Chapter Text
Louis walked back Rue Royale in silence, his adrenaline slowly fading and draining out of him until he just felt tired. Every step felt like he was trudging through mud, his footsteps heavy in his sudden exhaustion. Louis listened to the quiet sounds of the townhouse as he arrived at its front step. He heard the faint ticking of clocks and the slight scurry of a mouse in the hallway. Lestat must have already gone to coffin. Louis quietly opened the door. For a moment, Louis stared up the staircase, imagining going up and slipping into Lestat’s coffin.
Instead, Louis made his way to the kitchen. It was a superfluous room now, just domestic decoration. Not that he’d made that much use of it even as a human. Louis removed his suit jacket, waistcoat and finally his shirt, hanging them on the back of a chair. Louis angled his head, looking down at the bullets lodged in his torso. Louis touched one of the wounds lightly, curiously probing, and sudden pain shot to the forefront of his perceptions. Louis breathed out, steadying himself, and reached deeper and tried to find the bullet. Louis fought back a hiss of pain and focused on searching for the tell-tale feel of metal. There. The glass-like edge of a nail tapped against the casing. Louis tried to slip it between his fingers to pull it out but he couldn’t get enough grip on the bullet, everything made slippery with blood. Louis wondered if he should try to wake Lestat, surely someone would have shot Lestat’s irritating self before. Only, Louis didn’t think he’d be able to wake him, to rouse him from that unmoving death-sleep, he hadn’t been able to as a mortal. Maybe it was for the best, Louis could figure this out without Lestat’s advice or condescension right now. Louis could do this on his own.
Louis rifled through the cutlery drawers, settling on a tiny dessert spoon. He sat himself down on one of the kitchen stools. Louis held the wound open with his left hand and carefully worked the curve of the spoonhead over the bullet with the other. It rolled forward with slight pressure, enough to dislodge it, and Louis was at last able to pluck it out of the wound. Thankfully, it seemed intact. Louis didn’t know what he’d have to do if it had shattered into pieces. Louis carefully repeated the process with the second bullet, more confident now, and the second bullet also yielded.
It was strange, staring down at the two pieces of crushed metal in the palm of his hand, still wet with his blood. Something deadly rendered into a mere trifle. Louis stood and rinsed them off in the kitchen sink. He folded a cloth napkin around them, placing them at the back of a drawer, not being able to articulate why he was doing so. Then, Louis bundled up his shed layers of clothing in his arms and went up to the bathroom. Louis stripped off his trousers, bloodied with Fenwick’s blood as they were, and washed himself down with water from the basin. Louis sighed with relief, he felt better, cleaner, without Fenwick’s filth on him. Louis could feel the bone-deep tiredness in his limbs that signaled that the sun was approaching with the new day. The coffin room fireplace, still burning happily away, was closer than the incinerator and so Louis fed all his bloodied clothes to it. Louis stoked it with a poker, watching the fabric curl amongst the flames. Louis dressed in clean pajamas and looked at Lestat’s coffin, a little longingly. But Louis climbed into his own coffin and shut the lid. The exhaustion took him away with ease, consciousness disappearing with the dawn.
“For someone who didn’t like a ribbon on their first victim, who called it pageantry, this is certainly extravagant,” Lestat remarked with a coy glance at Louis from over the day’s newspaper.
Louis listened out the window, helplessly and with horror, at the cold reality of the consequences meted out. And not upon him. No, not upon him, Louis escaped it, didn’t he? Got to sit here all pretty and safe in the damn white French quarter in Lestat’s townhouse while chaos started to surge towards Storyville like a tide. It had always been coming. Destroy their businesses and buy the land for cheap, can’t let any colored businesses show up the white man. Louis could hear the sirens in the distance and the fragments of panicked thoughts on the very edge of his mental hearing.
“In the best possible way, mon cher. You’ve managed it with such aplomb,” Lestat added, his voice warm and indulgent and setting Louis’s teeth on edge, “It goes against much of my teaching but we can all have the occasional indulgence.”
“I didn’t do it for me, I did it for my city, my people,” Louis said, shifting on his feet, this was his fault. “That out there? That’s on me.”
“You merely provided them the excuse. Toss them into circumstance, they go for the throat,” Lestat said, voice dripping with patronisation, returning to his paper, “Relax, mon cher. It won’t reach here or the Garden District. Grace and the girls are safe.”
But what about Bricks? What about those that worked at the Azalea? That lived nearby? It wouldn’t stop in Storyville, not when a mob had wetted its appetite for cruelty.
“Are those the only people you give a fuck about?” Louis demanded.
