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"They will scatter the ashes won't they?"
Lestat looks up at him from the stage, eyes pleading and lip trembling. Armand doesn't move from his seat on the balcony.
Santiago hums "Maybe, maybe not." He tosses the yellow dress towards Lestat's seat, where he had stayed the past forty minutes since the performance ended.
Santiago exits the stage, leaving Lestat to balk at Armand only. "Oh please, you have to." He swallows, looks up at Armand "You know what could happen if we don't scatter the ashes!"
Armand scoffs, "I would think that you'd like that, no? your formidable fledgling come back to life." He leaps off the balcony and lands softly on his feet, producing a leather pouch from the pocket of his trousers.
He feels Lestat stiffen when he kneels down next to the ashes. "Armand."
He sighs, scooping up the ashes into the pouch. "I will take care of it." He examines his hands, the ash already settling in the creases between his fingers "And if you don't want me to, all you have to do is pull me off."
Armand knows that he won't. He had expected Lestat to create such a mess during the execution that Armand had frozen him in place; but the execution was over and done with, Armand had released his hold over him, and lo and behold Lestat was still immobile on the chair.
He thought back to Nicki's ashes, placed inside a coffin downstairs, the other coffin housing a still living vampire, maybe he should put Claudia and her lover alongside them, a bitter family reunion. Still, once he finished piling all the ashes inside the pouch and tying it closed he simply put it back in his pocket.
"You can go now." He said to Lestat, patting the pouch. "Your contribution is no longer necessary."
He doesn't bother to listen if Lestat will reply, he turns on his heels and goes down to the backstage area to place the pouch on his desk. Armand doesn't have a plan for what to do with the ashes, he just wanted to get them out of view so Lestat would shut up, but now that they're in the palm of his hand the only thing he knows for sure is that he will keep them.
The old tales disappoint, neither Claudia nor the dressmaker come back to life, half conscious and rotten. They remain neatly tucked into the pouch, always sitting at the bottom of Armand's travel bag or in storage with the rest of the stuff he doesn't want Louis to know about.
Eventually they make the journey with him to Montreal, maybe a final push if Louis refuses to make amends with him even after the waitress girl kills herself. Almost eighty years have passed and he still doesn't quite know what to do with the ashes.
Quite fitting, he thinks, he never really knew what to make of them when they were alive either.
"Madeleine!"
The papers lift from where she had thrown them and go up into the air, whipping around her until her vision blurs.She digs her hands into her hair, trying to dull the sudden pounding in her skull, her fingers are pulling so hard a couple of her curls are yanked out of her scalp. It doesn't fucking matter anyway,her regenerating "dead person" cells replace them with new ones the next second.
A dead person at one hundred and twenty two.
A dead person at forty six.
A dead person at fourteen.
She should've been offered a mainline to hell, instead of whatever her vampiric existence was. It would've been better if the person she was denied from seeing was the woman who birthed her, the dad who left her in the dust, the aunt who despised her.
Instead she's stuck with her heart beating faster everytime she mistakes a fire flame for red curls, watching over men who are so fucking stupid it just makes her want to scream and cry until she loses consciousness.
The whirlwind that has formed around her goes faster and faster, it leaves the flat in Montreal. Claudia doesn't know how she's aware of that, her eyes are closed and her hands are at her ears so she doesn't perceive anything, but soon enough there's a pop in her ears and she's thrown onto the ground as the whirlwind dissolves.
She blinks, coughing as she tries to sit down and registers her surroundings. She's in another room, smaller this time; unassuming bed, a closet and a nightstand, no windows. The room smells of humidity, there's insurmountable amounts of dust on the floor.
She adjusts, no, not dust, ash. It piles on the floor a few inches away from her, it takes her a few seconds to realize that the ashes come from her slowly dissolving arm.She lets out a dry laugh, it turns into a heave.
She's dragged out her miserable existence to listen to a half-assed, insanely cliche goodbye 76 years later, and now she's turning to dust, again.Her legs are dissolving along with her arms, if she has to guess she would say that her head has too. Maybe this is just how she's bound to return to hell everytime, Claudia doesn't know, this is her first time being summoned out of it.
