Chapter Text
He does it–as he’s already planning to explain to Louis when he undoubtedly answers for it later–to teach the stray a lesson. He’s largely made his peace with the intrusion of a tiny unwanted third in their lives, but if Louis must have his hobby, then Lestat has maintained from the beginning that he could at least also offer the courtesy of providing his pet with some degree of training, the lack of such a thing evidenced by her following him around at such a close range that she’s bumped into him twice tonight alone.
And in lieu of Louis doing what must be done, it falls to Lestat.
The girl doesn’t even have time to register what’s happening until she’s already in the air, tossed with carefully measured strength onto the sofa where she bounces once, large eyes absolutely massive with surprise. He crosses his arms over his chest, giving her a smug, condescending look.
“Maintenant tu vois. This is what happens to strays who-”
“Again!”
His mouth snaps shut as the child scrambles off of the sofa and bumbles over with her small child gracelessness, arms extended and hands grabbing the same way she does to indicate to Louis that she wants to be picked up.
Lestat stares at her.
The child bounces on her toes, insistent.
“Again!” She demands once more, giggling.
“It isn’t a game,” he informs her, thrown. He’d thought he would scare her, spook her into running off to her room to hide until Louis returns home from his hunting and can reclaim full custody of her. In the best case scenario, she would learn that he isn’t to be trifled with and allow him his full space. It’s the only likely peace they’ll achieve, an armistice of distance.
Instead she’s now closer than ever, even daring to tug insistently at his waistcoat.
“Again, please!” She pleads, apparently deciding to employ some of those manners Louis has been trying so diligently to instill in her.
From sheer bewilderment, he heeds her, sending her flying as a giggling projectile through the air to bounce onto the sofa once more.
*
He’s sent the child flying enough times that they’ve managed to move the sofa halfway across the living room before Louis returns, entering just in time to see Claudia land with a bounce, still shrilling with laughter as if this isn’t the fiftieth time it’s happened. When she sees her beloved Daddy Lou, however, she abandons their game and darts over, reaching her arms up the same way she did with Lestat, though her plea is now answered immediately, Louis greeting her with an affectionate “hey, you,” before swinging her up to his hip. He lifts his brows when he sees the state of the parlor.
“Y’all getting into trouble?” He seemingly asks the room at large, though it’s Lestat he looks to at the end of the question.
Before Lestat can even begin to tell him that there’s something incredibly wrong with the child he’s picked out, she answers for herself.
“Me and Uncle Les were playing flying,” she says with clear enthusiasm.
“Flying?” Louis repeats, sounding equal parts amused and dubious as he smooths a few wild curls, the stray’s pigtails having given up their fight halfway into whatever recreation Lestat was just stuck in against his will. “That so?”
“Mhm,” Claudia agrees, as if she’s the only one being addressed, rude thing. Louis, though, doesn’t correct her, just sets about the usual routine of getting her fed. Before he goes, though, he glances over his shoulder and mouths a Thank you.
Lestat, for lack of any idea about how to explain that he wasn’t attempting to do anything that would require gratitude, just gives him a small, tight smile and then retreats to the safety of his piano.
*
“You shouldn’t indulge her in this absurdity,” he informs Louis, when their progress downstairs the next evening has once again been stalled by the stray’s demands to be picked up enough to tap twice on the bannister, an inane little ritual she insists upon each night. He’s read in her mind that it’s a superstition, the result of Louis tapping on the bannister idly on her first night with them, convincing the child that it’s good luck.
The acquisition of which is complicated by her lack of ability to achieve it on her own.
“It’s good luck!” The child insists, content enough after her ritual to perch prettily on Louis’s hip, the pair of them now executing the motion as smoothly as if they’ve been doing it for years.
“It’s good luck,” Louis repeats with a small smile, clearly meant to tease.
Lestat rolls his eyes.
“You’ll raise a spoiled brat, heeding her every whim,” he informs his lover as he follows them down the stairs.
