Archive of Our Own

march, 2028

Louis' weekends have become very structured since the divorce. He comes home from work on Friday to an empty house, makes dinner for one, and watches a movie. He wakes up on Saturday and tries to take advantage of Claudia being out of the house to get some cleaning done. On Sunday, he waits around listlessly until it’s time to pick Claudia up.

There are advantages to shared custody, something Louis tries to remember when he can do things like watch an R-rated movie or jerk off in the shower over the weekend. He could even go on dates! As it is, Louis spends his weekends trying to distract himself from the crushing loneliness of not having Claudia. The worst part is that Louis can’t even complain about the situation. Lestat has been surprisingly responsible with this arrangement, missing pickup only twice (once for a car that wouldn’t start, and once for an appointment that ran long). Claudia isn’t always thrilled after her weekends with her other father, but Louis knows they’re a net positive. It’s just, did it really have to be every weekend?

Three p.m. on Saturday, and Louis has run out of corners of the house to clean. It’s not a large place, just the right size for him and Claudia. After the divorce, Louis needed to start anew. He and Lestat decided to sell their sprawling house, and Louis moved to a quieter neighborhood in the same school district to keep Claudia’s disruptions at a minimum. Lestat, in turn, found a two-bedroom townhome in the French Quarter, which Louis finds completely inappropriate for a teenager to spend weekends at. But the lawyer declared otherwise, so here he is, debating whether or not to wash the couch cushion covers when the doorbell rings.

He hasn’t been expecting anyone. Maybe a neighbor lost a cat or something. Louis opens the door to find his daughter, pouting, and a cast on her wrist. Lestat stands a few steps behind her, looking equally miserable and quite a bit furious. Louis' heart rate kicks up immediately, mind racing through the possibilities. Claudia’s weekend bag is at her feet.

“What happened?” he asks, looking between the two of them.

“She threw herself out of a moving car,” Lestat says dryly.

Claudia rolls her eyes. “We were only goin’ 25.”

“Closer to 30.”

Claudia faux-gasps. “Papa, it was a school zone.”

Louis' pretty sure he sees Lestat roll his eyes. “Why would you do that? Why would she do that?” He redirects the question to Lestat, feeling, knowing, somehow, this is his fault.

Claudia shrugs. “Didn’t wanna be in the car anymore.”

Louis closes his eyes and takes a steadying breath. “Claudia,” he says slowly, opening his eyes. “Go upstairs. I need to speak with your father.”

She pushes past him, whistling like this was her plan all along, and Louis' teeth grind together.

“I took her to the urgent care,” Lestat says, and holds out a folder. “They gave me this and said she might have a concussion. She has an appointment with her pediatrician tomorrow at 11.”

Louis takes the folder, flipping through it absently. “What happened?” he repeats his question from earlier.

Lestat rocks back on his heels with a sigh. “I was taking her to go see that new movie with that Chalamet fellow in it.”

“Lestat, that’s rated R,” Louis cuts in, ignoring how Lestat’s accent flows over Chalamet.

“She is 17. And she wanted to go,” Lestat says coolly. “Very badly. But on the way there, she suddenly decided she did not want to go anymore. I told her pas de bol; I’ve already bought the tickets, we are seeing it. And she screamed and opened the door and threw herself onto the road.”

Louis blinks once, twice, three times, then, “Why would she do that? Did you say something?”

“Something other than that it’s rude to renege on plans when the tickets are already purchased, you mean?” Lestat is still affecting such a casual tone, like they’re discussing Claudia’s new school uniform and not her throwing herself out of a moving car. “I don’t know; she’s always picking a fight about something or another. Her loss, since I know you will not be taking her to see this movie.”

Well, he’s right about that. Louis won’t be taking Claudia anywhere but school until she’s 30. “She’s a teenager, Lestat,” He says, crossing his arms and leaning against the door jamb. “She feels things very strongly. You gotta be better at managing that.”

Lestat gives Louis one of his signature what the fuck are you talking about looks. “Yes, I was supposed to read her mind and know a slight provocation about a movie she wanted to see would lead to her throwing herself onto the road. Another one of my failures, my inability to predict a teenage girl’s emotional outbursts.”

Louis can feel that there’s something Lestat isn’t telling him, whether because Lestat doesn’t want Louis to know or because Lestat doesn’t think it’s relevant. But he also knows that Claudia often operates within a logical paradigm that seems to make sense only to herself. The two of them stare at each other for a moment, sweating on Louis' porch.

“I don’t know why she’s acting like this,” Louis says eventually, sighing. “What are we going to do?”

“I know why,” Lestat says, affected detachment. “She told me I should’ve tried harder to kill myself before she opened the door.”

Louis winces, feeling the words right under his ribs. “Lestat, she doesn’t mean it.”

“Oh, I think she does,” Lestat says airily. “What I am going to do is not press my custody rights. If she does not want to see me, she will not see me. I can only take so much of this.”

“Lestat, c’mon,” Louis says with a half smile, almost believing this entire past 20 minutes has been an elaborate prank by the two of them. “That’s not what you want.”

Lestat sniffs. “Perhaps, perhaps not. Ce n'est pas grave. It’s not like I ever wanted her, anyway, right?”

He turns on his heels as Louis winces, his own words thrown back at him from their custody battle two years ago. Even though he knows that’s not true, that Lestat may have taken longer to form a connection to their daughter, but that connection was there nonetheless.

Louis stands there for a long moment, half expecting Lestat to march back up to the door and continue the conversation. But he doesn’t, and all Louis has is a packet of medical information and an angry teenager. At least he won’t be alone this weekend.

He stands outside of Claudia’s door for two minutes, waiting to hear anything past the heavy guitar and loud female singing voices pouring from her speakers. When nothing arises, Louis sighs and goes to his own room. On the bed, he first checks MyChart to see that, as Lestat said, there’s an appointment for Claudia the next day. Louis lets himself relax a bit at that. He still remembers when he was on a business trip, and Lestat let Claudia stop her course of antibiotics too early. The ear infection had bounced back, and Louis had to be the one to get her to the pediatrician.

She doesn’t emerge from her room for the rest of the day, even when Louis texts her that he ordered pizza. He hears her move around the kitchen after he shuts the door for the night, microwaving leftover pizza and then watching TV. Louis doesn't know what he’s supposed to do. He wishes he could ask Lestat about it, like he wishes to ask Lestat about many things. But Lestat is part of the problem, probably always has been, and Louis needs to get used to doing these things on his own.

The next morning, Louis waits and waits downstairs until Claudia finally emerges around noon, hunger superseding her desire to avoid the conversation. When she stops at the bottom of the stairs, Louis raises one eyebrow at her, then gestures for them to sit down at the kitchen table.

“Give me your phone,” Louis says first, offering his palm for her to place it in.

“Why?!” she practically shrieks.

“Seriously?” Louis scoffs. “You threw a tantrum and jumped out of a moving car. Phone.”

“How do you know it wasn’t Lestat’s fault?”

She’s been calling him Lestat now, instead of ‘papa’ or ‘pops’ or the more severe ‘father’ she used to break out when she was being dramatic. Like she can distance herself from him, like she didn’t use to follow Lestat around like a shadow, imitating his every move while Lestat pretended not to notice, making increasingly dramatic gestures until Claudia was spinning around, laughing so hard she was doubled over. That feels like forever ago now, an entire decade between that family and this one.

“Because Lestat ain’t the one in a cast,” Louis says sternly, still holding his hand out.

Claudia groans and plops her phone into Louis' hand.

“I’ll need it back next weekend,” she says. “For when I’m at Lestat’s.”

Louis looks down at the phone, shifting it between his hands. “You won’t be there next week.”

“What?” Claudia sits straight up, arms crossed in front of her.

“He’s said he won’t press custody,” Louis says slowly. “He’ll give up his weekends unless you want to see him.”

Claudia has a look of disbelief, like she genuinely didn’t think Lestat would fold. It’s fair; they’ve been pushing each other for years, and neither has ever yielded. And certainly none of them thought it’d be Lestat to do so.

“Are y’serious?” she asks, so excited the words run into each other. “Does that mean we can go to Mexico this summer?”

“Claudia,” Louis cautions. “The furthest you’re going in the next year is the high school.”

She rolls her eyes. “Well, I’ll need my phone back, then.” When Louis raises a skeptical eyebrow, she adds, “to let Lestat know when I want to see him.”

Louis snorts. “Nice try.”

He pockets the phone. Claudia sticks her tongue out at him and slumps back down in the chair.

“He told me what you said to him,” Louis says after a beat. Claudia’s eyes go wide. “You can’t say shit like that. To anyone, and especially not to your father.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she mumbles, looking away and down at the ground. “I was just angry with him.”

“Why were you angry?” Louis asks patiently.

A long pause, Claudia pouting across from him. Louis waits and waits, until she says, “He wasn’t listenin’ to me. He never listens to me, Dad, and I told him I didn’t want to see a movie ‘cause I had plans with my friends, which I had told him about, and he acted like that didn’t matter. Like I’m just some doll for him to do anything he wants with.”

Louis purses his lips. “So you threw yourself out of his moving car, and told him to kill himself.”

She glares at him. “Well, when you put it like that, it sounds like an overreaction. I don’t even know why I have to see him every weekend. He doesn’t even like me,” she adds on, hands now gesturing wide in emphasis.

“Don’t say that,” Louis admonishes on reflex. “He loves you.”

Claudia rolls her eyes. “Sure, maybe out of some deep, repressed fatherly duty. But he doesn’t like me very much, and the feeling is mutual.”

Here they are again, the same dead end over and over again. Louis understands her, he does, but he’s known Lestat for two decades now. He knows how Lestat loves, how he cares, how he acts in every sweeping emotion he feels. Sometimes, his daughter and his ex are so similar that Louis believes she sprang from Lestat’s head, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus. Early in their relationship, Lestat crossed a street on a red light because Louis was yelling at him. A car screeched to a halt, sounding almost cartoonish.

“Maybe it’ll be good for you two to spend some time apart,” Louis says eventually. “You can both think about how to approach each other again.”

Claudia says nothing, drumming her fingers on the table with no apparent rhythm. She’s looking at the piano that Louis insisted on getting back when he thought Claudia would actually keep up with her lessons. Once Lestat stopped sitting with her on weekends to run scales, she lost interest almost immediately. The instrument has been collecting dust ever since, and Louis has learned how utterly impossible it is to get rid of a piano.

“I don’t want to see him again,” she says decisively. “It shouldn’t be this difficult. Why am I always the one who has to try? He’s the parent. He should try.”

Louis thinks Lestat has been trying, in his own way. Blocking off entire weekends to spend with Claudia, buying her movie tickets, and letting her stay up too late. But Claudia doesn’t want that, not from him. She just wants a father, which Lestat seems incapable of being.

“Okay,” Louis sighs, pressing his fingers into his eyes for a moment. He feels a headache coming on. “But this doesn’t have to be permanent, you know. I won’t push either of you, but you can always change your mind.”

Another long silence, only interrupted by Claudia’s grumbling stomach. Maybe she’d like to go grocery shopping with him later, a Sunday errand they haven’t done together since Claudia was 12. There are advantages to this, too, the feud. Louis will have his daughter back on weekends.

“I really didn’t mean it,” Claudia says quietly, still not looking at Louis. “I was just angry. That doesn’t mean I want him dead.”

Louis swallows around the lump in his throat, pushing back memories. “I know, baby. I know.”

It starts to feel untenable about two weeks in.

It’s not just the logistics, like getting Claudia to and from her play rehearsals and friends’ houses and dinner every night and lunch every day (they’ve had more takeout in the past three weeks than the first 10 years of Claudia’s life). Louis had to give her back her phone just a week in, since he forgot he had to pick her up from school Friday afternoon, after nearly two years of not having to.

There are other things, too. Louis thinks Claudia misses Lestat, though he’s no expert in teenage girls. Either way, Louis is the one running her school play lines with her and watching Project Runway. He tries to communicate this to Lestat, in what is probably a poorly worded text message that Lestat just straight up ignores. Claudia, on the other hand, blossoms under her new perceived weekend freedom. Louis sees her infrequently; she’s taken to making plans every Saturday and Sunday. She says that it’s the same things she was doing with Lestat, but to Louis, it seems like she’s trying to keep herself busy.

If Louis didn’t have to transport Claudia around town constantly, he wouldn’t feel the change so acutely. Because he loves having her around full time; his weekends no longer feel so empty. But she just needs to go to so many places. It’s times like these that Louis briefly regrets dismissing Lestat’s offhand suggestion that they move to New York when Claudia was 7. At least then she could take the subway.

It was Lestat who was teaching her how to drive. Louis had tried, at first, when Claudia first got her permit. It was the beginning of the separation, when he and Lestat came together and pushed apart every few weeks and were utterly convinced Claudia couldn’t see it. Under the right light, Louis could pretend the looks of disappointment Claudia gave him were related to his mediocre dinner.

But Louis couldn’t do it. Claudia was so scared, his brave, ferocious baby struck through with terror as she looked over the steering wheel. “Are y’sure I’m tall enough to drive?” she kept asking, frantically adjusting her mirrors forward and backwards forward and backwards.

She was, and Louis could hear the cruel remark Lestat would’ve made about it. About her height being the least of her problems, rattling off the other ways she’s deficient at this new thing, this scary thing. So Louis overcorrected against the Lestat in his head, let Claudia take a break and then another break and then never pick up driving again.

Until this last summer, her summer before senior year, when all she could do was lament about her inability to drive. How her friends were all hanging out without her because Louis was too busy to drive her and pick her up. Louis, with resignation, had just called Lestat.

He doesn’t know what happened during their first lesson. All Louis remembers is Claudia coming home with red-rimmed eyes, slamming the door on Lestat’s smug face. She refused to tell Louis what had happened; Louis always hated when she did that, when she and Lestat had their own secrets that Louis was on the outside of. All he knows is that the next week, they had another lesson. And then another and another, until Claudia said she wanted to take the road test.

She failed, unable to parallel park in enough turns. From what Louis could parse through the angry shouts back and forth between her and Lestat, Claudia had then screamed in the car and stormed out. Lestat found her walking along the side of the road, following her in the car until she got home.

“I only failed because you don’t know how to drive,” she spat in Lestat’s face. “If I had someone competent teaching me—”

Lestat laughed, cutting her off. “Please, mon petit, you would chase off anyone who tried to instill the slightest bit of knowledge. I told you you were not yet ready for the test.”

Lestat had shown up the next week for a lesson, but Claudia was already out of the house, visiting a friend. Two weeks later, he didn’t come back, and Claudia pretended not to be waiting for him. In the years since, there haven’t been any genuine attempts to resume the lessons, but Louis knows Lestat lets Claudia drive on his weekends sometimes. No one’s ever broached the subject of her getting her license.

