Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Claudia demands that Lestat sit in the backseat with her, tugging his hand and repeating, “Papa, Papa, Papa,” with a louder whine at the end of each successive syllable. It tugs at his heart that she wants to keep him so close to her. It irks him so that she asks this while there is gauze in his mouth and his limbs are stiff from being strapped into the dentist’s chair for— he checks his phone— two hours. “Papa, Papa, please? Daddy says he can’t sit with me because he needs to drive because you can’t drive and I don’t want to be alone in the backseat, Papa, please?”

Lestat wants to tell her to be a big girl and sit alone for the twenty minute drive home. Louis, however, kneels, tightens the bow on Claudia’s collar while she squirms, and he says with an even tone, “Sure, baby, Papa’ll in the back, but you have to be very careful to be quiet, okay?”

Claudia wrinkles her nose. “But I wanna tell Papa about—”

“Later, Claudia,” Louis cuts in smoothly. “Later, I promise.” He presses a kiss to her forehead and rises, shoots Lestat a cool look as he does, and thus, the matter is settled without Lestat’s input. The afternoon moves forward.

If Lestat compares the two strictly in terms of emotional severity, of course the morning Louis discovered the voice notes from Antoinette ranks higher than right now, this afternoon of his wisdom teeth removal. The latter is nothing so awful. The surgery is painful and degrading, yes, with Lestat’s gums prodded and injected with enough painkillers to render his jaw numb and slack, hanging open dumbly as the dentist hacked at the back of his mouth. Humiliating, to be sure, that he leaves the dentist with cotton covering what the dentist told him would remain an open wound for a few more hours, that when Claudia leans into him on the drive back home all he can feel is disgust for the blood he can feel dripping down the back of his throat, Claudia’s tiny hand in his own barely perceptible in comparison and Louis’s complete silence over Antoinette only intensifying the tannic taste in his mouth. 

Two hours later, Lestat stands in front of the bathroom mirror, watching blood bubble and dribble out the corner of his mouth. “They said,” Lestat says, gaze divided between the mirror and Louis, who leans against the bathroom door as he reads a sheet of aftercare instructions. “That the swelling would only last a few short days. One long, dull week, mon cher. One week. All of this,” Lestat says, pointing to his reddened, bloated face, though Louis’s gaze remains on the instructions. “Is only temporary, Louis.”

“Think you should stop talking,” Louis says, without looking up at him. “It’s making the bleeding worse.”

It is, indeed, making more blood drip down. “I must speak.”

“You should focus on resting.” Louis’s tone is light. “Try going a couple hours without speaking, just until the bleeding stops.” Louis flips over the page. Lestat pokes his chin and feels nothing, the drugs from surgery not quite out of him yet. “Says you can’t swallow,” Louis says. “Or spit. Or swish anything inside your mouth. Just, uh, lean forward and let it fall. Like that, yeah,” he says, finally looking up as Lestat does just that, leaning and opening his mouth wide to let the blood fall forward. When Lestat makes eye contact with Louis in the mirror, Louis holds contact for a second before turning away.

This is miserable. This is agony. Lestat straightens and stares into his mouth. The gauze has been fully stained red, shiny with saliva and webbed with blood. Lestat snaps his teeth together, wincing at the resulting squelch. He fumbles with the packet of fresh gauze the dentist had given him, struggling to get a nail under the plastic.

“Here.” Louis steps into the bathroom, setting the sheet on the counter as he takes the gauze. “Gonna wet these for you.” 

“For—”

“No talking,” Louis reminds him. “Dry gauze might pull out the blood clot, remember?” Lestat doesn’t remember. Louis doesn’t look at him as he folds the square of gauze into a thin rectangle and holds it under the tap. “Take the ones you have out.” 

Lestat complies, reaching into his mouth and yanking out the gauze, dropping them into the bloodstained sink. He waits for Louis to scold him for the mess. Louis doesn’t. When Lestat reaches for the wet gauze, Louis pulls back.

“I’ll do it,” Louis says, and, well, an indignity while sitting in the dentist’s chair is a scrap of affection in their bathroom. Lestat leans forward, angling his face so that they’re eye-level. Louis, still frowning, uses one hand to cup Lestat’s face, and Lestat feels a hot flash of annoyance that he’s still too drugged to fully feel and savor Louis’s touch. “Can you—” Lestat opens his mouth wider, raising an eyebrow. Louis doesn’t react, only places the gauze in with far more gentleness than the dentist had used just hours before. Louis’s touch is all warmth, pressing the gauze into the back of his mouth, his fingers bumping against the walls of Lestat’s cheeks and brushing against the sharp edges of his teeth.

All warmth, his Louis, standing in the orange-magenta haze of their bathroom lighting. Cold tap water from the gauze pools the bottom of Lestat’s mouth, melding with the existing blood and saliva. It takes everything in him to not swallow. He watches Louis’s eyes narrow in concentration, and he thinks of two days ago, standing in this very same position, both of them dripping wet, the shower still running, gobs of conditioner yet unwashed in Lestat’s hair, and Louis standing expressionless as he played Antoinette’s voice notes in order, Louis raising the phone’s volume with every gasp and giggle Antoinette had recorded and sent Lestat. On and on, the messages went, Antoinnete’s voice pink and uncaring, Lestat’s voice caught somewhere low in his chest, Louis silent and giving Lestat nothing, no reaction at all. On and on, until Claudia banged on the door, a shriek of citron naivete, demanding Louis to please, please, pleaseeeee make her sunny-side up eggs for breakfast, and Louis had gone, leaving Lestat to drip alone in the bathroom with Antoinnete’s voice still playing from where Louis had left Lestat’s phone at the edge of the sink.

Lestat knew Louis would find out about Antoinette. He knew from the start that Louis would, eventually, look through Lestat’s phone. He knew. He anticipated it. What he didn’t expect was this, Louis shuttering and giving no reaction at all. 

Louis lets go of him. Lestat breathes, tilting his head back to blink at Louis, who blinks back before looking away.

“Yeah,” Louis says, almost absently. “Press down, don’t talk. Try not to make the bleeding worse.” Louis looks at him, another pulse of eye contact, and then sets the packet of gauze on the counter, on top of the sheet. “Go to bed,” he says, stepping away. “Grab more ice. Sleep or just lie down, whichever, just keep your head elevated. I’ll find something for you to eat. You shouldn’t be taking antibiotics on an empty stomach.” And he walks out, just as he did two days ago, leaving Lestat alone in the bathroom, blood congealing around his mouth and staining the white ceramic of the sink.

Claudia stands at the doorway, looking around the room with her cheeks puffed up and her expression thoughtful. She’s holding a pink glitter pen that Lestat had bought her last week in one fist, and a cyan-colored notebook gripped by the spine in the other fist. When she sees Lestat, sitting up in bed and leaning against the headrest with an icepack pressed against his cheek, she breaks into a grin.

“Hi, Papa,” she says, dashing over. “Daddy says I can’t play the piano ‘cause it would hurt your head, and he says I can’t let you talk ‘cause it would hurt your head, too, so how bad does it hurt right now? No,” she says, brisk, swatting away his offered hand with a huff. Lestat watches, amused, as Claudia claws her way onto the bed. It’s only a few inches shorter than her, their bed, and Claudia seemingly refuses to let go of her pen and notebook in the process. “I’m six, Papa, I can do this myself.” 

As if six were too old for accepting her father’s hand. Lestat retracts anyway, setting his ice pack aside on the nightstand and folding his legs into a cross-legged position as Claudia, having successfully pulled herself atop the bed, makes her way over to him. 

“Your face looks funny, Papa,” Claudia says, settling into his lap, her space buns brushing against his neck. “Like a squash!” She leans back to poke his chin, giggling. “It’s so—”

Lestat jerks his head away with a hissed, “Stop that,” and Claudia stops, abruptly crestfallen.

“You’re not supposed to talk,” she says, sounding as though she’s close to darting off and away. Lestat breathes through gritted teeth. This is awful. 

“I,” he starts, then stops when shakes her head. He rolls his eyes. In lieu of saying anything, he schools his mouth into a tin-lipped smile and presses a consolatory kiss to Claudia’s brow with minor difficulty, his chin bumping against the bridge of her nose. It mollifies her. She giggles again.

“Daddy bought me a new diary,” she says, holding up the notebook. It’s glossy, dotted with pink petals and has a lineup of Disney princesses on the cover. “I saw it when we were getting medicine at the pharm— pharm— pharm-see.” She seems pleased. Lestat will correct her pronunciation once his gums are no longer gushing blood. “Daddy said no, first, but I asked again and again and again until he said yes!” 

She grins. He stretches his smile wider. It was not terrible, Louis being at the receiving end of her filial manipulation instead of him. 

Claudia pushes her pen into his hand. “Papa, Papa, can you write for me while I talk? You write faster and prettier and you can’t talk, anyway.”

A solid argument. Lestat presses another kiss to her brow, making her giggle again, and takes the notebook from her. Claudia’s already written BELONGS TO CLAUDIA!!! on the first page in squiggly, blocky letters. Lestat skips to the second page, and Claudia dictates.