Lestat looked at him blankly. “Yes?”
Louis turned back to the window, shaking his head. “I need to go help. Are you coming or not?”
“Help?” Lestat repeated disbelievingly.
“Yeah, that never even occurred to you, did it? Actually, why don’t you stay the fuck here, it’s not like anyone would see you and think you’re here to help,” Louis said and turned to go, dropping out of the window down to the street.
Louis thought for a brief moment that Lestat might protest, might follow him, but no one followed him out of 1132 Rue Royale. Louis was on his own.
Louis got to Storyville with vampiric speed, twenty blocks of excess, gambling, and sex and it was being torn apart. Louis reached the Azalea, it was already burning. But it was empty, Louis could feel no minds within it, it was just a shell now. A pretty shell or a Fabergé egg, all emptied out and cracking inwards, splintering and shattering. Louis stared at it. All those years of work and toil and effort going up in flames.
“Can I help you?” he asked a man passing him but he didn’t respond.
“Please let me help,” Louis begged as another man brushed by, that mind stinging with worry, with thoughts of his family and he shrugged Louis off.
He had vampiric speed, he had vampiric strength, but he felt powerless. Time blurred and it felt like Storyville was endlessly burning, would burn forever unabated. Louis stumbled through the streets, a chaotic flood of images pouring over him from the minds around him, he was drowning in it. Louis kept moving, swept by the tide, while everything burned and was crushed and was torn apart around him. He was invincible and yet everything broke around him, fragile as glass.
The fire and chaos was quickly spreading out of Storyville, igniting in other districts and Louis was caught in the current and chaos of it, stumbling through, unable to fix it, unable to take it back. Unable to take anything back.
Then came the cry that sliced through air, through Louis, agonized and reaching out across the psychic distance.
Help me.
Louis ran into the burning boarding house. He pushed past the kneeling corpse of a woman on fire, hand still clutching the doorknob, following the echo of the mental voice through to the bedroom.
It was a young girl in her bed, brown skin badly burned by the flames, smoke smothering the room, heat hazing the air around them. Louis choked. She was suddenly Grace at that age. She was suddenly Frances and Mary more grown up. Fenwick’s murder had been the spark that set this off and this girl was dying because of Louis. He needed to fix this. He could fix this. Louis scooped her up, her mind radiating so much pain that it made Louis gasp from the force of it barrelling over his mind,and she wasn’t going to make it, how could she when he could feel the loose grip of her consciousness threatening to fade away completely?
Louis headed for Rue Royale.
“Lestat! Help me!” Louis yelled, bounding up the stairs, his arms filled with the dying girl as he called out.
Lestat was still lounging in a chair in their bedroom, reading that paper like Louis’s world hadn’t just burned down around him.
“A late night feed?” Lestat asked, voice wry, as Louis laid the girl down onto the bed, trying not to exacerbate the pain with each movement.
She was so fragile. Like a bird.
“Can you save her?” Louis asked desperately, turning back to Lestat.
Lestat blinked. “Save her?”
“She’s dying because of me,” Louis said, looking from one to the other, his heart shattering uncontrollably.
“She’s dying because someone presumably set her house on fire,” Lestat said dryly, standing up to look down at her amidst their linens. “There are limits to healing with the blood, Louis.”
Louis’s mind refused to accept it. No, no no. He could save this one. Needed to.
“Then turn her, just don’t let her die,” Louis demanded.
Lestat looked at him in surprise. “Turn her?”
“That would save her, wouldn’t it?” Louis asked desperately.
“And she’ll live here being… what? Louis? A lap dog? A little pet for you to occupy yourself with?” Lestat demanded, throwing his hands up in the air.
Louis looked at the burned girl hopelessly, and then back at Lestat, fighting back the tears threatening to well in his eyes.
“No? Not a dog,” Louis said. She wouldn’t be a pet. She’d be-
Lestat’s expression shifted.
“A daughter?” Lestat asked quietly.
Louis gazed back at Lestat, unable to speak it. It felt like the world tilted. Yes? No? He didn’t know, he just didn’t want her to die. But a daughter? A daughter? The word sent him spiraling inward and inward, hope and despair shredding into each other in painful cacophony.
“Please,” Louis said, hand on Lestat’s chest, over his heart, clutching at the fabric of his shirt. “Please.”
He knew they’d been fighting but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the girl on the bed, her breathing increasingly labored.
“I’ll do it myself,” Louis threatened, his voice thick with tears. “If you won’t.”
Louis stumbled towards the girl. He sunk his teeth into his wrist, tearing at the flesh, and held the dipping wound up over her mouth. Blood wet the girl’s lips and she faintly stirred.
