Chapter Text
Hedonist that he is, Lestat has never particularly cared to be held to the constraints of a schedule. Louis may enjoy the routine and predictability of something as prosaic as the requirements of managing a business–one of his many little idiosyncrasies that Lestat simultaneously enjoys and is frequently irritated by–but for him? Non. He can enjoy the artistry of a well-planned ball or the satisfaction of a business deal well-struck, but he’s always enjoyed the freedom of not quite knowing what’s coming next. In a long, long life, it’s far too easy to fall into a rut and find oneself constrained to it for decades before noticing.
Even with his taste for surprise, however, Louis holding out a tiny, sooty, sniffling child is a shock he is not best pleased by.
He flicks his eyes up from the big-eyed, dripping moppet, raising a brow and feeling his lip curl slightly in distaste. The child reeks of smoke and fear and God only knows what else.
“Put it back,” he says flatly.
“Please,” Louis says, cradling the child close, the creature snuffling its snotty face into the crook of his neck, right where Lestat likes to press his lips, something he doubts he’ll be doing for quite some time from sheer residual disgust of the current display. Louis gives the sniveling little creature a gentle pat and an even gentler cooing noise into her ear before looking up again.
Registering the mixture of despair and hope in his lover’s eyes with a growing sense of dread, Lestat has a sinking feeling about how the rest of this conversation is about to go. There’s a frenetic energy to Louis that Lestat doesn’t care for, the energy of an animal with its leg in a trap, a desperate, feral sort of stubbornness.
As if his usual variety wasn’t enough to contend with.
“My love,” he says, trying to turn the endearment into a gentling purr, “you cannot-”
“She can be ours,” Louis says, staggering forward a step. The child still clinging to him makes a small noise of alarm at the lurching nature of the motion, but Louis even before his rebirth was no delicate flower–Lestat would never have been interested if he was–and he doesn’t drop it.
More’s the pity. Perhaps a quick fumble resulting in a broken neck would have made this farce come to a close so they could both move on with their lives.
“We can keep her,” Louis says, eyes too bright, burning with something that Lestat has no wish to see there. “You can-can change her. She-”
Lestat lets out a bark of a laugh, unable to help it, startled by the utter audacity of the idea.
“C’est impossible-”
“Please-”
“The gift cannot be given to children!”
“She has nowhere to go,” Louis says, desperate in a way he has no business being for a girl he absolutely does not know, and Lestat sways under the force when his lover gets a handful of his shirt over his bicep, yanking with a desperate, clumsy sort of strength. “We have to-”
“The Great Laws forbid it!” He snaps, something he knows he should have covered with his paramour long ago.
Perhaps then he would not have found himself in this absurdity.
“We have to-” Louis starts, eyes fever-bright, fervent, shining like a penitent with a glance at salvation.
“We have to do nothing,” Lestat says. To the credit of the child, it has remained quiet, watching them with large, observant eyes, but without crying despite the teartracks through soot indicating that this was recently not the case. In one swift motion, he moves to pluck the unwanted thing from Louis’s grasp, but Louis holds on, getting a hand around her ankle before she’s out of reach. “Let go,” he demands. “I will get rid of it.”
The child whimpers, reaching back to Louis with open, grasping hands, lower lip wobbling.
The sight gives Louis an unexpected surge of strength, and he wrenches Lestat’s wrist, reclaiming the child.
Lestat’s lips draw back, baring his teeth in an annoyed snarl.
“You do not know this girl,” he says, stalking forward. Louis moves back, the child held more securely now, as if he’s afraid of a second attempt. If it weren’t so absurd, Lestat might laugh. “She cannot be changed.”
“I’ll do it,” Louis says defiantly. “I’ll-I’ll change her.”
“No,” Lestat says, low and final. “You won’t. She is too young. You would have her stuck as an infant for all eternity? You would wish that on her?” Clearly reason won’t be enough. Time to appeal to his lover’s ever-bleeding heart. “Return her to her people,” he says, softening his voice enough to coax Louis back to reason. “Ours is not a life for a child. She would be miserable. Put her back, and let her return to her kind.”
“She ain’t got nobody,” Louis says, and he sinks his fingers into the girl’s tangled, frazzled hair. “Everybody’s gone. All of ‘em. Because of me.”
If he didn’t think it would make things significantly worse, Lestat would roll his eyes. Honestly, the weight his companion insists on shouldering.