“And you would know all about brats, wouldn’t you?” Louis asks dryly, not even bothering to look back.
Lestat scowls, mood worsened when the stray copies his expression over Louis’s shoulder before dissolving into giggles.
*
“Louis,” he says, voice hard to indicate his extreme annoyance, which makes it supremely obnoxious when his lover looks up only to laugh at him.
Though admittedly, the gravitas of the moment is undeniably impacted by the giggling urchin dangling off of his left foot as he raises it.
“You being a terror?” Louis asks the child, but his voice is warm, indulgent, and Lestat has the sneaking suspicion that he’s about to find no assistance at all in his current plight of dealing with a parasite.
“Yep!” The child chirps, pulling herself up enough to wrap her legs around his calf to get a better hold, leaving her upside down when he lowers his foot once more, the stray sliding down a bit but holding on tightly, her head cushioned by the soft cloud of her hair, loose for once to let it fully dry after her bath earlier.
Lestat gestures to her, disbelieving.
Louis returns to his reading, unconcerned.
“Y’all have fun.”
Lestat feels more than slightly betrayed, retreating with his leg still encumbered by the giggling barnacle holding it captive.
*
“You’re an absolute aberration of nature,” he informs the child one evening during what has now become a routine of his peace being disturbed until he has been provoked into sending the child flying into the sofa. In a just world, Louis also being home would spare him from this trial, but his lover has proven as useless as ever in controlling his child.
“What’s a ab’ration?” The stray asks as she returns, arms already up for another round of being thrown. His aim has improved a great deal since the start of this routine of theirs, but there is still a line of pillows in front of the sofa for when the child fails to make her landing gracefully.
(Really, the urchin didn’t even cry when she hit the floor the one time it happened–even if the force of landing on her face left her with a bloody nose–but for the sake of not again receiving the icy treatment he did from Louis for three weeks after it happened, Lestat has been forced into this absurd concession towards the stray’s safety.)
“An aberration,” Lestat informs her, “is a-”
“Word Uncle Les should watch how he’s using, he knows what’s good for him,” Louis cuts in from the doorway.
Lestat gives him an unimpressed look as he sends the stray flying, the moment punctuated with her shrill of glee as she sails through the air.
*
The true crux of the issue, Lestat thinks on an evening disrupted by the need to send Louis’s child sliding across the parlor on her back between brief snatches of time he can play through a new piece before she recovers and darts back over, is that he doesn’t even know how he has become the de facto target of the stray’s desire for recreational violence.
“Louis is upstairs,” he reminds her, lifting her by one ankle, which only makes the damned creature laugh and try to pull herself up. “Go pester him.”
He fakes a drop, which makes her heart speed like a hummingbird’s, the terror too fast to even let her squeal, but even that threat does nothing but make her laugh and demand an encore.
“Daddy Lou’s busy,” she informs him.
“As am I, beastly thing,” he informs her, laying her back on the ground and then sending her shooting across the polished floor once more. “Go find an occupation of your own.” It’s not as if she lacks any manner of recreational options, after all. Louis has been a force of nature in acquiring any number of toys for his new pet, to the point that an outsider would never have known their house wasn’t previously perfectly devoid of strays. For the sake of them not breaking their necks tripping over the bounty, each room has acquired a basket for toys to be tossed into, and it throws him, still, entering each room of the townhouse and seeing a visual reminder that there is now a child within it.
As if he wouldn’t know from the noise alone, he thinks, making a face at the pitch of the child’s shrill as he pushes her hard enough to send her through the open doors into the foyer.
