Chapter Text
Claudia is turning twenty-seven tomorrow, officially older than her mama was when she died.
She’s still not entirely sure how she feels about it, but she does know it’s worth a visit to her mother’s grave to acknowledge the occasion, a bouquet of pink peonies in hand as she hops lightly over the back wall.
Vampires, after all, can’t observe normal visiting hours.
She remains the only vampire who ever comes here, even though Papa Les finds legends about them not being able to go onto holy ground funny. If Daddy Lou isn’t there to witness them, she and Papa Les enjoy playing at dramatic “deaths” if they go near churches when they hunt, with the first person who realizes they’re on holy ground the one who gets to deliver a wrenching final monologue, usually in the other’s arms. It’s a shame, she thinks sometimes, that Papa Les didn’t become an actor; he really is a natural.
She’s told her mama about Papa Les, of course, back when she was little and he was still Uncle Les, just like she’s told her about everything interesting that’s happened to her. She’d felt guilty the first time she came here with Charlotte to catch her mama up. It had felt like a betrayal, almost, being happy in a new family when her first fell apart so completely. She’d worried that her mama would worry she was being forgotten.
Now, though, she thinks her mama would appreciate the life she’s lived and lives still. She’s grown up loved and protected and cherished. People have teased Daddy Lou–the only father people either know about or can acknowledge openly–over the years about spoiling her rotten, and she knows there’s some truth to it, even if Aunt Grace has always playfully said she’s been spoiled sweet, not rotten. It’s been amusing, hearing Daddy Lou and Papa Les’s business associates in their heads pass commentary that she’ll never get a husband with how she’s been raised, too pampered to accept anything less than the treatment she grew up with. One had even talked his son out of trying to ask her on a date, warning him that it was a bad idea to go after “girls raised like they’re daddy’s little princess.” His loss, Papa Les had told her when she’d relayed as much to him, amused and wanting to share the joke. He’d said anyone intimidated by the idea of putting his full effort into courting her wasn’t worth her time. After all, what value would there be in a man foolish enough to not pursue a princess?
Claudia had wholeheartedly agreed.
She steps over the wet grass of the graveyard carefully, not wanting to ruin her new shoes, an early birthday gift from Daddy Lou, pretty light blue velvet, the color of the sky. They’re a joke, an affectionate one, a nod to the way she’s been trying to learn the Sky Gift even though Papa Les has told her she’s too young still.
She’s fallen on her ass more than once trying anyway, but it hasn’t dissuaded her. She’s sure she can get it. She just needs a little-
“Celestine?”
The sound of her mama’s name has her turning her head at once on reflex, surprised to hear it said out loud, and she finds a man who seems vaguely familiar staring at her like he’s seen a ghost. She tilts her head, trying to place him, but it’s like snatching at dust in a sunbeam.
“No,” she says, and it comes out like a question. “I’m sorry, you have the wrong person.”
“You look just like her,” the man says, sounding choked, and there’s a light in his eyes that has her backing up a step, silly as it is for a vampire to be wary of a mortal. He’s not a danger to her, especially when she can smell how drunk he is, but she was a woman for twenty-five years and has been a vampire for only two, and old habits die hard, her fingers twitching slightly with the urge to reach for the knife she still keeps in her purse from habit.
“Do I know you?” She asks, though the answer is still no as far as she can recall. He looks so vaguely familiar, this man, but she can’t place him.
Not until she very abruptly can.
“You,” she says, the word hoarse. She knows this man, knows his face.
Knows how it looks when it turns away from her and never turns back.
“How dare you,” she grits out. “How dare you speak to me as if-”
“I tried,” he says, the words a plea. She doesn’t back up when he staggers towards her, but when he reaches out for her, she plants a hand in the center of his chest, shoving him away.
It’s not as hard as she could have done it, but it certainly wasn’t gentle.
“Tried to do what?” She asks with a sneer. “Tried to leave me behind? Tried to forget you ever even had a daughter?”
She resists the urge to spit. It isn’t even really pain she feels, not really. He didn’t want her. It’s something she’s long accepted.
But Daddy Lou and Papa Les did.
“Get the fuck out of here,” she says through her teeth. “Twenty-two years and you suddenly wanna come crawling back? I don’t fucking think s-”
“They took you, Claudia. They stole you.”
She rolls her eyes. Took her? Where she was left went up in fucking flames, taking her hit-happy Auntie with it. Should she have stayed? Should she have burned with her? Reunited with her mama in heaven? ‘Stole’ her. Her lips pull back in distaste. She wants to spit on the man for his audacity, wants to let him know that she doesn’t need him, hasn’t ever needed him, has been raised and spoiled and loved by-
“I didn’t want the money, Claudia. I didn’t have a choice, sugar.”
She frowns.
“Money?” She repeats.
“He paid me,” the man says, eyes fever-bright. He starts to stagger back towards her, and she holds out a hand in a warning.
Even as she feels the first little wriggle of dread twist to life in her stomach.
“The-the French man,” the man says, holding himself up with a grip on a headstone. “I didn’t want the money, Claudia, you have to believe me.”
“What money?” She demands, even as a childish part of her wants to cover her ears, doesn’t want to hear what this man has to say.
She can sense already that it’s going to be the type of thing that can rip a person apart.
“I didn’t have a choice, Celes- Claudia,” the man says, and she doesn’t even have it in her to be either hurt or offended by the slip-up. She loses her patience with his rambling, goes right to the source with the Mind Gift.