“Whatever happened,” he says with a vague wave of his hand, “it is no concern of ours. Go put the child back. They will send her to-to wherever it is their spare children are collected.” And then this urchin will be someone else’s problem, and Lestat and Louis can put this entire thing behind them, with Louis hopefully having learned a valuable lesson about staying out of mortal affairs.
“We’ll raise her,” Louis says. “We’ll-until she’s old enough. She’ll be…”
“What?” Lestat says, unable to help a half-smile. Honestly, such dramatics for a child pulled from the streets on a foolish whim. “A pet? A lapdog?”
“No,” Louis says, squeezing the girl so tightly that Lestat hears her let out a whining noise of discomfort, not that Louis seems to notice. “Not a lapdog.”
Lestat feels his breath catch at the look in his lover’s eyes. There’s a promise there, a pledge of dedication, the presentation of something with which to bind the both of them in a way not so easily broken as mere words.
“A daughter?” He says, the words clumsy on his tongue.
Louis nods, the gesture near frenetic in its speed.
“Our daughter,” he says. “Yours and mine. We’ll raise her. Together. I won’t leave.” He meets Lestat’s eyes, and in them, Lestat sees that Louis knows this is something desperately wanted and so far never given. It’s cruel and manipulative.
It’s also so tempting he can feel the tug of it in his chest.
“Please,” Louis says, crossing the room in a blur of movement before falling to his knees, the girl flailing for a moment, obviously slightly dazed at being moved so quickly. Louis doesn’t appear to notice, reaching up to grip Lestat’s hip, head bowing forward as if he’s praying. “Please. I won’t leave. I won’t ever leave.”
An obvious ploy, something almost embarrassingly clumsy in its execution. It’s utterly foolish, the idea of a child in their home. It’s the set up to a joke, the plot of some dimestore novel not worth the paper it’s printed on.
“Need I remind you,” he says, throat tight despite knowing he’s being manipulated, “that you couldn’t even be around your own niece without wanting to sink your teeth into her throat?” It’s a low blow, and he knows it, the sort of thing he would usually reserve only for the worst kind of fight, for when he truly needs to make it hurt. Before he’s even finished speaking, Louis is shaking his head with enough force to make the child’s head bobble as well. Really, they might not even need to have this fight. Louis’s fervor might kill the child and take care of the problem.
One can hope.
“I’m older now,” Louis says, pressing his forehead against him more firmly, nearly enough to knock Lestat back a step. “I can control myself. I can. We’ll raise her, our daughter.”
Lestat lifts his eyes to the heavens, cursing every decision that’s led him here.
But also knowing that it would take a far stronger soul than his to deny his Louis something he wants so desperately.
“Fine,” he says, resting a hand on Louis’s head, feeling as if he’s added a century to his age in the past five minutes alone. “Keep your wretched little urchin if you must.”
The breath Louis releases sounds like a sob.
*
For all of his bold words to Lestat about self-control and all of his practice sating his thirst on animals, Claudia still smells like young, bubbling life, something Louis doesn’t anticipate until it very abruptly becomes a problem. When he rescued her from the burning building, her heart had merely sounded like a bird throwing itself against a cage’s bars, frantic, desperate, her little voice, hoarse from smoke, asking if he was an angel there to save her. Tiny fingers had curled into the fabric of his shirt with a strength born of sheer desperation, and he had felt nothing other than the need to get her out, to not let her faith be in vain, wrapping his coat around her to shield her from sparks as he made his way back out of the building. She had smelled of smoke and terror and tears, nothing appetizing at all.
In the after, though, when she’s clean from a bath and wrapped in a towel…he can’t help but notice the promising thrum of life beneath her skin, the sweet, new smell of young blood, of new life. He swallows against his hunger, feeling a spark of terror low in his belly, remembering the feeling of his fangs emerging as he stared down at his infant niece. There’s no sister to worry about now, no one who would stop him from-
“Putain.”
His head snaps up at the sound of the swear, and he sees Lestat roll his eyes before he flings a nightshirt at him, nearly catching him in the face. Claudia giggles at the sight, the first time she’s managed such a thing all night, and he manages the faintest hint of a smile for her benefit before he looks back up.
“If you’re going to keep it,” Lestat says with a slight wrinkle of his nose that indicates how dearly he wishes they weren’t, “we will have to dress it.”
“We’ll order something,” Louis demures, hoping his voice isn’t coming out as rough as he fears it is. As he sets her on her feet, Claudia looks up at him with big, trusting eyes.