He wonders exactly which of his past misdeeds has earned him this torment, chosen playmate for Louis’s project. He isn’t his lover, after all. Even as a human, he had no desire for children of his own. There was some vague idea in his mortal life, perhaps, that he would one day settle down with a wife selected by his parents and set to work creating a new generation of de Lioncourts, but that had been out of simple obedience to the path set before him, not out of any true urge to take part in it, and even that had been tossed to the wind when he’d run off. In his mortal days in Paris, he’d lived without any thought of the future, content to soak in the joy and pleasures of the immediate moment like the hedonist he’s always been at heart, and after his changing, well…
With a timeline as long as eternity, the only way to survive it is to focus only on the immediate future, lest the enormity of immortal existence prove a weight too crushing to withstand.
His immediate future right now, however, he thinks with annoyance, is being stuck as the unwilling prey of his lover’s stray.
“Enough,” he declares, trying to pull away as the child tries to pull herself up to wrestle with him, as if it doesn’t require more self-control to not harm her than it would to snap her bones like toothpicks. He growls a warning and is rewarded only with a growl in return, playful and carrying far less resonance coming out of a much smaller chest. “Louis!” He calls, as the child attempts to scale his arm. “Louis, retrieve your child!”
A pointed silence in answer.
He peels the child off, ignoring her attempts at resisting him, and sends her sailing off over the floor once more, wondering if Louis’s need to coddle might be appeased by a lapdog instead.
*
“You gonna be an ass about her forever?” Louis asks one evening when Lestat has once again been forced to drag the child around on one foot for a good half an hour before she was tempted off with the promise of cookies she wasn’t supposed to have, a treat she’s still surreptitiously stuffing into her cheeks as fast as possible down in the kitchen before Daddy Lou catches her mid-mischief.
“The child is your hobby, mon cher. I have no interest or experience in catering to the whims of street urchins.”
“Just do what your parents would have done,” Louis says, adjusting his tie and thus missing the look Lestat shoots his way.
If Lestat employed even an iota of the conditions he was raised under on Louis’s child, he has no doubt there would be a reckoning for the ages in store for him.
“My parents would have raised me with basic respect for adults,” he says dryly. “A gift you seem to be denying your project.”
The look Louis gives him in the mirror is sharp.
“She just wants to play with you,” he says, as if Lestat is missing something very obvious. “She’s a kid.”
Therein lies the problem, Lestat thinks but doesn’t say, turning away to shrug into his jacket for the evening.
What on earth has to be wrong with the child that she would want to play with him?
He isn’t Louis, isn’t plagued by the need to coddle something. He enjoys giving Louis things, enjoys spoiling him as far as he’s allowed, but he hasn’t understood his companion’s desire for fatherhood since the first time it came up between them, and even then, he’d thought it simply the result of Louis determined to be discontent. He watches them with a researcher’s interest sometimes, Louis and the child, who is always much sweeter with her daddy than with him. Of anyone who deserves to be climbed and pushed and pestered, it should rightfully be Louis, but instead the child is all sweetness and cuddles for her father, who reciprocates the affection tenfold, doting on his stray like a hen with a single chick to tend. He’s been pleased in a vague sort of way that Louis has seemed so settled and content with the stray perched on his hip or invading his coffin each day, but the source of the contentment has remained a mystery to him.
A mystery not solved by being forced into wrestling the little beast against his will.
*
“No,” he tells the child, who ignores him, tossing her picture book onto the sofa before she begins to climb up after it. He rests an implacable hand on her head, preventing her invasion.
“Yes!” She contradicts with a giggle, headbutting his palm like a goat as if this is all some game. “Daddy Lou said come read with you ‘cause he’s busy doing stuff.”
“Daddy Lou shouldn’t presume to fill other people’s schedules,” he says dryly, shoving the child with just enough force to make her stumble back a step. He overestimated her sense of balance, however, and he curses under his breath as he rises with inhuman speed to save her forehead from a collision with the hard corner of an end table.
Ungrateful little urchin that she is, he catches the flicker of mischief in her mind right before she darts right for the sofa, laughing as she claims his seat, sitting down with satisfaction and crossing her arms over her small chest, chin raised in challenge.
He raises his brows in response.
She raises hers back.