And feels her throat choke shut when she does.
Flyers, she sees. Flyers put up about her, looking for her, trying to get her back.
And a glance of someone she knows enough to recognize as Daddy Lou ripping them down.
She shakes her head, disbelieving. This man has misunderstood. He has to have. It can’t be true, the cycle she can see in his head, putting up posters only to have them ripped down by Daddy Lou until the man finally gave up on putting them back up at all. It can’t be true. It can’t be.
Papa Les, face cold in a way it never has been with her, not ever. If you’ve any sense of self-preservation, Mr. Landry, you’ll make the correct choice. It will go very poorly for you if you don’t, I assure you. An envelope, slid across a table.
Slid across a bar.
Slid down a porch.
Slid down a-
Envelope after envelope after envelope, tidy stacks of cash.
Year after year after year, a steady cash flow, a rental fee.
In exchange for her.
“Is that blood?” The man–her father? does she even use that title?–looks horrified, and it’s only because she’s still in his mind that she realizes tears have started to fall, crimson droplets flowing in slow trails down her cheeks. “What in the hell-”
She wipes his mind of the memory of this whole exchange in one clumsy swipe, a reflex from years of training. It makes him drop to the ground like a doll tossed by a child. She did it too hard, she thinks distantly. Papa Les always says using the Mind Gift to modify takes a delicate touch, focus and precision, just like playing the piano and picking out the correct keys.
The thought of Papa Les makes her stomach turn over as she pictures his hand sliding over an envelope of cash, and she holds onto a gravestone as she vomits, blood splattering in crimson droplets over green grass and white marble and her light blue velvet shoes.
*
“Always the accursed streamers,” Lestat grumbles, and Louis ignores him, handing him another paperchain.
“She likes ‘em,” Louis says unnecessarily. For all of his complaints, Lestat is still willingly helping to decorate, even though Claudia’s birthday isn’t going to be a grand affair this year by her own request. He’s noticed that she’s been a bit down in the past couple of weeks, but she hasn’t shared, and he hasn’t wanted to pry. She’ll come to him or Lestat eventually, he knows, if it’s really that serious. He’d caught a quick snatch of her thinking about how her mama only made it to twenty-six the other day, so he assumes her uncharacteristic reserve has been coming from that, from being older than her mother ever was.
He hasn’t pried. Her birth family has never been something that’s come up in their home, and he’s had no desire to change that. He knows from looking into Miss Babin’s mind a few times that she’d taken Claudia to see her mama’s grave through the years, and he’s seen a few entries in passing when she’s left her journal open to know she wrote a few letters to heaven when she was little addressed to Celestine, but she’s never brought it up with him, and as far as he knows, she’s never brought it up with Lestat either.
And if the guilt of thinking about her birth family has made him determined to still give her a good birthday even if it’s not a big one, it’s not like anyone can call him on it.
“That’s crooked,” he points out Lestat secures one side of the chain lower than the other.
Lestat gives him a look, tossing a balloon at his head.
*
She stumbles out of the churchyard numbly, trying to patch the pieces of her reality back together.
Trying to figure out what the reality is.
She’s always been wanted, always been special. She’s always known those things to be true. Her mind, louder than other human’s, had reached out to Daddy Lou, had called him to her in the fire. It was a sign they were always meant to be a family. It’s why she’d asked about the story so much as a little girl. Her first father hadn’t wanted her, but that was okay. The confusion of it, the hurt of it, all of it faded under the undeniable truth of how much her daddy and papa did.
She doesn’t know what in the fuck she’s supposed to do with the truth that they weren’t the only ones who wanted her.
But that they were the ones willing to make sure no one else could ever have her.
*
She enters the house quietly.
She doesn’t stay that way for long.
“Why didn’t you give me back to my father?”
The words land like a brick through a glass window when she asks them, stunning Daddy Lou and Papa Les into stillness, smiles dropping.
“Cherie,” Papa Les says, “what are you-”
“He put up posters,” she says, looking right at Daddy Lou, thinking of how many memories Raymond had of them being torn back down. It makes her feel sick again, the thought of the hands that cradled her and dried her tears and tucked her close ripping down the efforts someone else was making to find her.
She was stolen, she thinks in a moment of stunning, devastating clarity. That’s the word for it, the word Raymond used in the graveyard. They stole her.
And they made sure they would never have to give her back, no matter the cost.
“How much, huh?” She asks, vision blurry with tears, which just makes her angrier, her disbelief cracking like ice in spring, setting loose a rush of rage and hurt. She grabs for her purse from where she’d discarded it on their entryway bench, pulls out a fistful of bills, and throws them at her parents.
They flutter around the room like confetti.
“How much do I owe?” She asks, voice hoarse. “Did you get a good deal for me? Or was I top shelf? A couture child?”
Her heart is breaking, and she feels each sliver like a piece of broken glass, slithering deeper and deeper into her chest, making her angry, making her mean.
“What was my selling point, huh?” She demands, clenching her jaw when she feels it wobble. “Was it me calling to you? Or were you just picking at random? Whichever little orphan spoke up first?” Daddy Lou looks speechless, and she bares her teeth at him before Papa Les steps forward, like he’s defending him.
As if he isn’t just as goddamn guilty.
“Did you send him out to get one?” She asks, sharp as a blade. “Hm? Or was it just a good moment in the market?” She laughs, sounding a bit crazy. “A literal fire sale, how fucking lucky.”