Over breakfast, 12 days into this new normal, Louis asks Claudia, “Have you ever considered trying for your driver’s license again?”

Claudia pauses in her dissection of a papaya, looking at Louis over the orange flesh. She looks utterly flummoxed. “Why?”

“So you could drive yourself places,” Louis answers, shrugging. “I wouldn’t have to drop you off or pick you up.”

Her eyes narrow. “You only have one car.”

“I’d get you a car,” Louis says, and means it. A foolish investment, perhaps, but she could take it to college with her and use it to come home on weekends. “Is that what’s holding you back?”

“What’s holding me back is that I don’t know how to drive,” Claudia says bluntly, eyebrows raised in such a Lestat-like impression that Louis has to bite back a smile. “You gonna teach me?”

A terrifying proposal. “Maybe you and Les could start up the lessons again.”

Claudia scoffs, abandoning her papaya and crossing her arms over her chest in indignation. “Is that what this is? You’re offerin’ me a car to make nice with Lestat?”

It wasn’t what it was at all, or at least not what Louis had planned. In hindsight, it’s not a bad idea, though it appears Claudia isn’t keen on it. “I just thought you enjoyed it,” Louis says weakly. “And you really should learn to drive.”

“What part of me coming home screaming made you think I was enjoying those driving lessons? I know that’s you and Lestat’s idea of foreplay, but most people don’t like getting screamed at.”

“Claudia,” Louis says sternly. Her mouth sets in a moue. “Watch yourself.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m just saying; if you’re trying to get us to talk again, you’re gonna need a stronger motivation than that.”

Louis knows she’s right, and though the reunification of his daughter and her father wasn’t even in his mind when he suggested the driving thing, he can see how it’s a weak motivator. The problem is that he doesn’t know what would be a strong one. He’s never understood Claudia and Lestat’s relationship, difficult and evolving as it is. It presents to him unlike any parental dynamic he’s ever known. Sometimes, he thinks their similarity is their downfall, that they will both try to out stubborn the other until they don’t speak for 20 years. Other times, he thinks this will all blow over before he knows it, and they will be sniping and giggling together as if nothing happened.

Or maybe not, he thinks as he watches Claudia quarter and scoop her fruit with a ruthless efficiency that could’ve only been learned in Lestat’s kitchen. Claudia is nearly grown, at an age where she can start to make her own decisions. And Lestat is hurt, in a way that may be inappropriate but is still very real.

It’s weird to think that it might actually be fully severed now, this connection between him and Lestat that’s been stretched and lax and snapped and shortened over the past two decades. When the divorce went through, Louis knew that it was only a separation in one sense of the word. For the rest of their lives, they’ll share Claudia. Or that was the case.

There’s still the bar, but Lestat’s been a silent partner since they first bought the Azalea with both of their generational wealth, in what was probably a terrible investment in something with a lower rate of return than some stock indexes. But Claudia was theirs, a bit of each of them walking around in the world. No matter what Louis thought of Lestat, he’d always imagined sitting next to him at Claudia’s college graduation, her wedding, passing a grandchild between them. Never once has Louis imagined a future without Lestat, and now when he tries, there’s a strange void where his ex should be.

For the sake of this shared future, for the continued presence of Lestat in their lives, Louis thinks maybe he does have to fix it. Maybe this isn’t as simple as their previous spats, and there’s real work to be done. After Claudia leaves for school, Louis decides to go see Lestat.

It’s a Monday, so the Azalea is closed, which is why Louis is free. Though now that there’s a manager, he spends less and less time at the bar. He doesn’t know what eccentricities of Lestat’s life allow him to be sitting on his front porch at 10 in the morning on a weekday, chainsmoking cigarettes. He watches Louis as Louis pulls into his driveway, discerning blue eyes and stiff-set shoulders. He’s dressed, ridiculously, in a house robe and basketball shorts, his bare chest exposed to the humid Louisiana air.

Lestat says nothing as Louis approaches him, just watches Louis walk up the steps and stand in front of him. Louis hasn’t spent much time at Lestat’s place, but he’s always liked the porch, with the wide swing bench, outdated floral pattern and all. Lestat places a toe down to stop the motion of the swing when Louis stops in front of him, raising an eyebrow in question.

“Have you heard anything from Claudia?” Louis asks.

Lestat raises the other eyebrow, takes a long drag from his cigarette, which is nearly down to the filter, and says nothing. He maintains eye contact with Louis as he exhales smoke out of the corner of his mouth, shrugging one shoulder rather Gallically. Louis wrinkles his nose up in disgust at the smell; he hasn’t smoked since the separation, tossing his last box of cigs out the day Lestat moved out as if he could cut off all his vices at once.

“I broached the idea of her getting her license,” Louis continues, “since driving her everywhere is such a pain in the ass. And she told me that she doesn’t know how to drive, and I was thinking you might be able to start teaching her again. If she was open to it.”

Lestat stubs out his cig and grabs two more from the pack on the side table. He offers one to Louis, who stares at it for a long moment. He’s missed smoking, the feeling of nicotine in his blood, sharing a smoke with Lestat. Finally, he sighs and grabs it. Lestat, with a small smile, lights both of theirs.

“No, I haven’t heard from her,” Lestat finally answers. “So I don’t think I’ll be restarting her driving lessons.”

“Well, there’s no rush,” Louis says with a sigh. He leans against the post, taking a drag. “You two always come around.”

Lestat laughs, something ugly and unsettling. “We do not have forever. She is moving to California.”

He says it like he’s reminding Louis of something instead of breaking news.

“What?” Louis stands straight up. “What are you talking about?”

Lestat stares at him for one long moment, blinking. “She is attending UCLA,” he says slowly, YOU-SEE-ELL-AY, enunciating each letter of the acronym painstakingly, as if he’s been practicing. “She did not tell you?”

Louis' head is spinning. The cigarette forgotten in his hand. “No, Lestat, she did not tell me.” The words come out angry, Louis' fury spitting through and onto Lestat. “And you thought to keep this from me.”

“C’est impossible.” Lestat throws his hands up in the air. “I thought you knew, Louis. We paid the deposit last month.”

“Lestat, we’re supposed to split her expenses.”

“Putain, it was $250. You can Zelle me.”

Louis feels all his fight leave him at once, and he collapses onto the swing chair, swaying back and forth with the force.

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

Lestat’s silent for a moment, then, “She probably knew you don’t want her to leave. And that I would agree more easily. She knows how to get me to say yes.”

Louis snorts. “I don’t think that’s true.”

He slumps further into the chair, his and Lestat’s arms pressed together. Louis shifts a bit more and rests his head on Lestat’s shoulder. Lestat stills, then relaxes.

“I don’t want her to go either,” Lestat says quietly. He squeezes Louis' knee. “But it seemed like she would have found a way no matter what. And she caught me at a fragile time.”

Louis remembers now, last month. Closer to 6 weeks ago at this point, Lestat was one year sober, and his only request was dinner with Claudia. Her assertion that she never learned anything from Lestat was clearly wrong.

“Damn. I even gave her my credit card to pay for dinner,” Louis says, voice thick with unshed tears.

Lestat laughs softly. “Don’t worry, mon Louis. She picked up the check.”

Louis laughs at that, too, ignoring the wetness gathering on the shoulder of Lestat’s shirt.

“She was always going to leave eventually,” Lestat continues after a moment. “Claudia has wanted to grow up since un petit enfant. Instead of being sad about it, I think we should be proud that she grew up so well despite doing so in our house.”

Louis wants to be mad; he wants to press Lestat and make him spell out exactly what he means by that. But Louis, underneath the anger, knows Lestat is right. Claudia became the best of two people with very little good in them. They should be proud.

“Besides,” Lestat is still speaking, idly now as if to fill the space until Louis can speak again, “I hear property in California is a good investment. If we ever wanted to move.”

Louis laughs despite himself. “I think she’d do something worse than jump out of a moving car if we need that.” Lestat is silent then, grip on Louis' hand tightening. Louis adds, “She’s just a teenager, Les. It’ll pass.”

“I am not—“ Lestat clears his throat, sniffs, and starts again. “I’m proud of her, actually. I never could have done what she’s done when I was her age. She is probably better for it.”

“Throwing yourself out of a car?” Louis asks, not following Lestat’s train of thought.

Lestat hums. “Severing ties from my father. Perhaps I wouldn’t be as…difficult if I could’ve done what she’s done and escaped my own childhood.”

Louis disentangles himself, shifting to stare at Lestat. “You really believe that?”

“Believe what, Louis?”

“That it’s the same,” Louis says with a frown. “Your childhood and hers.”

Lestat gives him a look, eyes soft and brows knitted together. “Oh, Louis, of course not. You are a much better parent than either of mine. That might be why Claudia has the foresight and the ability to extricate herself when needed.”

“Lestat,” Louis says quietly. “It’s not the same. You’re not the same.”

“How would you know?” Lestat says with a hum. “I’m the only one who was there for both.”

november, 2015

For what feels like the first time in weeks, Louis can't wait for Lestat to get home. He watches Claudia scribble over a coloring book, pink, then green, then purple. She hasn’t spoken since Louis met her earlier today, but Lily said that’s been the case since her parents died last year. Louis hopes that as Claudia becomes more comfortable in their home, she’ll start speaking again.

It feels like a miracle. It probably is, because what are the chances that Louis would run into Lily for the first time in months when Lily had just met Claudia? And that he would then call Lily to make plans just as Claudia’s temporary care situation fell through, and Lily was scrambling. And that Louis would still be an authorized foster for another year before the certification Lily made him get ages ago expired? Claudia, his little miracle.

He hears Lestat’s car pull up and runs to the door to meet him. Louis stands in the doorway, blocking Lestat’s way in and making Lestat laugh.

“Louis, what is this?” he asks. “Would you like me to carry you over the threshold?”

Louis rolls his eyes, but can’t keep the smile off his face. Soon, he thinks. “I’ve got something to tell you, but keep your voice down.”

Lestat’s face shifts immediately, worry clear in his features. “Is something the matter? Is there someone there with you?”

Louis steps out of the house, closing the door mostly behind him, leaving just a crack to listen for Claudia. “You know my friend Lily, the social worker?”

“Yes,” Lestat says, apprehensive.

“Well, I called her today, and she was freaking out because she’s got this little girl, only 5 years old, whose parents died in a fire, real awful. And she couldn’t find a place for her to stay. Out of the blue, I remembered that I’m an eligible foster parent and I met her, and Lestat, she’s so perfect.”

The look on Lestat’s face is not the unbridled joy Louis had been hoping for, but rather one more akin to horror. “What are you saying, Louis?”

Louis smiles, trying to infect Lestat with his own joy. “I’m saying I agreed to take her home.”

“She is here? Right now?” Panic, now, in Lestat’s voice as he tries to peek in the crack in the door.

“Yeah,” Louis grins. “You can come meet her.”

Lestat looks at him with concern, but follows Louis into the house anyway. Claudia is still there, doodling over the coloring pages Lily gave them. Louis notes with pride that all of the crayon has stayed on the page, and none on the table or the couch. Surely Lestat will appreciate that, too.

“Claudia,” Louis says softly, leaning down to get eye level with her. She looks at him, eyes wide on her small face. “I want you to meet someone. This is Lestat.”

Claudia turns her placid gaze past Louis and to Lestat. Louis looks back over his shoulder to watch Lestat take in Claudia for the first time. His eyes are as wide as Claudia’s; they’re wearing almost twin expressions of repressed fear.

“Hello, Claudia,” Lestat says carefully, taking a step forward. Claudia says nothing in return and simply goes back to her coloring.

Louis straightens up and goes to stand by Lestat. Before he can say anything, Lestat grabs him by the crook of his elbow and pulls him into the kitchen.

“She doesn’t speak?” he asks, watching Claudia through the cutout in the wall.

“Lily said it’s a trauma response, but with some normalcy, she’ll get back to speaking.”

Lestat looks between Louis and Claudia, arms crossed over his chest, and shoulders hunched. “And you are going to provide this normalcy? In our home?”

“We can provide it, don’t you see?” Louis says excitedly. “The moment I met her, I just knew she was meant to be here. Can’t you feel it?”

“Louis, you do not know her,” Lestat says slowly, like he’s speaking to a small child. “She doesn’t know us.”

“But she will,” Louis insists, trying to press upon Lestat this feeling of rightness that has been flowing through him since this morning. “We’ll be a family. I’ve been thinking, and this is what we need. What’s been missing.”

“A daughter?”

“Our daughter.” Louis steps forward to close the gap that’s opened up between them, grasping Lestat’s hands. “I figured it all out with Lily, and I can foster her while we get married, and then we can adopt her together.”

Lestat leans back. “Married?”

Louis smiles at him. Two days after Obergefell, when they’d finally sobered up from celebrating, Lestat asked Louis to marry him. That had been nearly 6 months ago, when Louis had looked at Lestat and been unable to answer him. Not yet, he had said. When, then? Lestat had asked. All Louis could think about was Paul, fragile, unstable Paul, and how, selfishly or rightly, he believed this would tip Paul over into something Louis couldn’t pull him back from. That never mattered, in the end.

“Yes,” Louis says now, in the present, clinging to the spark he can see in Lestat’s eyes. “I was thinking ‘bout why I’ve said no before, and it was ‘cuz we weren’t ready and there was no reason to rush it. But now there is. We can be a family, Les.”

Lestat’s mouth is slightly agape, his jaw working in small circles as he takes in Louis’ words. Louis, in an attempt to soothe the creases in Lestat’s face, strokes his thumb over the broad expanse of Lestat’s shoulder, digging his fingers in reassuringly. He waits and waits, becoming the picture of patience as Lestat slowly relaxes in his grip.

“Her name is Claudia?” Lestat finally asks, voice barely above a whisper.

Louis grins, ignoring the slight tension around Lestat’s mouth. “Yes, Claudia. I was gonna make us dinner. Do you wanna go say hi?”

Lestat nods slowly, but stays planted even when Louis releases him. After a moment, he walks back to the living room, limbs moving woodenly. Louis watches through the pass-through window, observing Lestat perch carefully on the sofa. For a long moment, their family holds like this, Louis watching Lestat watch Claudia, all in silence. Then, without a word, Claudia hands Lestat a crayon.

Lestat stares at it, then at Claudia, and finally at Louis. Louis, unshed tears along his waterline, nods encouragingly. Lestat, with the fluidity of a robot, pulls a random coloring sheet towards him and starts to shade it blue. Claudia doesn’t look at him again, but after a minute, Louis can see a smile on Lestat’s face.

They’re married 6 months later; Claudia’s the flower girl. 6 months after that, both their signatures are on her adoption papers. 12 years later, and those same signatures adorn divorce papers.

may, 2028

Louis waits patiently on the couch for Claudia to come home. He crosses and uncrosses his legs, picks at microscopic lint, and reads half of his book before Claudia finally gets home from rehearsals. She sees him sitting in the living room and pauses momentarily.