(Well, if she has nothing else, she certainly has no shortage of sheer audacity, he thinks, not for the first time.)
“Move,” he demands, returning to the sofa and flicking his hand to the side in indication.
She gives him a challenging look and settles deeper with a defiant wiggle.
He contemplates exactly how much flesh Louis would have from his hide if he sent the annoying thing through a window.
“No!” She cries when he lifts her, but the declaration is made with glee more than anything, and she laughs when he tosses her to the end of the sofa.
“Stay,” he tells her in the same tone he did his hounds so many years ago.
Unfortunately, Louis’s stray is not trained nearly so well, and she’s already flipping herself to her knees as she lands from her last bounce.
“What are-no, non, retour à-”
But his protestation is in vain, ignored when the child crawls back over the sofa to settle next to him, knee pressing into his thigh as she folds her legs up to rest her book on them. He sighs to indicate his annoyance, but the child simply opens her book with an air of supreme self-importance.
“If you make noise, I will throw you from the roof,” he tells her, reaching for his sheet music, discarded when he was beset with a pest.
The only response is her turning a page.
*
The child has fallen asleep on him, and still Louis has not appeared to reclaim her.
Lestat’s trials truly know no bounds.
He can feel the soft puff of her breath, her face crushed to his ribs from where she fell to one side when sleep claimed her. From sheer lack of other options, his arm has ended up over her, rising and falling with the movement of her chest. She makes a soft noise in her sleep and noses closer like a puppy, sighing deeply before she settles, hands coming up to curl in small fists beneath her chin. He rolls his eyes heavenward in unanswered supplication before he looks to his sheet music once more.
It’s not the first time she’s done this, pressed him into unwilling service as a pillow, and yet it’s as bewildering as it has been every other time it’s happened.
Never in his wildest dreams as a child would he have thought to curl up next to one of his parents. It wouldn’t have been allowed, for one thing, and for another, he was primarily occupied with remaining out of their attention as much as possible when he was young. Once he was old enough to hunt, to provide, he was worth even a word of gratitude from time to time, but at the stray’s age? If he’d wanted the comfort of a warm body to curl up against, he would have taken refuge in the kennels or the stables, snuggled in like a pup or a foal and made his peace with it.
Beneath his elbow, Louis’s child sleeps peacefully, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to curl up against him.
Just do what your parents would have done, he hears Louis say. He can picture it, what his father or Gabrielle would have done for the audacity of trying to fall asleep against them, hard hands and sharp words and slammed doors. In a rare moment or two, Gabrielle would imbibe enough at dinner that he was necessary as a ballast to navigate the halls afterwards, and he can feel the phantom of it now, the gentlest touch he knew in those days, a hand clutching at his shoulder hard enough to hurt as it squeezed the bones inside, but it was alright, the pain, because it meant the sheer joy of being touched, of being needed.
Of being wanted.
Up and down…up and down…up and down, the slow, steady rhythm of the child breathing beside him, curled close and trusting.
He sits with her until she wakes.
*
“Throw me!” Claudia demands after skidding into the parlor after her release from her lessons with Louis.
“I’m busy,” he informs her, eyes only on the piano even as a wriggling presence makes its way up under his elbow, a curly head obscuring his sheet music as it pops into view. He flicks his eyes down to her, fingers unceasing. “You’re abominably rude,” he tells her conversationally.
“Throw me!” She demands with a grin, unconcerned.
Lestat sighs as he brings the piece to a close, the final notes lingering in the air-
-before he whirls and sends Claudia flying before she has time to register what’s happening, shrilling a giggle as she bounces on her landing.
“Again!” She cries, rolling off of the sofa and scrambling back over, arms extended.
“Pest,” he tells her, picking her up and tossing her once more.
(And if he’s unable to stop a small smile from curving his lips as her laughter rings off of the walls, well.)
(It’s purely from the joy of getting to throw the annoying little thing, that’s all.)