees the vampire trail him. Daniel grabs the first kitten, one of the tabbies, and starts to part its fur with thumb and forefinger. The thing starts to purr, making swimming motions with its front and back legs as if to get away from him despite evidently enjoying the touch. Odd creatures. He’d had a cat in Modesto, or fed it whenever he saw the mangy thing. A tan, skinny tom that his father would tell him to leave be.
“Wily lil’ things,” Louis observes, sliding his hand under one of the tortiseshells and inspecting its ears for pests. Daniel watches the kitten wriggle against his hands, watches a soft smile spread on Louis’ face. He knows by now if he waits patiently, Louis will offer an explanation. Apparently, his probing questions aren’t always needed. Who knew?
“Grace tried to tame a cat in our neighborhood,” Louis finally murmurs, pinching a flea between two fingers and depositing it into the sink. “Tortiseshell just like this one. Sweet, too. I—” He looks briefly pained, absently scratching the kitten behind its ears. “I can’t remember what we called her.”
Daniel draws him carefully back with the apt description of the tomcat from Modesto, the volume and pitch of his father’s harsh voice. Louis smiles, still a bit sad, but no more tears impending. He drops a couple more fleas into the sink with a wrinkled nose and aborts his motion to put the kitten back in the box, clutching her to his side. He turns back to Daniel who had not so subtly frozen, thumbing the scrawny neck of the cat in his hands.
“We can’t put them back in there. There’s more fleas,” Louis points out.
“Ah.” Daniel holds up a finger, hands Louis the other kitten, which he takes with an abrupt hum, and then disappears. He knows he’s got it somewhere, knows he’s the one who took it when they split houses.
The playpen is folded in the closet, and it takes a little bit of struggle with his arms, shakier by the day, but Daniel manages to tuck it between chest and bicep and unfold it in the hallway area. He nudges it with his feet the few yards to the open bathroom door, eavesdrops a moment when he hears Louis’ voice coming from inside, a playful lilt to it that has been starkly absent since the Interview.
“You look jus’like her, yeah you do,” Louis coos at what Daniel assumes is the tortiseshell. “And, let’s see—ah-hah, you’re a girl, too. Who knows, maybe she sent you. Wouldn’t that be neat?” Some shuffling, a high mew. “Yeah, yeah, hush. What about you, son? You’re fussy, gotta be a boy.” One, two, christ… did he get lost in the matted fur? “Mhm. Knew I was right. Maybe we’ll get to name all of you, but I don’t think Danny wants all seven of you here climbin’ up his curtains.” Louis laughs for a second, then, voice as smooth as ever, as if the moment of warmth was only a hallucination— “Daniel, it’s your apartment. No need to linger by the door.”
And he peeks around the corner, two kittens squished on top of each other in one of his hands, eyes like fresh sage, smirking like an asshole.
Daniel rolls his eyes, holds his hands out, and lowers the bundles into the playpen. After a second thought, he retrieves a couple of extra towels from the closet and lines the bottom for extra warmth. It’s not even a full minute before the two are curled up and heading rapidly to sleep.
Louis watches them with him. Then he looks up, a glint in his eyes like flint on steel. Daniel stiffens to prepare for the blow. “Was this for one of your daughters?”
Yup. “Lenora. She learned to walk and then learned to run,” he replies. “I wanted her out of my office and Alice also wanted her out of my office.”
“You couldn’t just lock the door?”
“Alice hated locked doors. Hard to trust your husband behind them when he has a history with drugs.”
They trade humorless glances and simultaneously head back into the bathroom when concerto de cat litter begins to sing again. They pick up another pair— Daniel going for the one with onyx fur and Louis another tabby. Fleas, fleas, more fleas. After another forty minutes, the kittens are a sizable mass in the corner of the playpen, and Louis is washing his hands languidly.
Daniel’s tremor is back, as well as a dull pain springing between his shoulder blades. The hunching over the sink. Huh. Nice to know age doesn’t discriminate on deeds done— wrecking a marriage from bent over his laptop hurts about the same as cleaning kittens of dirt and fleas.
Louis snorts. Daniel huffs. “What did I say about looking into my head?”
“It’s invasive,” Louis just about sing-songs. “C’mon. Let’s sit.”
“Don’t you need to eat.”
“Why,” asks Louis. “Nervous about me being in proximity to the cats?”
“Louis.”
He drops down onto Daniel’s loveseat with a childish umph. “Yes, while you were asleep. I went down to the bodega at the end of the block, nabbed some guy threatening the cashier.” While Daniel nods— “Also brought back the newspaper and coffee creamer. You don’t need to keep buying the stuff at cafes.”
“You wired me ten million dollars,” Daniel says archly.