“Come sit,” Louis pats the cushion next to him. Claudia’s eyes go wide, but she obeys. “So, UCLA?”

She gasps, starting as if she’ll run away, halfway off the couch in a flash. Louis grips her upper arm, firm but gentle, to keep her still. He’s been waiting for two months for Claudia to tell him, hoping even when it seemed impossible that she would admit to this and he wouldn’t have to confront her. But it seems like his daughter had been planning on waiting until she was at the airport to tell him.

“Sit down,” he says more firmly, guiding her towards the couch. Claudia sits down, looking anywhere but him. “Were you ever gonna tell me?”

Chewing on her bottom lip, Claudia slumps against the cushions, as if that will make her smaller. “Did Lestat tell you?”

“At least someone did,” Louis responds, still sitting perfectly still. “You didn’t even tell me you applied.”

“I’m sorry,” she says with all the despair of a teenager having been caught. “I was gonna tell you soon; I swear!”

“When?” Louis asks, still maintaining his stern tone. “In the airport?”

Claudia shakes her head. “Before graduation. I know you’re mad at me, but Dad, it’s a great school!” She sits up now, turning towards him, ready for a fight. “Better than Tulane! And I’ll come home all the time; I promise.”

“I’m not mad that you want to leave.” Louis is mostly telling the truth. “But why didn’t you just tell me?”

Claudia shrugs. “I wasn’t sure you’d let me,” she says bullishly. “You’re so lost on just the weekends I spent with Lestat; I didn’t want to leave you for months at a time.”

Louis’ heart aches in his chest. “I’m not,” his voice is thick and he clears it, “I’m not that fragile, Claudia. I’ll miss you like a limb, but you shouldn’t think you have to treat me like something you’re caring for. That’s my job.”

She smiles wetly up at him. She looks so grown, like a mini adult, and Louis can feel her pulling away from him like a tree being uprooted, the spindly tendrils of Claudia removing herself from his soul.

“It’s always been you and me, me and you,” she says. “And I’ve loved it, I really have. But I’m ready to be someone who isn’t Louis’ Claudia or Lestat’s Claudia, but just myself. But I was afraid if I told you that you’d take it the wrong way or get upset or something.”

She really is so smart, his Claudia. She’s always picked up on things she shouldn’t, seen through the bullshit they try to hide behind. Of course, she can see how much Louis has grown to rely on her over these past couple of years without Lestat. Of course she thinks he’s completely incapable of being alone, and maybe he is, but Louis can’t grip so tightly that he crushes her. That’s what Lestat was saying, wasn’t it?

“I’m not upset,” he lies for her sake. “I’ll miss you something fierce, but I’m not upset with you. I’m so fucking proud of you, for wanting to be your own person. I’ve let you worry too much about me when you should be focused on yourself.”

The tear tracks on Claudia’s cheeks glisten in the sunlight streaming in the window. “You’re my dad. Why wouldn’t I worry about you?”

Louis pulls her into him, gathering Claudia up in his arms in an embrace like she’s a child still, small enough to fit against his chest. She goes easily, resting her cheek against Louis, the wetness of her tears seeping through the fabric of his shirt.

“I’ve relied on you too much,” he admits, stroking small circles with his thumb against her upper arm. “I’m not your responsibility, okay?”

She sniffs. “Okay,” Claudia says, the words thick in her mouth, muffled against Louis’ shirt.

“I mean it. I don’t want you out in California, worrying about me instead of your schoolwork. I’m gonna be fine.”

And he will, eventually. It’s funny, how he’s always seen himself as a loner, solitary. But if Louis is honest with himself, he doesn’t know who he is without someone to look after him. Otherwise, all this care builds up inside him with nowhere to go. He certainly has never focused it back on himself. He’d gone from his family to Lestat to Claudia, and now an empty house.

“I won’t,” Claudia says, and it almost sounds like a promise. “I’ll focus on class, and makin’ friends, and partying, all the college stuff.”

Louis pulls back to raise an eyebrow. “What was that last one?”

Claudia just smiles beatifically up at him. “So, are you not mad at me?”

Louis purses his lips, but lets it slide. “I’m not mad,” he reasserts. “But you’re still in trouble. Phone?”

“Daaaad,” she whines, but complies easily enough. From the self-satisfied gleam in her eyes, Louis knows that she knows he’ll only be able to hold onto the phone for so long.

Claudia is in the business end of play rehearsals, a leading part for her last production with her high school theater troupe. A high school adaptation of Clue, and Claudia is their Miss Scarlet. They have rehearsals every single day, and while she can usually get a ride with a friend, Louis has had to be on call just in case. Hence the continued need for Claudia to have a phone, since she’s seemingly incapable of memorizing 10 digits of Louis’ phone number.

Louis has been running the lines with Claudia on weekends, who insists on practicing, though Louis is sure she knows her lines better than Lesley Ann Warren at this point. She takes it so seriously, in a way that makes Louis ache with nostalgia, remembering Lestat when they first met. The same kind of single-minded determinism, an obsession with perfection gilding over a sense of insecurity.

So much of Claudia reminds Louis of Lestat these days. Her mercurial moods, the way she cuts her food so neatly just to scarf it down as fast as possible, her expressive face. How she will sit and watch him for a moment, some thought forming in her mind and on her face, and then it’s out of her mouth before she even processes it. Louis wishes for nothing more than to be able to turn to Lestat in these moments and share in the wonderful amazement of having a piece of him just out in the world.

Lestat should go to Claudia’s play. Louis told him as much over text, which Lestat has ignored. Lestat was 30 minutes late to Claudia’s freshman year debut (“She is playing a role with one line entirely invented for the show. Shakespeare is rolling in his grave.”), something he has never lived down in their family. Since, he’s never missed a Claudia performance, even the year that he and Louis couldn’t be in the same room without starting an argument. They’ve always brokered peace to watch Claudia prance around on stage.

But Lestat is hurt and throwing a tantrum, and even if the consequence of that tantrum is their daughter, Louis knows he has to address the underlying hurt with the tantrum. So he goes to Claudia. He asks her, multiple times. “Are you sure you don’t want to invite Lestat?” over and over again, Claudia always dismisses him with an eye roll or a stuck-out tongue or even a scoff. But last night, she’d said, in a voice that reminded Louis of when she barely came up to his knee, “If you want to, you can invite him.”

Louis, elated, waits for Claudia to retreat to her room and slips out the back door to call Lestat. Who surprisingly picks up.

“Yes, Louis?” he says, and Louis has to close his eyes for a moment as the sound of Lestat’s voice washes over him, warm and familiar even with the tinny phone speaker quality. He hasn’t spoken to Lestat or seen him in two months, since that day on his porch. It’s the longest Louis has gone without seeing Lestat since they met.

“You comin’ to Claudia’s play?” he asks, sitting on one of the chairs they have out in the back. He wants a cigarette, sitting here staring at the ashtray that he and Lestat used to fleck ash into every evening after Claudia went to bed, sharing a few moments together in the humid New Orleans nights. Something sparks in his memory, and Louis searches the underside of the table with his hand, grasping along something taped there. He pulls it off with a smile, taking the box of cigarettes and lighter out of the plastic baggie.

“I was not under the impression that I was welcome,” comes Lestat’s answer, after a long moment of silence.

Louis flicks the lighter a few times before it catches and lights a cig. He wonders if Lestat can hear it over the phone speaker. Lestat probably has one of his own between his fingers right now, tobacco being the one vice he’s never given up. Louis hadn’t even smoked before meeting Lestat, but it became a thing to do together, a reason to meet in a darkened alley or slip out of a party early to be in each other’s presence. Lestat used to light only his own cigarette, inviting Louis in to light his own off the burn of Lestat’s, which was already between his lips. The early rituals of seduction that Louis fell into without a second thought.

“She told me I could invite you,” Louis says, watching the smoke billow around him. “I think she really wants you there.”

“You think?” Lestat repeats, voice flat. “I still have not heard a word from her.”

“And have you reached out at all?”

Louis can practically hear the dismissive flick of Lestat’s head, see the way his hair whips around his face as he scoffs off Louis’ words. “Is she waiting with bated breath to hear from me? I had thought she wanted nothing to do with me.”

“Lestat,” Louis says more firmly, done with the game they’re playing. “She’s a teenager. She’s being stubborn and self-righteous. What’s your excuse?”

Lestat hums. “Oh, you know me. What is it you diagnosed me with? Narcissistic Personality Disorder?”

It’s like Lestat can remember every single word exchanged between the two of them during their divorce proceedings, but nothing else. He remembers things Louis has long forgotten in his pursuit of trying not to hate himself. Like the insults, deeply meant at the time but since regretted, that Louis would lobby constantly while Lestat sat there and laughed or mocked or deflected.

“It’s like you don’t even care about your daughter,” Louis sneers. The cigarette is now long forgotten, burning away in the ashtray. “This is her last school play.”

“Yes, some high school production of Clue. I ran her lines with her so much that I could go up there and perform a one-man show. I don’t really see the need to watch inferior actors to myself butcher a quite wonderful movie.”

“So you’re not gonna go? That’s it, then?”

Another long silence, where Louis can hear Lestat breathing. He hears the rustle of papers as well, and wonders what Lestat was doing when Louis called. Maybe he was at his piano, like he often is in the evenings, filling the silence that he can’t stand with music.

“I’ll try to come,” Lestat finally says, voice quiet and small. “If that’s what she wants.”

Relief and something like excitement flood through Louis. “Okay, I can get you a ticket.” He already has one, purchased as a precaution when the tickets went on sale. “I’ll get there early and save you a good seat.”

“Yes,” Lestat says, sounding a bit distant. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Louis, I’m feeling rather tired all of a sudden. I must leave you.”

“Sure,” Louis says, a fond smile on his face. “I’ll see you, Les.”

Lestat makes a small noise, then, “Goodnight, Louis.”

“Goodnight.”

Next week is the week of the play. Louis got them tickets to the first performance on Friday night. By Wednesday, Claudia has worked herself into a frenetic ball of energy, as she always does on show weeks. Louis can’t believe he ever thought Claudia would want to be anywhere but Los Angeles, where she’ll fit right in with those specific artist types.

On Friday, she’s quiet for most of the ride to school. Louis lets her stew in it, watching her read over her lines like she would have somehow forgotten her part. He won’t see her again until after the show tonight, when they’ll get dinner, and he can ply her with the praise she always wants desperately.

“Is Lestat coming?” Claudia asks, looking out the window of the passenger side with affected casualness.

Louis had sent Lestat his ticket that morning, to which Lestat sent a thumbs-up emoji. That seemed like a good sign. “I sent him his ticket,” Louis says. “He should be. I’ll save him a seat, since we know he likes to be late.”

Claudia smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Her shoulders are stiff, and she won’t stop bouncing her leg, an action that makes the car shake a little as they drive. She has her script in her lap, wrinkled from how she grips it.

“Are you nervous?” Louis asks, which makes Claudia snap her head towards him, eyes wide. They stop at a red light, and Louis watches the morning light dance across her face. She looks particularly young, small, and soft in the front seat of the car.

“No,” she says mulishly. “I know, I know my lines. Can’t say the same for everyone else, but what can you do?”

Louis smiles fondly at her. “You’re gonna do great. Or is it break a leg? What should I tell you?”

Claudia rolls her eyes. “Drive, Dad, the light is green.”

It is, so Louis presses the gas, looking away from his daughter and towards the road. When he gets to school, he once again wishes Claudia luck and tells her he’ll see her that evening. Then, he allows himself a couple of hours of wallowing in the idea of his baby girl growing up and ending her high school theater career. This might be the last time for a while that Louis gets to see her perform. Another reason he wants Lestat there; it’s for his sake too, not just Claudia’s.

Louis gets there early in the evening, though there is already a small crowd of parents. He says hi to the ones he recognizes and finds the ideal seats, middle of the row, a few rows back so that Claudia will see them easily. Using his jacket to save the seat next to him, Louis texts Lestat where he’s sitting, and then goes through his emails while waiting for it to start.

The auditorium gets increasingly more crowded, and Louis can feel the annoyed stares of other parents when they see the empty seat next to him. Louis swipes back to his text thread with Lestat, wondering if he missed a reply. There’s nothing there. Now, worried, Louis checks on WhatsApp, which Lestat has solely because his mother refuses to get an iPhone, to see when he was last active. It says 20 minutes ago.

Annoyance, then anger, takes over the worry. The show starts in five minutes; the lights are starting to dim. Louis pictures Claudia backstage, a ball of nervous energy, tapping her shoe against the stage floor in a rapid sequence to try and control her energy. She’s going to enter on stage, scan the crowd, and know immediately. Just as the lights flash, Louis takes out his phone to send Lestat a furious text, then puts it on Do Not Disturb and watches the curtain rise.

It’s the last straw, the look on his baby girl’s face when she sees the empty seat next to Louis. The brief flash of profound disappointment before Claudia schools her features back into a beaming smile, the mask of the character slipping over her face. Louis’ fury radiates from him for the rest of the show, like he’s seeing everything tinged red as Lestat somehow finds a way to ruin this for him when he’s not even here. Louis can barely pay attention to the play, or Claudia’s surely wonderful performance, thinking about what could possibly be more important to Lestat than being here right now. He didn’t even have the courtesy to tell Louis he wasn’t coming.

Claudia recovers admirably, Louis is sure, somehow more used to this particular brand of disappointment than Louis is. Louis knows it took a lot for Claudia to be okay with inviting Lestat, and he’s burned any and all goodwill that might have still been lingering between the two of them. And like always, here is Louis to try and salvage something from the wreckage. To be the only adult in the room, as always.

Lestat never messages him back. Louis checks as soon as the lights go up, after giving Claudia the appropriate standing ovation. His car better be in a fucking ditch, Louis thinks as he waits for Claudia in the atrium outside of the auditorium. Happy families all around them, mothers and fathers flanking a child. Louis stares at his sad bouquet, wilted from the heat of his drive over here.

He feels Claudia before he hears her, her small arms wrapping around Louis’ waist, her head buried in the side of his torso, no doubt smearing stage makeup all over his nice button-down. Louis just lays his arm around her back, anchoring Claudia to him for a moment.

“You were amazing, Claudia,” Louis says. “Best performer there.”

Another moment, and Claudia pulls back from him, her face just as it was on stage, like a mask she’s slipped on and forgotten to take off. She grins at him, and it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You’re just sayin’ that, Dad. Everyone thinks that about their kid.”

“Yeah, and I’m the only one who’s right.”

Louis gives her the flowers, which Claudia smiles softly at. He and Lestat have been getting her the same bouquet since she started doing theater in middle school, the same yellow roses and baby’s breath and eucalyptus that she always leaves on her bedside table until the whole room smells like rotten flowers and there are petals all over the floor.