She has him write down the details of her seeing this new diary at the bottom-most shelf in CVS’s snack aisle (“Daddy says they put stuff like this there just to hook the kids like it’s fish bait,” Claudia says solemnly. “He tried to talk me out of getting it by calling me a silly fish, but I told him he was silly for thinking I’m a fish and I won!”), the details of how strange the pharmacy smelled (“Like the fish fry Uncle Paul makes, ‘cept the fish’s all rotten and mixed with even more rotten tomatoes. It was so gross, Papa. Tellement moche, Papa, c'était comme ça.” Those are not the right words to use. Lestat aches to correct her on so many things.), the details of her piano lessons (“I got a gold star, la plus haute distinction,” she says, triumphant, and Lestat’s heart pinches with pride. “Daddy says I can play for you once you’re better! You should get better faster, Papa.”), the details of her love (“Write that I love you and Daddy and Uncle Paul and Aunt Grace and Uncle Levi and Grandma, even if she makes Daddy soooo mad and annoying, and—”), and the details of her dreams (“Write about how I’m gonna travel and go around the world one day, how I’ll see everything out there. Papa, you’re not writing it down!”).

He chuckles, the sound muffled by his closed mouth. She wasn’t so different from him, was she. Although, his childhood ambitions of wanting to travel had chalked up to simply wanting to leave home because it was, in a word, brutal. Claudia, he would ensure, would not feel the same way about home. 

“Your handwriting’s really pretty, Papa,” Claudia says, muffling a yawn, curled into him as he writes. “It’s nice, even though Daddy says you can’t spell right, most days.” Louis said that? About him? “But I don’t think it matters that much if you can understand it. Can you teach me to write like you? Later, when you can talk,” she adds, twisting in his lap to peer up at him. When he nods, she laughs, clapping her hands.

Then she pauses. “Papa, your teeth are all red,” she says, fascinated, reaching up. Lestat reels back, but Claudia’s faster, swiping her finger over his teeth before he can remove his head from her range. “Ooh,” Claudia says, admiring the dark red on her finger. Was it dangerous to touch blood? Was it dangerous for children? Lestat doesn’t remember. “It’s so pretty!” Well. Lestat does adore her strange ideas about what constituted beauty. Course correction could be done at a different age.

He reaches for a tissue from their nightstand, but Claudia is faster, again. She stamps her finger against the open notebook, a bloody thumbprint at the edge of Lestat’s paragraph about everyone she loved, the smeared whorls covering Louis’s name. “Papa, look, I got you!”

She does indeed have him. She’s precocious, his daughter, his petit grenouille. Nowhere near as fragile or squeamish as Louis believes her to be. 

Lestat laughs the best he can with his lips firmly pressed together. He wipes Claudia’s finger and then, for good measure, picks her up, takes her to the bathroom to wash her hand off with soap and water. He switches the gauze in his mouth, too, setting Claudia down and using one hand to handle the gauze, the other to press down on Claudia’s head and block her from reaching into the sink. 

Back in the bedroom, back in his lap, it doesn’t take long for Claudia to nod off, her face tucked into the curve of Lestat’s neck. She’s sticky with sweat and too warm against him. His chin is beginning to ache and Claudia’s weight against his neck makes it difficult to breathe. Yet he doesn’t move to lay her down beside him and instead keeps his arms loosely curled around her, cradling her close. He watches her breathe and squirm, ever the restless sleeper, and thinks of teaching her how to hunt, how to play Bach, how to write in cursive, how to speak French properly. 

With the curtains drawn, at sunset the bedroom is a cool gray-purple, the sunlight filtering in as dashes of hazy pinks and yellows. There’s a sweet glow to everything, like the tailend of a good dream. 

Lestat presses another kiss to Claudia’s head. He would teach her everything, in time.

Louis sets a pint of chocolate ice cream and a spoon on the nightstand next to Claudia’s notebook and the still-melting ice pack. “Here,” Louis mumbles, moving to extract Claudia from Lestat’s lap, hushing her when she stirs. Lestat, empty and cold without her, stretches his neck with minor pain as Louis walks to the other side of the bed, lying down at Lestat’s side, Claudia nestled in the crook of his armpit, the top of her head bumping against his chin, Louis gently adjusting her arms. Lestat, craning his neck until it cricks, notes with a dull pang how easily Louis moves to embrace and hold her, all in stark contrast to how Louis was with Lestat. 

It’s reasonable that Louis is so affectionate when it comes to Claudia. Lestat treasures her so, too. It doesn’t stop the sting of noting how Louis only seems to withhold more and more from Lestat while bestowing everything to Claudia. She’s a chance to be better, Louis had said during the adoption process, eyes sparkling when he picked Claudia up for the first time. She’s a chance to do something good in the world, y’know? Claudia had hardly been a year old then, wary and quiet around them, wrinkling her nose at the catfish Louis had mashed into a chowder for her and scowling up at Lestat when he poked her stomach. We’re her whole world and she’s ours, isn’t that something? Those early years had been an easier time for them, in some ways. 

“Louis?” 

Louis’s eyes flick over to him, a second of eye contact. “The bleeding, Les.”

“A vow of silence won’t stop the bleeding,” Lestat says, with more confidence than any certainty about his gums.

Louis’s face pinches as though he wants to scold. Then it smooths over. “It’s your recovery. You don’t need my permission to jeopardize it.”

“Jeopardize— the instructions did not say—”

“You didn’t read them.”

Lestat inhales through his nose. “If you are angry with me, Louis,” he says, with an edge that’s carefully but barely restrained. “Please say so. Don’t bottle it. It is so unlike you.”

Louis, with a cross between annoyance and amusement, says, “You think I’m angry?”

“Well.” Lestat gestures vaguely to the side. Louis yawns. “What else could you be?”

“What could I be, huh.”

“Louis—”

“Paul nearly died,” Louis says. His tone is strikingly calm. “We thought he did, for a few minutes, it was touch and go. And while I took some time—”

“It was months, Louis,” Lestat interrupts. “Months.” Months of Louis toiling thanklessly, letting his mother pin her frustrations onto him, while Lestat walked along the hospital walls every evening with Claudia’s hand in his, waiting for Louis to end his nightly visit to Paul’s bedside so they could go home, where Louis, more often than not, would opt to fall asleep in Claudia’s room midway through her bedtime story. “Months.”

“And while I took some time to care for him,” Louis repeats, ignoring him. “And keep my family together, you—”

“You ignored—”

“You went and had sex with someone else.” Louis clicks his tongue. “Angry? Yeah, sure. I’m angry. You can’t stand that I have people in my life that aren’t you?”

The pink warmth of the room is suffocating, only adding to the ache building in his jaw as the drugs wear off. Lestat says, sincerely, “You’re the only one I love.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

“The only one I want, Louis, I swear it.”

There’s a lengthy silence. Then Louis sighs, clicks his tongue again. “If Claudia—”

“Don’t bring our daughter into it.”

“I’m not letting her get hurt.”

“She is my daughter,” Lestat says, louder than he intends. Claudia makes a noise, and they both still. When she doesn’t stir again, Lestat repeats, “She is my daughter. My light. You, my Saint, her, my north star. My family. I never want more than you two. I never could.” And he waits, leaving a natural space to break in, for Louis to ask Lestat to end the affair and for Louis to echo the sentiments about family. 

He waits. Louis adjusts his arm so that he can hold Claudia’s hand, and says nothing.

Lestat holds back a sigh and instead places his hand over Louis and Claudia’s. He looks at Louis, willing Louis not to break eye contact, and, as if listening, Louis doesn’t, his eyes wary and guarded. “Do you remember our first meeting?”

Louis frowns at him. “I remember you being an asshole at Taco Bell, yeah.”

“I was a gentleman.”

“Uh huh. You spilled your drink over my textbook.”

“Oui, oui,” Lestat says, nodding. The corner of Louis’s mouth twitches. “An action I do not regret because it allowed us to meet again when I replaced your precious books. I knew you were the one for me from that moment.”

Louis snorts. “When I threw my drink in your face?”

“When you lifted your head from whatever it was that you were reading and met my eyes.”

There’s another lengthy silence, Lestat continuing to hold Louis’s gaze even as Louis frowns, Claudia breathing between them. Then Louis breaks eye contact and shifts his and Claudia’s hands away from Lestat’s. “You should eat. Take the meds.”

Lestat swallows. “Louis?”

“Not now,” Louis says quietly, looking down at Claudia. “Later, when you’re bleeding less. I don’t want to wake Claudia.”

Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. The room has fallen into a purple-green hue, tinged raspberry at the edges and dark yellow in the center. Claudia, as always, at the center of everything they ever did. Sometimes, Louis’s love for him felt like the slow-rotting bowl of apples in their kitchen, seen daily and untouched nightly, left alone but still kept inside with the potential of future consumption. Was it so criminal and wrong of him to assume that the indents of a different person's teeth on the apple would rouse Louis into taking a full bite?

Lestat looks away. “As you ask.”

He reaches for the ice cream. It’s partially melted, thawed down to foam and liquid at the top. Whether it’s because the aftercare instructions demanded that it be eaten this soft or because that much time had passed, Lestat doesn’t know. He shovels it into his mouth, taking care not to spill. He swallows the saccharine chocolate along with the copper of his still bleeding gums. He watches Louis and Claudia, the way their chests rise in sync. He watches his own fail to match their beat and blames it as an aftereffect of the surgery. He was her father, his lover— why would they ever fail to be in discordance if not for a medical intervention?

His mouth aches terribly. Lestat sets the ice cream aside and gets up to change out the gauze, careful not to wake Claudia or disturb Louis. 

Chapter Text

The Friday morning Papa tells them he’s going on up to Baton Rouge in the evening for business and then staying there for the full weekend for further business, Daddy’s face does that thing it always does when Papa delivers this exact sort of lie: a pinch and instant smooth over, not a hint of displeasure, not a hint of pain, not a hint of anything. He picks up Papa’s plate even as Papa’s cutting into his bacon, and over Papa’s protests, he announces that he’s taking Claudia out to Austin this weekend.