She blinks, then blinks again after looking at her arm. The ash is not dissolving, it's regrouping, reattaching and becoming solid. Second by second, as if time is going backwards, the ashes become her arm.
It happens to her other arm, her legs and the rest of her body. She can feel the cells in her tendons working to knit the flesh back together, instead of standing stagnant just like they have since that day at the theater; it's working slowly, probably because it has been a human lifetime since her body last ingested blood, but it's working nonetheless.
On the other hand, the thirst comes back like a strike to the gut, her organs demanding the fluid again so they can keep working. Her fangs come out in a flash, making Claudia hiss before she even has time to think about it. She rights herself up on her feet, hands going up to the door's pommel.
It doesn't give, no matter how much force she puts into it, Claudia's guess is that the key is in the pocket of whoever sleeps in this room. Then, like she hasn't in so long, she picks up on the sound of a looming heartbeat, steady and relaxed; footsteps coming closer. Claudia grabs the pummel again, she hopes that her hearing coming back means all of the other gifts have too.
After checking for other heartbeats on the outside hall she waits until the person passing through reaches the room, she lunges with all her strength at the door, feet kicking hard enough for it to give out. The man steps aside, thankfully the kick gives Claudia enough momentum to tackle him to the ground fast enough, teeth sinking into his throat without a second thought.
She had forgotten a lot of things with the time passing, had forgotten her father's face, the name of the lady in charge of the boarding house she used to live with, Charlie's laugh, the address of their apartment in Paris, Madeleine's favorite pastry.
The blood got the brunt of it, she remembers liking it, the taste as well as the rush it gives her. The truth is that it was so much sweeter than she remembered, she feels instantly revitalized from the taste alone. She sips slowly as the life going out right before her eyes makes itself known to her; middle of the road man in his thirties, coming back from running errands, hasn't seen his brother in a year since their fight.
It's all she can glean before she completely drains him, when no more blood spills out into her tongue she lets go of him and he immediately slumps on the floor. She wipes her chin with the back of her hand to erase any trace of blood left, mostly just custom now, by the end she had managed to drink without any of it dripping down her mouth.
She carries the man to the bed, rinses the smoke stains from her body on the bathroom sink and raids the closet for something to wear. Her dress takes way longer to come off than it should've, mainly because Claudia becomes astonished at the fact that she can take it off at all; she finds a sweater and some pants that she can roll the cuffs off, decides that shoes two sizes bigger is better than being barefoot and puts them on before walking out the door, yellow dress bunched up between her arms.Her ankles slowly heal, already finished by the time she's at the bottom of the stairs, thankfully the front door is already unlocked, so she crosses the threshold unto the cool Montreal night air.
She takes a deep breath in, the oxygen goes into her lungs for the first time in nearly a century; breathing had not been an option in hell and even though she had not needed it for years she missed the comfort it brought her, when she exhales her lips make the shape of a smile.
The dress is buried deep inside a trash can sitting out the back of a building, once that's done she starts moving to get to the opposite side of town, even besides the corpse laying down on the bed, she has the inkling that there's a specific reason she wound up waking there and she doesn't wanna know.
Twenty minutes pass by before the first vampire tries to get inside her mind, yellow eyes glaring at her the minute she kicks them out. A middle aged woman, an unassuming man swaddled in a long coat, a couple of young people looking to be in their twenties sporting tight, short clothes.
She trails them at a safe distance, they know they're being followed but seemed amused by it, taking Claudia's young body as sign for naivety. Still, one of them keeps looking back at her and knocking incessantly to be let in into her mind, finally she lets them in.
Did you come here for the concert?
She scoffs. Something like that, where are you kids heading right now?
A stray thought, offended at being called kid by what the fledgling assumes to be a newborn vamp. Claudia takes up the opportunity to dig into her mind. Runaway at sixteen, hanging out with the wrong crowd, maker found her in a drug den and up and left once she had learned the basics.
Going out eating, you should come with us.
Where?
Night club, couple of streets over. Tag along.
