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Lestat was the most foolish man to ever grace this earth. He had been told so many times; by his brothers, his Nicky and the priest that striked him across the face after one too many mistakes while trying to recite the scripture. And that was fine with him, the vampire had no claim of being particularly intelligent or well-read. Sure, he could be cunning at times or bright when the situation called for it but usually, he acted on his whims that gave him no time to think. He was too impatient for that. His emotions always flashed through faster than his thoughts and by the time he formed a smart option, his body was already on the move to let out whatever it was feeling. That’s how he ended up with broken furniture and shattered relationships.
But that wasn’t why he was a fool. Not the fact that he couldn’t read until after recieving the dark gift or that math never made sense to him. He was a fool because he was greatly, painfully naive.
Lestat was an optimist. He thought that everything could still be fixed as he sat among ruin. He tried the get a hold of ashes and shape them back to a man even as the tar slipped between his fingers. He held onto the barest hint of light no matter how long he was stranded in the dark. It was the naive hope of a little boy that didn’t yet comprehend the finality of some consequences, throwing his toy and confused when the shattered pieces didn’t mend together. Except Lestat wasn’t a toddler. He was a 170 years old immortal who have seen the humanity at its worst and still didn’t learn.
It was that hope, that irrational childish hope, that made him offer to go to the opera with his love even as he knew the answer: silence. It was what he was always met with these days. That and an occasional accusation or an insult. Lestat prefered them though, the cutting remarks of Louis hurt less compared to the unbothered disregard that filled him with restless energy under his skin, itching to pick a fight just to get a reaction.
The reaction was the same this time. Louis didn’t even bother to look up from his book as he ignored him. Lestat watched his fledgling with exhoustion, his nightclothes on as a permanent fixture no matter the hour, the messy hair that was flat on one side from where Louis rested his head against the cushion of the couch. The sickly tone of skin, almost greyish, and the shaking hand holding a book. Shaking from hunger, with exhoustion because Louis was too weak to even hold up a book. He sometimes didn’t eat at all for days and when he did eat, it was a few rats or an occasional raccoon. Having resigned from convincing the younger vampire to feed human long ago, Lestat even debated going out there and stealing a pig or a goat or any big animal that contained more blood from a farmer with the sky gift to bring back to his beloved despite all his disdain for it. He would fill the house with cattle if that was what it took to make Louis eat but he knew that his stubborn husband would see this act as humiliation. He would resent Lestat for thinking him too weak to even hunt some animals and refuse to eat.
The whole house was a mess with scattered newspapers and books Lestat wasn’t allowed to touch because appearantly it was all possible clues to find Claudia and Louis had a system. There were multiple dead rats, a couple of stray cats and a racoon that stinked the place up. Lestat was annoyed at his fledgling for not even cleaning after himself and left the carcass where it was with the hopes that the smell might get the younger man up on his feet to clean up to no avail. He now accepted that Louis had no intention of doing anything but read and brood but still refused to clean up out of sheer stubbornnes. He wasn’t some housekeeper that cleaned up after both of them and his pride left them in a messy, stinking room.
And even among this mess, his love was still a vision. He was pale and unkept and so, so cruel but it still didn’t take away from his beauty. How could he not look gorgeous? He was Louis! His cold, hateful saint that drove him near insane. Lestat sometimes wondered if Louis knew what torture it was for his maker to be denied that emerald eyes and that sweet silky voice. Even if the voice was used to spit insults, those green eyes cold with disdain, Lestat still treasured them. He wondered if Louis knew this and ignored him in purpose as a form of punishment. He wanted to believe that this was a desire to hurt him because that would mean Louis cared enough to think about him, to hurt him. It was far better than the likely truth that his lover was simply too indiffirent to his presence to regard him. And damn it, it hurt.
Lestat tried everything to get a reaction. He tried sweet words, gifts. He tried cruel one’s. He yelled and screamed and broke stuff. He even went back to Antoniette and deliberatly made it known. He came back close to the sunrise with lipstick smudged in his collar, her perfume clinging to his clothes in hopes of something, anything. For Louis to get jealous, angry, sad. For him to yell at Lestat, or hit him. Anything but the stony silence that followed his inspection of his husbands state, his eyes empty.
It was a harsh truth; Louis didn’t give a fuck about Lestat anymore. All he cared about was their prodigal daughter that spat on both of their faces with her teenage rebellion and fucked off. He sometimes wondered if their happy days were an illusion. Those days when they were a family, the three of them. Moments filled with geniune warmth and happiness. Going shopping for her almost every week as Louis complained about her having enough clothes or winced when she took a v-neck dress that went a little too deep out of the rack to inspect. He rolled his eyes and told Lestat he shouldn’t get her everything she wanted even as a smile tugged on his lips at the face of their daughters happiness.