“But I have plans,” Claudia cuts in, jamming bacon into her mouth before Daddy could walk over and take her plate, too. “I’ve got stuff to do, like— homework—”

“You can work on it during the drive there,” he tells her. 

A road trip? A fucking road trip? Didn’t they have the money to go by plane like normal people? “But—”

“We’re going,” Daddy says, ending it. Claudia scowls. When Papa gives her a sympathetic look, she shoots him an uglier scowl because it was only his fault, anyway, that Daddy was taking her out. She bets the sympathy on his face isn’t even genuine.

Thing is, Claudia already had a thing planned with Charlie during the weekend, already had her outfit for their date picked out and laid out on her bed, cute but not cute enough that her parents would get suspicious over why she was so dressed up, and now she’ll have to cancel, have to miss out on talking to him, miss the gleam of his teeth, miss the spark in his eyes, miss the blueberry-blue of his veins, miss the way the earth seemed to crackle when he smiled at her, miss, miss, miss. Claudia already had plans. She already had the excuses for why she needed to be at the library all day at the tip of her tongue to stave off Daddy’s overbearing concerns that she was spending too much time outside and Papa’s tart accusations that she was hiding something from them. She already had an explanation for Papa when he would ask why her location was turned off for a few hours. She had everything planned before her parents went and bulldozed over it all, like they tended to do. Charlie told her it was probably a sign of love for them that they did all this to her. Charlie was cute enough that Claudia saved him the long-winded explanation that, no, it was not love, not exactly, it was love, but more than that, it was them trying to control and keep her close the best they could, because they didn’t quite grasp that she was an adult and not their little kid anymore.

She’s so ready to break into her skin, walk around downtown on her own, scab her knees and stub her toes on unfamiliar places until she could feel at home with herself, inside herself, no matter how weird the place she was standing in. She could go on ahead and discover herself like everyone before her had done for centuries, the thrilling work of developing your sovereignty, but no, not for her, her parents would lose their minds if she stepped out without her location turned on and an itemized itinerary in their messages that included a promise to be back a half-hour before curfew. 

Curfew. What kid still had curfew after eighteen? Her, apparently. 

There’s fuck-all to do in Austin. Not that Daddy would let her do much anyway. He keeps her close, on a tight schedule of visiting every other park and nature preserve, still with the same 10PM bedtime and screens off by 9PM rule he’s imposed on her since forever. Some vacation. 

He does take her to an art museum on the second day, right after they check out of their hotel and right before they start the eight hour drive home, and it’s— better. It beats the sweaty socks and endless highways of the road trip and the sweatier socks and endless lakes of the parks and nature preserves. It’s nice, walking through it, Daddy next to her pausing to tell Claudia about each statue and painting, telling her about how much he likes the way light bounces off of this particular shade of garden green, the way the blues in another work seemed to stretch on for miles if you looked at it from the right angle, and so on. He’s happy, Dad, shamelessly pleased and enthused about it all. Austin has been boring, but here, right now, with him— she’s glad they came, she’s glad she didn’t put up too much of a protest over the road trip, she’s glad that Daddy isn’t sulking over Papa’s lies anymore.

“You’re really into this, Daddy,” she says, and he huffs a breath, amused. 

“It’s art,” he says, bright and honest the way he gets around her and never around Aunt Grace or Uncle Paul or even Papa. Especially Papa, especially during these past few years when Claudia grew up and realized that, oh, her parents didn’t have that perfect of a love after all, not at all.

There’s a certain level of happy that Daddy gets that only Claudia sees, like he didn’t know how to be a full person around anyone other than her. It’s always nice to remember that. 

“Look,” he says, pointing, and Claudia looks over. It’s a painting of a broad-shouldered woman in a white dress, her pig-tailed hair thrown over her back as she holds up a smaller, beaming figure. Her baby, most like. “First steps,” Daddy says, reading the caption. He laughs. “Got a pic of us two lookin’ just like this,” he says, and he pulls out his wallet, ruffles past a row of credit cards, and pulls out said picture.

All this time, all these years, and he still carries baby pictures in his wallet with him? She stares down at the pic— she’s so small, grinning with her face angled toward the floor, mouth parted in shriek or giggle, yellow babydoll dress poofy around her, her hands held up by Daddy, her tiny hands gripped around the tree trunk fingers of his, and he wants it to be a sweet moment, she knows, but she looks and all she can think is: this is always how he’s going to see her. A baby who couldn’t walk on her own. It’s love, it’s so much love, but it’s a love that keeps her small, keeps her dependent on him, always keeps her as the baby he was holding up, always keeps her as a little girl. Never more than that.

She looks back at the painting. The mom and the baby, smiling together, her practically carrying him. The warmth of their bond glowing against the dark background, their faces so similar to each other. “Cool,” is all she says, and she walks away before she can see Daddy’s face fall.

It is, maybe, her fault for not talking to her parents that she’s here now. The pain had started a day ago, and at first Claudia had dismissed it as some weird cramp (girlhood staple, mysterious and unexplainable pains). When the pain persisted past three hours, she still didn’t tell her parents because she was mad at both of them, Papa for flaking on their monthly hunting trips in addition to his usual Baton Rouge bullshit, and Daddy for laughing along and acting like Papa wasn’t hurting him, like Papa wasn’t skewering Daddy’s heart with what he did. She hated Daddy, sometimes, for the shit he took from Papa and how he just rolled with it without complaint. 

The pain was still there in the morning, throbbing and achy and ugly, but Claudia had grit her teeth and stayed mum about it because breakfast had been dealing with Papa gazing at her neutrally from across the table while Daddy paced the kitchen and went on about how he had called Uncle Paul and learned that Claudia had not, in fact, been spending the last few months visiting him every other day to gut fish and read the Bible together, so where, exactly, had Claudia been going for hours at a time? Where was she going and what was she hiding and, god, Claudia, when did you start lying and sneaking around so much, when did we ever raise you to be like this, Claudia?

It had been at this point, sitting at the table and holding her breath as if it could make her body hurt less, that Claudia figured it would have been easier to have told them both about Charlie from the start. They might have told her no, they might have chaperoned every date like it was the 50s or something equally stupid, but it would have been better than this, watching a couple years’ worth of lies slowly coming undone while Daddy acted like Claudia was heralding the apocalypse for existing unsupervised and Papa was looking at her like she was his latest quarry. 

In the end, she had been spared having to explain anything by needing to rush off for school, dodging Papa when he tried to grab her and ignoring Daddy when he yelled at her to come back and answer him. Everything had hurt all over and kept getting worse, and by the time she made it to school, she was almost doubled over, clutching her stomach and trying to remember what she’d eaten recently, if she was coming down with a new disease, or maybe her periods were just getting worse with age, maybe?

Charlie had appeared at her elbow, saying something she couldn’t make sense of. He was holding a single rose in his hand, and it was for her, and it was so sweet of him, and it was overwhelming how fond she was of him for getting her flowers everyday, but when Charlie tried to help Claudia straighten up, all she could do was scream. 

And now she was here, hours and maybe even a day later, in a hospital bed, skin clammy and mouth dry, Papa screaming at the nurses for something, Daddy holding her hand, and, well.

Appendicitis. Extremely basic, routine medical emergency. Or so Papa assured her, while Daddy hounded the doctors for describing in detail how her appendix had burst and how the surgery had been complicated by having to find and pluck the bits of the dead organ— was it an organ? Claudia doesn’t know or care— out from where they were floating inside of her and how, yes, Claudia had been carting around death inside of her for a good few hours. 

It sucked. This sucked. Everything sucked so bad.

Daddy presses a cup of ice water against her chin and helps her drink, ignoring when she tries to grab the cup and drink the water herself. “Don’t worry,” he murmurs. “We’ve got you. Does it feel any better?”

Claudia nods, swallowing hard. Papa sits on the other side of the hospital bed, watching her with a tight frown. He’s still breathing heavily from fighting with half the nursing staff. “Yeah,” Claudia says, hoarse. She clears her throat. “Yeah. Better. Thanks, Papa.”

Papa gave her a short, curt nod. “The nurses here are miserly with how they issue morphine.”

“They have their reasons,” Daddy says, like he hadn’t been yelling at the nurses for the same thing, like he hadn’t been at Claudia’s side, muttering things much worse than what Papa had been telling them to their faces. 

Papa snorts. “I wasn’t going to let my daughter suffer because they had their reasons, Louis,” he says, with enough stress on reasons that it’s clear Papa doubted anything could count as a valid reason. 

Claudia swallows and looks away from him.

“And you think I was?” Daddy sighs, then his voice turns a shade softer. “Claudia, honey, you can’t just not tell us when you’re hurt.”

“Yes,” Papa adds. “You should be more communicative.”

“Uh huh.” Claudia manages a nod. “Okay. Yeah. Sure. I know.” She feels numb. “Won’t do it again.”

“No,” Papa agrees. “You only rupture your appendix once in your life, I’m told.”

“Not the point, Lestat,” Daddy mumbles, and Claudia doesn’t have to lift her head to see the quick glare thrown Papa’s way. 

They fall into a quiet. Daddy gives her more water, Papa stares at the floor, and Claudia leans back against the itchy hospital bed pillows, staring up at the ceilings, attempting the impossible task of counting every lump in the popcorn ceiling while circling around the doctors’ words, that something in her had burst and scattered inside of her, death clinging at the edges of her still living organs like parasites, trying to drag down the rest of her body to death, too.