She wants to punch them, wants to hurt them.
And at the same time, she wants to run to them for comfort, wants them to soothe her hurt as if she’s a little girl again.
It just makes her angrier.
“Enough, Claudia,” Papa Les says, Daddy Lou still silent. “Enough of this.”
“Enough?” She demands, nearly barking the word out. She grabs the first thing she can get her hands on–a book, she doesn’t even fucking look to see which one–and tosses it at them.
It crosses the room in a flutter of pages like a sad paper bird.
Papa Les bats it out of the way without even having to look at it, which just makes her want to throw another.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he says, and she knows that their bond is working against them right now, hurt flowing from her like water through a cracked dam, chipping at her control second by second. She can feel his irritation at her volume, at her rage, at her flying into their house like a hurricane.
Just like she can feel his unease, now that she’s confronting him with the truth, the emotions whirling between them like a tornado, scooping up anything that gets in the way and making the whole thing uglier and more destructive.
“You ain’t got nothing to say?” She demands of Daddy Lou.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out.
She wants to bite him, wants to bite both of them, her teeth aching with the desire. It would feel good, drawing blood, causing pain. They’re not hurting like she’s hurting right now.
They’re not facing a structural pillar in their life collapsing into sand right under their stupid feet.
“You are our daughter, Claudia,” Papa Les says, intervening again to save Daddy Lou. Normally she would find it sweet, the gesture.
Now it just makes her angrier.
“I’m your purchase,” she spits, looking right at Daddy Lou. Daddy Lou, though, seems more confused than hurt at the accusation.
“What are you talking about?” He asks, and Claudia barely resists the urge to hiss.
“I saw it. In his head. My father,” she doesn’t miss the slight flinch the word earns her from Daddy Lou, “was paid pretty good. Didn’t know a daughter was worth that much. Surprised more people haven’t jumped into the business.”
“He accepted the money, Claudia,” Papa Les says, voice hard.
“What money?” Daddy Lou asks, looking to Papa Les.
Papa Les looks torn between trying to address both of them.
He turns to her.
Being chosen now doesn’t remotely feel like a victory.
“He didn’t want you, cherie,” he says, and the pet name does nothing to soften the blow of it. Her breath leaves her in a rush, but she growls when Daddy Lou looks like he’s going to move to her. He stops. Papa Les continues. “There is no sense in being angry with us, Claudia. If you’ve a need to vent your anger, pick the proper target for it.”
“‘The proper target’?” She repeats, incredulous. “And you don’t think you’re the proper fucking target, Papa Les?” She makes her tone bitingly sweet. “Is that still the title you’d prefer? I wanna make sure you get what you’re paying for, after all.”
“You are acting like a brat, Claudia,” Papa Les says flatly. “Perhaps we should table this discussion until you aren’t so-”
“So what?” She demands, the words a hiss. She can feel her fangs descending, and she wills them back, wanting to make sure she can speak real fucking clearly. “Feeling some buyer’s remorse?”
He doesn’t respond, and it’s like gas on a flame, like twisting the valve that fuels the incinerator all the way to open.
The burn, though, just leaves her cold, carbonized ash sticking to her, obscuring the beautiful clarity that her world was just an hour and a half ago.
“Was it worth it?” She asks tonelessly. “Your fucking investment?”
The tension in the room stretches and stretches.
She snaps it when she turns on her heel, clearing the staircase in one leap.
*
It’s the sound of things hitting the floor that breaks Louis out of his foolish stupor. He stumbles over his own indecision for only a moment, torn between needing to figure out what in the fuck Lestat has done and what the fuck Claudia is currently doing.
In the end, it’s a crash that decides him, twenty-two years of fatherhood pulling him to his daughter like a magnet.
He finds her in the midst of a tornado of activity.
Even among the chaos, he doesn’t miss the suitcase she’s busily throwing things into.
“Don’t-” He starts, and he moves his head out of the way when the objection gets a hairbrush launched at him, hard enough that it leaves a dent in her wall.
He thinks bitterly that perhaps they should have worked harder to curb the throwing things habit when she was young.
The internal note about his own failings as a parent, however, is rather lost under the far greater failure she now knows firsthand.
“Don’t run away,” he says, and though he means for it to come out reasonably, calmly, it comes out as more of a plea. “Stay and talk-”
“Now you wanna talk?” She asks, turning on him. “Seems to me like we had a whole fucking lot of time to talk, twenty-two fucking years, and you didn’t say shit.”
The next projectile she manages to get her hands on is a pair of socks, and it bounces off of his chest harmlessly. She slams her suitcase shut so hard he hears one of the hinges crack, but she doesn’t seem to notice, snapping the latches closed and picking it up.
He moves at once to get in her way, a reflex, but when they’re face to face, he doesn’t have anything to say. Still, the pain in her face pushes him to say something.
“I didn’t wanna hurt you,” he says. Pathetic as it is, it’s the truth.
Even if it’s not the whole truth.
She exhales a laugh like a stifled sob.
“And how’d that work out?” She asks flatly.
When she storms past him, he doesn’t have it in himself to stop her.
*
Lestat hears Claudia storming out the stairs into the courtyard. He doesn’t stop her, sensing in their bond that her emotions are in a riot and that attempting to get in her way is only going to lead to things neither of them can take back.
His good judgement with his daughter, however, does mean that he’s still in the line of fire when his lover comes downstairs at a significantly slower pace.