She turns them over a couple of times in her hands, then hands the flowers back to Louis. “Some of the cast is gonna go get something to eat. Lena’s driving me; can you take those home and put them in water?”

Louis frowns. “I thought we were gonna get dinner?” They have a reservation for three at Claudia’s favorite restaurant, which Louis was going to try to get changed to two before they got there.

Claudia smiles sadly. “S’okay, Dad, you don’t have to try and make it up for him. I’m fine.”

His brow furrows further. “You don’t have to be. I’m here if you wanna talk or just sit or whatever. I’m not going anywhere.”

A wider smile now. “I know. Right now, I want to go hang out with my friends and celebrate my last opening night. You okay?”

Louis almost rolls his eyes and decides against it. “I’ve been dealing with Lestat for a lot longer than you. I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Claudia says in a sing-song voice. She starts to walk away, still facing Louis as if she’s afraid he’ll break down at any moment.

“Be home by midnight!” Louis calls after her.

“As if you’ll even be awake to check!” Claudia calls back and then gets absorbed into a group of teenagers, all lauding her with praise.

Louis stands there for a moment, long enough for the anger to creep back from where it had retreated while speaking with Claudia. He looks down at Claudia’s bouquet and sees it’s shaking. His hands are shaking.

When he gets behind the wheel of his car, Louis moves on autopilot. Before he knows it, he’s parked in the driveway of Lestat’s house, right behind Lestat’s own car, conveniently not located at the bottom of a ditch or wrapped around a tree. Short of a brain aneurysm, Lestat is out of excuses, and they haven’t even spoken.

His hand grasped around the door handle, Louis reaches for his keys and sees the already sad bouquet, wilting further on the passenger seat. There’s already a loose eucalyptus leaf on the leather.

“Fuck it,” he whispers to himself and grabs the flowers.

Lestat opens the door while Louis is still stalking up to it, leaning against the frame in his house robe, a casual arch of his brow at the figure Louis cuts. It’s late, but the summer sun hasn’t completely set, and Lestat is bathed in the twilight glow of the evening. His eyes are almost purple, raking up and down Louis’ figure and landing on the flowers.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Louis?” Lestat asks. “And for you to bring me flowers as if we’re courting again?”

“These aren’t yours,” Louis snarls. “They’re Claudia’s, and you’re gon’ put them in water so they don’t die while you explain to me why you couldn’t get off your ass and go to your daughter’s last play?”

Lestat sighs dramatically, plucking the bouquet out of Louis’ hands and wooshing his way into his home. Louis follows him, tread heavy, as he watches Lestat fill a vase with water and carefully begin snipping the ends of the flowers with his kitchen shears.

“You came straight here from it? Was it any good?” Lestat asks, as if he’s inquiring about the latest Marvel movie or a new coffee shop.

“You’re unbelievable,” Louis scoffs. “Genuinely, genuinely, what is your problem? You had somewhere better to be? Some drugs to snort, some hole to fuck?”

Lestat snips the end of the eucalyptus with a particularly aggressive slice of the scissors. His face is unreadable as he carefully works the stem into the crowded vase. Louis lets the silence close around them, his anger making the room claustrophobic as Lestat does his best to pretend like it’s not there.

“She did not want me there. She never asked,” Lestat says finally. “It’s admirable that you want so desperately to fix this relationship, but really, Louis, it is more doomed than our marriage was, and you gave up on that rather quickly.”

Louis’ teeth grind together; his jaw hurts from how he’s clenched it all night. The familiar sensations of being angry at Lestat.

“She did ask you,” he says through a tight mouth.

“No, you asked me on her behalf,” Lestat counters. He inspects the flowers and then sets the vase back down, satisfied. “What were her words exactly? Did she say, "Oh, Daddy Lou, please, please invite Lestat"? I want him there so badly,” Lestat pitches his voice up, a ridiculous caricature of a Southern belle. “Or was she simply indulging you as she often does, feeling so responsible for your emotional state?”

Lestat’s incisiveness steals the words from Louis’ mouth for a moment. He often forgets how much Lestat knows, how much he hoards until he can deploy it at just the right moment. How he can see right into the heart of the matter if he truly wants to.

“Does it make a difference?” he asks, some of the fight leaving him as the absurdity of the situation finally hits him. “Claudia was expecting you there, and you weren’t.”

Lestat hums. “Yes, and your fury about it drove you all the way here to what? Yell at me? Haven’t we had enough of that, Louis? Come,” he says suddenly, pushing off the counter. “I need a cigarette.”

Louis follows Lestat through the house and out the back door onto the wraparound porch. There’s more furniture here than in the front of the house: a few chairs and a glass-top table with an ashtray. Lestat lounges in one of the chairs and pulls a pack out of his robe pocket. He lights a cigarette, takes a drag, then dangles his hand over the railing, letting the ash flake onto the lawn. If this were Louis’ house, he’d tell Lestat to be a bit more mindful of the grass. As is, he just sits across from Lestat.

Lestat offers Louis a cig. He frowns, nearly shaking his head, but his hand reaches out on instinct. Lestat smirks at him, lighting one by holding it in his mouth as the lighter passes over it. As he passes it to Louis, he’s careful to make sure the tips of their fingers brush together, and he watches as Louis closes his lips around where Lestat’s just were.

“Just tell me why, Les,” Louis says. He stretches his legs out, his exposed ankle brushing the toes of Lestat’s bare feet. “I know you got some fucked up reason that makes sense to you, so help me understand.”

Seemingly unconsciously, Lestat shifts his foot to press more firmly into Louis’ ankle, the skin-to-skin contact settling over both of them. He takes a couple of drags before answering, blowing the smoke out of the corner of his mouth to avoid it wafting over Louis.

“I am trying to get better at knowing when something is over, even when I don’t want it to be. No one likes a lingerer.” He says the last part with his eyebrows raised in humor, like this is a shared joke. “When our marriage was ending, it was quite interminable with all the startings and stoppings. If you had just been clear with me from the beginning that you wanted out, then I wouldn’t have stuck around so long.”

Louis’ brow furrows. “You wanted out just as much as me, Lestat, don’t lie.” Louis has the lipstick-stained shirts to prove it.

“I never wanted a divorce, Louis,” Lestat says. “That was all you.”

Louis scoffs. “Right, you cheat on me for a year, but I’m the one who wanted out of the marriage?”

Lestat laughs. “And how long were you checked out, hmm? I came home every day to a house that might well have been empty. A husband who would barely look at me. Who would retreat into his own world with our daughter and leave me on the outside in my own home.”

There’s real anger behind Lestat’s affected casualness, clear in the glint of his eyes and the set of his mouth. Louis is angry too, still simmering from early and now from the years of their marriage that they lived in quiet resentment with one another. It’s apt that this conversation, which began under the guise of Claudia, has morphed into one about their marriage. Caught between them since the first day.

“What, I was busy raising our daughter, and that means you can cheat on me?” Louis asks, incredulous.

“You did not love me, Louis!” Lestat exclaims. “Is it my fault for trying to find someone who would?”

Louis’ turn to laugh. “C’mon, Lestat, at least find a reasonable excuse. We were married, but I didn’t love you? I had a daughter with you, but that means I was checked out on our family?”

Lestat looks miserable now, jaw set and the corners of his eyes tight, like he’s trying not to cry. “I never said you were checked out with our family. You have always been a wonderful father,” he says quietly. “But every day in that house, I was on the outside looking in. I had trapped you into a loveless marriage that you wouldn’t even leave, and I was forced to see the consequences of my actions constantly. To live a half life with the love of my life, who couldn’t even return the barest hint of affection. And yet I wouldn’t have changed a thing, because to spend any time in your presence, Louis, was worth it.”

He hates Lestat like this, eager and open and embarrassing with not even a hint of shame. Like he’s never had any cause to be ashamed in his life, nothing to regret. A kind of disgusting vulnerability that is as unbearable to Louis as it is unfamiliar. And yet he loves it. He’s always loved it, the way Lestat can be completely himself, knows entirely what he wants. It makes Louis’ chest ache with tenderness. But he’s always been better at showing the hate than the love.

“I did love you,” Louis says, surprising Lestat as much as himself. He can see tears, unshed, forming in Lestat’s eyes. “I did. I d—if you never thought that, if you didn’t know, I’m sorry. I loved you more than I thought it was possible to love anyone. I felt it all the time; it was like being a fish in water, it became so obvious to me. I couldn’t imagine you didn’t know.”

Louis is crying now, too, their faces with matching tear streaks and red rims as they stare at each other from across the porch. He can feel it in his chest, all that love, all those years, right under the surface. He knew he was bad at expressing it, but still. It was unthinkable to Louis that anyone would believe he didn’t love Lestat. He thought it could be seen on his face, that strangers would spot him on the street and just know. That’s a man who’s in love. He wears it so wonderfully. Perhaps they did. But even if the whole world knew, Lestat didn’t.

“I had hoped,” Lestat says finally, voice thick with tears. He clears his throat. “And I think I did know, at the beginning at least. But towards the end, I thought I was projecting what I wanted onto you. I thought you needed an out.”

“So you cheated on me?” Louis asks, incredulous. Another one of Lestat’s logical traps that makes sense to no one on Earth but him.

Lestat laughs, a quick, bright thing. “Well, in hindsight, it was not my best idea. But I figured you either loved me enough to ask me to stop or hated me enough to leave me. And I got the answer.”

Louis’ stomach rolls, memories flooding over him in an unstoppable wave. He can see it now, Lestat’s fucked up, telenovela plan, and he can see how he walked right down the path that indicated hate to Lestat. He thinks about the couple’s counselor a friend recommended to them years ago, and nearly laughs out loud imagining her dealing with this.

“You were wrong, Les,” Louis insists. He leaps from his chair, unable to bear the distance between them anymore. Lestat watches him warily, staring up at Louis as Louis looms over him. Louis takes his face in his hands and says, “It was all kinds of wrong. Because I love you.”

“Louis,” Lestat breathes out, voice breaking.

Louis doesn’t give him a chance to say anything further. He pulls Lestat until his back lifts from the chair, and kisses him. Lestat makes a small noise, then his arms are snaking around Louis’ waist, pulling him in closer. Louis follows easily, kneeling on the chair, bracketing Lestat’s hips. He takes careful movements to make sure their lips stay attached, practically devouring Lestat. He feels hungry, starved, for this, for Lestat’s hot tongue in his mouth and his strong hands on his body.

Lestat makes a soft sound, breaking this kiss for a moment to breathe heavily into Louis’ mouth. Louis brushes his thumb across the expanse of Lestat’s cheek, feeling tears gather on his finger as he does so. Lestat’s eyes are wet and tender, looking into Louis’ with a fragile hope that has Louis smiling back. Lestat brushes their noses together; they’re so close that Louis can no longer make out any features on Lestat’s face.

“I love you,” Lestat says right into Louis’ mouth. “I always will, Louis. I’ll be anything you want me to be, anything. But I need you to tell me what this means to you.”

Louis grins, then kisses Lestat again just because he can. It’s short, chaste, just something that he does to do it. “Would you like to try again? Be a bit kinder to each other this time? I’ve missed you.”

“Yes,” Lestat says immediately, making Louis giggle. “I would want nothing more, mon cher.”

“Mon cher already, huh?” Louis teases.

“Please, it’s been torture keeping it in these past two years.”

He does look adequately miserable, so Louis rewards him with another kiss. This time, he threads his fingers through Lestat’s long locks, cradling the back of Lestat’s head. Lestat is, just like Louis’ memory, a sloppy, amazing kisser. He licks along the backs of Louis’ teeth, making Louis moan, then nips at his bottom lip, tugging him down into the seat. Louis goes easily, pressing their chests together to feel the heat of Lestat through their clothes. Lestat’s robe has fallen open, but he’s wearing a white tank top under it. The hand not in Lestat’s hair grips the now bare shoulder, and Louis digs his nails in when Lestat scrapes his teeth along Louis’ jaw.

“Les,” Louis whines, but Lestat doesn’t do much else. He eventually stops kissing Louis altogether and just holds him close, allowing Louis’ head to rest in the crook of his neck. Louis inhales the familiar scent of Tobacco Vanilla by Tom Ford and the drugstore shampoo that is somehow enough to get his hair so luxurious. Lestat’s hands draw small circles on Louis’ back; one of them has slipped under Louis’ shirt to brush along the bare skin of his lower back. Louis shivers pleasantly, content enough to ignore how uncomfortable it is to squeeze into patio furniture built for one.

“Claudia is gonna be angry with us,” Louis says eventually. He moves to get off of Lestat, but Lestat makes a noise of protest, gripping his waist tight. With a roll of his eyes, Louis settles awkwardly into the small gap between Lestat’s body and the arm of the chair, still half on Lestat’s lap. It makes him feel more equipped for the conversation they’re about to have.

“Yes, well,” Lestat says succinctly. With his free hand, he gets a new cigarette and lights it. Louis tilts his head at Lestat until he places one between Louis’ lips. Louis leans forward to light it with the end of Lestat’s. “It’s not her marriage, is it?”

“She’s still our daughter,” Louis says.

“And she’s almost an adult,” is Lestat’s answer. A fair one, though Louis doesn’t particularly like it. “She’ll be in university soon. Perhaps it’s time for her to learn that you can make decisions without her. Want different things than her. Love different people than she does.”

He says the last part distantly, and Louis frowns. “She loves you, Les.”

“She wants me dead, Louis, she said it herself.”

Louis’ heart aches in his chest. He wants to say no, she doesn’t. He wants to say you weren’t awake when she saw you in the hospital. He wants to say she’s the only person I know who is more stubborn than you. “She didn’t mean that, Les. She wanted you there, tonight.”

Lestat shrugs lazily, flecking ash off the tip of his cigarette into the patch of lawn where nothing grows. “She can want many things at the same time. She still wishes I were dead. She’ll be grateful for it in the future. A full sever.”

Louis laughs nervously, Lestat’s moroseness choking him. The real reason finally emerging, the answer Louis was seeking when he stalked into this house. “Lestat, you sound insane. You seriously think this is what she wants? To never see you again?”

“I’m sure we’ll talk on holidays and birthdays,” Lestat muses. “And I’m sure you will continue to meddle. But I think it would be easier, don’t you? She is quite pernicious when she doesn’t get what she wants.”

Louis lets that lie between them, lingering in the air with the cigarette smoke. The two most stubborn people he knows. It’s hard to feel pessimistic about it, though, pressed against Lestat, halfway to being a family again. Like these past two years were all just a bad dream that they’re slowly waking up from, stitching back together and treating one another kinder.

january, 2027

He almost doesn’t pick up the phone. Louis only really looks at the caller ID to do something other than keep arguing with his daughter about her driving lessons. When it says the local hospital, Louis frowns and steps out of the room to answer, just a warning look over his shoulder at a pouting Claudia.