Or something like that. Daddy had cut off the doctors before they could answer her questions and get into more detail about things. 

Papa clears his throat. Claudia turns her head to look at him, and finds him smiling at her. It’s closer to a smirk, actually. It’s not that comforting at all to look at, actually. 

Her stomach twists in premonition. “Papa?”

“Oh,” he says. “I just thought that I should issue some congratulations to you, Claudia.”

She blinks at him. “What?”

“Lestat,” Daddy snaps. “Not now.”

Papa raises an eyebrow. “Is the timing not perfect?”

“She’s recovering from surgery, what do you think?”

“Hm. So you want to fawn over her and hope that things will, what, fix themselves? Indulge this?”

“That’s not what I want, that’s not what I said, and you know it.”

“What,” Claudia cuts in. “What are you two talking about?” There’s a pause, both of her parents staring at each other, both of them scowling, and she hates it so much when they do this, talking in front of her with just their eyes. “Are you going to tell me?”

Papa clears his throat again. “The Beaux-Arts de Paris,” he says, with a flourish that feels more mocking than appreciative. Claudia’s breath hitches. “Quite the prestigious school, Claudia. It’s not easy to get in. There was no need for you to tuck the acceptance letters into the folds of your diary.”

She stares at him. “You— you looked through my things?”

“Well,” Papa says.

“Claudia,” Daddy starts. “You lied to us about Uncle Paul—”

“Just because I did that, doesn’t mean—”

“And you lied about getting into Tulane,” Daddy speaks over her. He sounds tired. “What else?”

“Ah, yes,” Papa says. “You enjoyed many midnight rendezvous with your— Charlie, was it?”

Her fingers curl into themselves, whether to make fists or cut into her palm, she doesn’t know. She feels dizzy. “You read my diary?”

Daddy has the decency to sound guilty. A little guilty. Maybe Claudia’s just being delusional. “You weren’t talking to us. You weren’t answering our questions.”

How much had they read? Just about the college apps to French art schools and Charlie, or further back, back to being thirteen and getting into screaming fights with them about not wanting to keep her location turned on all the time? Being ten, breaking Daddy’s favorite watch and blaming it on Papa? Being fourteen and lonely enough to die from it? It was stupid, all of it, but— how much? How much?

“We are your parents, Claudia,” Papa says. Claudia isn’t hearing any guilt in his voice. Nothing, just the cold, hard edge of his words. “When you forsake meals with us and sneak out so late at night, lying to us with such artful consistency— we have every right to look and confirm your wellbeing. And what do we find but pages and pages of ungratefulness, how you itch to run away to Paris with your beloved and leave us.” 

“Were you just going to go, Claudia?” Daddy sounds— hurt? Him? Hurt? She could laugh. “No note, just run off into the night, let us get sick with worry?”

“My diaries are private,” she says, and she wants her anger to make them regret it all, regret that they ever knew her, but her voice trembles too much to accomplish that. “You have no right to read them, and I hate you, I hate—”

Daddy speaks over her, “Don’t speak like that, Claudia,” and over him, Papa says, “If you didn’t want us to read it, you should haven’t hid from us, cast us out of your life as though we were pesky flies, leaving us desperate to understand why, why would—”

“You could have talked to me! Asked me!”

“I tried,” Daddy says, and, yeah, he did try, to his credit, and Claudia didn’t tell him anything, to her lack of credit, but— “Claudia, we’ve been trying, you—”

She fixes him with a glare. “I can’t believe you,” she says, and Daddy looks away from her. “You let him read them? They were private.”

“Again,” Papa says. “You left us no choice.”

No choice. “Yeah?” She keeps her eyes on Daddy. “Like how you leave Daddy with no choice, too?”

There’s a pause. Daddy turns his gaze back to her, frowning. “What?”

She manages a laugh. It doesn’t sound or feel nice, scraping sharply at her throat. “You didn’t read that far?”

“Claudia,” Papa says, a warning.

She ignores it. She tells Daddy, in a rush, “Papa goes up to Baton Rouge every month— every second weekend— to see his white girl, and you just let him go, each time—”

Papa shouts over her, “None of that concerns you!”

She turns to look at him, holds back the instinctive flinch from getting hit with the full force of his glare and swallows, runs through every memory she has of stashing her phone in her room and following Papa up, up, up to his Baton Rouge retreats while Daddy withered away at home. “Every month, you see her, and I see you hold her hand and buy her jewels and treat her nicer than you ever treat my Dad—”

“My?” Papa repeats. “My? My Daddy? Your father is my husband, and this is a matter between the two of us, just us two, you are meddling, Claudia—”

“You meddled with my life when you read my diaries!”

“You went behind my back!”

“You’ve been going behind ours for years!”

“Enough,” Daddy says, and they both startle, whipping their heads to look at him. Daddy has his head in his hands and looks— miserable. Completely miserable. “Enough.”

Papa tries, “Louis, she—” and Daddy repeats, “Enough.”

Claudia swallows. Her voice comes out smaller than she wants it to be. “All he ever does is hurt you, us—”

“Claudia,” Daddy says, over Papa’s noise of protest. “I said, enough.”

“But—”

“No. Enough. When you get out of the hospital, we’ll talk about everything you’ve done.”

She blinks at him. “And you’re just… you’re just going to let what Papa did go?”

He lifts his head. He looks at her, expression blank, and says, flatly, “Don’t talk of things you don’t understand.”

She flinches. “I understand what cheating is,” she says. “I understand that it hurts you, I understand—”

“Claudia, just stop.” Daddy looks away from her, mouth twisting into a frown. “Just stop.”

There is quiet. Claudia stares at Daddy, doesn’t dare turn her head to look at Papa. 

She isn’t crying. Her eyes are bone-dry, really, when she rubs them with a fist. It’s just her breathing in uneven chunks and chops. Inhaling and exhaling with a jagged lack of precision as her pulse beeps on the vitals monitor. She’s getting too much air, she’s not getting enough air, she can’t fucking think at all.

She had wanted to tell Daddy. Both of them, even, maybe, depending on things. Really, she did, she did want to talk, she did want to be honest. She had wanted to come clean about Charlie, about Paris, about how much she hated the way they treated her like a little kid. She hadn’t. She had been too deep into the intricacies of a double life to do that, and now they just knew. Knew everything, looked through her things and read however much of her secrets, and it’s like being crushed, torn up, shredded, all the blue of the world coalescing into tendrils to scatter the yellow into something flimsy, thin, and green. 

She breaks up with Charlie a month before she leaves for Paris, citing him heading down to Rice, her to Paris, and her not having the bandwidth for a long-distance relationship, and he takes it in stride. He gifts her a bouquet of sweet-smelling lilies that she manages to keep alive for a week in the corner of her bedroom while her parents pretend not to notice, which coming from them, is probably the closest she’s getting to an apology. Or acceptance. 

Once she does get to Paris, Daddy calls her everyday, without fail. Claudia answers each call, without fall. Their first few conversations are clipped and strained, small talk about the weather and not much else. At home, there was an easy amiability between them, something they could fall back on no matter how tense things got between them, but that easiness doesn’t translate over the phone. At first she’s determined to ignore what’s broken between them and instead focus on how nice it is to live in her own apartment and on her own for the first time ever, but then the homesickness forms a cold pit in her stomach and she ends up looking forward to Daddy’s phone calls, asks him more questions about what’s happening there, attempts to make him laugh and sometimes even succeeds, but, even then: there’s something broken between them. She doesn’t know how to fix it. She’s not sure she wants to because, sure, maybe it was mostly Papa’s idea to snoop around her room and read her diaries, maybe Daddy was unwillingly dragged into it all, but Daddy still read them, too. It’s not something Claudia can forget. 

Papa doesn’t call, doesn’t text, doesn’t—and Claudia checks each account she has to be sure— email. Daddy doesn’t mention him. Claudia doesn’t ask about him and begins to think wishfully that the two of them are actually over, that Daddy finally snapped and left. Or, made Papa get up and leave their home. Whichever. She gets into a habit of checking Facebook every other weekend for a relationship status update on Daddy’s account. There’s nothing everytime she refreshes, but one day, maybe. 

Madeline, who apprenticed at a tailor shop a stone’s throw away from campus, tells her to cut them off. She’s nice, Madeline, mocking Claudia’s French at every turn but still dragging her around, splitting butter-rich croissants with her and buying wax paper-wrapped chicken sandwiches for the two of them to eat together by the river, giggling as golden-colored grease drips down their elbows and into the Seine. Madeline even suffers through McDonald’s for Claudia, wrinkling her nose at the fries but eating them all the same, dipping them in excessive amounts of ketchup as Claudia munches on the apples. It’s not like the grade school love she had with Charlie, honey-sweet and rushed, but it’s still— love. Steadying, dizzying. Love. 

It’s nice. She’s nice. Claudia doesn’t tell Daddy about her, not even when Madeline coaxes her into taking a nine-hour train ride one weekend down south to the coast, Claudia leaning her head against the window and watching the bucolic green muddle around her as Madeline held her hand and told her about growing up in the French countryside. It’s nice.

Madeline drags Claudia to a chapel the second day into the trip, promising her it’s worth the visit, and— it is. It’s decorated with Matisse artworks in frames, in murals, in displays, in stained glass, all bold colors and rounded lines. Claudia stands in front of a series of windows, each outfitted with blue and yellow glass against green to mimic tulip petals, and laughs softly, watching the blue-yellow-green light dapple against her hand.

“How many times have you been here before?” She asks Madeline, glancing over. Madeline’s leaning against the wall, watching Claudia. It’s nice and peaceful here, with the chapel mostly empty save for the two of them.