He recalled her scream of joy when he was convinced by her to enact Hamlet as a single person play and grabbed the maroon silk fabric they just had delivered yesterday for a tailor made dress for Claudia and wrapped it around himself to a makeshift dress before reciting Ophelia’s lines. Louis’s adorable giggles and a happy spark in his eyes. The mildly disaproving look when Claudia let it slip Lestat had been teaching her how to drive (she could have gotten hurt, Les!).
Lestat would teach Claudia to play the piano in this very room while Louis sat in this very couch watching them with a fond expression. Giving his husband a long, chaste kiss after she was back in her room like a thank you for being so patient with their overexcited daughter not listening to his instructions.
The dances in the courtyard, the enjoyable walks to the parks, the loving flash of gazes; was it all a dream? Did Lestat see what he wanted to see? How else could he explain his husbands compassion leaving them along with her? A painful stab in his chest reminded him that Louis had been ready to leave him just before they had Claudia. Of course he only stayed for her. He promised so. On his knees, begging, he promised to never leave Lestat if he gave him their daughter; making Lestat break his promise of not forcing the gift onto anyone like his own maker did. And he was so much worse then Magnus now, selfishly imprisoning her to a fate that would end with her burning in the fire. His worst crime, his gravest sin. His most beatiful mistake.
She was a mistake. A thorn on his side that would be his doom. The reason why his love was too depressed to eat. His spoiled, stubborn, cruel Claudia. His most embaressing failiure and yet the most precious. He was enraged at her, yes. But he also loved her with an alarming intensity. He loved her cunning little pout she always weopanized to get what she wants. Her endless curiousity that sometimes hit too close to home, her reckless excitement. He loved the little dimples that appeared when she smiled and scrunching of her nose that reminded him of her daddy. He loved how she never took what he tought as it was and always improvised with her own style, whater it be killing or playing.
With all the headache and heartbreak she caused, Lestat couldn’t bring himself to regret her. Couldn’t imagine a world where she wasn’t there to glare at him with her instense gaze. He loved her like the fool he was despite knowing that one day, she would be the end of him.
But now she was gone and took all the peace with her. Leaving her two guardians to stew in their misery. Was she the only reason for Louis’s happiness in the old days? Lestat naively thought that he made his husband happy but now it seemed like it was all her. Lestat’s presence was a mere interruption, only allowed to stay but never the cause for the clear love in their gazes.
Lestat knew what it was to be an outsider in your own family. He had far too many beatings from his father and brothers as a child to ever harbour a love for them. And while Gabrielle loved him, in her own way, she never truly saw him as family. More like a situational ally that they shared an enemy with. Or as she once told him, her manhood, that would go out there and live for the both of them.
The dirty walls of their castle in Auvregene had never been a home to him. It was tainted with the aching heart of a little boy silently crying on the cold stone floor of his room, wondering why no one loved him. A place where his little puppies were all he had. Never part of anything in their family, never thought of and never regarded. Just outside, looking in and wondering what made him so wrong that his own family felt like strangers.
Lestat never wanted a traditional family. A companion was all he needed. Someone to spend eternity with. But he still ended up getting one, a daughter for him and his companion that made him -to his own surprise- enjoy the concept. But now he was back to square one. Yet again the stranger in the house no one gave a damn about. A cruel irony that made him want to sob like a little boy again.
And like the fool he was, unlike his mortal family he couldn’t wait to escape, he loved this one. His ungrateful husband and spoiled daughter he couldn’t stop pouring his heart out for. He would kneel and bleed for an ounce of love even if all he got was stony silence.
Lestat sometimes wondered if Louis was, in fact, really his god. He had the ethereal beauty of one. He was cruel and arrogant without being evil. He had the power of dominating his maker's thoughts without even trying and what was that if not a divine force? He too listened to Lestat beg and cry without moving a finger, just like god ignored the blue eyed praying young man in that tower.
“A college student was found dead in Brookhaven. It has gotta be her. I read about another dead college student in Mississippi last week.” Louis spoke now with a newspaper in his hand. A pathetic delight rose in Lestat’s chest from just hearing his beloved's noise. Even if it was about her, again.
Lestat only glared at Louis, he knew that his husband was thinking out loud more than asking for his opinion. Which he nonetheless provided many times. He said multiple times that they taught her better than being so stupid with her kills just to be dismissed.