“What money was she talking about?” Louis asks flatly, and Lestat can see by the fire in his eyes that he’s about to answer for far more than he’s actually responsible for.
Still, he does his best to remain calm.
“Raymond Landry has received a handsome payment through the years in exchange for leaving our family be,” he says, slowly and clearly.
“You’ve been paying him for her?” Louis sounds unbelievably condescending as the person who necessitated the whole thing to begin with, and it provokes the first splinter in Lestat’s patience.
“Would you have preferred I killed him and started an investigation that would have led the police to wonder exactly where his firstborn got off to?”
He sees a muscle in Louis’s jaw twitch.
“The whole time you been doing this?” He asks. “And you never thought to fucking mention it?”
“It wasn’t anything you needed to concern yourself wi-”
“Is that what you told yourself?” Louis demands, harsh and bitter, and Lestat sees the exact moment his lover decides to toss another fight into the arena since they’re already having it out with each other. “Same thing you told yourself about Antoinette, or did you come up with something different for her?”
Lestat freezes for the briefest moment.
“Do you really want to bring up history that ancient, cheri?” He asks lightly.
“Not that ancient,” Louis says, biting. “What is it you like to say? A lick and a promise in vampire years?” Lestat doesn’t miss the imitation of his accent–something that Claudia enjoys doing but that Louis doesn’t usually venture into–but he doesn’t have the space to respond to it.
“Mon cher,” he starts, shaking his head indulgently even as his heart pounds. Louis can’t know. He can’t. Lestat was careful, and the deception only lasted a few years besides. Antoinette is gone, dead and buried.
She shouldn’t still be able to be deployed as a weapon now.
“Don’t,” Louis snaps. “Don’t lie to me. June 3rd, 1918,” he recites tonelessly. “Three years after you supposedly stopped seeing her. She dropped by the townhouse to drop off your lighter. Apparently you left it at her house the night before.”
Lestat draws breath only with conscious effort, mind spinning out as he tries to figure out how to salvage this.
“She had a talent for lies-” He starts, but Louis shows his teeth, fangs appearing briefly.
“Not as much as you,” Louis says, flat and final.
When he stalks upstairs, Lestat doesn’t follow.
*
His irritation grows after he leaves Rue Royal, at Claudia, at Louis, at this blow to their family coming out of nowhere for no reason.
He wants to sink his teeth into Raymond Landry’s neck and shake him like the rat he is, wants to hear the satisfying snap of vertebrae.
Again, he’s cast the villain, as if looking out for their family hasn’t been his priority from the time they became a family. Claudia is theirs, his and Louis’s, and she should know that. What does it matter if money changed hands? Why should her rage be directed to them, the parents who loved her, who raised her, who did what it took to keep her safe and happy and secure?
And Louis’s anger at him, as if his lover wasn’t the one who necessitated it in the first place, as if it wasn’t Louis who began the whole wretched thing, as if he wasn’t the one who plucked a sooty little orphan from a burning building and decided to make her theirs, as if Lestat wasn’t following his lead in the entire sordid thing.
And to hold Antoinette against him after all of these years…
It sits in his mouth like bile. A waste of rage, of a fight, over something that isn’t even a problem anymore.
As if he didn’t kill her for love of his family eighteen years ago. As if he hasn’t been exactly as faithful as Louis has always wanted for eleven years now. As if all of his good behavior means nothing against a brief lapse in judgement years and years ago.
He settles himself at a bar and sets to diligently drowning his sorrow and rage.
And when a pretty waitress makes eyes at him, he takes a mean satisfaction in returning the interest enough that she ends up settled on his knee, a warm, welcome weight and a happy palmful when he helps himself to a plump breast.
What has loyalty gained him, anyway?
*
The waitress–he doesn’t know her name, and he also doesn’t particularly care to learn it–is a sweet, obliging thing, curvacious and lovely and eager, welcoming him right into her apartment.
She squeals with delight when he kicks her door shut and then lifts her up, pressing her between his body and the wall. It’s been months since he’s had a woman–Louis has no taste for them, after all, and their joint dalliances are always more enjoyable when his lover takes an active part in the proceedings–and he relishes the soft give of her body, so different from the trim, toned physiques Louis so prefers, sinking his fingers gratefully into the flesh at her hips, nuzzling down her throat until he gets to her blouse, ripping buttons away and pulling down the cups of her brassiere to attach his mouth to a soft breast when it spills out.
“Oh, fuck,” she breathes, getting a hand into his hair and pulling. “Oh, fuck, baby-”
He pulls back, irritated with her and with himself when the term of endearment proves a distraction. It’s the pet name Louis uses for Claudia, after all, and the reminder of his family is wildly unwelcome in this moment. He presses two fingers into her mouth to stop her from saying more, resting them against her tongue to keep any other unwelcome words from escaping.
He doesn’t bother venturing further into her apartment. From skimming her mind, he gathers that she lives with two other women, and as fun as the promise of waiting for them to get home and join might be, he needs the satisfaction of a fuck now, here.
If she minds being settled on the welcome mat right at her door, she doesn’t say as much out loud.
Not that she really can, he thinks ruefully, not with his fingers in her mouth stopping any further hiccups to the proceedings from making their way out.
He yanks her dress up with little finesse. It’s not his most romantic liaison by any measure, but his partner doesn’t appear to mind, wrapping a leg around his hips and pulling him in, grinding in insistent waves of motion. He grazes his teeth along her throat–a tease, nothing more, given that people witnessed him leaving the bar with her–and she shivers.
