Chapter Text
The smell is unbearable.
Louis struggles to ignore it. The discomfort is omnipresent in his body: in the cold that pervades his bones, barely kept out by that damp shirt that is powerless against the cruel winds of February, in the clammy sensation of his bare feet on the wet parquet floor of their empty room, stripped of every comfort to prepare them for their new life. Everything is so terribly overwhelming to his body that Louis wants to tear the skin from his bones so he can't feel a thing anymore.
But the smell is the worst thing. It's acrid, like rotten meat left out to cook under the August’s sun. It smells like burnt sugar, like good blood wasted.
It must be so, after all.
Beneath his bare feet, now that he leans over to look at them, there is nothing but a pool of blood. Blood that seems to have a good taste. Perhaps it is Lestat's dinner, half abandoned on the floor. He must remind him of this, scold him about not eating so carelessly. It will be a good resolution for their life in South America. The thought warms his stomach for an absurd moment.
He must have argued with Claudia at some point. Louis doesn't remember anything, but it seems like a plausible reason for wasting all that good blood, as their Claudia always knows how to get on his nerves. She must have said something inappropriate, something mean. Louis should scold her too, remind her that they have to leave that kind of behavior behind if they are to be a family again.
And Lestat—he knows what Lestat is like. He must have responded with equal cruelty, for Louis can hear the distant, continuous crying of their little girl.
It's disturbing. Louis struggles to tolerate that noise. He's not sure how or why his instinct to care for her has been corrupted, replaced by an overwhelming urge to press a pillow against her face, to silence her shrill cries.
“Claudia,” he finds himself screaming as he drags his bare feet across the icy floor, leaving a trail of blood behind him. "Claudia, stop it. My head hurts."
But Claudia doesn't stop, nor does the cold stop blowing on him, nor the physical disgust of that smell.
“Les!” he calls out once he reaches the hallway.
He looks around, holding a hand to his forehead to try to keep the obsessive throbbing of that pain at bay. He discovers that his hands are also stained with blood. “Lestat, love—make her shut up, I beg you. And close the window, it's so cold.”
Lestat doesn't answer. Silence replaces the steady rhythm of his voice.
“Lestat?” he tries again, hurrying down the stairs.
Claudia's footprints are bloody on every step, and a cascade of blood trails down beside them, as if a slaughtered pig had been thrown downstairs. “Lestat? Claudia—come help me look for your father, and God—stop it, stop crying!”
The courtyard door is open, traces of blood marking its painful path. The smell is revoltingly stronger than before, as are Claudia's cries.
She is standing outside, motionless in front of the incinerator. She is barefoot, naked, with only a slip to cover her. He wishes he had a jacket to put on her shoulders, maybe then her crying would stop, but Louis has nothing. Nothing but that unrecognizable linen shirt, stained scarlet with the blood of a victim he cannot remember.
“Claudia, darling—please. Come inside, it's too cold and—and I can't find Lestat, we have to look for Lestat.”
The night is fading away, and none of them should be there.
His head is pounding, his steps are heavy, but somehow he manages to reach Claudia's small, trembling body. The flames from the incinerator warm her face, giving her skin a lovely orange glow.
Louis places his hands on her shoulders, squeezes them gently, and wants to apologize for leaving large handprints of blood on them, but notices that Claudia is also completely stained with it.
She turns toward him suddenly. Her eyes are swollen with a pain that Louis cannot comprehend, but he feels it pierce his stomach nonetheless.
“Do you think he's suffering?” she asks, her voice wet with tears. "Can he feel it? Can he feel the flames?"
It's a stupid question, and Louis would much rather ignore it than answer it. If Lestat were out there with them, he would take care of it, agreeing that it is absurd to worry about the suffering of humans, especially after sucking them dry. That it is rare, absurd, and counterproductive for someone to touch the incinerator with their conscience still intact, but Lestat is not there, and Louis must shoulder that pompous responsibility.
“Claudia, humans...” he begins, between sighs of exhaustion. He notices that his voice is scratchy, as if he had spent the night doing nothing but screaming, which is absurd, given that night—no, Louis doesn’t remember what he did that night. He leans over to look inside the incinerator, ignoring the urge to vomit that the smell of burning flesh provokes. He watches the skin melt, the clothes—beautiful, expensive clothes, made of fine fabrics and finely tailored—turn to ash before his eyes. He wonders if he drank from him too, or if it was just a body fought over between Lestat's gluttony and Claudia's hunger. He is a man, tall enough to barely fit in that cramped space. He has fair skin, Louis can see it from a fragment of his arm that has not yet been consumed by the flames. “Humans don't—excuse me, I don't remember. I can't remember what I wanted to tell you.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers to compensate for the pain of keeping his eyes open.