“Buy an espresso machine.”
They go on like that for another chunk of time, ending it with Louis’ feet sprawled across Daniel’s lap while the vampire hugs a pillow and Daniel swallows down his lepodova, now a pill. As the nausea renders him relatively immobile for the time being, Louis approaches the playpen, where some of the kittens have begun to stir.
“What’s all the fuss about?” He asks, casting a look over his shoulder. In Daniel’s head— not a word. Louis bends over— Daniel averts his eyes from the swell of his thighs in the light-wash jeans he’s wearing— and comes up with three cats strung behind the arm over his chest. The black one, the female tabby, and the orange one. “The rest are sleepin, these jokers were about to wake everyone up.”
Daniel shakes his head. He can see Louis’ fatherhood to Claudia, while it lasted, a bit more clearly now. Fuck, he would’ve been good. Better than Daniel ever was. “Can’t have that. Bring ‘em over here. Can’t say I can’t afford to have the place cleaned if we all do get fleas.”
With a sassy little hmph, Louis plops back down with them, instantly releasing the little things to the world, or Daniel’s beat-up couch off Facebook marketplace when he’d first moved into the NYC apartment, then a Divorce Pad.
The orange one instantly goes for the back of the couch, purring loudly as it embarks on an adventure to climb up. Daniel and Louis watch with twin amusement, the tabby curled against Louis’ thigh and the black one traipsing delicately across the cushion between them toward Daniel. Its eyes are a bright yellow, orange rings around the pupils. It almost looks like—
“You can say it,” Louis laughs. “Thought the same thing first time I saw the little guy. Think we should tell’im?”
Stricken by curiosity, Daniel raises his eyebrows. “You guys talking?”
Louis shrugs. “Hard work,” he says. “Negotiating who gets what properties. He’s currently sulking it up in our condo in Rome.”
“You sound absurdly joyful about Armand’s misery.”
A sigh from Louis, coupled with a shrug. “I love him. Always have, probably always will, just cause that stuff doesn’t go away. I was with him for a long time. But it’s earned— the turmoil he’s going through.”
The kitten resembling Armand’s likeness winds up perching on Daniel’s knee. He breathes out a laugh and scratches him under the chin, ears an enthused meow for his efforts. “I have a question,” he says after a few peaceful moments pass. It starts here— the table in the library in Dubai, Louis and Armand cheesing at each other, oblivious to the bomb Daniel was about to drop on their unholy union joined in unholier matrimony.
“And that’s the end of it,” Louis says, serenely, head bouncing back from its incline toward Armand, smiling at him from across the table. “There’s nothing else.”
Daniel nods as he processes this— there’s happiness, a sort of fulfilment, in the room with them. He doesn’t quite know who it belongs to. One or them or all of them. He can feel a smile on his face, because beneath it all, he is… proud, in a way, of Louis, who he knew now had come back from the chronicle of Claudia’s death and attempting his own, to someone who was, in a way— perhaps not the best way, but who was he to dictate that— content. Above it all. He almost feels bad that he’s about to break it. But, what was it, truth hurts?
He leans forward. “End of session.” Taps the key to stop the recording. The sound that rings as the key’s impact hits is not unlike the safety of a gun flicking off.
They silently toast.
Armand… when he drinks, looks over them like a pharoah. It’s attractive. It’s infuriating.
Daniel retaliates by paving the way for his declaration, moving the newspaper so the script would be easier to extract from it, voicing a few more arbitrary concerns that occurred to him along the way. Armand volleys each of them, Louis smiles as if they’re dismissable.
“Rashid, shall we begin dinner preparations?”
That’s not out of the ordinary, but Daniel assumes Rahid has been gone since the little Chekov’s Gun of his was set into his hands.
What is strange is the look that comes over Armand when he adjusts himself in his seat. “I do hope you’ll join us.” It was a threat, he’d assumed then. A prelude to ceasure.
He doesn’t know what to think of it now.
“You’ve always got questions,” Louis murmurs, but nods his assent.
“Before I pulled out the script—” Louis stiffens. A brief wave of hesitation overwhelms him— hasn’t he done enough, etc— but he pushes through it. Daniel finds the right words. “There were dinner preparations. Armand…” He shakes his head. “Armand extended an invitation of a sort.”
“Ah.” Louis chuckles, clapping a hand quietly over his mouth so as to not disturb the slumbering kittens. Tabby still on his thigh, Orange draped over the couch like a pathetically small throw blanket, and Armand 2.0 attempting to balance on his knee, every one of his snores bringing him closer to falling back onto the couch cushion he’d sprung up from. “We were going to turn you.”
Daniel sputters. He’d suspected as much, but— “We?”
