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Claudia knew she could only avoid the hard work of rebuilding her own room for so long, and one random evening of renewed vigor three weeks after the wreckage was exactly what she needed. She started to put her room back in order with deft, careful hands; it was disturbing, really, how quickly that softness had become second nature since she returned to Rue Royale. Seven years of only touching other bodies with the intention to drain them dry, and now here she was, a nakedly declawed thing, pawing at the derelict remains of the house forced into her stewardship.
At least she could trust the furniture, crushed and dented as it was, to hold itself up after some attention, to not melt or break in her hands. This was more than she could say for Louis.
He was, to his credit, doing better these days, more present in the world, able to limp good distances within a given room without help. Still, Claudia’s eye was too keenly trained to spare her notice of the subtler wounds that refused to heal no matter what she did. If the problem was firmly contained within his battered form—like his phantom pains, or his sudden bouts of poorly concealed tears seemingly provoked by nothing in particular, or the way he jumped whenever Claudia put furniture down too loudly—she could provide tokens of comfort and wait painlessly for it to pass.
It was when healing required feeding him—substantially, from herself, often as a last resort—that she remembered just how unnaturally gentleness came to her. Bad enough, when he was reluctant and cloying and slow to drink in a way that made her skin crawl, and worse when he was only half-conscious and didn’t know who she was; he would lose himself in senseless hunger, giving himself into the blood with a sigh of pleasured resignation. She supposed she should take it as a compliment, that her blood was strong enough to be mistaken for her maker’s in any state, but no strength made any binding to Lestat worth it.
The first few times this had happened, she had snatched her wrist back, sharply told him Enough of that, and discreetly purged her churning stomach in the questionable safety of the wet crumbling bathroom. Now, she was accustomed. Now, she could offer her wrist, let him have his share, and gracefully turn to get back to work and fix up yet another corner of the house.
She was getting stronger by the day, just as he was. This was good. It meant they could rebuild well enough to weather any storm that came their way next. All she had to do was patch up the walls and make sure their soft chairs crumbled from the violence less quickly than they did and sweep away the shattered glass that made her bare feet bleed over the floor and—
Lord, she had her work cut out for her.
Soft, sock-footed footsteps approached behind what remained of her door. Louis gave a light knock, though there was a perfectly serviceable dent in the wall he could have walked through.
“You can come in!” she called.
Louis painstakingly pushed the door open and placed it back in its nominal crook. He looked around at the state of the room and winced. “Having a hard time putting it all back together?”
Claudia glared at him, which only made him grin wider, his good eye glinting. “Maybe I don’t want to put it all back together. Maybe it’s better to leave some of it as is.”
“I know you don’t mean that.” He kicked idly at an inoffensive plank.
“Wait—” Claudia started, but it was too late, because it snapped, and brought a whole host of other rubble it was supporting down with it.
Claudia shielded her own face from the crash of dust and wood chips. The house was a delicate sheet now, reminding her of the miniature mansions she used to put in dolls that looked nothing like her, the ones with a missing fourth wall that allowed her to play God; perhaps every house had violation built into its structure this way, and what was becoming of their dear townhouse now was simply more honest about the fact.
When she opened her eyes, she was relieved to see that Louis’ unwitting stunt at least hadn’t eaten another hole in the wall. “There, see, there’s a reason I ask you not to—” She blinked. “Louis?”
Louis stood stiff, watching the crumbling pile with wide eyes; too wide, in the way that told Claudia he may have been in the room with her, but was not living the same moment. Just as quickly, he shook his head and plastered on a slapshod smile. Claudia did not return it, only tilted her head and waited for him to talk.
Louis sighed. “Came to tell you not to bother with a catch for me tonight. I’m going to coffin.”
She gaped at him. Naps at night and early coffintimes were the norm now, and she would have let him go, except… “The dog you had at dusk wasn’t nearly enough! At least stay up long enough to let me find you something else.”
He waved a hand. “Hot fucking blooded, that dog,” he said, not quite as breezily as he wanted. “You eat that much, you gotta rest it off, you know.”
Claudia folded her arms. “Speak for yourself.”
“Fine. I gotta rest it off. Jesus…” he volleyed back, but the levity in his voice was already fading. Claudia blinked, startled; had she caused that sudden deflation? “I’ll leave you to your—” He began to walk back to the delicately standing door, but suddenly stumbled and had to catch himself on a small side table.