He cannot stop looking at that body, at the flames enveloping it. He cannot understand why, nor can he understand the cause of the vermilion tears streaming down his face. It is just another corpse, one that has now lost all human connotations. He can no longer even distinguish the fragments of fabric from the exposed bones, consumed by the fire. Louis never enjoyed looking at them, never found pleasure in it, not even the buried and sick pleasure that part of him knows he felt at killing. He looks at it and tries to reconstruct its life, wondering what sound its voice produced from the ashes of that trachea, what color that hair was that now looks like straw and coal against the stone. That arm is still whole, and part of him wants to push it in to get it over with as soon as possible, but does not.
The hand is intact too. There is a small brownish mole on his wrist, so similar to Lestat's—but no, it must be ash that accidentally fell on that exact spot. His fist is clenched, curled up on itself. It is a typical sign of suffering, one that Louis has learned to recognize in the hands of all his victims. He can see a ring on his ring finger. It is a beautiful gold wedding band, adorned with two emeralds at each end. It is the same as Lestat's.
“He has Lestat's ring,” he whispers, and only notices the disgust in his voice when he hears it return to himself. “Why does he have Lestat's ring?”
Claudia's hands are clasped tightly around his arms, and they are so small, so small that he could break them off. The thought is assimilated into the confusion that clouds his mind, and in a brief but painful moment of consciousness, Louis realizes he is struggling. He notices the tremors that pervade his body, the way Claudia desperately tries to hold him still.
“Claudia—it's his ring, Lestat needs his ring. Why did they take it? Why—” he gasps, speaking haltingly, for the little air that manages to move in his chest.
He lunges forward, and the force with which he does so throws Claudia to the floor. He has one arm inside the incinerator, he wants to pull that piece of gold out by force, but the flesh is tender and limp, and his entire hand comes away with it, along with the burns that ruin his own.
“Louis!” and she says something to him, something Louis does not hear.
He is sitting on the floor, the whiplash has knocked him backwards.
He stopped feeling the cold long ago.
That hand rests between his, as it has done so many times before—so many times. Louis can only stand and watch.
“It's not ash,” he whispers, along with the wind of that stubborn winter, as he caresses the mole on that wrist.
“Louis—we have to leave. There's nothing we can do for him now.”
“Lestat?” he asks, pressing that hand to his chest. “Claudia—Claudia, where is Lestat? Where is he?”
He struggles to breathe, words tumbling over thoughts, which tumble over memories, which tumble over bile. Acidic, curdled blood now spills from his mouth, hot in his throat. It stains his hands—stains that hand—and spills onto the floor of the courtyard, their courtyard.
Claudia is upon him again, holding him still. That's how he realizes he's trying to get into that incinerator to pull him out. Or to burn with him.
He's screaming.
He is screaming and cannot breathe. His head is spinning and vomit keeps rising from his stomach. He tries to tear his heart out of his chest with his claws, but all he does is tear Claudia's skin from his wrist.
“Stop screaming!” his daughter urges him desperately, as she tries to pull the weight off Lestat's hand.
“We have to get him out—we have to get him out.”
Louis is kneeling on the floor, Claudia's arms wrapped around his back. She seems tired, he can tell by the way she's breathing, but Louis doesn't care.
Lestat's hand is pressed against his face, comforting him even as hell consumes him like worms would consume his corpse.
“He's my love, my love—”
“We have to go now, you promised me,” Claudia sobs against his head, “you did it for me, you promised me.”
“He didn't even fight back,” is a conscious sigh, swollen with the shame of a memory that his conscience has desperately tried to omit. Lestat's neck resting on his shoulder to give his blade easier access to his throat. If only to relieve Louis of the burden of his death as well.
“My love,” he sobs, “my love—I never told him, I never told him.”
He can no longer smell that scent.
Lestat has turned to ash, nothing remains of him. Even his hand, torn off with a force that Louis no longer has the courage to overcome, has joined that fire.
There is nothing left of Lestat.
Neither the monstrous, the terrible, nor the invincible. Neither the good, the patient, nor the brave. Neither the husband nor the father, for there are no more spouses nor children in that garden.
There is only the sound of that ring rolling through the cracks between the bricks, drowning in a pool of blood indistinguishable from all the others.
“Patricide,” he hears his voice repeat as Claudia drags him inside and closes the shutters behind him. “Patricide.”
It is a terrible sin, a tremendous sin. One not even Lestat would ever commit.