“Mm.” Madeline shrugs, one-shouldered and elegant. “Once, with my little sister, Aimee. Shortly before her passing.”

“Ah.”

Madeline chuckles softly. “Don’t worry. I don’t dwell in my grief. She was unwell most of her life.” She smiles, sad but tranquil. “She can rest now.”

“That’s good to hear,” Claudia says, and Madeline’s smile ticks upward.

“Oui. She enjoyed it here, when we came as children for a family holiday, a fun excursion…” Madeline straightens, walking to stand next to Claudia. She touches the window, lightly tapping the glass. “She liked the flowers, the blues, the way the light came through the window, all the colors.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes, well.” Another shrug. “I didn’t understand her then, what she saw in it. It’s just light, I told her. It’s just glass. But now.”

“Now?”

Madeline turns to face her. “The way this afternoon light covers your face, this tint of blue on you… resplendissante.”

Claudia holds her gaze. Then she laughs, turning away, and Madeline laughs, too, taking Claudia’s hands in hers. “Didn’t meant to laugh, just—”

“Non, non,” Madeline says. “It was too much.”

“No,” Claudia says, steadying. She twists out of Madeline’s loose grip and reaches to cup Madeline’s face, leans in. She drops her voice to a whisper. “It was just enough.”

It’s a nice kiss. Soft, gentle. Madeline is warm against her, tasting of the onion galette they had earlier in the day. It’s nice. It’s so nice.

Madeline pulls back first. “Et toi?”

Claudia raises an eyebrow. “Et moi?”

“What’s on your mind?” Madeline raises a hand, drags her thumb over Claudia’s cheek. “Your brow is furrowed. Has been furrowed since we entered this building, in fact.”

“It just feels good to be here. This stained glass…” Claudia waves a hand. The green of the windows casts a gorgeous glow over Madeline. “My Dad would love it here,” she finally admits with a laugh. “He used to take me to church every Sunday, ‘till my other dad got mad and it whittled down to just going in for Christmas.”

Madeline nods. “You miss them dearly.”

Claudia swallows. “Yeah,” she says, and it comes out like an embarrassed confession. All the years working to leave, and here she was. Homesick. “Yeah, I do. Still mad at them, though. It’s not just about them reading my diary,” she goes on, shoulders slumping. “It’s everything. My whole life. Their third, never the first for either of them, not really, just… me.” She shrugs, biting down on her lip. “Their little girl forever.” Their daughter, who they wanted to help walk even after she could manage just fine on her own, who they wanted to keep track of obsessively in lieu of trusting her to be on her own, who they wanted to stay as their daughter no matter how old she got.

“Why not let them know your anger?”

“It’s not that easy. They’re still my parents.”

“Still my parents,” Madeline mimics, not unkindly. “Is this a culture difference, this attachment you have to them? You are a woman now, no, Claudia? There’s no harm in leaving them behind. They had to have known that your leaving them was inevitable.”

She huffs a laugh. “Don’t think they ever thought that far about me.”

Madeline hums. “Then that would be their oversight, no? Not yours.”

No, it’s not. It shouldn’t be.

The week after she and Madeline get back, Claudia opens the door one morning to see Papa at her doorstep, dressed sharply in a suit and smelling thickly of the perfume Claudia had given her parents as a Father’s Day gift two, three years ago.

She stares at him, mind blank. He smiles at her like he used to when she was a little kid begging him to hold her hand as they crossed the street. He says, pleasant, “Bonjour, Claudia. Could you do me the courtesy of breakfast?”

Two hours later, Claudia’s sitting across from him in an outdoor cafe, arms crossed as she watches him stir his coffee. “When did you get here?” She asks. “Is Daddy here, too?”

“No,” Papa says, ignoring her first question. He takes a sip. “You’ve settled into a nice area.”

“Uh huh. It’s nice, affordable. Close to campus.”

“Your French still leaves something to be desired,” Papa muses, which is also what Madeline muses, but what sounds sweet from Madeline just makes Claudia’s skin prickle all over when it comes from Papa. “You shouldn’t worry about the rent, Claudia. I’ll handle it.” He says this generously, as though it’s a major concession. It is.

Claudia narrows her eyes and says, anyway, “I don’t want your money. I’m doing just fine.”

His eyes flash. A warning. His tone remains light. “Don’t be ridiculous, mon grenouille. I will provide for your education.”

“You don’t care about my education.” Mon grenouille, mon petit grenouille. The last time Papa had called her that, Claudia had been in middle school and stumbling down the stage steps from a piano recital, skirt bunched up in her fists, and Papa had been waiting at the end with a bouquet of carnations and a kiss on her forehead, a whisper in her ear about how proud he was for doing so well. 

Papa had been devastated when Claudia quit playing piano in high school. 

She swallows. “You never did,” she says, and Papa sets down his cup with a sharp clink.

“Claudia,” he says, in a voice that means he’s mad but trying very hard to not be mad. “However you may feel about me, I am still your father. I will fund your life here. You will accept it.”

“I don’t—”

“I’m not in the mood to be kind,” he says, and Claudia snorts.

“Are you ever?”

For a minute she thinks that he will get mad and upset the table, cause a scene in the cafe, embarrass them both. Then he leans back in his seat with an audibly forced chuckle. “Well. Someone’s intent to ignore all warnings and burn some bridges, non?”

She laughs, too, slumping down her seat with a giggle that makes Papa’s jaw clench. “I just.” She shrugs. “I just don’t want you to pay for things when you’re not actually interested in supporting me and my ambitions.”

“And you see me offering to pay for this, for your food, shelter, and the exorbitant tuition fees, as a lack of support?” He smiles at her the same way he did back in the hospital after her appendix burst. Claudia fights the urge to flinch. “What, Claudia, do you need more? A hug and a kiss and a promise to hang all your artwork on the refrigerator once you return home?”

“I’m not coming home,” she says, and Papa frowns. “That was never my plan. I never said I would be going back after this.”

“Hm.”

“What does that mean? Hm?”

“Louis mourns your absence,” Papa says.

“Okay.”

“He misses you quite severely.”

Hadn’t she expected this to happen the moment she Googled for art schools in France? Didn’t she know this already? Why else would Daddy call her so obsessively? 

Claudia asks, “And?”

“You’ve left him in a poor state, wallowing at home without you around to cheer him up.”

“Okay,” Claudia says.

And what, did Papa not feel the same? Do the same? Was it just Daddy, at home and staring at baby pictures of her, counting down the hours until he could call her and be someone again? 

“Okay,” Claudia says. “So what?”

“He let you come here. We let you go, Claudia. With difficulty, I will admit, but we let you go so that you could go and have your fun.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t return.”

Claudia straightens in her seat, leaning forward with a glare that only makes Papa scowl at her, like she’s being so annoying, so inconvenient, so Claudia. “You only want me home to take the heat off of you,” she says, and the flicker of indignation on Papa’s face tells her she’s right. “So I can distract Daddy, make him happy and give him company while you go back to Baton Rouge.”

“There is nothing for me in that city. Not anymore.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What an unfavorable image you have of me,” Papa says, tone cold. 

“It’s not unfavorable, it’s just honest.”

“Honest?” He’s angry now, properly angry, gnashed teeth and bits of spit flying as he leans forward. Claudia holds his gaze and doesn’t back away even as her heart beats jackrabbit-fast, threatening to burst inside of her like her appendix had. “I have endured you, I have cherished you, I have raised you, I made you who you are— all for Louis. All for you to run off, ungrateful and willful to the end—”

“You endured me?” It’s an effort to not scream. 

“Let’s not pretend you were a complete delight to raise. Especially not so in recent memory, with your incessant scheming.”

“You read my diaries,” Claudia says, and Papa sighs, leaning back, already done with her, and it’s worse than the lack of apology, him not even getting why she was still upset. “You went into my room and you went through my things—”

“As I said. As I have explained. You blocked the two of us out, Louis was at his wit’s end with you, and I had no other recourse.”

“No other recourse,” Claudia echoes. “You’re not here for me, are you, Papa?”

Papa exhales, mouth drawn into a thin line, and it’s that, the flash of agreement in his eyes, that does make her flinch away from the table, the confirmation that this really, really, wasn’t about her as his grenouille but her as someone to make Daddy less lonely while Papa fucked around in Baton Rouge.

Claudia rises. “Not for me,” she says, pushing in her chair. “Never for me, not with you.”

Papa’s slow to react. Something passes over his face— regret, maybe? If it was, it was too little, too late. “Claudia—”

“I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.”

“Claudia, I am your father, you will not—” He gets to his feet, grabs her by the elbow. “Stop this, cherie, you are being ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” She tries to yank herself out of his grip. “I never want to see you again, I never want to hear from you, I don’t want your money or you, I’m done. I’m done!”

“Don’t say such things, you—”

“You hurt my dad!” She shouts, and this startles him, his eyes widening, his grip slackening enough for her to break free. “You hurt him, you broke him, and now you want me back to fix him just so you can do it all over again!”

“You don’t know anything.” He recovers fast, Papa. His eyes narrow again, dog-like and wild. He makes another grab for her, and Claudia just barely manages to step away. “Claudia, we just. We miss you, Claudia.”

“I don’t miss you. I don’t.” She backs away, nearly slipping. He’s still trying to grab her, hold her in place like he used to when she was small and forcing him to play tag with her while they both ignored Daddy yelling at them to run inside the house, and it stings, this all stings so much. “Leave me alone!”

“Claudia!”