“Well, Armand had the honors,” Louis states, which is somehow even more confusing. “I just wanted to be there. And I had a stake of my own to claim.”
“No riddles, please, Louis,” Daniel grouses with a wave of his hand.
Louis scoops the tabby back up into his hand. She raises her head groggily and then surrenders to being held against his chest and pet, functioning as what Daniel imagines is a vampire’s stress ball. “There’s some stuff I can’t be the one to tell you,” he says evenly, avoiding Daniel’s eyes. If that isn’t a massive tell, he doesn’t know what is. “But it’s the reason I was adamant on letting him do it. As for me, I wanted to give you what I didn’t in San Francisco.”
Daniel snorts, filing away the stuff about Armand for a minute— he’s dominated enough of their conversations since Dubai, largely Louis stomping around with his fingers wrinkling the pages of books sent to Daniel by colleagues, teeth grit saying and don’t get me started on the Bacon diptych and then, later couldn’t even allow a speck of dust in the entire place followed by left the shower scalding hot . He’d truly heard it all, but the clarity on what his ex-wives likely said to their friends about him was appreciated.
“Give me what exactly?” He asks. “Cocaine? Because, Louis, I think that may kill me.”
Louis delivers an adorably frustrated and put-upon sigh and gingerly lifts the tabby off of him and onto one of Daniel’s pillows before promptly leaning across the couch and kissing Daniel.
He likes to consider himself somebody who’s often run through all of the possible outcomes to something, but this did not factor among them at all. Daniel throws himself back, because, come to think of it, this does have all the elements of a dream.
Familiar location. Surreptitiously normal up until its very much not. Random objects, or, the litter of kittens currently in their care. Wildly unrealistic occurrence, Louis shoving his face into his like a middle-schooler on a swingset. Check.
Louis blinks. “You look distressed, Daniel.”
Daniel sputters. “I’m confused.”
That kind of irritating but damnably attractive toothy smile crosses Louis’ face. “For a very intelligent man,” he says, scooting closer and somehow making that look suave, too. “And a two-time Pulitzer winner, you’re very dense about this.”
Ah.
“Armand got to turn me,” Daniel says unsteadily. “You got to fuck me.”
Louis looks over his shoulder, attention piqued in some other direction. “Huh, I’m— I’m looking for the next Pulitzer,” he starts to say, poorly concealing laughter as it bubbles up his chest and between his lips.
“Enough,” Daniel mutters, now replaying the very brief and very dry but no less sweet kiss that he sort of regretted ending now.
A flippant one-shouldered shrug from Louis. He turns back fully, though, eyes sitting at half-lidded. “Armand missed his turn,” Louis says, gathering the tabby right into his arms again and scrunching his nose when she mews, kneads at the soft fabric of his hoodie. “I’m just waitin’ on mine.”
Daniel falter, runs hot when Louis’ nestles back into couch after proudly flicking off the very tightly-sealed cap Daniel’s kept on his feelings regarding Louis.
He moves to bridge the gap. A pinprick of pain sinks into his thigh. Kitten claws, he realizes, before hissing and leaning back to remove the perpetrator to the tune of Louis snickering over it. He grabs the kitten by the scruff and lowers him to the cushion on his other side.
“Put that one down.”
Louis looks down at her. “She’s sleeping.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from playing hot potato with her the past ten minutes. We can keep them another night for all I care,” Daniel says, waving him off. “C’mere.”
Louis grins ear to ear, leans over Daniel, and lowers her beside her brother. The orange one drops down to join them.
Their connected again in milliseconds, Daniel’s hands under Louis’ shirt and Louis kissing him like Daniel’s about to vanish into thin air. He gasps into it. He fucking loves it. Fingers drift through his curls and Louis presses a wet kiss to the bite mark on his neck. He shudders.
“Why didn’t you do this sooner,” Daniel manages between Louis licking at him like they’re the cats in the room.
“Allow a man a fortnight to process his divorce,” Louis says evenly, a little bit smug, before bracketing Daniel’s hips with his thighs and, with a undulating movement in his lap, demonstrating just how well-processed the divorce was.
Daniel’s breath catches. One of his hands lowers downward instantly to grab at Louis’ erection where it’s tenting his jeans. Louis’ head rolls back, a gorgeous relieved sigh dropping from his lips, followed by a sweet little ‘ah’ when Daniel fondles him a bit.
Nipping at his jaw earns him a breathless Danny that turns his grip tight. Daniel moves them down to his ass and earns a laugh for it as Louis. They both find each other’s mouths at the same time, then, and Louis adjusts—
Something loud hits the floor.
They jump backward and Daniel scowls at the sight of one of his lamps on its side like a beached whale. Beside it stands the black kitten, already starting to nibble on the cord.