Three minutes later, he’s pulling on his sneakers and searching frantically for his car keys.

“I have to go,” Louis tells Claudia, not even looking at her as he shifts through the mail bowl. Has Claudia moved them? Did she borrow the car to practice without telling him? “Where are the keys?”

“What the fuck?” is Claudia’s answer. “Dad, it’s midnight. Where are you going?”

Louis looks at her, takes a pause, catalogs the concern and confusion across Claudia’s face. He thinks about telling her, weighs the pros and cons. They were vague on the phone, but Louis can read between the lines, and he has a pretty solid, sinking idea of why Lestat is in the hospital.

“It’s going to be fine,” Louis starts with a lie, to himself and to her. “That was the hospital. I’m still Lestat’s emergency contact. I’m gonna go see him, but I should be back by morning.”

Another lie, which does nothing to stop the wash of fear over Claudia, who all of a sudden looks very young, clutching her arms around her torso and looking up at him with wide eyes.

“I want to go,” she says, starting her own search, for her shoes and the keys. “I’m coming with you.”

Louis can’t even begin to explain why that’s a bad idea. “Claudia, it’s a school night.”

“So?” she says, almost hysterical. “I think this is a fair reason. What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Not technically a lie, but it still feels like one. “They told me he’s stable, but, uh, not much else.”

“I’m going,” Claudia says, already pulling a jacket on. She reaches into the deep pocket of the denim and pulls out the car keys, handing them to Louis.

Louis gives her a look, trying to communicate that they will talk about her stealing of the keys at a later date, but he knows it holds no weight right now, with Claudia pushing past him out the door.

The car ride is tense and silent. Claudia chews at her nails in the passenger seat, bouncing her leg the entire time. Louis wonders what she thinks is happening, if she thinks Lestat has been hit by a car or suffered a brain aneurysm. He wonders if it’s better, to have no idea what they’re about to walk into, or to be him, knowing with an almost suffocating certainty what Lestat has done to himself.

He should’ve made Claudia stay home. It’s late, already past 11:30, and Louis has no idea when, or even if, they’ll be allowed to see Lestat. And if they do, what Louis will tell Claudia about why her father is in the hospital. She is still so young in so many ways, still sees her parents as indestructible. Still doesn’t know about the parts of them that they shield her from. Maybe he should warn her, but Louis holds his tongue on the slight chance it is some kind of other disaster.

It’s a late Tuesday night, and the emergency room isn’t very busy. Louis sees a couple of other parents, with small children in their laps, and some exhausted people waiting for whoever they love to be treated. There’s someone checking in at the desk, so Louis waits impatiently behind her, tapping his foot and checking his watch. Claudia stands at his side, her small hand gripping his elbow tightly. Louis doesn’t know if she's shaking or him, or maybe both.

“We’re here for Lestat de Lioncourt,” Louis says the second they get to the front, not even letting the nurse greet them. “L-I-O-N-C-O-U-R-T,” he spells out, watching her type in the name. When it loads, he tries his best to read anything in the nurse’s expression, but she’s likely very used to situations like this and gives nothing away.

“You can have a seat, sir,” she says, looking at him over the top of the computer. “A doctor will be out shortly to speak with you.”

Louis stands this for a moment, clenching his jaw and considering demanding to be let back immediately. But Claudia pulls on his arm, so he follows her to the hard plastic chairs, slumping in one and tilting his head up with his eyes closed. The fluorescent lights beam brightly, lighting up the inside of his eyelids and putting Louis even more on edge. He can’t remember the last time he was in a hospital. Claudia fell off the swing set when she was 7, and he freaked out. After hours of sitting around, they found out she only had a sprained ankle. That was nearly 10 years ago.

“Why won’t they just let us see him?” Claudia asks from beside him, voice small.

Louis sighs, then lifts his head back up, opening his eyes. He turns to look at her, trying his best to look like he should, like a parent who can take care of something. “I don’t know,” he says. “But we’ll find out soon, okay?”

Claudia frowns, but nods, then rests her head on Louis’ upper arm. Louis shifts to wrap his arm around her, pulling her closer against his chest. They sit there for a minute or two before Louis hears Lestat’s name being called. They both get up, and Louis turns towards Claudia.

“Just stay here for a moment, okay?” he tells her, and she looks like she wants to argue. “I’ll come right back here and tell you what I know.”

She, surprisingly, says nothing further and lets Louis meet the doctor alone. The doctor looks young; Louis searches for her badge and sees “RESIDENT” printed clearly on the bottom. She must be a first-year, looking around over both their shoulders like she’s waiting for an adult to come over and deal with the situation. Louis finds himself wanting the same, wanting the attending or the fucking chief to come out and tell him what’s happening to Lestat.

“You’re Mr. Lioncourt’s family?” she asks.

“Yes,” Louis says. “Louis du Lac.”

The resident, Dr. Finneman, according to her badge, smiles kindly at Louis before speaking again. “Mr. Lioncourt was found unconscious in his home earlier this evening from an apparent overdose. He had a large gash in his side, seemingly from falling, and there was drug paraphernalia around him when he was found. He was administered Narcan on site and briefly regained consciousness before losing it again in the ambulance. He has woken up a few times since arriving here, but has been confused and panicked, so we’ve put him under sedation in order to treat his wound and run some tests. Right now, he’s stable but still unconscious.”

Louis leans against the wall, squeezing the bridge of his nose to attempt to relieve the headache that’s emerging. His breathing feels shallow, like he can’t get enough air into his lungs no matter how deeply he inhales. It’s somehow worse and better than he thought. Why would Lestat do this?

“So, he’s okay?” Louis finally asks, forcing himself to look at the doctor again. He can hear his heartbeat in his chest, faster and faster as he processes Dr. Finneman’s words. Lestat, overdose, unconscious, stable.

“From what we can tell right now, yes,” she answers carefully. “We’ll know more when he wakes up. I was wondering if you could answer some questions for me.”

Louis frowns, already itching to get back and see Lestat. This resident blocks his path back, staring at Louis with trepidation, as if she too has no desire to go down this road. Louis wonders how rude it would be to ask to speak with her attending.

“Uh, sure,” he says instead, too tired to have any fight in him.

“You are his husband, correct?” she says, glancing down at the part of the chart that must have the emergency contact information.

Louis chuckles wryly. “Ex-husband,” he clarifies. “The form must be a couple of years old.”

“Ah, okay,” she frowns. “But you’re in contact with him?”

“Yes, we share custody of our daughter.”

“Has he been acting differently lately? Or said anything that you think might be relevant?”

Louis knows what she’s asking. He thinks back over the past week or so, stomach churning. Lestat had come by a week ago to drop off some bedside table the two of them had argued about for weeks during the divorce, apparently finally agreeing that it didn’t work in his new place. He’d also given Claudia something, some kind of locket that she’s been so protective of that even Louis hasn’t seen.

Louis had thought he’d recognize it, when it was happening again. After Paul, he’d spent ages on support blogs and websites about recognizing the signs. He thought he’d internalized it, but maybe nearly 20 years have made him forgetful, neglectful.

He watches the resident watch him, knowing that she’s waiting for an answer. Louis thinks about what he knows about Lestat after Nicki, Lestat before Louis. Of Lestat’s near primal fear of being trapped, of the detest in his voice when he spoke about where Nicki went in those few weeks after his first try.

“No,” Louis lies. “I mean, we’re separated but amicable. I haven’t seen him much in the past week, but nothing seemed off. Do you think he did this on purpose?”

He pitches his voice towards incredulity, as if the mere concept is impossible to grasp. It works; the resident frowns, glancing at the chart.

“It’s possible,” she says slowly. “We can’t know for sure until he wakes up and we talk to him. Does Lestat have a history of drug use?”

Yes, but not like this. Instead, Louis says, “More so when he was younger. Though I think he indulges more now that he doesn’t live with our daughter. So he’s going to wake up soon, then?”

“He’s under sedation now, but it should wear off in a few hours,” she says, then hesitates, chewing on her lip. “He, uh, we won’t know the full effects until he wakes up. Since his neighbor found him, we don’t know how long Lestat was unconscious.”

Something pings in Louis' mind. He reaches for his phone. “Lestat called me,” he says almost frantically. Her eyes go wide. “A few hours ago. 9:47.” He looks up from the screen. “That’s good, right?”

She smiles a tight-lipped smile. “Potentially, yes. The EMTs picked him up about an hour later. That’s a good sign, then.”

Relief floods through his body. “So can I see him?”

“Yes! Sorry, yes, please, you can follow me.”

Louis hesitates, looking back at Claudia, who has been watching them the entire time. He wonders how much she knows, or at least suspects. “Should I—my daughter. Can she come?”

The doctor pauses. “She’s allowed, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not sure how much she knows, but I can bring a social worker back to talk to you guys if you’d want some resources to explain it. She also might have some insight on how much your daughter should see.”

Louis has to concentrate to keep his face from souring. A social worker poking around their family is the last thing he wants. “I’ll just come back first, and then think about it. Let me go talk to Claudia for a moment.”

Claudia has her feet up on the chair, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her chin resting between her knees. She has the wide-eyed look of a child about to learn things she’s been shielded from her entire life. For one brief, selfish moment, Louis is furious at Lestat for putting him in this position, for making him the one to shatter this innocent world that Claudia has been living in. For choosing such a dramatic and unavoidable way of thrusting Claudia into adulthood.

Louis sits next to Claudia, resting a hand on her shoulder to get her attention. She startles out of her tight hold and whips her head towards him. Louis leans in close, trying to keep their voices low and undetectable by the seemingly omnipresent medical staff.

“Is he okay?” she asks, voice frantic and loud.

“They think so, yes,” Louis says quietly. “He’s under sedation, but the doctor said he’s stable and they’ll evaluate him more when he wakes up.”

“What happened?” she gets the message and whispers.

Louis rubs his thumb along his temple, taking a moment to really think about how to go about this. This would be so much easier if he had left her at home, if Louis had a chance to figure this out with an awake Lestat. Though he thinks he knows what Lestat would tell her, always pushing and pushing Claudia further along the road to adulthood, burdening her with more than she can handle and watching her figure out how to carry it. In a way, here he is doing the same thing he always does, finding a way to get their daughter to grow up too fast.

“When Lestat and I were younger, before we had you,” Louis says with a smile, gesturing towards Claudia, “we made some bad decisions. We liked to have fun, too much fun, and we owned a club. We both agreed to stop when we brought you home, and we did. But since Lestat’s moved out, he’s been indulging more.”

“Are you saying he’s an addict?” Claudia asks, voice small and unnerved like a child. “He has a drug problem?”

Louis tugs on his bottom lip, trying to find the right phrasing so Claudia knows it’s not a drug problem, but a death problem. It would’ve been easier to explain a car crash or a health problem than this, this thing that Louis still can’t look in the eye, 20 years in with Lestat. The volatile, terrible things.

“He’s not an addict,” Louis says. “But the drugs are…a vehicle for him, sometimes.”

Claudia, smarter every day, frowns at him. “What are you saying? Did he do this on purpose?”

Louis looks over his shoulder to make sure no one is eavesdropping, then says, even quieter than before, “I don’t know. Maybe; it wouldn’t surprise me. But don’t tell anyone, okay? This isn’t our thing to tell; it’s his.”

She looks at him for a long moment, mouth slightly open and eyes moving rapidly over his face. “Are they going to take him away?”

A childish question, in a childish voice, echoing Louis’ own thoughts. He can feel tears pressing against the backs of his eyes, a future he can’t even bring himself to imagine looming right there. “No,” he says firmly, clearing his throat. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do, but we’ll figure it out together, okay? I’m gonna go see him now, and I’ll come back to get you.”

“I want to come with you!” she insists, standing up.

“Claudia, please,” Louis practically begs, pulling her by her wrist back into the seat. “Let me go see him, and I’ll bring you back as soon as I can. I promise,” he says, the last part as he’s standing. “I promise,” he repeats to her distressed face before going back to where the resident doctor is standing patiently at the entrance to the emergency room.

Dr. Finneman scans them back, then leads Louis to a room deep in the emergency room. It’s nearing the middle of the night, and surprisingly calm here. Lestat’s alone in his room, even, which Louis is grateful for. He’s sure he’ll be spending the night here, and he’s hoping to get some sleep, even in the uncomfortable chair to the side of Lestat’s bed.

“He should be waking up in a couple of hours,” the doctor, whom Louis forgot about the second he laid eyes on Lestat, says. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. I’ll bring you and your daughter visitors' badges.”

“Thank you,” Louis says distractedly, not even looking at her.

Louis’d thought the cliché of someone looking smaller than themselves would be true, but Lestat looks as much like himself as ever. He spans the bed, wide shoulders above the blanket they’ve tucked around his torso, muscular arms out over the sheet. His hair is a mess; Louis thinks he sees traces of vomit and maybe blood on the ends. He has a sudden thought of washing Lestat’s hair in the sink, like they used to do when they were first living together. He reaches out to brush some strands off Lestat’s forehead.

Is Lestat cold? Can he feel cold like this? Even in the New Orleans humidity, Lestat can get cold. Louis used to joke that the only reason Lestat moved here was that it was the hottest place he could find that spoke French. And Lestat would scoff, saying that the bastardized French of New Orleans might as well be a different language. And they’d both ignore the chill that seems to live in Lestat’s bones eternally, burrowed in during years of drafty childhood homes and towers.

Louis takes Lestat’s hand over the blanket, turning it over to look at his hospital bracelet. Absent-mindedly making sure he has the blood type right, then Louis strokes his thumb back and forth over the back of Lestat’s limp hand. He focuses on the rise and fall of Lestat’s chest, the steady beeping of the machines. There are deep, dark circles under Lestat’s eyes, ones that Louis can’t remember being there the last time they saw one another. How many of these small signs has Louis missed?

He sits there for ten minutes before he can’t ignore the buzz of his phone in his pocket, text after text from Claudia. Now that Louis has seen Lestat, he really doesn’t want to bring Claudia back here. But he promised, and Louis knows she’ll be like a dog with a bone until she can see Lestat. Louis reluctantly lets go of Lestat’s hand, picks up the badges that someone dropped off when he wasn’t paying attention, and heads back to the waiting room.

Claudia’s eyes are glued to the door, and they latch onto Louis immediately. She jumps out of her chair and meets Louis halfway, grabbing the visitor’s badge from Louis’ hands. “I can come see him now?”

Louis nods, but doesn’t start moving. “But then I’m taking you straight home.”

“Why?” Claudia's indignant. “I know you’re just gon’ come right back here.”

“I’m an adult,” Louis says sternly. “And Lestat and I got things to talk about when he wakes up. Adult things.”

She studies him for a moment. “You’re really not budging on this, are you?”

“No,” Louis says with an exhausted laugh. “I’ll carry you out if I need to.”

“Dramatic,” Claudia says with a small smile. She walks past Louis, but he grabs her by the arm to stop her.