The faith only makes him feel more ill. He wouldn’t be her angel if he saved her from fire only to drain her now. Breathing against the worry he can’t voice–he knows what Lestat’s response would be–he tugs the shirt down over her head, wishing he had it in him to smile when her curls spring through the collar first. He breathes shallowly, trying not to inhale her scent too deeply for fear-
But no, as his nightshirt settles around her, it’s his scent that wafts towards him, enveloping hers almost completely. He can smell her, still, but it’s a faint hint. It registers, but not as something that provokes hunger, just something he could track if he needed to, distinctive but not tempting.
He remembers now, an offhand answer to a question asked long ago. Vampires smell other vampires more strongly than they do humans. Lestat had never elaborated, and Louis had never asked further. They’re the only two vampires in New Orleans, after all. When else would the topic have come up?
Taking a deep breath and smelling only the faintest hint of Claudia under his own smell, he couldn’t care less about the reason.
He can only be grateful.
“Ain’t that for dead people?” Claudia asks when they’ve retreated to the coffin room for the day. There’s no fear in her voice, just a small child’s curiosity at something novel. He shifts her to his other hip to lift the lid of his, ignoring the noise of distaste from the other vampire as Lestat climbs into his own coffin after securing the door.
“Only sometimes,” he says. Claudia opens her mouth to ask more questions, but it seems the evening from hell has finally caught up with her, and she merely yawns, leaning forward and rubbing her cheek against his shoulder sleepily with the innocence and easy trust of a child.
The gesture, simple as it is, fills his chest enough to leave him nearly breathless. The rightness of it, of her in his arms, fills him with the same conviction he always wished religion would.
“Are you going to put it to bed, or simply stare at it all night?” Lestat asks dryly, chin resting on his forearm on the edge of his coffin.
If she resents being an “it,” Claudia doesn’t mention it, just presses closer, eyes closing.
“Best to check it for fleas before you allow it in,” Lestat suggests. “You’ll never be rid of them otherwise.”
“Enough,” he says, but with no true heat. He knows Lestat by now. It’s easier to let him get his shots out of the way now, especially if Claudia doesn’t seem bothered by it. He’ll come around eventually.
He just needs to show his ass first.
“We’re sleeping in a coffin?” Claudia asks as he settles with her, setting her beside him. Again, there’s no trace of fear, just curiosity, and he smiles slightly as he reaches for the handle to shut the lid, pausing only at the last moment when he remembers nights of Grace creeping into his room when they were kids, chased by shadows and an overactive imagination.
“You ain’t afraid of the dark, are you?” He asks, pointedly ignoring the grumbling the question provokes from the other coffin.
Claudia shakes her head.
“No,” she says, face scrunching a bit in thought. “Stacey down the hall says monsters live in the dark, but I don’t think so. I ain’t never seen one.”
“They do,” comes Lestat’s muffled voice. “They eat annoying, unwanted children who don’t know when to stop talking and go to sleep.”
“And grumpy old men from France who don’t know when to shut up already,” Louis tells Claudia, who laughs, her dimples showing.
The silence from the other coffin is heavy with outrage.
Louis settles down with the feeling that all is finally right with the world.
*
He wakes before he means to and far before he should, disoriented. He registers warmth and smiles sleepily, turning his head to kiss Lestat-
But no.
The warmth isn’t Lestat. It’s too small, its scent too faint and unfamiliar.
Frowning, Louis looks down in the dimness of his coffin.
Ah, he thinks as soon as he registers the curly little head pressed against him, Claudia.
From the sheer constrained dimensions of a coffin, they’d fallen asleep close together, but she’s snuggled even tighter in her sleep, practically burrowed beneath him. It was her pointy little elbow digging into his ribs that woke him. He snorts softly, pushing her back just enough that he can be sure she can actually breathe. She’s completely slack in her sleep the way only a small child ever is, limbs loose and near-boneless. She makes a soft noise in her sleep when she’s jostled, gentle as he tries to be.
“We aren’t keeping it if it’s going to be this… noisy,” comes the muffled sound of Lestat’s voice. The volume says he’s been awake for a while and waiting for the opportunity to complain to an audience. “It has already woken me twice with its grating sounds.”
“She ain’t noisy,” Louis responds, rolling his eyes as he resettles Claudia, curving his arm around her. She lets out one long breath before she goes still again. “Go back to sleep.”
“Would that I could find rest, but alas, there is vermin in my home, disturbing-”
Louis tunes the rest of his complaints out. He’ll talk himself out eventually the way he always does.
Closing his eyes and settling his chin on top of Claudia’s head, Louis drops back into sleep, lulled by the steady rise and fall of the small back beneath his palm.