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Claudia, dressed in a pretty, white and blue patterned dress, scurried out the front door with the briefest of waves before Lestat and Louis could even wish her a good hunt.
“Someone’s hungry,” Lestat said, surprised. His gaze remained on the door as if Claudia might come back to stick her tongue out at them. Louis put his arm around Lestat's waist.
“I think she has a date with that boy, Charlie, I told you about,” Louis said with a grin.
"C'est le commencement de la fin," Lestat murmured, throwing his sleek, curled hair over his shoulder.
Louis’ arm dropped. He rolled his eyes with a tut. "Don't be like that. It's good, her gettin' out more. She needs friends, people in her life who ain't us."
"Hm." Lestat folded his arms.
"What?"
Lestat sighed through his nose, turning to look at Louis. They had danced around the topic of Claudia's mental maturation for a couple of years, ever since she'd started asking them when she'd grow into the more adult styles of jewellery they’d gifted her. Louis had shrugged off the topic whenever it cropped up and Lestat had to admit he also had no interest in facing the reality of the life they had burdened Claudia with, so he hadn’t pressed the matter. In fact, speaking it aloud had become something of a taboo between them, and it was all too easy to stay comfortably cocooned in the congenial, joyful facade they had created for themselves. However it had become apparent, as time passed all too quickly, that they couldn't ignore it for much longer. Perhaps they were already too late and the time for discussing it had already come and gone. Not that Lestat was sure what use discussing it would even be. What point was there in acknowledging the inevitable pain of the future when they could stay happy and willfully oblivious in the present?
"You know exactly what," Lestat said, feeling reckless. "She's getting older. At nineteen she's not a little girl anymore."
"Lestat-"
"A young woman blossoming within the body of a child. Now she's chasing boys. How long before-"
"Not this again," Louis cut him off. He turned away from Lestat to march into the parlor. Lestat followed him slowly, lingering near the doorframe as Louis sat on the couch with a tired flop.
"You said you weren't even sure if she'd grow up in that way. Her metabolism is the same as a child's still, so who's to say if she's...gonna want…" Louis gestured with his hands instead of finishing his sentence. Louis was generally uncomfortable talking about the particulars of sex, which was ironic for an ex-brothel owner, Lestat thought with a fondness. He would only really talk about their own love making if they were engaged in it or were imminently about to be. Discussing the potential burgeoning of their daughter's sexuality was possibly out of the question for him. But that was American puritanicalism, he supposed. It would probably be at least one mortal lifetime before Louis shook it off completely.
"So she's sweet on someone," Louis said finally with a shrug. "It's normal, especially for teenagers. It won’t go any further. She won't want to..." Louis grimaced.
"Fuck?" Lestat finished for him. Louis pulled another face. "Make whoopee? Oh, no. I'm sure at the tender age of fourteen you weren't interested in any such things at all. Cold baths and thoughts only of God and prayer, was it?"
"Les."
"What use is it putting our heads in the sand?" Lestat picked up the silver cigarette case on the side table and lit one, sauntering further into the parlor.
"Burying our heads," Louis corrected with a soft smile.
"Burying our heads, then."
"Well!" Louis said with exasperation. "What does it matter even if she does want to? It's not like she gon’ make papaws out of us if that's what you're worried about. You wanna sit her down and explain the birds and the bees? Because I think that boat sailed when you took her to Lover's Lane."
“The girl grew up in Storyville, Louis,” Lestat snapped. “That boat had sailed before we even met her, so spare me the-”
“You don't get it, do you-”
“Ugh, assez.”
Louis huffed and Lestat rolled his eyes. They'd already argued about his and Claudia's hunt at Lover's Lane, more than once. He was bored with it. Louis raised his eyebrows like he was daring Lestat to restart the argument. Lestat just smoked again, exhaling dramatically.
"It's not about sex," Lestat said. "It's not about her knowing what sex is. It's not even about her having sex. It's her mind growing while her body will not. Her mind becoming a garden while her body remains a singular daisy. Romance and, oui, I suppose, sex, will be the cruellest reminder of this. This boy you mentioned, Charlie? He's eighteen, you know." He blew out a puff of smoke and sat next to Louis, crossing one leg over the other.
"How do you know that?"
"Please," Lestat said with a flourish of his hand. Naturally, he’d followed him a little. He’d been tempted to kill him, honestly, but he would have been racing the sun waiting for the right moment. Louis narrowed his eyes at him, like he knew exactly what Lestat had been planning.
"Can't you just let her be? This is why I didn't want to tell you about him."
Lestat laughed coldly. He took another drag of his cigarette. "Let's say they fall madly in love. What do you think happens when the young man ages and she doesn't? When he wants children and she can't provide them? Heartbreak. Misery. Desolation."
"She ain’t you, Lestat. She’s not gonna be looking to get married a month after knowing someone," Louis said with a sly smirk.
Lestat tried to look offended, but he could feel the smile tugging at his lips.
“You forget I could read your mind then, mon cher. You wanted me as much as I adored you.”
“Don’t-”
“A man ain’t got no right havin’ a waist that devilish,” Lestat said, attempting poorly to imitate Louis' drawl.