“Just, before you go back there,” he says. “He looks…he’s fine, but it might be a lot. He looks tired.”

Claudia's face shifts, a grave seriousness over her features now. She nods, then walks forward again. Louis comes with her, keeping his hand on her arm and guiding her through the bright, harsh emergency room. There’s a nurse leaving Lestat’s room when they arrive, but she just smiles at them and tells them nothing new or even old. Louis closes the door behind them and watches Claudia.

She’s shaking a little, probably not even aware of it herself. She walks to Lestat’s side, running her hand down his arm, then grasping his hand. “He’s asleep?” she asks.

“Sedated,” Louis says.

“What happened to his head?”

There’s a small gash on his head, taped shut. Louis had noticed it too when he first saw Lestat and figured that’s where the blood in his hair came from. “He fell, they said. Must’ve hit his head.”

Claudia nods, then traces over the gash carefully. Louis half expects Lestat to wake at that, the soft touch of Claudia along his face. But he doesn’t, still as still as a statue, steady beeping filling the quiet room.

“Has this ever happened before?” Claudia asks in a whisper.

“Uh, no,” Louis says thickly. He blinks a couple of times to clear his head and his eyes. “Not while we’ve been together, at least.”

“Why’d he do it?”

So many questions Louis wants answers to, too. “I don’t know. Maybe when he wakes up, he’ll tell us.”

Her eyes snap to him, unshed tears glistening along her waterline. “You can’t take me home. I have to stay here with you.”

“Claudia,” he says softly, stepping towards her. “Please. Lestat doesn’t want you to see him like this.”

“But I already have!” she says hysterically. “You shouldn’t have—” she hiccups, placing a hand over her mouth. “You shouldn’t have brought me here.”

Louis pulls her into his arms, feeling her face, wet with tears, against his shirt. “I know,” he says miserably. “I know. I’m sorry. But you have to go home.”

She shakes his head against his chest, a fresh sob coming out. Louis strokes her back soothingly, letting his own tears run down his face and into her hair. Her hands cling to his shirt, gripping the fabric tight enough that it stretches along his back. Lestat can’t see this, Louis knows. He can’t know Claudia ever saw him here, knew about this.

Louis doesn’t know how long they stand like that, maybe 5 minutes, maybe 15, but eventually, Claudia is no longer crying and is just hugging Louis. He rocks her side to side for a moment, then pulls back.

“Are you ready to go home?” he asks as kindly as possible. She just nods her head, wiping her face with the back of her hand.

The drive home is silent, as is the house when they finally get there. Claudia immediately goes to her room, and Louis grabs a change of clothes, a phone charger, and, without thinking too much about it, a travel bottle of Lestat’s shampoo that’s still in the back of his bathroom vanity. He’s sure the hospital has at least a sink they can use if need be.

The chair next to Lestat’s bed is predictably uncomfortable. Louis gets maybe 45 minutes of restless sleep before he gives up and just sits there watching Lestat. A nurse comes in again to check on him and tells Louis that Lestat should be waking up soon. He’ll be disoriented, she tells him, but that will wear off. She also tells him to press the call button the second it happens. She says the last part seriously, like she knows Louis’ plans for private conversation. Louis also knows those conversations can wait, and he wants to make sure Lestat is healthy enough for them first.

Around 2:45 in the morning, Lestat stirs. Louis sits up immediately, alert and finger over the call button. As Lestat blinks his eyes open, he presses it.

“Louis?” Lestat asks, voice thick with his accent and sleep. “Where are we? Why aren’t you in bed with me?”

Louis smiles fondly. “Hi, Les.”

The click of the doorknob interrupts anything else he’d say, and a rush of doctors and a nurse comes in. The resident from earlier is there, along with, thankfully, someone who looks a bit more senior. Louis sits back and watches as they run a series of tests on Lestat, constantly asking him questions. Does he know where he is, does he know how he got here, has he ever thought about hurting himself, how often does he take opiates recreationally? Lestat gets with the program remarkably quickly and answers just as Louis expected he would, the lies and the truths.

When the doctors are satisfied, they finally step back, and Louis can see Lestat in his entirety again. They smile at one another from across the sea of people, and Louis could laugh with relief.

“You seem to have recovered remarkably well, Lestat,” the doctor Louis doesn’t know says. “We’ll keep you here for another 8 hours to monitor your heart, and after that, you should be good to go. I am going to leave you with some resources on substance abuse and addiction.” He lays some pamphlets on the table. Lestat looks at them with a small smirk. “They’re yours to take or leave, whatever your decision.”

“Yes, thank you, doctor,” Lestat says, that self-serving smile already back on his face. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d love a moment alone with my husband.”

Every person in the room then looks between Lestat and Louis, then the resident says, “Yes, of course. We'll come back to check on you periodically.” And then they are alone.

Louis looks at Lestat, looking right back at him, taking in the bloodshot eyes and the dilated pupils. Lestat seems to be waiting for Louis to speak, his shoulders slightly curved in like a child waiting to be scolded. To buy himself a moment, Louis looks at the pamphlets on the table, with their photos of pleasantly diverse, pleasantly banal people smiling, and the text advertising rehab facilities. There’s one at the bottom about mental health that Louis tries to subtly move to the top.

“Are you okay?” he asks eventually, trying to focus on what’s in front of him now, rather than the swirling questions of the future. “Like, not whatever medical bullshit they just told us. Are you okay?”

“Oh, you know me, Louis,” Lestat says, voice airy and thin. “There’s nothing I can’t endure. How is Claudia?” he adds before Louis can say anything else.

Louis sighs, pressing into his temple to try and stave off a migraine. “She’s home, asleep. I haven’t—she doesn’t know what happened,” he lies. Lestat looks relieved, and Louis is momentarily extraordinarily guilty.

Lestat nods, his hair shaking loose from behind his ears. Louis remembers the shampoo in his bag, right there hanging on the back of the door. “I didn’t—I’ve tried to keep her from this as much as possible. Both of you.”

Louis swallows thickly, then looks down at his hands. He’d forgotten to put on his watch, and he traces along the tan line. “How long has it been going on, then?”

“A few months,” Lestat answers quietly. “Halloween time, maybe.”

“You can’t do this shit with her in the house, Lestat,” Louis says firmly, looking back up.

Lestat takes it calmly, not even offended. Louis' defenses feel raised even higher around this version of Lestat he can’t understand, small and deferential. Which seems to be most versions of Lestat these days.

“I know, Louis,” he says quietly. “It wasn’t—I don’t keep anything in the house.”

Louis eyes him warily, the unsteadiness in his chest unrelenting. “Lestat, you can—is there anything you wanna talk about?”

Lestat gives him such a quintessential Lestat look, wide grin, gleaming eyes, as if that will allow Louis to ignore the bags under his eyes and the vomit in his hair. “While I appreciate the offer, I’ve already been set up with a variety of different people who seem so eager to speak with me. So you can be on your way, assured that I will never again expose our teenage daughter to the detritus of my life.”

Something tugs in Louis' stomach. “I’m not gonna take away your custody, Les.”

Lestat’s face takes on, for perhaps the first time since Louis entered the room, an honest expression. “I hardly think anyone would blame you.”

Louis shifts in his seat. “We’ll take a pause, obviously, for however long is needed. But it’s good to have her in your life, I think”

“And what about the other way around?” Lestat asks carefully. “Is it good for her?”

“Yes,” Louis says empathetically, the look on Claudia's face when she saw Lestat etched in his brain. “You’ll get clean and do whatever you need to do, and then we’ll get back on the schedule. Maybe you can start teachin’ her to drive again.”

Lestat snorts, then coughs, his throat probably still dry. Louis winces as he listens to it, but Lestat recovers and says, “I don’t think any of us want the consequences of that. If you thought this was bad…”

Louis laughs, his chest aching like it’s cracking open. “Don’t—Lestat, don’t joke like that. It’s not funny.”

Lestat raises an eyebrow, a smile wide on his face as Louis tries to control his hysterical giggles. The joke wasn’t even funny, but he’s more than a little delirious. It’s remarkable how this whole thing already feels like a bad dream, even as Louis is living it.

may, 2028

“Are you serious?” Claudia practically growls, staring at him in disbelief.

She’s sneering at him, and though she’s 17, a child, Louis feels sheepish and wrong-footed.

“It’s our marriage, Claudia, not yours,” Louis says calmly, repeating Lestat’s words.

“And what? I get no say because I’m only your daughter?”

She’s furious, Louis realizes. Practically incandescent with it, the anger flowing from her in waves. Louis, for his part, is surprised. He thought they all knew, were all in it together. That he and Lestat were gonna find their way back to one another eventually. Apparently, only Louis had a sense of the plan.

Maybe he should’ve taken Lestat’s advice and waited to tell Claudia. But Louis didn’t want to keep her from this; he had a feeling she’d be even angrier to discover they’d been hiding something from her. Besides, Louis had been, perhaps foolishly, excited and wanted to share that excitement with Claudia.

“It’s a good thing, Claudia,” Louis tries. He gestures for Claudia to come closer, to sit back down with him, but she just crosses her arms in front of him, frowning. “We love each other. We’re trying to be gentler with each other.”

“Are you only doing this so he doesn’t kill himself?” she asks callously.

“Claudia,” Louis warns, letting his anger come out, letting it wash over him like a hot bath. “Don’t speak about things you don’t understand.”

“Right, because I’m just some kid. Just some marble for you two to roll across the floor to each other til you get bored. And I was worried about you. Goes to show what an idiot I am. Of course, you’d run right back into his arms once you’re rid of me. It’s not about me. It’s never about me.”

But it is, Louis thinks. They got married for her. He remembers the first time he saw her, 6 months into a downward spiral that started with Lestat on his knees and a ring in his hand, 6 months of wondering why he deserved any of this happiness, any of this sanctity of marriage when it still felt so unnatural to him. And there was Claudia, beautiful and mute, showing him a way of being that made sense. A way of being a family, just like Louis always wanted.

Or maybe they had her to get married. It’s all the same to Louis, one big family.

“What do you want me to say here?” Louis is exhausted already from the conversation. “What are we supposed to do? Help me move us forward.”

Claudia shifts in her stance, hands on her hips. She’s standing while Louis sits on the couch, but even like this, they’re close to eye level. He can tell she’s trying to loom over him, exert some kind of power.

“I want you to tell me why he didn’t come to my play,” she says, eyebrows raised. Louis sighs, rolling his neck out and thinking of Lestat and severing and gratefulness. Of Nicki and Gabrielle and himself and Claudia.

“Did you ever apologize to him?” Louis asks, and regrets it immediately when Claudia’s face turns thunderous.

“Are you really blaming me right now? This is what always happens; God forbid I get in between the epic romance of Louis and Lestat!” she screams, gesturing wildly with her hands.

“I’m not blaming you!” Louis insists. “Just, he’s not always easy to deal with when he’s hurt, and sometimes you gotta recognize that.”

“And why do I have to deal with him? Isn’t it supposeda be the other way around? I’m the kid here.”

Almost an adult, Louis thinks but does not say. Old enough for her to cut Lestat where it hurts when she wants to, which seems to be all the time. The cruelty of a child with the cunningness of an adult.

“He’s trying,” is the best Louis can come up with. “And he and I, it’s not gonna change. It’s about him and me, no one else, not even you. It’s not me choosing him over you, or anything like that. I love you both. You’re both my family.”

He thinks about what Lestat would say. You are not a child who can crawl between us in bed anymore, or something equally as awful. Louis thinks he does a bit of a better job.

Louis can see tears gathering in Claudia’s eyes as her mask of resolve starts to waver. Her jaw trembles as she sits down next to Louis on the couch, far enough away that Louis would have to reach his arm out to touch her. He can see her anger so clearly, in the set of her shoulders, the furrow of her brows. The way her feet lay flat on the ground, pushing down like she’s ready to spring into action at any time.

“Why’d you even leave him, then?” she asks, looking straight ahead rather than at Louis. “If you were just gonna keep on loving him until you got back together? What was even the point of these last two years?”

What was even the point? A question Louis’ been having himself, thinking of the signed papers and the lawyer fees and the complicated business tax structures that lay in their wake. Maybe they had to do it wrong before they could do it right. Maybe Louis could recognize that Lestat and Claudia needed space from each other. Maybe Louis was trying to delude himself into thinking he’d choose the right person for once.

“I think we’ll be better off for it,” Louis says honestly. “All of us. And it’s okay if you’re mad at him; be mad at him for as long as you want. But I’m gonna need some compromise from the both of you here.”

Claudia crosses her arms, slumping back into the couch. “Well, I am mad at him. I’ll deal with it, though, as long as you don’t talk about him or make me see him.”

“Okay,” Louis agrees easily, smiling, despite himself. “But I am gonna be seeing him more, so I might not always be home.”

“Ugh, ew,” Claudia groans. “I don’t want any details.”

Louis laughs at the childish scrunch of her face. It all feels familiar in a warm and fuzzy way, despite the difficulty of everything else. It’ll be fine, Louis knows. As much as it pains him, soon, Claudia will be off in California, and the distance and time will help her understand better. And she’ll have to get used to it by Christmas, because Louis is not doing separate holidays like he’s a child of divorce. Louis even thinks he’ll be able to get some semblance of an apology out of Lestat by then.

They pass an uneasy week in this truce. Louis sees Lestat during the days while Claudia is at school, then spends his evenings with his daughter around the dinner table, avoiding talking about it. Claudia doesn’t ask, though Louis can see she wants to. She clearly wants to know how it’s going, whether due to morbid curiosity or repressed hope. Louis, true to his promise, doesn’t give her anything. However, she must be able to glean something based on how happy and light Louis has felt.

It’s almost like the early days of his and Lestat’s relationship, constant teasing and spending as much time as they can together. Louis is giddy with the constant undercurrent of hope, and he knows Lestat is, too. The feeling that it might actually work out this time, blanketed over them as they go to the movies, or get lunch, or roll around in bed for an entire day.

But then it’s the weekend, two full days of Louis unable to get away and go see Lestat. He’s sure Claudia would be fine on her own, but she insists on hanging out with Louis. She apparently has a TV show she’s been wanting to binge with him, and then some shopping for her graduation dress that Louis can’t say no to. She suspiciously has no plans with her friends for the first time in weeks. It’s quite elegant, really. Monday morning, he goes to see the person she learned it from.

Lestat takes Louis to Home Depot on Monday since he needs to replace his smoke detector, and neither of them sees the point of spending even an hour apart when they don’t have to. They wander through every aisle, then out into the humid garden center. Louis’ shirt clings to his back as Lestat, in his sheer long sleeve shirt, looks completely comfortable amongst the hydrangeas and the jasmine.

“Louis,” Lestat calls, leaning over to read the tag on a Meyer lemon tree. “Do you think this will survive in my backyard?”