The rest becomes dark. Time is consumed, wasted, extinguished. Louis's conscience does the same. It collapses in on itself, vomiting bile even in his sleep. He lets Claudia take care of everything, drag him into that box, lock him inside, wake him up already on his way to Europe.
Louis doesn't care. Everything he cares about is now dead.
His heart beats in the chest of a corpse, and nothing beats in his own.
***
Existence has lost its meaning. The days pass, one identical to the next, their contours blurring in the morning light. Louis struggles to remember where he is and what day it is, and can barely count the years.
He often wakes up confused, unable to distinguish the past from the present. Europe seems to him to be a single agglomeration of pain. He finds its suffering mawkish, repulsive, bitter in the blood of its victims. He considers it stupid and senseless, obscene in presenting itself before his eyes, above all else.
What is war, what is fatigue, what is the pain of seeing their children starve to death, compared to what Louis feels? Compared to what Louis will feel every day and every night for the rest of eternity.
Somehow he keeps going, somehow he does not give in to the fire.
Claudia thinks he does it for her, and perhaps a resilient and stubborn part of him is convinced it is so, but in his chest the only truth he knows warms the cold of the old continent.
He searches everywhere for pieces of Lestat. Fragile and fleeting fragments of a life he was never given the chance to know, but which he was so easily allowed to break.
He deludes himself into thinking he has found what he is looking for at the first port they dock at, when he turns back to that ship and sees it from the outside for the first time. Even in the cathartic cold of that winter of war, even in the storm that shook the coffins in that hold, even in the darkness of night, the Mediterranean Sea retains its beauty. It is the same, the very same destructive and uncompromising beauty that has always been high tide in Lestat's eyes, the same that seems to preserve the light of the sun even in its absence, even on the darkest and most desolate nights. Even in death.
And so he curses himself, as if he could ever stop doing so. Lestat deserved to die in a place like this, with the waves dragging his body onto the rocks. A sweet death, like a lover's kiss on his blade.
He still searches for him, then, in the woods where they end up hiding, in the howls at the moon that lull him to wakefulness.
He searches for him in Claudia's voice, where he always ends up finding him. He despises himself for blaming her, while he is consumed by vulgar envy of not carrying a piece of Lestat inside him, as she manages to do. He hates her more often than not, yet loves her even more.
Every now and then, he wonders if he would love her so much if she weren't so similar to him. He hopes he never finds out the answer.
Paris, then, is both a blessing and a curse.
Lestat is everywhere and in every place. His presence is embedded in the bricks of every building in that city, and it is murky even in its wind. His joy, the material and fearless desire for life that distinguished him, has also polluted its aquifers, for Lestat flows into the Seine and dies in it every night.
Grief soon turns into obsession, and obsession almost always grows into cancer.
He sees his shadow, follows his voice, draws his profile at the bottom of every page.
Claudia is a constant ghost, who willingly or unwillingly follows in Lestat's footsteps to the point of wearing his clothes, sooner or later becoming the spitting image of a version of her father that neither of them ever had the honor of knowing.
They would have loved each other deeply, he believes that with sincere pain. Claudia and Lestat would have loved each other without restraint if they had met in that theater. It's the first thing Louis thinks as he looks up at that painting, followed only by an unbearable and incessant pain.
He makes it his new purpose in life, then, to get to know the parts of Lestat he never got to meet. That's why he indulges in those attentions at first. He does so unabashedly, knowing that every word he tries to steal from Armand has only the guise of Lestat's phantom. Only later, and with time, does he understand that the other's intentions are not so different from his own. There is comfort, for a time, in stealing from each other a version of that impossible soul, unattainable in its greatness. There is even more comfort in the insurmountable awareness of having incomparable power over that memory. That Lestat was something to him and only to him that he was never to anyone else, that he chose him, and truly did so, and never considered an eternity that was not alongside Louis.
That relief is short-lived, a temporary caress, barely a memory of the real thing. Louis hates the touch of another on his skin, it makes him unstable, violent. He can barely tolerate the water washing away the sorrows of the day, which little by little seems to want to erase the scent of Lestat from his flesh.
Soon he begins to intolerate even Armand's inquiries, becoming jealous, terribly and madly possessive. Those memories are his and his alone.
The first time he makes fire, discovers its power, it happens like this. He can feel it, as he has never been aware of it before. He can feel Armand digging painlessly through his memories, searching for Lestat among them. His voice, his words, his kindness. His body, then, his love.
Before he realizes he is the cause, Armand's clothes catch fire, followed immediately by his hair.