“I don’t want you,” she says, and turns, breaking into a run as Papa shouts and screams behind her, demanding her to come back, to come home. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t slow down, just focuses on the snap of her shoes against cobblestone as the city rushes around her, pea-green with dots of yellow, blue, and peach underneath, all melting into one cold mess of color and sound.

Chapter Text

Back when they visited years ago, the Blanton Museum in Austin had had one exhibit tucked to the side: an arched square building of white limestone, with a three-by-three grid of square windows at the front, each window outfitted a different color of stained glass. Standing in the interior at a little past noon, the effect was wondrous, sunlight streaming through the windows and leaving perfect square patches of colored light on the ground.

Louis has a photo of Claudia at the exhibit, her basked in a glow of jello-green, her head tilted back, eyes wide, grinning in awe as she stared up at the stained glass. It’s one of the few photos he has of her during her senior year where she’s actually smiling, expressing joie de vivre and not glaring at Louis as he angled his phone camera toward her, or otherwise sitting in sullen boredom as though the act of spending time with Louis was pure torture.

He has other photos of her, pre-high school. One of her dressed up for her first Mardi Gras a little after the adoption, her huddled in Lestat’s arms with her tiny arms reaching to tug at the bow Louis had put on her. One of her at Paul’s place as a mud-flecked toddler, wrinkling her nose down a bucket of live lobsters. One of her on Louis’s shoulders as they walked through Disney World, her putting a Minnie Mouse headband on Louis and nearly taking an eye out in the process. One of her playing the piano with Lestat, both of them with expressions of similar severity. One of her curled up on the couch at six years old, hiding behind a pillow that was only a little smaller than she was, her partly-visible face blotchy with tears— that one, Lestat had taken in a bid to cheer her up during the hours after Louis had first yelled at her over coloring on the walls with neon markers or something equally mundane, something stupid that wasn’t worth completely losing it over but Louis had lost it anyway, scolding Claudia until she was sobbing and running away from him, and she had been fine within hours of it all, back to wrapping herself around Louis’s legs like an ankle weight, but Louis hadn’t slept right for days on end after, stared up at the white of their ceiling while Lestat, half-asleep and tetchy, murmured into his neck that it was fine, that he had gotten yelled at and worse as a child and came out fine, and sure, yes, Louis had gotten worse as a child, too, and he was fine, but none of that changed how everytime he closed his eyes, he saw Claudia’s face frozen in the betrayed realization that her Daddy could be as cruel and mean to her as anyone else. 

Louis thinks he’d take that look of betrayal, or even the disbelieving horror she had back when her appendix burst, over what he gets from Claudia now. She answers his Facetime calls blank-faced, thin-lipped, audibly frustrated and hateful in response to anything he says or asks, like being on the line with him was a despicable task she had to tick off every other day. She’s always so tense. She picks up each call without fail, even when Louis makes a mistake with the timezones and calls her a little too early or a little late, but she hardly ever smiles during the calls, hardly ever divulges life updates if Louis doesn’t specifically ask for them. She’s gone and gone maybe forever, his little girl who used to shriek and cling to him tightly whenever a frog crossed their path. 

The photo of Claudia in Austin, her green and game for everything ahead of her in life, was set as his phone lock screen immediately after he took it. It’s still his lockscreen, years later, because it’s a good photo and because Claudia didn’t share too many photos of her life in Paris. She was too busy living life to pause and capture it in photos, she claimed, and he believed her, he did, but it still felt like just another way of cutting Louis out of her life. 

Two days after Louis falls into the bayou during a fishing trip with Paul and fractures his wrist, Claudia sends him a flight itinerary and a text saying she’ll be back home for a week to pack up what’s left of her room and to collect her birth certificate so she could finish the transition of living in France on a student visa to living there on a worker’s permit. Louis texts her a picture of his neon green cast and she texts back an updated itinerary showing she’s extended her stay by two weeks. 

He picks her up from the airport even after she tells him not to drive and hugs her tight even as she grumbles about not straining his arm. Five years of only seeing her through Facetime, and she’s grown up, yes, gotten a sharper jawline and developed a lazy sort of grace that wasn’t in her before, but she’s still his Claudia, it’s still the same face his life used to— still does— revolve around. 

They get home and she drops her bags in the foyer and does a slow twirl, her eyes darting around. “You haven’t changed the place much.”

“No,” Louis agrees, locking the door with minor difficulty. Claudia rushes over once she sees, locks the door for him. He huffs a laugh. “There wasn’t any need to.”

“You could have changed the curtains. You always hated ‘em. You said you were gonna, last year, last April.”

“Papa liked them,” Louis says delicately, watching the way Claudia’s expression sours for a second before she deliberately smoothens it to something blank. Louis’s never brought up Lestat during their calls, for better or worse, rationalizing that it was better to keep Claudia on the line as long as possible rather than risk her hanging up on him but now, with her standing at home again? 

He forgot how much he missed it, just the three of them in this house. 

“And where is he?” Claudia finally asks, chewing on her bottom lip as she looks up at Louis. “He home?”

“No.” Of course she wouldn’t know how things have been between him and Lestat since she packed up her suitcase and left. “He’s out,” he says, and Claudia must read between the lines on that one, because her shoulders relax, and it stings, how much Lestat’s absence brightens her. 

She’s tactful enough not to make a production of it. She insists on taking over the bulk of his chores, not believing him when he says that a fractured wrist was hardly anything to stress over, handles the grocery shopping and cleaning and even his nightly phone calls to Grace, gossiping and giggling with her aunt while Louis’s stuck sipping the chamomile she brewed for him at the other end of the sofa, watching her laugh about something dumb Benny was doing, and it unwinds some of the knots of anxiety that built up since she left, seeing her smile, seeing her home. 

A week and a half into Claudia being back, Louis walks out to the back porch in the evening to see Claudia leaning against the white wood of their railing, flicking fireflies and holding a cigarette. Louis steps next to her, the wood creaking under his feet. He raises an eyebrow. “Since when do you smoke?”

Claudia shoots him a glare that doesn’t completely fade as she returns her focus to taking a slow drag of the cigarette. “I’m grown, Dad,” she says, tone clipped, and ah, okay, this is when the honeymoon of her homecoming ends, isn’t it. 

“At twenty-three?” Louis snorts. “You’re still a—”

“I’m not a baby,” Claudia says. “I’m not a child. I’m an adult.” She says this all with just the faintest of tremors. She swallows audibly after she finishes speaking, and for a heart-stopping three seconds, seems to choke on the smoke. She bats off Louis’s hands when he tries to pat her back. “I’m fine. I’m doin’ just fine.”

He watches her. Her face is still stuck in that glare, that instant spasm of anger that he’d seen all the time when she was in highschool. Instead of asking her why she’s angry, he asks, “Are you happy?” He hastily adds, “With her,” but he knows that she knows he’s more concerned with the general answer, not the specifics of her deal with the white girl she says she’s living with. 

She rolls her eyes. “Are you happy, Dad?”

“We’re not talking about me right now.”

“Oh, we could be. Saw you and Papa last night.” Her tone is conversational. It doesn’t bury the disgust in her voice that thoroughly. Louis’s not sure she’s even trying to. “Heard a noise from the front door, expected, fuck, maybe—”

“Language.”

“Expected a fucking burglar, but no, it was just you and Papa in the kitchen, going at each other like crazed rabbits.” She takes another drag of the cigarette, still glaring at him. “Now your neck looks like you got mauled, Dad. Wonder what Papa looks like?”

“Claudia,” Louis says.

“This is, somehow, worse— worse!— than after you two finally got married and I had to deal with you and Papa thinking that the honeymoon could continue even after you got back from Madrid. I can’t— I can’t believe you two. I can’t believe you. You’re back with him, after everything he did?”

“He’s still your father.”

Claudia snorts. She sounds just like Lestat when she does it, with an artful sniff and hair toss. “I hate him.”

“Claudia—”

“You’re my dad.” She says this calmly, but her hand shakes and the cigarette bends beneath her finger. He reaches out to take it from her before it can burn her skin, and she steps backward, waving the cigarette-holding hand impatiently. “He hurt you. I was there, Dad, I was there and I saw what he did to you, you were miserable, you were always a shell of a person because of all the shit he kept doing, and you—” Claudia sucks in one hot, angry breath. It sounds like a chuckle. Her eyes are dry but she’s wiping them like they’re wet. “You wanna get back with him? Him, still?”

How to handle this. How, how, how to handle this. Louis misses, sudden and sharp, having Lestat at home and at his side to glance toward and tilt his head and silently plead, hey, you can take this one, this time.

“This doesn’t affect you,” Louis settles on saying, too tired to fully get into it. This only seems to rile her up more.

“Doesn’t affect me, huh? Seriously?”

“It does,” Louis amends, scratching the edge of his cast. “It does, Claudia, I know, but not—”

“Not enough to talk to me about it. No, that would be, what, letting me meddle?”

Louis exhales. “It doesn’t change things between us,” he says, and Claudia snorts again. “You’re still my daughter. You’re still our—”

“I just want you,” she says, biting each word out slowly, carefully. “To be honest with me. To talk to me. I just want you, for once, to see me as an adult instead of just your daughter.”

The impossibility of the request nearly makes Louis laugh. Think of his daughter as anything but? She might as well ask him for the sun, and he would burn himself to dust getting it down from the skies for her because he would try, he would try so fucking hard, but in the end, it was what it was— impossible.

“It’s not impossible,” Claudia says. He didn’t realize he had said anything out loud. “‘S not impossible at all, you just—”

“What, stop?”

