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This was always going to happen.
She’s been dead since the beginning.
— Aeschylus, “The Oresteia”
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
— Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird”
Claudia had burned once.
The excruciating heat, the immeasurable, all-consuming pain — it was familiar in a way. Except, this time no smoke encaged her lungs, no roof or walls fell around her, and, more importantly, no black angel would appear to save her.
Louis—
Her early memories with Louis flashed in her mind’s eye, similar to how she could watch people’s memories as she ate their lives away. Despite his failures, despite how he could never have been what she needed, despite how angry she had been at him, she had loved him deeply. She should’ve said it more often.
No earlier memories came up. That fateful day was when she had been truly born after all. From fire that burned down her human form to let her rise from the ashes as something beautiful and powerful that she thrived as, all to lead to this burning that was finally going to take it all away.
New Orleans, 1917, or Paris, 1950; it never mattered. There was no version of this story where she could have saved him, and no version where he could have saved her.
The weight in her arms became lighter. Madeleine was vanishing. Claudia held her tighter anyway, trying to shield her with her own body, but the scorching light engulfed them both mercilessly. One spotlight like a single stone for the two of them.
Claudia didn’t let her go, and neither did Madeleine.
Claudia felt her fear and her pain and it hurt as much as that damn light how her life slipped away faster than she could process it. Madeleine, essentially still a newborn as a vampire, too weak to handle sunlight for more than a few moments, disintegrating in Claudia’s hands. Claudia, helpless, clasping whatever remained.
Her lover, her friend, the only one who ever cared to understand her — her companion — now ashes slipping through her fingers and filling the air around her.
Of course Claudia wasn’t given the grace of fading away at the same time as the only person who had ever truly loved her. She had to die with the weight of that loss too.
They had been so close to flying away forever and leaving their old prisons behind— oh, how naive Claudia had been to think she couldn’t hurt a lover if they were turned into a vampire, that at least in that way she couldn’t kill them.
When had she not hurt someone she loved?
How deeply she had failed her sweet Madeleine. She never got to know how happy she had made Claudia, how free she'd made her feel. How much she had healed her in the brief, brief life they had shared together. How she had given Claudia everything she’d ever wanted when she chose her on that very stage, in front of everyone. How in that small moment, despite everything, Claudia had been the happiest being alive.
Maybe that was why Claudia smiled as she burned. That, and because she had long ago learned to never go down without a fight. Or, perhaps, it was the blood in her veins. The performance asked for a painful, miserable death, so Claudia gave them a smile. They wanted a horror show, so, instead, she sang.
Gathering the last bits of her strength, she turned around. Even as her life force slipped away, she still felt him. Her maker, her murderer, her… father. If Lestat could read her mind he’d know she wanted him to save her, but she would never beg or plead, no.
She needed to look at him one last time. She needed him to see her.
Lestat watched her, of course he did. That much grace he afforded her, to look her in the eyes. Nothing else beyond that, not even a reaching hand.
If she didn’t know the sunlight was the culprit, she could believe her own anger was what made her burn that way. She wanted him to never forget this, for this memory to imprint in his mind like the light imprinted in her flesh, for it to plague him every time he closed his eyes. She’d come back and haunt him, she promised herself.
Anguish emanated from him, but how could that matter when he stood there unmoving? When he rehearsed for this very moment? When even now, when she needed him more than she’d ever have, he still abandoned her? Claudia was in the spotlight but that had never been her show. Was she following his play? Was she the right pawn in his chessboard?
In the end, Claudia stood alone.
In the end, the burning consumed her.