“Louis!” Claudia rushed to steady him, but not fast enough. His sudden force was too much for the wood to handle and it splintered loudly, sending him crumpling to the ground. She broke his fall, and on his hands, the gashes and cuts from the wood were being stitched back by preternatural healing, but… other wounds materialized and festered, on his neck and seeping through the sweater on his back; but these wounds were old, they should have already healed…
Louis’ eyes, like bloodstained glass, looked up at Claudia but didn’t see her, and his skin, when Claudia made to touch his face, was searing hot to the touch. She could only sputter, stupidly, “You—you’re burning up, your wounds are opening again, there’s no way—”
Of course there was a way. If there was a way for him to get hurt this badly at all, if there was a way for men like Lestat to yell and batter and a way for other men to rape and wring women dry still… of course even their flawless healing was an easily dispelled illusion if they didn’t maintain it. Violation in the architecture of their house, their bodies, their hearts… they would never escape.
Louis let out a cry of pain, shaking her out of her thoughts.
“You’re okay,” she said firmly, hauling him into her arms. Familiar words, familiar weight, always wrong in her mouth and arms. “Stay with me, you’re going to be okay.”
When she pushed the both of them through the door this time, it shattered off its hinges. The wall had already been crumbling; it was only a matter of time. Claudia blinked past the plaster dust and forged ahead.
~~~
Steeling herself and cutting her wrist open for him did nothing. Louis drank obediently at first, but the blood barely made it down his throat before he coughed it back up, somehow bleeding worse and hotter to the touch than before. His flesh, it seemed, was determined to expel every blood that fell short of what it wanted.
When she snapped at him about not eating enough, he had only looked down and brushed his own stomach as if it existed independently of him.
Clearly, she had to try something else. She ran herself ragged, from coffin to pantry to the lawn to coffin again, but no matter what she fed him, his heart was rabbit-fast and his blood still gushed from perpetually opening wounds, boiling beneath his skin and threatening to burn through. At her absolute wit’s end, in an absentminded moment, she closed his coffin for the day’s sleep, and of course it only trapped the heat and spilling blood in there, leaving him nearly insensible until she fed him awake.
“It’s him,” he whispered sharply, the first thing to leave his mouth, the surest thing to sour the entire rest of the evening. Him, of course; it was always him. “It has to be. He won’t leave me alone, even now—”
“You’re delirious,” Claudia scolded. “You’ve gotten yourself worked up, your heart was supposed to settle with sleep…”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Louis muttered, squirming in her hold but seemingly not bothered enough to flinch away. “It burns—”
“I can feel it.” She looked around. “What do you need? You need to eat something, close the wounds up again—”
He shook his head. “Nothing can close these.” He blinked, releasing a breathless scream that she had to keep herself from flinching at. “A fucking river away and I can still feel everything he’s done. Down to my bones, and he gets to enjoy—”
“Stop your heart,” Claudia demanded, not wanting to hear any more.
Louis stared, and did seem to cool for a moment from utter shock, before his heart caught up with him again. “What…?”
“It’s like holding your breath,” she explained. “You can play dead, hide yourself from anyone looking, or just… let go of it all for a moment.” Don’t ask how I know, she pleaded silently, willing herself not to think of the scratch of fingernails and mite eaten floorboards. “You stop your heart, you stop—your body, and whatever it is that’s opening you back up, until I figure it out.”
The battle playing out on Louis’ face was very short lived, before he gave in, burrowing into Claudia’s chest. “Just… stay till I get it right.”
Claudia smiled thinly. “And ten minutes after in case you wake?”
Louis scoffed. “M’not that much of a glass bird,” he said, but didn’t refuse. He let her wrap her arms around him, shrinking into her hold, muscles compacting. One perfunctory breath, two, three… and his heartbeat slowly receded, until he had brought it down to a corpse’s stillness. Then, a spike again. “You’re sure you got this? I can jump into the water, see if that—”
Claudia moved him back into the coffin, pressing on his chest to smother it back down. “Shut it and die.”
With a long suffering sigh, Louis closed his eyes and obeyed. Dead to the world, and it was up to Claudia to bring him back to life.
She waited out the entire ten minutes to make sure he didn’t wake up screaming again.