Louis doesn’t respond or come closer, just watches Lestat mutter to himself as he reads over the care instructions on the little tree and touches the leaves curiously. He tries to picture the tree in Lestat’s small, fenced backyard. The two of them sitting on the back porch, the tree more grown, casting a shadow over the grass. Then he thinks, why should Lestat plant a tree in the yard of a house he won’t be living in for much longer?

“Why do you want a lemon tree?” Louis asks eventually, coming to stand next to Lestat amongst the citrus trees. Lestat is still looking at the tree, tracing over the branches with an absorbed look.

“Fresh squeezed lemonade sounds nice, non?” Lestat asks distractedly. “And things like lemon bars.”

Louis can suddenly feel tears pressing against the backs of his eyes. Claudia’s favorite dessert is lemon bars. She loves everything lemon, actually; he and Claudia used to spend Saturday mornings making lemon scones. He’d zest lemons until his fingertips were stained yellow, and Lestat would lick each one gently, face scrunching up at the sour taste. This must be what Lestat is thinking of as he looks at this tree reverently.

“What if you moved back in?” Louis asks before he can stop himself.

Lestat reels back, blinking at Louis. Louis presses on. “You could be closer to Claudia.” And me, he doesn’t add. “For these last few months before she leaves.”

Lestat frowns. “I am not sure that’s a good idea, Louis.”

Louis feels the familiar flame of anger rise in him, thinking about why Lestat wants nights to himself still, who he could be bringing to his bachelor pad. Before he can say anything, Lestat continues.

“I don’t know if we’re ready yet. That was the problem last time, non? Moving too quickly.”

It was. Louis moved from his family home into Lestat’s with barely any notice, subsumed into this life with each other. Before he knew it, they were married with a kid and more problems than he could count. Louis spent the last two years working his way towards some semblance of self. He never considered that Lestat might have been doing that too.

“You’re right,” Louis says. Lestat smiles, eyes twinkling like he’s going to remember Louis saying that forever. He probably will. “What about dinner? There?”

Lestat sighs, the earlier smile gone. “I don’t know, Louis. I think it must come from her.”

It did, though, Louis thinks, but does not say. He knows how much it took for Claudia to even ask Louis to ask Lestat to come to her play.

“I’ll talk to her,” Louis says. He steps into Lestat, wrapping his arms around Lestat’s waist and looking directly in his eyes. “If she says you can come over, will you?”

Despite their proximity, Lestat avoids Louis’ gaze, looking down. Still, he says, voice small, “Sure. If she says.”

Lestat doesn’t get the lemon tree, but it takes Louis showing him a Reddit thread about the poor quality of Home Depot trees. He does bookmark a local landscaping company on his browser, though, so Louis can’t claim a total win. Maybe he’ll just beat Lestat to it and get a tree planted in his own yard. He’ll need a project once Claudia leaves for school, more than just Lestat, and a garden sounds nice.

That afternoon, they take turns at the top of the ladder, trying to figure out the electrical wiring before Louis finally Googles it and gets it done in 5 minutes. Lestat laughs in delight when Louis gets it clicked properly into place, his blond hair cascading down his shoulders as he stares up at Louis, the sunlight filtering through the window in the front door to strike arrestingly across the planes of Lestat’s face. Louis has no choice but to beckon Lestat closer until his face is level with Louis’ torso, then lean down to kiss him.

Lestat sighs into it, craning his neck up as Louis bends his body down to deepen the kiss. Lestat’s hands find Louis’ waist, crushing the delicate fabric of Louis’ shirt between his fingers. Louis kisses him slowly, savoring the warm, wet press of Lestat’s lips against his own. When the angle makes his back start to hurt, Louis carefully steps down the ladder, keeping himself attached to Lestat. He finally breaks the kiss when they’re back to eye level, gripping each other tenderly.

“I’ll talk to Claudia about dinner,” Louis says, nosing along the curve of Lestat’s cheekbone.

“You are trying to soften me like butter,” Lestat groans. Louis smiles fondly at the mixed-up metaphor.

“Is it working?” he whispers against Lestat’s cheek, watching Lestat shudder minutely.

“No,” Lestat says dishonestly. “I am,” he breathes in sharply as Louis kisses the long column of his neck, “inébranlable.”

Louis hides his smile in the crook of Lestat’s neck. Lestat’s hands, over the planes of Louis’ shoulder blades, start stroking up and down. Louis relaxes into it, bringing one of his own hands up the expanse of Lestat’s back to fiddle with the ends of his hair. They stand like this for a moment, rocking gently against each other. Louis is half hard in his pants; he can feel the press of Lestat against him. They’ll get there later, he thinks, just enjoying their embrace for a moment.

“Perhaps I am softened,” Lestat says eventually. “I’ll come to dinner. But it will be a disaster; I’m warning you.”

Louis’ heart kicks in his chest with giddiness. “Come Wednesday. And it’ll be wonderful; maybe you can even stay over.”

Lestat pulls back slightly to look Louis in the eye, smiling. “Cher, your optimism is quite sexy. Misguided, but sexy.”

“Oh yeah?” Louis asks, raising an eyebrow. “Gonna do anything about it?”

Lestat’s grin gets a bit salacious, then he’s leading Louis up the stairs with a hand wrapped around Louis’ wrist. Louis follows him, giddy on the optimism surging through him.

The next day, when Claudia comes home from school, Louis is on the couch waiting for her, this time at the kitchen table with a laptop open that he’s idly using to check emails. She’s come to associate this waiting with Louis wanting to talk to her about something serious, and she’s immediately wary.

“Hi, Claudia,” Louis tries to project calmness and tranquility with his voice, smiling sedately at her.

“Hi,” Claudia answers apprehensively. She fiddles with the straps of her backpack, glancing over her shoulder to the stairs.

“I wanna talk to you about something,” Louis says, gesturing for Claudia to come sit. She does, though still suspicious.

She has on a t-shirt that Louis recognizes as one of Lestat’s, an early, rejected attempt at merch for the Azalea. The year is misprinted, making it seem like they established the bar in 0213. It’s much too big on Claudia’s small frame, and she has it tucked into a pair of frayed jean shorts. An outfit Louis has seen on Lestat himself many times.

“What do you know about Lestat’s mother?”

Claudia clearly hadn’t been expecting that, her eyes going wide. “Nothing, really. I know I have never met her since she lives in Europe.”

Louis hums. “Maybe that’s where she is. We don’t know, really. Lestat hasn’t spoken to your grandmother in years.”

Claudia, despite herself, is curious. “Why?”

Louis sighs, leaning back in his chair. He’d thought about this for days, weeks even, and still doesn’t quite know what to say. What to share with Claudia that will still protect Lestat. How to tell Claudia something about her father’s life that he himself hasn’t seemed to realize.

“I can’t tell you everything, since it’s not my place to tell, but Lestat and his mother were always close. Very close, too close even. She never wanted to have kids. It’s one of the first things she ever told Lestat, that she was never meant to be a mother. Lestat’s father was a difficult, terrible man whom his mother never loved. She didn’t want his children, but she had three of them, and Lestat was the youngest and the one she saw herself in.

“They did a lot together,” Louis continues, carefully studying Claudia’s face. She’s still so young, though older than Lestat was in that house. There’s so much she might not yet understand. “They would get dinner together and go see a show. He went with her to doctors’ appointments and the bank. She shared things with him like she would with a husband, if she had loved her husband.” And more things, things that Louis can share with Claudia without Lestat here too. He was in that house for a long time, into his 20s, under that all-encompassing presence of Gabrielle. He told these things to Louis with an off-handed casualness that wasn’t even faked. Like he thought what he was saying was normal childhood things.

“What happened?” Claudia asks, apprehension clear on her face.

“His father died,” Louis says with a shrug. “20 years ago, now. He moved to America, and she took the inheritance and started traveling. She stopped talking to Lestat once she got her freedom. He’ll hear from her every couple of years, usually a happy birthday text two weeks after his birthday or a ‘how are you’ that she never follows up on.”

His voice has turned bitter, sneering over the words. Lestat hadn’t, and still doesn’t, even see what’s wrong.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I think you should know that Lestat doesn’t always know what it means to love someone correctly. No one ever taught him, and he’s been punished for trying. You’re old enough to know now, and try to understand.”

“Why?” Claudia sneers. “So you can keep making excuses for him, and I just gotta accept it? Because he has mommy issues? You look past his shit because you’ll look past anything for him, but that doesn’t mean I have to. We’re not all as pathetic as you.”

She spits the last part, harsh enough that Louis winces. Claudia has been hiding her disdain for Louis and his decision-making recently, but she lets it shine through now. It cuts Louis harder than he thought it would, to see what his daughter really thinks of him.

“It’s not pathetic to have empathy,” Louis tries. “Especially not for someone who loves you, and you love in return. And because Lestat is coming to dinner tomorrow, and I want you to try to be nice.”

“What?” she shrieks, jumping up. “Why?”

“Because he wants to try,” Louis keeps his voice as calm as he can, trying to establish some kind of normalcy here. “Compromise, remember?”

Claudia makes a childish, high-pitched noise, then storms up to her room. Louis slumps in his seat, defeated, then calls Lestat, then hangs up before Lestat picks up, changing his mind.

Everything okay? comes Lestat’s text a couple of minutes later.

Yes, butt dial :), Louis sends back. Can’t wait for dinner tomorrow, he adds.

Lestat likes the message, but says nothing else further. Louis sighs, pocketing his phone and resting his head in his hands for a few moments. He knows Claudia will process what he told her while she’s alone in her room, that her too-big brain will speed towards answers and connections. Louis only hopes she chooses to act kindly with this information he’s trusted her with. There’s more, so much more, that she still doesn't know about Lestat. And Louis, for that matter. The lineage of family secrets that she’s starting to get old enough to hear.

The next morning, Louis is already in the kitchen when Claudia comes down. It’s like he hasn’t moved,the only sign that it’s a new day is Louis’ new clothes. Claudia pointedly ignores him, going wordlessly to the fridge for the milk. Louis listens to her pour out cereal, then milk, then grab one of her overly sugary Starbucks bottled frappuccinos, then she finally sits across from him. She’s put on her over-the-ear headphones, staring at her phone so Louis can’t catch her eye.

Louis sighs, then plucks the phone out of her hand. Claudia shouts in protest, looking up at Louis with anger on her face. Louis holds onto the phone and gestures for Claudia to remove her headphones. She does so with a glare, letting them rest on her neck.

“Tonight,” he says, making Claudia roll her eyes, “are you gonna play nice?”

“Is he?” she counters, lip curled in annoyance.

“Yes,” Louis answers simply, because Lestat should know there will be consequences if he doesn’t. “I’m doing this for you, you know. So that in 10 years, you won't regret anything.”

Claudia snorts. “Right, you’re so altruistic. What’s it that Lestat’s always callin’ you? Saint Louis?”

Louis gives her an unimpressed look. “I don’t want you to bring up anything I told you yesterday, okay? I don’t like Lestat’s mother, but he loves her and wouldn’t want you to know any of this.”

“I wouldn’t,” Claudia says, suddenly earnest amid the petulance. “Was he—did anything else happen? To him?”

Louis has to clench his jaw tight for a moment to keep his breathing even. “It’s not my place to talk about anything else. Maybe one day you can ask him.”

“So that’s a yes,” Claudia says under her breath, frowning. “You guys didn’t tell me any of this. What else do I not know?”

“You were a kid, Claudia,” Louis stresses. “You are a kid. And Lestat doesn’t share easy. I’m still learning things about him.”

Claudia swallows. She pushes her now forgotten Cheerios around her bowl, surely now too soggy for her to enjoy them. “I think you’re much more forgiving than me.”

Then, she stands up, puts her dirty dishes in the sink, and leaves to catch the bus without another word. When Louis hears the front door click shut, he lets go of a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

Louis spends the rest of the day trying not to think about the dinner. He throws himself into the prep work for dinner, spending longer than necessary in the grocery store comparing nearly identical heads of broccoli. He par-boils the potatoes before roasting them and makes the dressing for them from scratch, driving to the specialty Asian market for yuzu kosho. He roasts an entire chicken, though it’s just the three of them.

It’s easier to focus on the food than anything else. The food he can control, can make as perfect as possible. The food responds to his gentle coaxing and aggressive shaping, unlike Claudia, who retreats to her room the moment she gets home. Louis hopes she doesn’t plan on sulking there for the entire evening. There’s an entire chicken to eat.

Lestat shows up at 7:30 precisely, impeccably dressed and holding a tin-foil covered baking dish in one hand and a bottle of sparkling apple cider in the other. Louis relaxes immediately at the sight, leaning in to kiss Lestat, just a quick peck, before either of them speaks.

“I brought dessert,” Lestat says as he steps over the threshold. He holds the dish out to Louis, who takes it and peels back the tin foil. Lemon bars, he sees, smiling at the sight.

“You didn’t have to,” Louis says, though he’s already holding them preciously against his chest and carrying them to the kitchen to place in the fridge. “Did you buy that tree without telling me?”

Louis turns back towards Lestat from the fridge to see Lestat smiling.

“No,” Lestat says. “Lemons were on sale this week.”

They share a look, Louis tacitly agreeing not to call Lestat out on the pointed dessert, then Louis calls for Claudia to come down. After one long, tense silent moment, they hear her door open and close, then the pad of her feet down the stairs. She stops at the bottom, holding onto the banister as she stares at Lestat. Unlike him, she’s dressed almost too casually, in sweat shorts and a T-shirt that Louis knows for a fact has a hole in the armpit.

“Good evening, Claudia,” Lestat greets, nodding his head towards her. He keeps his hands grasped behind his back, and from this angle, Louis can see the whites of Lestat’s knuckles.

“Lestat,” Claudis says coolly, then marches past him to take her seat at the table. She chooses the head, sitting with pristine posture and her hands folded on top of the table.

Louis catches Lestat’s eye, who raises an eyebrow and shrugs one shoulder. He takes his seat with the bravado of a general taking his place at a war council. Louis follows suit, pleased, at least, that he can look directly at Lestat. He reaches his legs out to brush a roe along the arch of Lestat’s foot, urging him to relax.

“Louis, this looks wonderful,” Lestat says, gesturing at the array.

Before Louis can thank him, Claudia says, “Missed having someone play housewife for you, Lestat?”

She reaches across the table and grabs the largest drumstick. She takes an unceremonious bite, chewing as she glances between Louis and Lestat, waiting for them to react to her provocation. Lestat, to Louis’ gratefulness, does not. He simply serves himself, then Louis, passing the salad and the broccoli to Claudia, who dutifully scoops the vegetables onto her plate.

“Claudia, could you pass me the potatoes?” Lestat asks, the picture of politeness. Louis smiles encouragingly across the table.

Claudia grins sweetly at Lestat, then pushes the potatoes towards him. Then, just as he goes to reach for it, she pushes them even further so the trailing edge of his shirt gets caught, oil smearing over the white fabric.