Shivers like Claudia did on the roof before he gave her his jacket the way he always does when his stubborn daughter thinks she’s strong enough to withstand the chill without one, that night notable only for I just want someone to love me like you and daddy do. You would never do that to Daddy- He growls, but it’s in frustration and not in want.
Which grows evident by the way his interest in the woman very obviously flags despite the way she’s still giving it her best effort to grind against him, her want obvious even through the cotton still covering her. He tries his best to refocus on her, to fill his lungs with the resin-rich smell of her arousal, to think of sinking into her heat, to imagine the satisfaction of fucking whoever he wants with no need to seek permission for the first time in over a decade, the thrilling, petty rebellion of it.
His erection, however, does not seem to share his intention, waning in slow degrees until he pulls away entirely, annoyed.
He pulls back, removing his fingers from her mouth, and she blinks up at him, aroused and surprised at the sudden stop in the proceedings, too lost in her own lust to have noticed the cessation of his, apparently. He looks away, launching himself to his feet and retrieving his hat from where he’d flung it into the corner. He shoves it onto his head and reaches for the door, not glancing back as he speaks.
“Don’t let strange men into your apartment,” he tells her flatly. “It will get you killed one day, you little fool.”
He slams the door shut behind himself when he goes.
*
Louis is already in his coffin when Lestat returns home.
The red-tinged handkerchief he sees at the top of the laundry basket just makes him feel even more the worst sort of beast.
“Cheri?” He calls softly, kneeling beside Louis’s coffin.
“Go fuck yourself,” Louis snarls back, anger carrying clearly despite the slight muffle of the coffin. A harsh exhale of a laugh. “Smells like you already fucked someone else.”
Lestat has a brief moment of self-reproach that he didn’t think to shower and change his clothes. Even if he didn’t actually go through with it, he still does smell of the woman.
Stripping down right now, though, seems like asking for trouble he has no wish to jump into.
It takes a few more seconds of soft but insistent knocking, and then the lid of the coffin shoots upwards so quickly it raps against the bone of his wrist before he can move it out of the way. Louis is beautiful, of course, arresting in his rage, lovely in his wrath. As much a cad as he knows it makes him, there’s a reason there’s such an appeal to winding him up into a fury.
Having it taken out on him is always such a pleasure.
*
Louis glares at Lestat, fingers itching with the urge to wrap around his goddamn neck, right where he can see a smudge of lipstick. It’s cheap, he can smell amidst the cloying smell of human arousal clinging to Lestat’s clothes, his hair, the lipstick’s smell waxy and sharp, like a crayon. Even when she was sneaking around to buy it, Claudia was buying better makeup when she was fifteen.
“I owe you an apology, Louis,” Lestat says, and Louis narrows his eyes. Lestat sees it, and he responds by leaning down, resting his hands on Louis’s coffin and his head on top of them, angling up to look at him but still in the posture of submission, of penitence, like a puppy seeking absolution after chewing up a pair of shoes.
Louis toys with the idea of slamming the lid of his coffin down for the sheer joy of seeing if he can crack his skull like a fucking pecan.
“You still fucking her?” He asks flatly, eager for a fight, near-desperate for something to do with everything inside him. His daughter is in the wind, his family is in shambles, and there’s nothing he can do about either of those things.
But he can finally pick a fucking fight about something he should have addressed years ago.
“She’s dead, mon cher,” Lestat says, still in that tone of conciliation.
“That why you went out to find another one tonight?” He asks archly. He flicks his gaze down to where he can detect the source of most of the smell is from, right over Lestat’s dick.
“I wanted to hurt you, yes, but I couldn’t go through with it.” Lestat goes to reach out, and Louis hisses, showing his fangs briefly. Lestat’s hand retreats.
“But you still tried,” Louis says, retracting his fangs so he can speak clearly, hard as his anger makes it. “There is something so fucking wrong with your head.”
“Oui,” Lestat agrees, with a faint, rueful smile. “You have observed before, mon cœur, that I am a handful.”
“Don’t make it right,” Louis says, determined to be pissed. It’s easier to be angry with Lestat, after all, than it is to even begin touching what he feels about what happened with Claudia. “I don’t go off and fuck people when you piss me off.”
“You are a better man than I, my Saint Louis,” Lestat observes, voice warm, and Louis hates himself for the way he can already tell he’s softening. God damn the man for knowing the exact way to weasel his way back in after crossing lines Louis knows he should stand firm on. When Lestat reaches out again, Louis allows it, even permitting him to take one of his hands in his, pressing a kiss to his palm and then resting it under his cheek, eyes closing. It’s the version of Lestat that no one else gets to see, this Lestat. Even Claudia gets a slightly modified version. This Lestat lives only here, in the space between him and Louis, tucked away in the privacy of their hidden coffin room, in a safe bubble away from any witnesses.
This Lestat is impossible to hold accountable for the sins the other Lestats commit.
Still, Louis tries his best.
“You said you got rid of her,” he points out, flexing his hand enough to press his nails against Lestat’s face in a gesture that could be a threat.
Lestat doesn’t even bother to open his eyes, submitting himself to Louis’s will in a way that makes Louis want to throttle him at the same time it makes him want to kiss him.
“I had no wish to cause you pain,” Lestat says.
Louis doesn’t even dignify that with a response.
“I confess, mon amour, that there is an aberration within my soul that demands defiance in the face of impositions on my will.” The words are delivered like an apology, as if any of the words mean anything at all.