When she had to go out, she stripped and changed in the same room as the coffin too, just in case. She shrugged on a respectable jacket and a long skirt, stepping into blocky heels that provided a much needed boost but still wouldn’t hurt to walk in. All the while, she examined every curve, every dip and protrusion of shape in the broken mirror. Every shard showed a distorted, fragmented image of her, highlighting a different enraging feature. No one was ever meant to look at their face at all, Claudia believed firmly, and certainly never meant to look at so many reflections of their face at once.
It wasn’t that she disliked her body, on an objective level. She could acknowledge that she was built just fine, even if she was entirely detached from it in every way that mattered, even if it wasn’t hers… she had accepted it with the resignation of a long overstaying tenant who didn’t have anywhere else to be but this building. It was when people looked, connected that skin she wore to her as a person, that made the worst feelings fester. Louis didn’t help much; she suspected he would never see her as anything other than his little girl.
Good enough, she decided ultimately when she had armored her diminutive figure enough, a nice shell of cotton and herringbone between her and the world. Then, she stomped out onto the streets, mind racing. Whatever it was she was going to do, she had to do it quickly, before Louis bolted back to life with that horrible overflowing blood once more. Furiously, she scanned the area, trying to think with her mind first and fangs second; she had to remind herself that the freshest warmest blood she always craved would likely upset Louis’ heart even more. Her best bet was something cold, soothing, but still nourishing, able to go down easily enough to start healing his wounds.
Fucking hell, of course, leave it to Louis to find an affliction impossible to lift through blood, the only thing that sustained them.
Claudia swallowed the bitterness, and ran through every option available to her; he had firmly rejected her own blood, so she examined everything that walked past her. People, as satisfying as it would be to wipe some of these women’s knowing sidelong looks right off their pretty faces, were out of the picture for now, until everything else failed her; she wasn’t very keen on upsetting Louis, as incomprehensible as his restraint was. Cats and dogs were too warm and too meager to stitch him together even if he managed to stomach them. Goats could manage by volume, but she doubted he could digest them. She cursed under her breath, having to lift her dress to avoid mud; at this point, she could reach the river having made no progress at all.
The river. Fish.
Yes, cold, good to gather en masse, easily digestible, and a favorite of his for some godforsaken reason. She needed to nab some fish.
With that, she broke into a run. She strode to the riverbank, draining a lone fisherman and grabbing his boat and considerable trunk for herself. Spreading the net, she gathered as many fish as she could, then held her breath to keep the stench at bay and hoisted them up. She let their twitchy slimy forms fall into the compact water of the trunk, one, two, three… five were quite enough, she thought; this was a cramped home, but it was temporary, and they had to keep from killing each other for at least the time it took to get home. The rest, she spilled back into the river, hoping the disruption wasn’t so great that they could never find their homes again.
She pawed the water for a while, hoping her icy skin would cool it enough to affect the blood too. After that, it was only a matter of hauling the spoils home. As she cut corners through the city, it occurred to her that she could always step toward her own district; she knew the path like it was marked into the soles of her feet; going forward out into the world hadn’t worked, but part of her had a fantasy of going back and reclaiming her old grounds for herself with the new power she had. She stamped the thought down; the place had likely changed beyond recognition from the knife of law driving wedges into the city, and if she saw it again, it would only be with the sickening recognition of a twitching severed limb.
There was only one home she was allowed now, and she trudged toward it, not quite able to muster any of the anger she always thought it deserved. Maybe it was just as wretched and ill-suited to the world as her, in the end.
~~~
When she returned, Louis lay undisturbed, blood crusting over his wounds. Claudia set the trunk down at the coffin’s edge, scooped out a flailing fish, and tried to keep her grip firm as she punctured it and brought it to his mouth. Drained it to death, waited for him to wake, forced some composure when he didn’t, then turned to another fish. Rinse and repeat.
It took three fish for him to finally rouse him, sputter back to life with blood dribbling on his chin, and ultimately swallow what he continued to take. Little by little, his wounds stitched back up, his heart slowing to its usual steady, if sharp, rhythm. His breathing evened, and he managed a smile.
The relief made Claudia’s knees tremble. She felt his forehead, letting out a happy sigh; the fire beneath had cooled away. “How do you feel?”
