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Even as he slept, Daniel simmered with an energy – taut, raw, vibrating.
Louis tilted his head, surveying the man. Slumped back upon the couch, resting between rounds of questions, Daniel had laid down his incisive investigation – yet never fully laid it down, some vestige of that strategy still whirring beneath his features, even as his thoughts drifted into dreams. Never not a journalist. Never fully relaxed. Mouth hard, brows quirked, jaw nearly clenched. Only those piercing blue eyes were hidden, still searching behind his eyelids.
Yet a fragility lingered on him too. Not simply his mortality – temptation pulsing in his arched neck, slow breath rising in his brittle chest, bite scars jagged on his crumbling body – but a vulnerable whisper within his heart. The guarded hesitation of a man who saw others with sharp clarity, mapping their flaws like mountains, yet saw his own life as a mire of mistakes – a tangled, writhing mess of personal failures beneath the seedy lacquer of his profession, adrift, unmoored, unsure of his truest self. Like a lamb strutting among the lions in their den, asking to inspect their claws, knowing his only weapon was his wit. Louis licked his lips.
Daniel shifted, murmuring, brows pulling tight. Unaware he was the subject of study, always the taker of notes – yet here, wordless, guardless, he shrivelled beneath Louis's gaze.
A frown creeping onto his forehead, Louis noted the slow slide of blood through the man's veins, the prickle of hair on his wrinkled skin. A heaviness bloomed in Louis's chest.
He rushed to the bedroom, whooshed back with a blanket, laid the thick fabric over Daniel's sleeping form. When he stood back, Daniel no longer looked so vulnerable. More comfortable.
After a minute, perhaps two, Daniel's shoulders twitched with new tension. “You know I'm awake, right?” he said, eyelids still closed.
Louis tilted his head to the other side, gaze still lingering. “You were not, before.”
Daniel snorted, eyes flickering open, fixing Louis with a look that was part tease, part challenge. As he stretched – a deliberate, casual, inelegant movement – he dropped his chin to stare at the blanket.
“Cute,” Daniel said, roughly smoothing the fabric down, almost dismissive. “Keeping Grandpa warm.”
Louis's forehead creased more deeply. Daniel Molloy had many strategies in his reporter's toolkit, and blunt insults were certainly one. But he rarely scorned himself unless it was the truth, and yet – Yet Louis knew he was this barb's real target, and that ploy unsettled him. “I know that's not how you see yourself,” he said, softer than he intended.
Those pale eyes burned into him. “Is it how you see me?”
“No,” said Louis, quick and plain, though the word left an ache upon his tongue.
“Such sweet flattery,” Daniel drawled, meeting honesty with a wall of sarcasm, solid and steady. But a ghost of that fragility flickered across his face and he glanced at his watch, too nonchalant. “Well, this old man needs another... twenty minutes, before we carry on.”
“Take all the time you need,” murmured Louis, chest unaccountably tight as Daniel wriggled further beneath the blanket, settling himself amongst the cushions, almost daring Louis to remind him of the danger.
But Louis said nothing more – simply plucked a book from the shelf, perched across the room, and let the letters drift past his eyes as Daniel's breathing slowed again.