“That’s it, drink,” Louis whispered.
“Louis,” Lestat walked forward and drew Louis’s arm away from her, his large hand clamped over Louis’s wrist. “Stop.”
Lestat
Louis made a low wounded sound, his face crumpling in despair, his wrist still firmly in Lestat’s grip. It felt so fragile compared to his own.
“Lestat,” Louis said his name, pleading.
And Louis slumped to his knees before Lestat. Lestat’s heart felt like it broke. Louis whispered pleas against Lestat’s thighs, the cadence something like prayer, desperate and aching. Lestat stared down at him.
Louis…Louis deserved a daughter, didn’t he? Lestat still remembered the quiet confession walking back from Grace’s after Benny had been born, Louis wanting a family of his own and having to abandon the notion. His dear sweet Louis on the boat, overwhelmed with the fact that he’d never have a family. Lestat could give him this, give him a child. But what Marius had said to him, to never turn someone too young? One of the archaic Great Laws. And this girl was young, it would be a mistake. But he’d also said to make fledglings out of love.
“Please, Lestat.”
And this was Louis asking on his knees. Here and right now, Lestat could provide him the one thing that Louis had thought he’d given up by being with him.
“Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll be anything.”
Lestat slowly reached out, tilting Louis’s head up with one hand and stroking over Louis’s cheek with his thumb, looking into Louis’s eyes. Louis was so heartbreakingly beautiful when he pleaded. When he wanted. When he wanted so much he was practically trembling. How could Lestat say no to this? He was still making a fledgling out of love, wasn’t he? Love for Louis. And she would be loved, this girl, wouldn’t she?
And it meant that Louis would never leave him, didn’t it? A daughter binding them together. A child cementing them as family. And Lestat needed Louis. He loved Louis so desperately, more than anything else in this savage garden.
“Lestat, please?” Louis begged again, looking up at him, his eyes bloodied with tears. They were starting to run down Louis’s cheeks, streaks of wet scarlet.
Putain de merde.
This was a mistake.
Lestat did it anyway.
Louis
It felt like a miracle. Louis had watched as the girl grabbed onto Lestat’s arm with ferocious appetite, strength stirring within her.
A family. A daughter.
Now, Louis stretched an arm around her trembling shoulders as the girl sat on the edge of the bed and gripped the porcelain bowl, throwing up, blood sweat on her brow. Lestat stood by, a comforting hand on Louis’s shoulder. Bricks had called. Her and the girls were alright. Shaken but alright. Glimmers of hope amid the wreckage of it all.
“It’ll be over soon, I promise,” Louis said softly. “You’re going to be alright.”
Claudia. Her name was Claudia. And the last of her human self was dying. Louis’s arm tightened around her. It felt like caring for Paul or Grace when they were children and they came down with sickness. Claudia’s tired head lifted from the bowl and rested on his shoulder. Louis’s heart ached painfully, wonderfully, in his chest. A family, a daughter, he wanted it so badly and impossibly, here it was, feeling as fragile and as burningly beautiful as anything he could have dreamed.
Later, they’d have to take Claudia out to drink her first fill of blood. And Louis would have to talk more with Bricks, work out how things could possibly go from here, survey the damage and the aftermath. But for this moment, Louis looked up at Lestat and smiled.
“Thank you,” Louis whispered.
Lestat’s expression was soft. “How could I say no to you?”
Their recent fighting felt so unimportant now in the face of something so momentous and new. A daughter. They were going to be a family.
After a time, Claudia’s head readjusted on Louis’s shoulder. “I think I feel better now?”
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Louis suggested. “Lestat, do you think we can find some clothes? Maybe Maison Blanche? I saw a sailor outfit, chiffon skirt, last time we went?”
“Une petite délinquance, mon cher?” Lestat said, sounding archly amused but turning on his heel to go. “I’ll see what I can do.”
While they waited for him to return, Louis filled up a fresh bowl with warm soapy water for Claudia, helping wipe her face free of blood and ash. Claudia gazed at him, with red-pink irises that reflected the light.
“Would you like some help with your hair next?” Louis asked, unsure if the offer would be accepted. But Claudia nodded.
“I thought you were an angel,” Claudia said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “But that’s not it, is it?”
Louis hesitated. “No, I am- we are vampires. And we’ll look after you, keep you safe.”
“Vampire,” Claudia repeated, testing out the word with satisfaction.
And then she smiled, it breaking over Claudia’s face like a sunrise at dawn. A sunrise of a new beginning.
“Vampire,” Louis agreed, feeling an incredible sense of hope.