“Awful,” he said, still smiling. “But… cold and wet after a fresh rain, kind of awful. Smooth and starting over. Not nerves burning everything else into oblivion, not breathless a hundred feet into the air or choking on wood—”
“Fantastic, then,” she summarized, tears pricking her eyes. “God, you and your poetry…”
She sat there beside his coffin, then. The two of them drank in each other’s presence, the miracle of their continued existence. Louis looked at her rolled up sleeves and the splashes of mud from a hard evening’s work on her dress; Claudia was embarrassed by how much the pride in his eyes almost made it all worth it.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “For coming back. Again.”
Claudia scoffed. “Uh-huh. As if anything else was ever an option.” She may as well have been born in this house, the hold it had on her was that total. “You know it wasn’t.”
“Doesn’t mean it stops being special. For all that matters, you could leave me for dead and be better off,” he said, sitting up. “What do you think caused it?” He looked away, sheepish. “Is it some—attachment he’s bound me with?”
Claudia scoffed. “Don’t give him all the credit. This act of eating yourself was all you. You wear it on your sleeve,” she said. “Raw, pulsing. In every jump and flinch from the slightest bit of movement. Of course that’s the thing that sets your heart to burn you from the inside. You open every wound, because—” She stopped herself. Because you think you deserve it, she almost said, before remembering he would argue that he did. Before remembering that though the sentiment was utterly wrong, she couldn’t fight back in good conscience. Some hurts, they did bring upon themselves. Some hurts came only as punishment for the mistake of chasing love and warmth from the wrong places. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be no better than him in that poor judgement. She finished limply, “I don’t know. You confuse me.”
He looked hurt, but grimaced in resignation to her point. “Hm.” He stretched an arm out, leaning against the lip of the coffin. “You trying to say there’s no hope for me?”
She tried to smile. “I’m trying to say exactly what I’m saying, and everything you read into it is from your own mind,” she said. “But yes.”
His own rueful smile was vanishingly brief. Working a fingernail over the wood, he said, so softly as if to protect from intruding ears, “I’ve thought the same, often.” His eyes reddened. “One wrong slip-up away from becoming—someone to be ignored, shoved away somewhere, never to emerge in polite society again till they straighten me out. Already happened once to…” He trailed off but Claudia heard his brother’s name, heard the ghost living in his throat loud and clear when he choked on a bitter laugh. “Sometimes when mornings get bad, I fear it’s happened to me too.”
Claudia didn’t have the heart to say it had, in every way that mattered, that this house might as well have been a prison; even if the warden had run away, here they still were, afraid to lift the latch of the unguarded door. How long would they stay afraid? She squeezed his hand. “We don’t have to stay here.”
She said it with all the conviction in the world. One sign, any sign at all from Louis, and she was ready to launch into tens of branching runaway plans, crossing oceans and cities and ancient ruins and the wide, wide world beyond the ashy air of this house. She was ready to fight, always would be, if only he would join her.
Then Louis looked at her. That way he always did, eyes glistening and dark with a cornered animal’s fear masquerading as a father’s concern, effortlessly driving Claudia’s passion into a hasty retreat to the realm of childish fancy.
“Yeah,” he said. “It would be nice to get out.”
It was always worse when he didn’t have the nerve to deny her outright.
Instead of pressing him further, Claudia asked, “Will you be sleeping alright?”
Louis pawed the satin lining of the coffin. “I can try.”
“We can keep it open,” she assured him. “I’ll move it to the room down the hall, it’s blocked off light best—”
“It’s not that,” he cut in, avoiding her eyes, and Claudia understood immediately. This was the same shit that made him suffer, hell, the same shit that kept him in the house long enough to be on the wrong end of the blows that racked this house sideways. The loneliness that could seemingly be quenched only by Lestat, Lestat, and only Lestat. “I’ll pull through.”
Claudia was climbing in practically before he finished the sentence. If all Louis wanted was a body to fill the coffin—because that’s all this was, at the end of the day—Claudia would be that body. She’d give Louis everything he needed and more, until he forgot about Lestat and stopped needing her to give anything at all. Louis’ hands hovered in the air, like they didn’t know what to do, and Claudia authoritatively pressed one down beside him and the other between her shoulder blades. She squeezed into the space, all too familiar a configuration to fit into, except this time, she’d be the one taking care of him. He could feed from her when he woke if that was what it would take. Anything to make these festering wounds fade.
“Okay?” she asked.
Louis nodded wordlessly.
She closed the lid over them both, and listened to his always overflowing heart until he slept.