“Seems like a fancy way of trying to say the devil made you do it,” Louis observes dryly, unimpressed.
Lestat smiles faintly and turns his head to kiss Louis’s palm a moment, lingering briefly before turning his head again. He opens his eyes, and Louis curses him for it in his head.
It’s always so much harder to resist Lestat when facing the lamplight intensity of his eyes.
“In my foolish need to rebel, I did indeed pursue Antoinette’s company beyond what I told you was the end of our liaison. I did put an end to it, though, Louis. I swear it to you.”
*
Lestat tries to find something he can swear on. The most obvious subject would be Claudia. Louis knows him well enough to understand that he would never swear anything by their daughter that wasn’t God’s own truth.
Bringing up Claudia right now, however, seems more likely to spark another fight.
Louis stares him down for another few moments, and Lestat allows it, makes himself open, receptive. If he could coax him into standing, he would prostrate himself before Louis, rest himself at his feet, a humble penitent seeking absolution.
As it is, he just waits patiently.
Finally, Louis sighs and lays back down in his coffin, shifting enough for it be an invitation. Lestat stands and strips out of his clothes without needing to be told. He joins Louis in his coffin, shutting the lid and settling down, slotting with his lover easily after decades of practice, daring to press close until they’re sharing each breath. Louis allows it, and the catharsis of the end of their argument has nearly lulled him to sleep until Louis speaks again.
“What was the final straw?” Louis asks.
“Hm?” Lestat responds, eyes still closed.
“With Antoinette.”
At the name, he does open his eyes.
The truth is that she almost got their daughter killed, but he knows saying as much will doubtlessly start another fight. Instead, he pulls Louis into a kiss.
“Guilt,” he says simply, which offers the advantage of not being a total lie.
While also avoiding the worst part of the truth.
Louis cups his face with a warm palm and pulls him into a kiss, sweet and languid, and Lestat accepts it easily. They don’t move to make it anything more than a simple moment of connection, and when they pull apart, they simply slot together to fall asleep.
They very carefully don’t address that their household is still short one member as sunrise creeps its way over the horizon, dragging them down to sleep.
Don’t do anything foolish, ma petite, he thinks, even knowing she can’t hear him. You will break our hearts if harm comes to you.
*
Claudia spends her first night out of her parents’ home getting as far away as she can. She doesn’t even properly pick a direction. She doesn’t consult a map. She doesn’t even think to steal a car.
She just starts walking and doesn’t stop.
Not until the gray of the sky tells her she needs to seek cover.
She finds it in a crypt in an old churchyard, the disrepair of the structures and the wild sprawl of the overgrown weeds telling her it’s been a while since it’s had active mourners. She shoves at the crypt she picks out a few times to be sure it won’t fall apart in her sleep and let her burn to a crisp, but the construction seems solid enough. She slides the covering sheet of rock loose, shoves the coffin over, climbs inside, and pushes the stone back into place, leaving her in the close, dank space smelling of cold stone and old bones and skittering things that once took shelter until even they realized this wasn’t a place for the living.
She rolls and rolls and rolls as she tries to settle and tries not to think of how gators do the same when they’re killing their prey, something Daddy Lou used to tease her about when she was little and still sharing his coffin.
She growls in frustration when she can’t get comfortable, shifting again. She can feel the pull of the sun beckoning her to rest, but she’s hyper-aware of every goddamn pebble that keeps finding its way under her hips and elbows, and she has the absurd thought of the Princess and the Pea and the night when she was little when Papa Les helped her stack every mattress in the house in a pile because she wanted to try it out for herself. Her breath catches in her chest when one frustrated turn knocks the stone over her slightly ajar, and she hisses when a stream of sunlight hits her elbow, sizzling it instantly. She swallows around her panic as she slides the rock shut once more, pressing her palms flat against it and trembling faintly with adrenaline, aware of the fact that she almost just killed her fool self pitching a hissy fit.
It’s a long time before she’s steady enough to drop her hands.
Despite trying her hardest not to, she thinks wistfully of her satin-lined coffin in its secret chamber, her pretty wallpaper, her vase always filled with a bouquet, her little fireplace keeping it warm in the winter. She doesn’t know why, but Papa Les has always felt strongly about their coffin rooms being large and comfortable. His and Daddy Lou’s, after all, is palatial, but he’d been just as set on making sure hers was roomy. She’d thought it silly at the time–she was one girl, after all, only needing to fit a single coffin–but she’d enjoyed it nonetheless, the care behind it. She’d picked out the decor, but he’d designed the space, leaving it comfortable and cozy but still open enough for her to get up and walk around if she truly felt like it.
She feels the difference to her current accommodation keenly.
She presses her lips together tightly, determined not to cry.
The tears escape anyway.
*
The streamers from Claudia’s birthday that never happened remain up as the hours become days become weeks become months. Louis apparently hasn’t had the heart to take them down, even as the balloons have shriveled, leaking air in slow increments until they’re limp, flaccid bits of plastic, like colorful slugs exposed to salt.
Or maybe he’s just keeping them up to stoke his guilt into flames, Lestat thinks as he watches his lover wander room to room in the townhouse like a ghost, making them both suffer through the decor as holy penance in a nod to his previous life as a Catholic.
Lestat starts to take them down one day when the dust has gotten so heavy on them that even walking by makes him sneeze, but the look in Louis’s eye when his lover wanders into the room stops him, one hand still reaching for one pink paper chain from his perch on a chair. In the bond between them, he feels an ache of pain so acute it makes his own eyes sting in sympathy, Louis’s misery ringing into him like a tuning fork resonating against his soul.