“You-” Louis flushed.
“His eyes, like a fairy prince in one of those storybooks we had when we was kids.”
“I never-”
“I wonder if his hair is as soft as it looks.”
“Shut the hell up!” Louis said, laughing and blushing. He was perfect. Unable to resist, Lestat abandoned his still lit cigarette in the ashtray and lithely straddled him, his knees on either side of his hips. He kissed him, long and slow. Louis moaned, his hands drifting to rub Lestat’s thighs, then around to cup his backside.
“You should say these things to me more, mon cher,” Lestat said when they parted. “Who knows what kind of response you’ll elicit.”
“Oh, I know exactly what I’m getting with you.”
Lestat chuckled, tilting his head to the side, an invitation. Louis looked him up and down appraisingly, a smirk on his full lips. But instead of following through on his flirtation, Louis took Lestat’s hands from the back of his neck, and thread their fingers together. He stared at their clasped hands, and Lestat watched the emotions play over his face.
"What if she just has a little date, a little hand holding and then goes back to thinking that boys are no good and annoying?” Louis said after a moment.
Lestat squeezed Louis’ hand. “That’s not going to happen,” he said gently.
“You don't know that.”
Lestat sighed and removed himself from Louis' lap to sit beside him again. He picked up his forgotten cigarette. They sat in silence for a moment. Lestat was tempted to let the conversation die there, on a thread of hope for Louis’ sake. But he’d started the conversation and now that Louis was engaging with it, he felt it’d be a mistake to stop.
"Even if she does grow bored of this particular boy, or never, ever wants a permanent romantic companion, she will feel desire. We didn’t make her at five years old, we made her when she was already developing into an adult. Raging hormones are part and parcel of that, mon cher. We’ve coddled her, sheltered her, but we cannot stymie her mind. What do you think happens when she tires of eighteen year old boys and their young, foolish, pawing ways? She might occasionally pass for nineteen, depending on how she dresses and how drunk the beholder is. But to glance at her, she is childlike and will never pass for any older than a teenager. " He smoked again. "Regardless, she will age. Thirty, fifty, one hundred years. Only a particularly disturbed forty year old man will pursue her looking the way she does. Is that what you want for our daughter?"
Louis swallowed, unable to meet Lestat's gaze.
"That's what I thought."
Louis leaned his elbows on his knees and wrung his hands. He seemed to be genuinely considering Lestat's words.
"So, what do you propose?” he asked. “Lock her away all her life like a prisoner? We did that already with her childhood, kept her away from other kids."
"Because she'd certainly have eaten them, yes."
"I agree. But now? She can control herself better. She knows herself better."
"That’s debatable. But I'm not worried about her eating her lovers. A dinner date is a rite of passage."
Louis laughed, then caught himself. With a sly grin, Lestat nudged him. Louis sighed and took his cigarette for a drag before handing it back. Lestat watched him carefully.
"No, to your point, I don't want to ‘lock her away like a prisoner’," Lestat lied. In fact, he almost certainly would have preferred to do exactly that. Or rather, it would be better to say that he would have liked to have kept their little family all locked away, together, and to have kept this near perfect moment in time, frozen in time. Claudia, still a girl in a girl's body, Louis, kind and attentive and mostly present with him, their finances laughably inflated and their place in society relatively stable. Lestat was all too aware that they had enjoyed a period of happiness, and that that happiness was finite. Whether it would be a hunt gone wrong, their queerness finally deemed unacceptable, pitchforks and torches at their door for their ‘witchcraft’, or Claudia needing to exert her independence and leaving them...there would be something that would be the tipping point into melancholy and chaos again.
Lestat remembered everything. Against his will, he often replayed Louis' begging the night of Claudia's turning. 'I’ll stay. I’ll never leave you ever again. I promise. I’ll be happy, for you, for her. Please.’ Some desperately sad, doubtful, needful part of Lestat knew that even after all this time Louis was only with him because they had Claudia, too. If Claudia became unhappy, if she left them, Lestat would lose Louis. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. The thought was wholly unbearable to him.
If he could magically stop Claudia from growing up, he would. He would lie to himself and say it would be for her sake, to protect her from the inevitable pain and anxiety that would haunt her stunted existence. But somewhere deep, deep down Lestat knew he would do it with only one goal: to keep Louis. It was a morose thought, and a miserable fantasy that came from a dark, controlling, lonely part of himself that he did not admire and could barely begin to acknowledge.
"But we need to keep her safe," Lestat said finally. “From herself.” He extinguished his cigarette. "If we can temper this interest in romance, in mortals, she may avoid the painful realisation that she will probably never know the kind of love we have."
"Don't say that," Louis said. But the tenseness around his brow and mouth told Lestat that he knew the truth. "We love her. She has us."
Lestat nodded. "She does. But we're her Fathers. We won't be enough forever." For long, he wanted to say, but he didn't. “I'm certain an opportunity will present itself eventually that will allow us to discourage her from it all. Leave it to me.”
He kissed Louis on the corner of his mouth.
Louis nodded.