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Five! She seemed surprised that I didn't know.

[And he has no reason to think she'd lie, no motive she'd have to deceive. There were already plenty of subtle differences between her life and the one his Claudia had known, but this one was something he truly hadn't anticipated.]

Don't look at it, then. She was not happy that it was there.

I can't-- it was me and you that-- five?

[Louis just sputters into the phone.]

Exactly!

[See he's so glad Louis is on the same page because he is whirling with absolute bafflement and distress. Louis is the only other creature who could grasp it.]

How? I don't -- mon Dieu, she was already so small!

Five? [Louis just might be sick. How could he have brought a five year old into their twisted family as a remedy for marital discord. A five year old.]

Five!

[Honestly if this conversation is just them stating the number over and over, that's fine with him, he needs to share in this horror.]

What were we doing?

I remember what we were doing, but even that was--

[Louis simply cannot believe that a version of him could be so reckless.]

Five.

Five.

[Lestat is in a similar headspace. He'd known the consequences better than Louis when he'd turned their Claudia, had done it with a growing sense of all the ways it could go wrong but oh my god at least she had been a teenager.]

I do not understand it. I don't.

She's been trapped in a five year old's body for forty plus years?

[Which is even more horrifying.]

We kept a coffin that small in--

[Infant death is still a very real thing in Louis's time. Cemeteries were full of graves of the smallest lives. To have a child-sized coffin in their home? What lunacy.]

I -- I suppose so, yes.

[Which is just so, so much. At least their Claudia could walk about on her own without causing alarm. At least she was of a height that didn't make looking after herself impossible. Not for forty years.

He hadn't thought much about the coffin, but in his mind, it makes sense. A child-sized casket would be no difficult thing so long ago.]

I'm not sure. I imagine so. I did not think to ask.

Fuck.

[Louis isn't sure how much more of this he can take.]

Five years old. I took a five year old into the battlefields of the European Theatre? What is wrong with me?

I don't know. I -- the dress, it did not look like our era.

[Lestat's seen the outfit in the image, and it did not look like a dress of the 1940s. It looked like something of the 19th century, the frills and puffed skirts of the Second Empire or of Reconstruction times.]

I think she might be of an older time. Or perhaps all of us are.

[So hey maybe you didn't make that mistake at least.]

[That doesn't exactly make Louis any happier.]

Older time, newer time, five years old.

Five years old.

[Louis isn't wrong, it's no real comfort. Just a small example of one way it could have been worse, he supposes. It doesn't change that she was too young, too small.

And it doesn't change how it all ended, though he refuses to picture a child so small standing there in the sun, the light searing her skin...no. No. He can't let himself picture that.

With a bleary, wry tone to his voice, he adds:]

Claudia said that must mean the two of us had much more sense.

[Not that he actually believes that.]

[Louis can't even imagine carrying a five-year old girl with him through the European Theatre, doesn't want to. It was hard enough bringing a fourteen-year old through the harshest conditions a vampire can survive.

Only to not be able to reach her at the end.

No amount of sense will change that.]

Are you out with her now?

No -- no, I am not.

[He's coming down a bit from his frenzy, his head spinning less. It's easier to settle himself with Louis sharing in his horror, with someone to talk to who can fully grasp the situation and all its insanities.]

I saw her ad on the Finder and replied to her there and we spoke. That was only a few moments ago. And then I called you.

Come home.

[The request is simple, quiet, and full of a yearning need.]

All right. Give me but a moment.

[It strikes him that it isn't a question or a request, just a simple, plain statement of need. He obeys it without question, setting out for the house, his head still light and whirling as he strides through the city.

It'll be for the best if they're in the same room. If they can each be around the only person that could fully grasp the odd guilt and confusion and grief of it all. Fifteen or so minutes later, the front door opens, and Lestat enters.]

[Louis is sitting in the living room, pinching the bridge of his nose when he hears the front door open. He looks up at Lestat before rising and making his way slowly to him. He curls his arms around Lestat and draws him in.

All in silence.]

[Lestat folds into Louis' embrace, pliant and wordless, letting himself sink into it. His arms wrap around Louis' waist in turn, tugging him in, the two of them melding together in silent understanding.