Frankly, Lestat didn’t really believe his own answer either. Because while his competent fledgling knew how to be discreet didn’t mean she would. She was reckless and messy when in a mood, much like her maker, as they gravely came to find out recently with her killing spree that almost brought all of their end.
What the older vampire didn’t share was that he knew for a fact that Louis was right. While a maker-fledgling bond closed their thoughts to one another, it created a connection between the two that was faint but unmistakably there. It was like an arm or a leg where you didn’t feel the existence until you lost it, which was why Louis and Claudia couldn’t feel it. But with age and power and most importantly, a better grasp of one’s vampiric mind, someone like Lestat could feel it with a bit of focus.
It felt like the tiniest bit of string connecting their minds, barely there. But it was there and if you honed your skills, you could feel the general sense of where your fledgling was. It was more like a subtle warmth of a presence radiating from far away and less like a compass that allowed you to pinpoint their exact location. And if Lestat focused on it now, he could feel his daughter's presence towards the northeast and very close in distance. It perfectly matched Louis’s assumption of Brookhaven.
Louis surely wouldn’t waste a second fetching their rebellious daughter back if he knew what Lestat did. That’s why he didn’t tell him. Because among all his rage and desire to bring Claudia back, Lestat understood her. He himself ran away from home as a teen, he knew the unstoppable desire to be free and chase his dreams. He also knew that he would have stopped at nothing to regain his freedom if he was dragged back to his cage. And surely neither would Claudia, with her endless determination and stubbornness.
His wild, untamable Claudia wouldn’t be kept anymore than he had been. She grew up sheltered and spoiled, thinking the most cruel thing one could do was to teach her a lesson by making her watch the consequences of her actions in front of the incinerator. She would claw her way out of their house she saw as a cage and would destroy anyone who stood on her way if need be. And because of that, because he knew that any attempt to drag her back would be futile in the end, all Lestat could do was wait and worry for her.
Because even though he seemed unaffected -one of them had to keep a clear head and it certainly wasn’t going to be Louis, he worried about his girl. As ferocious as his fledgling was, she was still built like a little bird. She was strong enough to fight off any mortal who could get any wrong ideas about a seemingly little girl wandering alone but she was no match for a vampire. She would forever have the body of a little girl and her powers as a vampire were nothing as of yet since she was but a newborn in vampire standards. As Lestat also told her, they would shred her to little pieces with ease. He hoped that she would never have the misfortune of meeting one for all of their sakes.
Lestat sighed at the depressing train of thought and the even more depressing atmosphere of the room. He looked down on his own sleeping robe he hadn't bothered to change, drawn into his lover's gloom. The man stood from the couch with a dramatic flourish to loudly stomp upstairs to change. Making his departure loud as possible to get a reaction that never came.
He toed away the dirty laundry scattered across the floor of their coffinroom and pushed his closet open to select a suit to wear. He would find out a drunk guy to sip from, consuming alcohol himself barely having any affect, and then maybe go see Antoniette. She was dull as dishwater but the sex was good and a warm body that held him was even better. She wasn’t completely worthless as she had talent and a nice voice. They sometimes talked about music, perhaps the only entertaining conversation they could have. She also paid attention to him. It wasn’t the kind of attention he wanted or the person he wanted it from, but it was the only one he would get.
Lestat moved in front of the mirror to tie the red tie he chose with his grey suit. He looked handsome, he thought. No hint of the utter exhaustion and blinding sorrow he felt underneath. Good.
The vampire had just moved back to the closet to grab a hat when he felt a sudden tug in his chest. A dull pain of fear that throbbed between his temples for a moment. The feeling of panic cold in his lungs that didn’t come from him. Claudia, he thought.
It wasn’t too common for a maker to feel their fledglings’s emotions. Besides the obvious necessity of the control over their bond, the connection was too vague to make sense of any emotion unless it was a very intense one. Something happened to Claudia, he thought as he mindlessly took the stairs down, something bad enough for me to be able to feel her fear.
He left the house without a glance at his companion, instead using his focus to open his mind. He slowly widened his range as he listened for any other vampire's thoughts. It didn’t take long until the unprotected mind of a fledgling was heard.
Stupid little girl, the voice echoed in his mind, thinking she can go around using a fellow vampire's help without giving anything back.
Lestat snarled, having heard enough. He took up into the air, following the connection to his fledgling. Whoever it was that decided to hurt his daughter, they were about to be very, very regretful.