“Oops,” she says angelically, fluttering her eyelashes. “Sorry.”

Lestat’s mouth presses into a thin line as he carefully raises his arm up, watching dressing clump the delicate fabric. He says nothing, but serves himself some potatoes. Claudia continues to eat merrily, ignoring Lestat.

“Claudia, do you want to show Lestat photos of the graduation dress we picked out?” Louis prompts.

They’d gone to the mall last week for Claudia to try on white dress after white dress, before finally finding one she loved. Louis had cried on the couch outside the dressing room in J Crew, as she twirled and pretended to throw a cap in the air. Graduation is a little over a week away; they only have two more months before Claudia is across the country. A different time zone entirely.

“Oh, is he coming?” Claudia asks, wide-eyed. “Didn’t know he had the time.”

“Of course he’s coming,” Louis says with a flash to Lestat, just to make sure he doesn’t try anything. Lestat nods.

“Of course I am coming,” Lestat confirms. “It’s your high school graduation.”

“Well, pardon me for being confused,” Claudia says, voice dragging over the words dramatically. “Just going off recent events and all.”

Lestat puckers, sits back in his chair, then speaks.

“Fine. Claudia, I apologize for missing what I’m sure was a riveting high school theater production,” Lestat says, looking right at her. She maintains her pristine posture, shoulders back and eyes hard.

“Had somewhere better to be, is it?” Claudia idly wonders, the sharpness of her gaze belying her true anger. “The floor of a bar bathroom? An Assholes Anonymous meeting?”

Lestat huffs loudly out his nose, grinding his teeth together as he forcibly relaxes his shoulders. “I mistakenly thought you did not want me there. Désolé.”

“Like you wonderin’ if anyone wants you has ever stopped you before,” Claudia says haughtily. Louis is about to open his mouth to scold her, but Lestat speaks first, voice hot and biting.

“If you had not been such an insipid enfant terrible, perhaps I would’ve thought it was worth my while.”

“Lestat!” Louis says sharply at the same moment Claudia scoffs.

“See, Dad, this is why it’s useless to even try. He’s never cared; I’m just something he appeases for you. We would’ve been better off without him.”

She pushes back from the table, the chair scratching against the hardwood in the harsh way that she always got yelled at for as a small child. Louis calls after her, but she ignores him, stomping up to her room. It leaves Louis and Lestat, across a full table with full plates and both expressions icy. Louis turns his gaze to Lestat, raising an eyebrow.

“What the fuck was that?”

“She was being difficult,” Lestat says petulantly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Was I supposed to ignore it?”

“Yes!” Louis practically screams. “She’s throwing a tantrum. Sound familiar?”

Lestat rolls his eyes. “You heard her, Louis. She knows what she wants, and it’s for me to disappear. I know I shouldn’t have indulged this.”

“So you’re giving up, then? That’s it?”

“Yes,” Lestat says simply, shaking his hair over his shoulders. “I’ll go to her graduation because I’m still selfish enough for that, but I’ll leave before photos. And once she’s at university, we’ll be more free to see one another.”

“Lestat,” Louis says, fear creeping into his voice. “Don’t—we can’t give up yet.”

“Yet?” Lestat says with a laugh. “I think we’ve already pushed this past the point of futility, don’t you? I can understand that she wishes I would’ve died, but I could do without hearing it every time I see her.”

Louis can see from the set of Lestat’s jaw and the tightness of his eyes that he’s holding back tears. He reaches across the table to grab Lestat’s hand, squeezing it. Lestat tilts his head back, sniffing.

“I know this is hurting you,” Louis says softly, to which Lestat laughs bitterly. “Both of you. But I don’t know what else to do.”

Lestat tilts his head back forward, opening his eyes, which are red-rimmed. “Leave it be, Louis. For both her and I. Let us figure it out if that’s what she wants. I don’t,” he sniffs again, looking down at their intertwined hands. “I don’t want this to ruin what is otherwise some lovely developments.”

The selfish, desperate part of Louis agrees. He squeezes Lestat’s hand again. “Okay,” Louis says, though he doesn’t like saying it. “She’s moving out there in late August. Signed up for some pre-quarter program that lets her move in early, didn’t even tell me,” he says ruefully. “That’s three months from now. Lots of time to fix it.”

“Yes,” Lestat says, then he smiles, not quite reaching his eyes.

“And the holidays, of course,” Louis continues, desperation leaking into his voice. “I don’t think she’s flying back for Thanksgiving, but she’ll be here for Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Yes,” Lestat repeats, his eyes staring blankly at the corner of the room. “Well, I think I better be going. I’m sure the food is lovely, Louis. I apologize that we couldn’t eat it.”

“Lestat,” Louis says, following him towards the front door. “You don’t have to go. Stay. Eat.”

“I do,” Lestat says sadly. He cups Louis’ face with his hand, pulling him in for a short, sweet kiss. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

Louis nods miserably, then stands at the doorway, watching Lestat’s car drive off. When the last of the exhaust is dissipated, he trudges up the stairs. He doesn’t even bother knocking; he just walks right into Claudia’s room. She’s on her bed, headphones on, staring up at the ceiling. Louis walks over and pulls the headphones off.

“Hey!” she yells, sitting up.

“What was that, huh?” Louis asks, too tired to put that much passion into it. He sits next to her on her bed. “What happened to compromise?”

“You heard what he said to me!”

“You were mean to him the second he arrived,” Louis says, unimpressed. Claudia huffs, crossing her arms but not saying anything. After the silence settles around them, he says, “He left, so you got what you wanted.”

“Really?” She turns to him, actually surprised. “When is he coming back?”

“He’s not.” Louis can’t keep the sadness out of his voice. “You happy? You won.”

She doesn’t seem happy, mostly confused, brow furrowed and lips downturned. “So that’s it? You’re done meddling?”

“Yes,” Louis sighs. “It’s—not good, maybe, for you two. I can see that now.”

Claudia uncrosses her arms, leaning back on them on the bed. “Thanks for trying, though. I know it meant a lot to you.”

He knows it means a lot to her, too, though she won’t say it. Louis just shrugs, resigned. He feels, for the first time, out of his depth in this. They sit in silence for a couple of minutes, just the unpaused music streaming from Claudia’s headphones, quiet and tinny.

“Can you at least eat some of the food I made?” Louis asks after a bit. Claudia snorts.

“Yes, I'll come down in a minute.”

Louis leaves her up there, making himself a plate and carrying it to his room. He hears Claudia go down later, moving around the empty bottom floor.

The rest of the summer moves both slowly and quickly, a steady spread of molasses over them that soon becomes suffocating. Louis bounces between Claudia and Lestat, done making excuses for the other but also careful not to mention one to the other if he can help it. Lestat does go to the graduation, but he arrives separate from Louis and sits alone; Louis doesn’t see him, but he does share the photos later, the ones of Claudia and Louis, Claudia and Grace, Claudia and Paul, Claudia alone. Lestat just sends back a simple Thank you.

On the 4th, Grace hosts a barbecue to celebrate her pool opening. Unlike the Juneteenth celebration the month before, which had felt too early and like the completely wrong environment, Louis brings Lestat. Everyone reacts with thinly veiled non-surprise, fake looks of shock on their faces when Louis explains they’re trying again. Lestat is dutifully quiet next to him, though they are always touching, bodies pressed close, which makes his mother look at them with disdain.

Claudia ignores both of them, spending the entire time at the pool, giggling with the twins and the neighborhood kids. Louis catches Lestat watching her during the fireworks show, the colors illuminating both of their faces. Louis rests his chin on Lestat’s shoulder, wrapping his arms around Lestat’s waist from behind. Lestat leans into it, placing his own hands over Louis’.

“D’ya want to come home with us?” Louis says into Lestat’s ear. “Have breakfast together tomorrow morning?”

He can feel Lestat shake his head more than see it. “You said you were done meddling, mon cher. You and I can go to that new brunch place tomorrow, if you would like.”

Lestat and Claudia aren’t in the same place for the rest of the summer. As Claudia’s moving date nears, the frantic nervousness in Louis skyrockets. He asks Lestat over and over again if he’d like to come over, to say goodbye, to see Claudia, to help fucking pack because Claudia, like her father, is an absolute diva while packing. Lestat refuses every time, but he asks pointed questions, clearly interested in what is going on.

On the day of Claudia’s flight, Louis sends multiple messages to no response. Even Claudia looks uncertain, glancing around like she’s expecting Lestat to jump out of the bushes or from behind the bookshelf to bid Claudia adieu. He doesn’t, and Louis has to usher Claudia out the door so they don’t miss her flight.

Louis pays to park so he can walk her into the airport, then sobs as he hugs her. She has tears on her face, too, when they break apart, though not nearly as many as Louis. He makes her promise three times that she’ll call him when she lands, and Louis is then alone, watching Claudia go up the escalator to security.

He drives home with tears still in his eyes, vision blurry enough that he drives slowly. The house is painfully quiet when he gets home, worse than those weekends during shared custody. Louis pours himself a glass of wine and sits on the couch in silence. 20 minutes later, his doorbell rings.

It’s Lestat, panting like he’d run here.

“Where is she? Is she gone?” he asked frantically, pushing past Louis before Louis could even answer.

“Claudia!” Lestat calls into the empty house, the name bouncing off the walls. “Ma cherie, Claudia!”

Louis can hear the strain in Lestat’s voice, and it’s no surprise that when Lestat finally turns around, sinking into the weight of Louis' palm on his shoulder, there are tears in his eyes.

“Is she gone?” Lestat asks, voice breaking. “Louis, did she leave?”

Louis can only nod jerkily and pull Lestat into him. He feels wetness at the crook of his neck, Lestat’s body shaking with sobs.

“It’s—it’s okay,” Louis says softly, not believing his own words as they leave his mouth. “It’s okay. She’ll be back.”

“She will never forgive me,” Lestat says, words muffled against Louis' skin.

Maybe so, Louis thinks. But they’ve all forgiven each other for much worse.

october, 2028

It takes Claudia a full month to unpack her luggage. It’s not that she’s lazy, though she has avoided telling her dad this fact for fear of being accused of that, but she and Louis purposefully packed her stuff by season. A suitcase of shorts and dresses, one of pants and long sleeves, and the last, untouched one of heavier sweatshirts and even a coat which, between New Orleans and LA, Claudia’s sure she’s never needed.

In October, Los Angeles is still beautifully warm and wonderfully lacking in humidity. But Claudia’s dorm has a central air system that they, cruelly, deny students access to. So it’s freezing in her room, which gets paltry sun, and the cold is making her sluggish. She has a paper due in 4 hours, and she needs her brain to kick into gear. Claudia finally pulls her last suitcase out from under her bed.

She shifts through it, looking for her favorite sweatshirt (oversized, Paris written across the front), and her hand closes around something crinkling. It’s a manila envelope, with writing on the front that’s clearly Louis'. She recognizes the handwriting and can read the words, but it makes no sense. He tried.

Ignoring her quest for her sweatshirt, Claudia frowns, lifting the envelope to test its weight. It’s full, but not very heavy, probably stuffed with loose paper and not much else. She unwinds the string and then pulls out a stack of papers.

Now, she sees Lestat’s handwriting. Thinner, more curved than Louis'; she recognizes it from the notes he would leave in her lunchbox in elementary school and the running list of groceries that was always tacked to their kitchen board. Claudia’s heart kicks up, blood rushing in her ears as she lays the papers out on her bed. There are at least a dozen, maybe more, filled with varying lengths of text, some in French, some in English, all in Lestat’s handwriting.

She rifles through them quickly, catching only pieces of phrases. I don’t know what to say, I can’t believe you, Je regrette, how could you say that, je suis désolé.

Claudia can feel her father through it, his reluctant regret, his residual anger. All these months, and Claudia still can’t get the look on his face as she threw herself out of the car out of her mind. The last time they spoke to one another, his jaw tight and his eyes a deep, angry blue. She had wanted to push him even more, test his limits over and over again, and she had found the edge.

Her hands are shaking as she picks up her phone. She deleted Lestat’s number months ago, in a fit of rage she’s regretted on and off. But luckily, her parents still pay for a landline, like they're in their 70s. Lestat used to call it when Louis would block him on his cell. She knows Lestat is back at the house; she heard him in the background of more than one of her calls to Louis. He was probably waiting with a moving van, watching for her car to pull away the day she left.

Her heart kicks like a horse in her chest as the phone rings. It’s 9 p.m. in L.A., so 11 p.m. in New Orleans. Late enough that her parents could be asleep. No one picks up, which Claudia thinks is for the best. She decides to leave a message.

“Hi, Dad. You can, uh, stop listening if you want; this one’s for Lestat. Actually, please stop listening.

“Hi, papa.” Tears sting her eyes, and Claudia pulls a sweatshirt out just to dab the corners of her eyes. “I wanted to tell you I started driving lessons again. There’s a girl on my floor; she’s teaching me. She’s from France, actually, but her accent is different than yours. She says it’s because she’s from Paris, and you’re, uh, provincial. She says my name the same way you do, though. It’s been remindin’ me of home.

“She also says I’m a terrible student. I can’t even be mad at her because I know she’s right. Do you,” she pauses to sniff, “do you remember our first lesson, when I wouldn’t stop screaming in fear, paralyzed by it, and you pulled the emergency brake, right in the middle of the road? If I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, I would’ve broken my nose. It scared the shit out of me, more than anything else I’d ever done, and after that, driving didn’t seem so bad.” She hopes Louis has stopped listening by now. She’d never told him what happened because she knows Louis would’ve been mad, even though Claudia never was. She’d needed it. The push out of the nest.

"I wanted to say thank you, for pushing me. And that I’m glad you were around to do it. I didn’t—you’re the source of the two scariest things I’ve ever experienced.”

She can remember seeing him, pale and small, somehow, like a fragile bird or the bodies of sick people you see in movies. He wasn’t awake, and she couldn’t understand why, why any of it was happening, why Louis even took her there. She threw up in the bathroom when she got home and stayed awake in her bed until the sun had started to come up. That’s when Louis got home, and she pressed her ear to her bedroom door to listen to Louis sob in the foyer.

“I should have never said what I said.” Claudia’s voice is thick with tears now. “I wanted to push you. I don’t know why I do it. Do you know why you do it? Why we’re like this? I don’t—I want to be different. I want to try and be different. Do you?”

Claudia hangs up the phone, then, to prevent the voicemail recording the sob that rips out of her chest. Tomorrow morning, she’ll get a text from a number that’s been deleted saying thank you, and she’ll save it. At Christmas, both of her fathers will pick her up from the airport together, and she’ll introduce them to her girlfriend. She and Lestat will share a look in the rearview mirror that will make Claudia think that everything might be okay. And she’ll hope that in 10 years, she won’t regret any of this.