“Yeah? It’s not hard. I’m not a baby, Dad, I’ve watched the two of you all my life, I’m not a kid that you can keep lying to all the time.” 

Louis sighs. “Don’t be cold, Claudia.” She was so much like Lestat, a brat to the end. 

“I’m not being cold, you’re being—”

“Watch yourself,” Louis warns her, and it comes out harsher than he wants it to. She blinks at him, startled. He sighs again. “You think I don’t trust you?”

She gives him a long look. “You haven’t done anything,” she says. “For me to believe you do.”

“I let you go off to France so you could make art and date white girls, and that’s nothing to you?”

“You don’t get to make fun of me for Madeline being white,” Claudia says. “And you didn’t let me go,” she goes on, and Louis grinds his teeth, feeling the fracture in his wrist ache, feeling all the anxiety knots Claudia unspooled with her arrival tie themselves back up again. “That’s half of this. You didn’t let me go anywhere, Dad, I left.”

“You left,” Louis says, trying hard to keep his voice level. “You crossed an ocean, Claudia, didn’t look back once, didn’t bother to visit home even once, for a half a decade—”

“I was busy,” she snaps, and she doesn’t sound guilty. Louis wishes she did, wishes she would show something, something about how she was sorry for how she left them, how she left him. “I left for school, I was studying!”

“Even in the summers? The winters? You didn’t even bother to call in for Christmas last year.”

A minute passes. Claudia exhales. She’s not smoking anymore, just staring down at the cigarette, and her voice is calm when she speaks, calm the way Lestat gets when he’s at his limit and making a last-ditch effort to reel himself in before he inevitably explodes. “It’s an oceans-distance both ways, Dad. You could have come to see me, too. You never came. Even Papa came, even if it was just to try and take me back.”

“Is it so hard,” Louis says, with the same level of calm as Claudia. “To accept that maybe, just maybe, your father went to Paris to see you, because he missed you, because he’s your father and he loves you?”

“He doesn’t love me. He wouldn’t have read my diaries if—”

“You need to let that go, one day,” Louis says, mild, and the look she throws at him is one-part stunned, two-parts outraged. “Claudia, it happened. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have done that, but it happened, and you have to move on, and talk to him—”

“Why? Why is it on me to forget? Why can’t he apologize? Why can’t he call?”

“He came to see you—”

“You don’t know what he said to me when he was there, you don’t get it, you don’t care—”

“I care—”

“You’ll pick his side over mine every time, and now, either way, I’m back. I’m back, Dad.” The look she gives him is twisted with rage, but pain, too, and Louis winces, wishes they could go back, back to last night when they were both trying to get Grace to tell them her gumbo recipe. “I extended my stay because of your wrist, and now I have to deal with you and Papa, again. What’s gonna happen if he cheats on you again, Dad? When, actually, not if? I’ll be stuck worrying, again, like I did back in high school, back in middle school, because you wouldn’t leave him no matter what he did. You,” she says, pointing a finger at him, and it rankles him, the way she’s acting, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. “Why’re you always making me worry over you?”

“Make you—” He blinks. She’s turning on her heel, and he hates it, hates it so much that what they just had the day before was shattered. “If I was making you worry over me, you wouldn’t have left, Claudia!” He shouts this as she stomps off, and whatever she shouts back gets cut off by the slam of the door, ending it.

Louis had met Lestat at a Taco Bell one night in college. Louis’d been mildly tipsy and mildly high, sucking down a frozen strawberry lemonade while frantically skimming a printout of Romeo and Juliet as last-minute prep for a seminar session in the morning, and Lestat had slid into the booth across from him and breathed out in one of the most obnoxious French accents Louis had ever heard, “Excuse me, Monsieur, but,” and then whatever else Lestat had said had been drowned out by the glass in Lestat’s hand tipping and spilling all over the printout and Louis’s open American Lit textbook. 

It had either been 9PM or 2AM and Louis’s response had been to toss his lemonade at Lestat’s remorseful face instead of swallowing down the annoyance and walking away, and then, three months later, they had been back at the Taco Bell, Lestat’s hand in his, both of them stupidly drunk, wincing at the fluorescent lighting as they sat down back at the same booth they met in, and then they had made eye contact, held it, and burst into laughter, over nothing, nothing at all, just the delight of being together. They were indulging in their affection for each other with neither of them holding back a thing.

It had been so easy, then. And then Lestat had cheated on him, for reasons he doled out over the phone in between Louis’s choked out barbs: Louis was unavailable, Louis wasn’t enough, etc, etc, etc. Louis broke up with him. They got back together. They adopted Claudia, and everything had been stable and good even when Lestat tried to ferberize Claudia. Only a few days had passed since the adoption had finalized, making them legally set with her for good, and Lestat had wanted Louis to abandon her to wail away inside the varnished oak slats of her crib. Louis would push Lestat away and ran off to Claudia each night anyway, picking her up and cradling her in his arms, sinking to a criss-cross position on the floor, his forehead pressed against the edge of the crib and leaving indents in his skin as he breathed warm air down on Claudia, mumbling meaningless lullabies to soothe her, and when she ceased crying and fell back asleep he remained there, holding her in the room with only the red glow of her ladybug nightlight for company. 

In the mornings, Lestat would coddle Claudia, making her giggle through breakfast while Louis struggled to keep his eyes open at the table. When Louis would give up and push the cereal away to lay down his head, he didn’t have the energy to do more than hum in disagreement and to tell Lestat to soften his tone for Claudia’s sake as Lestat went in on him for being a poor parent, a poor disciplinarian, a poor fool whose indulgence of his child would lead to the ruin of both him and child. Of all three of them, in fact. Did Louis not care?

Even then, it was still good. And then Paul had nearly died. And then Lestat had cheated on him, again, citing: Louis was unavailable, Louis was too withholding, Louis wasn’t enough, Louis was dishonest, Louis took Lestat’s love and called it vile and undesirable, Louis was the problem, etc, etc, etc. Lestat didn’t stop, this time, and technically, Louis had never actually told him to stop in the first place, unwilling to cave to Lestat that easily. Lestat had made a show of being discreet and of acting as though nothing was wrong, and, okay, looking back at it: it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Claudia picked up on the resentment and tension that had built between them.

Lestat openly keeping a secret affair was one thing, Claudia trying to do the same— sneaking around, avoiding both of them, switching the location off on her phone and giving flimsy explanations for why such a thing had happened— was another. Reading her diaries had been Lestat’s idea but Louis had been there, too, flicking through the pages of the Disney Princess-themed diary he had gotten Claudia when she was six, pausing and frowning down on a page that had a bloody fingerprint and only frowning deeper at Lestat’s explanation for it. And then Claudia had left for Paris and Louis had been left standing at the doorway of Claudia’s room, staring at the Posca pens Claudia had abandoned un-capped on her desk, while Lestat hovered over his shoulder and tried to convince Louis that, well, an empty house was an empty house, no?

They didn’t divorce. Lestat moved out a few months after Claudia, but he wasn’t as gone as Claudia was. He kept coming back and staying with Louis, and the two of them kept falling into strange moments of sweet domesticity before one of them would end it and Lestat would leave Louis to his gloom again. 

They were in a strange state of back-and-forth. Lestat’s heartbeat was a kick, a snare, a drum, a solid beat that was sometimes perfectly in sync with Louis’s and sometimes not, but more often than not, if they marinated in each other’s company for long enough, their hearts would match each other tick for tick, bump for bump, breath for breath. It was so easily shattered, the tune they shared, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. It didn’t mean that it didn’t mean anything, the heart that they both occupied. Maybe Claudia was right, maybe it would be better once Louis cut Lestat out for good, but he kept going back for Lestat, Lestat kept going back for him, and it went on in a loop, both of them swinging away and toward each other. 

It’s not something he can explain to Claudia. She wants him to explain it, he gets that, but she wouldn’t understand it. What he can do, however, is force Claudia and Lestat to sit together again for dinner. So.

Lestat gracefully sips his iced tea while Claudia, sulking, lets her glass go ignored by her elbow, the condensation pooling at the bottom. It would disrupt the table’s patina, but Louis shelves that as a headache for the next morning and focuses on how it’s three of them at the table again. A meal en familie, pères et fille. That the meal is a course of fried eggs and toast because Claudia had refused to cook and had further refused to let Louis cook is a minor detail.

Claudia clears her throat. She pokes her eggs with a fork and asks, neutrally, “What brings you back to my Dad’s dinner table?”

Lestat’s eyebrow twitches. “It’s my dinner table as well. Our table. Our family table.”

“And the one up in Baton Rouge is—”

“Gone,” Lestat says, giving Louis and Claudia warm smiles in turn. Louis smiles back. Claudia does not smile back. “It is dust. This is the only family I’ve ever had and will ever need.”

Claudia snorts. “What, she left you?”

Louis shoots her a look. “Could you—”

“No, Louis,” Lestat interrupts. He places a hand over Louis’s cast, rubbing it gently. Louis watches Claudia watch the movement, her frown deepening. “Let her speak. If she doubts my commitment to us, so be it.”

“Oh, I more than doubt,” Claudia says. 

“Claudia—” Lestat stops. He takes a breath and recomposes himself. Louis flicks his gaze between the two of them, watches Claudia puff up as though expecting the worse, watches Lestat bite his bottom lip. “Claudia. Alright.”

“Alright?” 