“They should come down, cheri,” he says gently, though he doesn’t move to follow through.
Louis swallows, hard.
“They were for her,” he says, voice barely audible. “It was all for her.”
Lestat knows even without telepathy that the second half of the statement has very little to do with the sad, fading decor all around them.
He hops down from the chair and makes his way over to Louis, who doesn’t look away from the streamer he seems fixated on, swaying slightly like a drunkard. He hasn’t been eating the way he should, Lestat knows, too busy trying to trace Claudia’s path in the papers to bother even with rats.
As if eleven years of practice in choosing prey hasn’t taught her how to go unnoticed when she wants to, not that he can bear to hurt Louis in pointing it out. It’s a fool’s errand, yes, trying to divine their daughter’s location through the medium of mortal journalism, but Lestat gets the feeling that Louis is holding onto the hope like a rope in a storm, and he can’t bear to try and pull his fingers loose.
Not when he’s so afraid of how deeply into darkness it will make Louis drop.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” Louis says hoarsely, and Lestat shuts his eyes as he pulls him into an embrace. Louis’s breath shudders as he tucks his face into the crook of Lestat’s throat. It’s not the first time Louis has cried for their daughter, but it is the first time he’s done it outside of the safe privacy of a shared coffin in their chamber, as if crying during their proper waking hours would mean acknowledging that there’s something to cry about, as if grieving in the open means letting go of the hope he knows has been keeping Louis going.
It’s the reason he’s kept his own pain private.
He doesn’t offer platitudes, doesn’t offer words he has no evidence to support. He tells himself that Claudia will return, that their daughter just needs time and space to hurt. There’s a part of him that’s angry with her, yes. They’ve loved her all these years, given her everything she’s wanted, done their best to raise her with warmth and gentleness. It’s the height of ingratitude to storm off, to make them worry like this, to leave them tripping over her absence the way they used to trip over her shoes.
But the memory of the pain in her face and the heartbreak in their bond when she asked, “Was it worth it? Your fucking investment?” deflates his anger like the sad balloons all around them, shriveling it into nothing.
There’s nothing to say, not now, not for this.
And so he says nothing, just holds Louis and sways gently until he’s ready to let go.
*
Being on the road has forced Claudia to confront a very inconvenient truth about herself.
She has grown up with a very, very soft life.
She’s always been aware of her privileges, of course, especially after the start of the current economic crisis. She’s never wanted for anything, never gone hungry, never had a lack of clothes or shoes or books or ribbons. She’s had a charmed life, a protected life, a life funded and carefully curated for her benefit.
Outside of her family home, however, the world is a much harsher place.
She yelps and jerks forward when the roof of the shack she’d been taking shelter in gives way, dumping cold water right down the back of the jacket she’d taken off of her last victim, a mean wife-beater she’d stumbled across cutting through the woods on her way between towns. A rebellious part of her has wanted to kill at random, to hurt Daddy Lou in a way he won’t even know about by refusing to pick victims he would approve of. It’s something she’s stayed in the habit of after the change, preferring to feed from the worst humanity has to offer. It had started just as a way to please Daddy Lou, but she has developed a taste for it, for the surge of heady fear her prey feels when they realize that they can be victims, too. She’s chosen a few people at random, usually when hunting with Papa Les, but in the process of training her, he’s fallen into the same habit through sheer repetition, so their truly random hunts have been sporadic.
It’s just more satisfying, turning a predator into prey.
She huddles in the corner of her stupid, falling-apart shack and tries not to think of all of her jackets back in Rue Royale.
Not to think of curling up by the fire next to Daddy Lou, feet tucked up beneath her as she leans against him, both reading in companionable silence. Not to think of Papa Les shrugging out of his coat to wrap it around her, soaking in his warmth still lingering in the material.
It’s supremely difficult, loving people so much while also trying so hard to hate them.
*
She kills a couple just for the hell of it when they happen to pass by the shack, spiting Daddy Lou even though he’ll never know about it, draining the wife first after putting the husband in a thrall. She doesn’t bother drawing it out. A flashy kill is only fun when the victim is in denial, and innocent people usually accept death too quickly. She wonders sometimes if the adage about the good dying young might hold some cosmic truth, showing up in how little fight they have against their deaths.
Their last thought as both of them die is of the other, their love pure enough that impending death makes them wish only for the other to live.
It turns the aftertaste in her mouth bitter, their love for each other, impotent to save them but present nonetheless, down to their final breath.
When she buries them, she leaves them together, resting them in the same hole, foolishly sentimental as she knows it makes her. It’s little enough repayment in exchange for their lives, but it’s something, probably.
When they’re packed neatly beneath the earth, leaving her with their car and their luggage, the last fragments of their time on earth, their absence just makes her feel more alone.
*
She didn’t set out from home with any idea of what she was actually going to do. She’d just wanted to be gone, wanted space, wanted time.
Now she’s got it, and she has no fucking clue what to do with it.
She spends her time in research, mostly. She’s already spent years on researching vampire lore with the benefit of parents who could fund books or help her sneak in and out of libraries until she was practiced enough to do it on her own. She’d established quite a little library of vampiric lore back at home.
A little library that she left behind.
“Girl!”
She grits her teeth and attempts to walk faster, but the foolish mortal can’t take an attempt at mercy and accept it with grace.