From there, the road to madness descends rapidly.
One afternoon like any other, a few hours after the wake, he realizes that he will never have anything again, and that what he keeps in his memory, already chewed up and battered, is all he has left for eternity.
Lestat was. Lestat is not, and never will be again.
The thought infects him. Louis finds himself sick, adrift, dying. He believes there is nothing left for him but to let himself die.
Each night ends up becoming a pompous memory of the previous one, as he watches passively and impassively as Claudia swells with life before his eyes, then humbles herself to it without him taking notice.
Even the books end up resembling each other, disgusting memories of death and love incapable of honestly transposing the reality of things. Flaubert and Bovary, Foscolo and his Jacopo, Bronte and Eyre, Tolstoy and Karenina. The contours of the stories blur into the contours of the people, reality mixes without novelty into a hundred other realities identical to them. There is still nothing beating in his chest.
He reads almost out of inertia, and rereads very often. Nothing changes, the familiar pages are identical to the new ones.
There is nothing memorable about it, and it is a bizarre tale of a reality that is extremely different from life itself. Louis is not even sure how Raupach's mediocre pages ended up among the classics he keeps rereading to compensate for his worldliness. The prose evokes no feelings in him, nor does the story warm his heart in any way. Yet that story plants a diseased seed in the fertile soil of his obsession.
It should serve as a warning, reminding him to do the opposite of what it makes him want to do, but Louis pays no heed. What does Raupach know about life, or the lives of the dead? What, then, about Lestat?
Wake Not the Dead is the first brick in the wall of illness that builds around himself.
Its pages become his diary, notes upon notes appearing in fervent, disordered writing among the prose. Louis's research is all crammed into those chapters, and he returns to it every night.
That book becomes the sole prison of his existence. A hundred others end up following him.
Louis's investigations move clumsily and carelessly through the occult world of Paris, almost always ending in dead ends.
Cults, covens, and witches—only half of those he encounters are anything other than psychotic humans, and the other half don't particularly enjoy his company. Few want to help him, and even fewer know how to.
The sanctuary Louis builds in his room is an altar to resurrection that sooner or later takes the space Claudia leaves behind.
He hardly notices her absence, and most of the time he doesn't care.
He is bent over that book the night Claudia walks through the front door with Madeleine's hand clasped in hers. Part of Louis wonders how he could not have noticed, how he could not have sensed her thoughts, seen the light in her eyes. Most of him just despises her. How can anyone fall in love now that there is no more love to be found in the world?
“Not a chance,” is all the answer he gives to that plea. “Do it yourself if you must.”
“You know I can’t,” Claudia screams through clenched teeth, while Madeleine sits on the sofa, pretending that those screams are not for her.
Lestat would like her, perhaps he would make her for Claudia. That’s all Louis has the heart to think.
“After everything you've done to me,” his daughter whispers, cruelly holding his face tightly in her hands. Louis wishes he couldn't hear her. He wishes he could just reopen his book and search for the seed of hope hidden between those pages. “After everything you've done to me, you owe me this. Make her for me—you owe me, I deserve it.”
A cruel laugh breaks out of his chest, surprising even himself. He didn't think he still had that sound stuck inside him.
“I owe you? Why? To let you go, abandon me, and be happy with your companion after you—” the words die in his throat, and the lump is too tight to swallow. “After you made me slaughter mine? After you burned him, as if he was nothing? Your father, your maker—”
Louis's head hits the wall before he realizes he's being pushed against it. Madeleine screams something he doesn't want to hear, while Claudia punches him again.
“What should I do, huh? Lock myself in here like you do?” Her screams are scratchy and wet as she turns to pick up that book from the pile of others, abandoned at the foot of the sofa. “Fill myself with this bullshit? Stay here and mourn a death that you wanted as much as I did?”
His lips tremble, and Louis fears he will end up vomiting up the blood of the doves he swallowed short before.
"Go away, then. I'll do it for you if only to never see you again—go away and don't look back. Burn me like you did him."
Those pages are thrown in his face, and Louis kneels like a dog, desperately picking up every sheet that falls from that worn book.
“I should have chosen him,” Claudia whispers to herself rather than to Louis, and again, “make her, and you'll never see me again. And don't come crying at my door when the shit you're burying yourself in ends up choking you.”
Madeleine dies as gently as Louis once did, but she is born much braver. Claudia is such just as Lestat once was.
They leave Paris before dawn.
Louis leaves too, eventually. He doesn't know where, he doesn't know for how long.
He doesn't think it matters.
Lestat is dead. Along with him, all the things that mattered.