“I owe you an apology,” Lestat says carefully, and Louis stills. He stares at Lestat’s face and in the corner of his eye he watches Claudia blink fast, equally startled. “I wasn’t good to you or Louis. I regret it. You are both everything to me. You have your reservations, your suspicions… fine.” Lestat clears his throat, squeezing Louis’s cast. “But I want to do better, Claudia. I want to do better by both of you, this time.” 

There’s a short pause. Louis swallows and Lestat squeezes his cast again.

“Why,” Claudia says. “Should I believe a single word from your mouth?”

“Because—” Lestat sighs, frustrated. “Because I mean what I say.”

Claudia widens her eyes, over-dramatic. “That’s convincing. What changed, other than your affair falling apart?”

“You left us,” Lestat says, and Louis exhales, stares down at his plate, the oil gathered over the eggs like a shiny film. “You left me. I had time to reflect. Your absence was difficult for me.”

“More difficult to endure than raising me?”

“You insist on testing my patience.”

“You insist on seeing me. I told you. I don’t want anything—”

“I hurt you,” Lestat says. Louis watches Lestat stare down at his own plate, his mouth twisted into a rueful smile, his eyes glossy. “And I’m sorry I did. I hurt you terribly. I should have talked to you. I drove you away, and I sincerely apologize for it.” Louis chances a glance: Claudia looks stunned. She’s slow to mask it. “I will always be sorry for the damage I did to our family.” Lestat sighs, raising his head to look back at Claudia. “What would it take to earn your trust again, Claudia?”

Another pause. “To earn my trust again?” She exhales. “You’ll never earn it again.”

“Claudia,” Louis cuts in. She flashes him a hot look. “Watch your tone. You can’t talk to your father like that.”

“I’m talking to him like an adult.”

“No,” Louis says. “You’re being a brat about this, you’re not putting in the effort to compromise—”

“So it’s this again. You want me back only as a kid.”

Louis repeats, exasperated, “Claudia—” and she speaks over him.

“I’m not going back,” she says. “I’m not coming back to live like this again. I can forgive what you pulled on me before, but I won’t forgive it if you do it again, caging me in and acting like I’ve lost my mind for wanting to be a person.” She rises from the table, setting her fork down with a hard clink. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she says.

“Claudia, don’t—” 

“No,” Claudia says, curt, and she stalks off, her footsteps echoing up the stairs.

“She hasn’t changed,” Lestat says, after they hear the click of her bedroom door closing. Lestat rubs at his eyes, scowling. “Still the same as ever.” 

Lestat’s lips are pulled thin, his eyes distant and upset. Louis reaches over with his good hand and strokes Lestat’s eyebrow before leaning in to press a kiss at the spot, the hair scratching his lips. “She’s grown protective of herself,” Louis says. 

“She’s—” 

“She’s your daughter, Les. Our daughter.” Lestat shrugs, just as Claudia does, with jerky, childish inelegance. “I didn’t think you’d say all of that,” Louis says, and Lestat shrugs again. 

“You advised me to make amends with her tonight,” Lestat says. Louis had said that over the phone, but he hadn’t actually expected Lestat to follow through. Lestat, as if reading his mind, sighs. “I did mean it, Louis. Every word.”

“I know.”

“But nothing I do is enough for her,” he notes, moodily poking his egg with a finger. “Nothing will ever be enough for her.”

It’s possible that Lestat is right. But, a week later, Louis stands next to Claudia, watches the green-jeweled necklace Lestat had gifted her for her sixteenth birthday glitter around her neck, and he hopes, fervently, that Lestat is wrong. 

Louis just wants to hope. 

They’re at an art museum in Baltimore, him and Claudia, in the thick of a two-day layover before their flight to France. Louis flying to Paris with Claudia had not been part of the original itinerary, and she looked peeved when Lestat suggested it and Louis echoed the suggestion, but ultimately, she had made the changes, let Louis help her pack her bags, and she made Louis keep his nearly-healed arm in a sling so the cast wouldn’t jostle during the flight.

The exhibit they’re standing in front of now is a large, arched, stained-glass window, with different-sized cuts of different-colored glass arranged next to each other like puzzle pieces. Claudia is staring into the window intently, her face unreadable and cast in shades of reds, blues, and greens, and Louis’s hit with a pang of want, followed swiftly by a pang of guilt, concluded with a pang of love.

Pang, pang, pang. Maybe, one day, the three of them could be in the same space together without everything bursting into flames. 

“Claudia.”

She doesn’t turn her head to face him, but does the smallest tilt of her head toward him. “Yeah?”

“Listen,” Louis says. Claudia continues to look at the window instead of him. He sighs. “Don’t go worrying about me anymore, okay? I’m fine. I know you’re uncomfortable with it, but everything’s fine over here.” She doesn’t say anything. He sighs again. “He’s better. Things are better between us.”

“What’s changed?”

Claudia didn’t believe Lestat when he had said it, but it had been the truth: Claudia had left. Lestat had snuck off to Paris without telling Louis and had returned with apologies, for: mocking Louis for not being able to ferberize Claudia, mocking Louis during all those nights when Louis couldn’t sleep because the image of toddler-Claudia’s betrayed face wouldn’t leave his mind, mocking Louis for wallowing away when she left. Claudia was right, Louis doesn’t know what happened between her and Lestat in Paris, but he does know that Lestat came back from it in a state of agonized regret.

Louis settles on saying, “Everything.”

Claudia finally looks at him, frowning. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“He’s not good for you,” Claudia says, with some impatience, and Louis wishes he could go back and stop her from ever noticing anything wrong between him and Lestat. “He’s not good for either of us.”

“Don’t say that. He’s… he’s trying.” 

“You’ll settle for him trying?”

“I’m not settling,” Louis says, defensive. “I’m not enduring. We’re not even back together like that, Claudia, but we… we know each other. We know each other,” he repeats, mostly to himself, because that was it was, wasn’t it? That’s what it came down to, the night he and Lestat spent laughing away in Taco Bell, both of them seeing each other past the surface and responding to what they saw with love, simple and giddy. 

Claudia’s chewing on her bottom lip. “I know you.”

“And so does he,” Louis says. “He knows us both,” he goes on, and Claudia scowls but doesn’t protest. “It means something, knowing someone. There’s history between us, there’s a bond between us, between all of us, that we won’t get anywhere else.”

“You could if you looked, Dad.”

“I’m done looking, Claudia.”

With doubt, she says, “You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” Louis says, gently. “I’m sure.”

Claudia holds his gaze, then looks away, shaking her head. She glares at a green piece of glass at the top of the window. When she speaks, it’s with reluctance and some confusion, like she isn’t sure if she wants to actually say anything at all. “Madeline was the one to tell me that I should come back.” Claudia shrugs. “Said I should see you one last time before I set up in Paris for good.” Pause. “See you both.”

“She said that?”

“She said,” Claudia starts, then stops with a laugh, as if remembering the exact moment Madeline said such a thing, and Louis smiles, watching her. It hurts that she’s leaving, still, it hurts terribly, but. “She said she didn’t get why I was so attached to y’all, even after everything, called it a weird American thing and told me it would be better if I never came back home, but.” Claudia glances at him for a half-second before breaking eye contact, only to square her jaw and meet his gaze again. “She understood that I’d regret it if I didn’t at least try.”

She could have tried harder. Louis’s gaze flicks between the resolve in her eyes and Lestat’s necklace on her neck and amends, he and Lestat could have tried harder, too.

“Hm.” Louis shrugs, looking away from her. He prods the inside of his cheek with his tongue, mulls it over. He sighs, turns to look back at Claudia. “I like her.”

Claudia doesn’t smile, but her lip twitches at the corner like she wants to. “She’s nice. She’s good for me.”

“Yeah? Think I’ll meet her when we get there, this woman that’s swept you up and off your feet?”

She does grin, at that. “Dunno, Dad.” Her eyes glitter in the multi-colored light from the window. “Maybe. Hope so.”

“Hope so too,” Louis says, smiling back. He clears his throat. “You should focus on yourself. I meant it, don’t keep worrying about me. I’m sorry you had to. I didn’t want you to.”

“It’s okay,” Claudia says quietly.

“It’s my job to worry,” Louis says, going for stern and landing on amused. Claudia doesn’t laugh, though her smile does ease into a more neutral, serious expression. “Think of me like bedrock.”

“Bedrock,” Claudia repeats, toneless, with just enough doubt that Louis sighs.

He yanks her into a one-armed hug, her head knocking into his cast, and she grumbles, about Louis squeezing her too tight, about his fracture, about her hair, but she doesn’t try to flee even when Louis tightens his grip around her.

He breathes over her hair, smelling the vanilla of her perfume, and sighs again. “I won’t break, I won’t change, I won’t leave,” he says, and Claudia stiffens in his arms. “I’ll always be here for you, no matter how far you go.”

“You’re okay?” Claudia asks, her voice tight. Louis tries to tighten his grip further, pull her in and hold her like he used to when she was too small to hold her head up on her own. She’s hugging him back, has her arms wrapped around him like she hasn’t done so in years. “You’re going to be okay, once I go? Not like last time, like Papa said, you being— depressed, lost—” 

“I’ll be okay,” he says, and he means it. Wants to mean it. Wants to try, for her sake and his, so they can go forward together. “I promise.”

“Yeah, Dad, really?”

“You don’t believe me,” Louis says, and Claudia laughs, her breath hitched. “Trust me, okay?”

“Are you gonna trust me, too?”

“Yeah.” She snorts. “I mean it. I’m trying, okay? You have to try for me, too. We’ll both try.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay, Dad.” Claudia exhales. She doesn’t loosen her grip and neither does Louis. The light from the window streams over them, coloring them green. “We’ll try.”