“You, girl!”
She stops, turns. She mislikes the look of the boy immediately, and he is a boy, for all that he attempts to degrade her with the word girl. He’s younger than her, barely 19, and if there were any goddamn justice, he’d be addressing her as ma’am.
As it is, life remains unfair.
“I saw you stealing,” he says, content as a cat who’s stolen a sip of cream.
“I clean the classrooms,” she says tonelessly, as polite as she can manage. “I work in the library, too.”
The boy’s smile grows wider.
“You won’t mind telling that to the campus police then, will you?” He taunts. He sidles closer, looking her up and down.
She barely resists the urge to gag at the idea he’s angling towards before he even says it out loud. She doesn't even need the Mind Gift to understand exactly what he's hoping to get out of this.
“Then again,” he says, and she barely resists the urge to laugh when his voice squeaks on the word. The embarrassment makes him meaner, and he drops his attempt at seduction. “Seems to me you’d get in a lot of trouble, girl, going around stealing.”
“I didn’t steal anything,” she says, slowly and clearly.
He huffs a laugh.
“I might agree,” he says. “If you can make it worth my while.” He waggles his eyebrows in a way that makes her want to laugh in his face, and so she does, at the very end of her patience.
Her laughter makes him angry, and he moves to get a hand in her hair, the usual move for brutal fools who want to feel powerful.
She’s behind him before he gets half a step, hand on the back of his neck, fingers digging in tightly.
“Shoulda run when you could have,” she hisses. “Boy.”
She snaps his neck in one easy twist of her wrist and drains him as he twitches uselessly.
She stays on campus long enough to deposit his stripped body into a vat of chemicals in the science building, dropping his clothes in a donation box on her way out of town. They might figure out who he is, she knows, purely through doing a headcount and by scooping what they can of him out of the acid if they find him in time.
That’s not her problem, though, she thinks as she hefts her stolen bag of hefty books higher on her shoulders.
She moves on to the next town, back to her pointless journey to nowhere at all.
*
I’m sorry, Louis calls out into the night, sending the thought as widely as he can. He’s even started eating humans more often to make his range larger. Claudia, baby, I’m sorry. Please come home. Let’s talk about this.
As ever, there’s no response.
At this point, he doesn’t expect one, not really.
His fear over not knowing where his daughter is has faded over the months, giving way to the aching hole in his chest, the gaping empty spot in his mind. She’s clever, their Claudia. He knows she’ll be fine.
He just also needs to know when he’ll see her again.
They haven’t discussed it, his and Lestat’s attempts to find her. They’ve both done it, even knowing that their ever-sneaky child could run circles around them without them even knowing it. Even as a human, she could walk as quietly as a cat, and the gift has only made her more formidable when she doesn’t want to be found.
The payments to Raymond Landry have stopped, Lestat’s told him. With Claudia gone, there hasn’t been a fucking point, after all. They had a fight about it because of course they did, Louis feeling like it was Lestat giving up hope of Claudia coming back, but Lestat had proven unexpectedly patient, snapping once but then refusing to be baited. When the anger had given way to pain, Lestat had still been there, and they’d ended up in Claudia’s room, sitting near her coffin, desperate to be near a proxy of her if they couldn’t be by her.
Though perhaps he’s projecting onto Lestat too much.
Whether he’d been there for the same reasons as Louis or not, they’d ended up tidying the space. They have two women who come by twice a month to clean the house, but he’d refused to let them in Claudia’s room, refused to let them organize the chaos, as if leaving the mess would mean Claudia would have to return to fix it.
When Lestat had folded the first shirt, though, Louis hadn’t stopped him.
They’d worked in silence, the pair of them, straightening and folding and dusting, setting the disorder of her departure to rights. Claudia tends towards a certain degree of chaos by nature, operating under a system only she understands and is fiercely protective of, and Louis had felt absurdly fond when Lestat left her pens in the pile they usually sit in on her desk instead of putting them away in a drawer. He’d even gone so far as to dust her typewriter, a gift for her last birthday and cause of a great deal of racket from the day she got it, gleefully pounding away at the stories they’re only rarely allowed to read when they meet her exacting standards for being worthy of an audience. Now the silence aches in his ears as he wishes desperately for the clatter of the keys and the rustle of paper and even her swearing under her breath before she reaches for correction tape or her red pencil, ruthless with her work the same way she is with her kills. Pulling the dust cover over it had felt like resignation, and he’d looked away as Lestat did it. For his part, Louis had left the silk scarf she wraps her hair in at night hanging over the edge of her coffin the way she usually keeps it, her blanket still pushed to the bottom of the casket. Persephone, battered and faded but still granted a place in her room out of respect for her years of service, had fallen off of her usual place in the armchair she’s always left on, and he’d put her back as his chest ached so fiercely it was a wonder it didn’t cave inwards.
In the end, when the room was as neat as Claudia ever tolerates it being, they’d stood together in her doorway and taken it in before Louis had pulled the cord to swing her bed back into place, tucking her coffin out of sight in its chamber.
They hadn’t spoken, hadn’t commented, hadn't speculated on when the room's occupant might return.
They’d just stood and stared until sunlight pushed them back to their own room.
Come home, Claudia, he thinks in the coffin he first shared with her when she was a tiny little thing, so small she could climb on top of him without even touching the lid, sprawled over him like a blanket to rest her ear over his chest to fall asleep to his heartbeat. Please come home.