Some part of him feels as if this is wrong, that someone should be furious and screaming at him. He so often did things that were selfish or foolish, and people would be angry with him for it, a natural consequence of his own choices. It feels as if there should be something, some repercussion for what he's learned, for what some shadow of him did once many years ago.

But Louis is quiet and comforting, and Claudia had been only confused and sad and hurt. And he hadn't done this -- or had he? He doesn't know, doesn't understand, it was him and not him all at once, and the truth of it was that he still turned a young girl once a long time ago and that it had blown up for all of them ever since.

Leaning his forehead to Louis' shoulder, he murmurs:]

Tell me what is in your head, cher. Do not leave me alone to my own thoughts.

[It's easier, he thinks, if he can focus on Louis, if he can tears himself from his own flurry of regrets.]

[Louis curls around Lestat, holds him to himself as he struggles with the information he's been told. Like Lestat, he wonders how this other version of him could curse a five-year-old girl to immortality. But then he thinks of their Claudia, how could fourteen have been much better? Just on the cusp of adulthood, wanting for more than anyone could ever give her.

He remembers being in their sitting room and her screaming at them, then who's gonna fuck me?

He remembers her leaving not long after, taking a journey of her own into an adulthood her body would never reach.

When Lestat speaks, Louis replies softly,] I'm thinking of our Claudia. How reckless we were.

[Gently, he strokes Louis' lower back, listening in quiet contemplation. His own thoughts wander similar roads, at how all of it had been so rash and so thoughtless. She'd been so small then, and imagining her in an even younger form knots his stomach.

They'd been reckless, but Lestat had known better. He's not entirely sure which is worse, acting out of blind panic as Louis had, or knowing the consequences and doing it anyway. At least he'd heard of those damned Great Laws before then, had seen what could happen when someone too fragile was given the gift.]

For all our carelessness, she was stronger than we could have ever guessed. She did more with it than most vampires with twice her advantages.

[It doesn't absolve them, he knows that, but there is a sad sense of admiration for the vampiress they'd both known.]

Edited 2025-10-18 04:23 (UTC)

She was like you in many ways. [Louis replies wistfully. He'd been disappointed and frustrated at the time, but now he wished he'd handled her differently.

And maybe she would not have suffered a terrible fate.] It frustrated me at the time.

[His chest clenches at that, and for a moment he leans into Louis' shoulder, fighting back the rising swell of memories. Lestat remembers that first night with Claudia, remembers saying the words 'Who was it that she takes after?'. He'd said them almost out of pique, after a long evening of fraught emotions, but time seemed to have borne them out as truth.

As for Louis finding that frustrating, well. That didn't surprise him, not really, not given how it had all come to be in the first place. Not when Louis still clung so tightly to humanity while Claudia embraced her new life with abandon, not when Claudia was brought to them in the afterglow of one of their worst arguments.

After a moment, Lestat murmurs:]

She inherited the pieces that best helped her survive, I'd like to think. She took to the gift and thrived. And she did what she needed to be strong through all of it.

[It had been for the best that she took from him the will to keep going, the ability to endure and overcome. Not his temper or vanities or wild swings of emotion, just the aspects that would help her in her afterlife. At least, he'd like to think those came from him.]

She was stronger than both of us. Substantially.

[And her true crime had been wanting to be away from both of them, to find love in her own way. Was it fair that Louis had been spared, but Claudia burned alive? No. It was a cruelty to turn her and an even crueler measure to kill her for her needs and curiosities.]

Stay here tonight.

She was. Perhaps one of the strongest vampires I've ever seen.

[He could picture her roaming the ages with that ferocity in her spirit, living out the centuries without hesitation, perhaps with her French
compagne. Lestat thinks of Gabriella, striding through mountains and deserts in gleeful undeath and wonders if Claudia might well have been similar. Perhaps she might have met her own grandmother in the wilds and caught on like a house on fire. Perhaps many things could have happened.

And instead she had been put through a trial and put on stage and put to task for a murder that had not ended in death. And perhaps Lestat could have saved her, but he had saved Louis and had been frozen in place as he watched her crumble to dust with her fledgling at her feet.

At Louis' command, he nods numbly against his shoulder. His thoughts are in disarray and he does not wish to be alone. He can only imagine Louis is much the same.]

All right. I will, cher.

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