Claudia sucks on her cheeks. Don't got an ID, not sure they'd let me in.
Easy enough to start over in the middle of war torn Paris; now, from the little glimpses she's had, is nearly impossible to do anything without the right documentation.
She lets the last thought slip into the fledgling's mind, a silent request.
I've got a friend who can help you with that, with the social security number too, gonna cost a pretty penny though.
She thinks back to the flat in Montreal. Not a problem, I can meet you back here with the money in half an hour.
The fledgling nods. Good, I'll be here a good while, just call out when you're ready.
They had already arrived at the nightclub, there's a long line in front of the entrance, made of people dressed just like the group of vamps. Claudia can't get away fast enough.
She grabs a couple of bills of the pocket of a thirteen year old's dress, enough to call a cab that can get her all the way out to Lestat's apartment. She doesn't have any idea of how to get in, except for the obvious breaking down of the door that is, but she doesn't wanna disturb the apartment more than she already has.
Are they still there? It's been more or less an hour since she's left their side, hard to imagine they would want to stay in there, the witch probably ran away at the first opportunity she got. Either way, Claudia plans to be as far as possible by the time they get back.
The taxi pulls over, she murmurs a quick thanks to the driver before slamming the door shut and climbing up the steps; there's a pumpkin shaped bowl, decimated of all it's contents, and a quick note scrawled in Lestat's handwriting asking the kids to only take one treat.Claudia scoffs, hand rising to snatch the note off and pushing the door open in the process. Seems like they scrambled so far after she left they didn't even close the door shut.
She takes a breath, stepping inside the apartment. It's not the first time she's seen it, not even before tonight; sometimes, when the melancholy takes her in the middle of her looking she makes a pit stop here, lays back on the couch while Lestat plays around on the piano or chatters away on the phone. It was not a recent development either, she's wandered her way all through Louis' hotel rooms in Europe, the Garden district, sometimes even Dubai when she came to reach her highest levels of apathy.
She had wandered round Madeleine's shop at first, partly because she hoped that it was that place she was bound to reconnect with her love, their first meeting, replicated. The shop was demolished a year later and got replaced by a new bakery.She still couldn't bring herself to go back to Rue Royale.
But she's mostly been hanging out at the Montreal apartment, now that Lestat's been away on his grand ego tour. Practicing the measly tunes she still remembers on the piano, leafing through the books Lestat has piled inside the living room's corner; half interested at what's been going on since she died while the other half of her mind is on the very beginnings of a new plan to find Maddie.
Point of the matter is, she's come to know this place inside and out, so it doesn't take much effort to bypass all the mess of the living room and go into Lestat's room. There's a long black coat hanging on the closet's door, and on a pocket of that coat sits a wallet containing one of Lestat's many credit cards. Claudia fishes it out from the wallet and puts it inside the pocket of her pants, fist clutched around it.
No one stops to look at her as she goes down the entrance stairs two at a time, the door left wide open for Louis and Lestat to find whenever they come back, which might be any minute now, so Claudia ducks her way out of there and into the nearest ATM as fast as she can.
She keeps her promise and meets the fledgling back at the nightclub at the agreed time, gesturing for her to wipe away the stray drops of blood that have dried on the fledgling's neck. The journey back to the shitty house where the man with the fake ID's lives is short. The perfunctory conversation necessary to convince him to draft Claudia some papers is even shorter once she hands him the wad of bills.
She lets the man take a picture of her, trying to knock away the deja vu that being at the receiving end of the lens gives her. When he asks her what name to put her under she hesitates for a minute.The excuse of practicality shows itself first, wouldn't be wise to show up with the same name and description as the little girl in that fucking book, except there are thousands of girls named Claudia around the world, it's all the same.
Then it presents itself as freedom, starting over with a new name, same way she had done at fourteen when she had refused to tell her new parents her old surname. But then, that did nothing for her either, same girl no matter which way you try to twist it; bound to be abandoned by those who promised to take care of her, might as well embrace it.
She clears her throat, preparing to say a name she hasn't said since 1917. "Hebert, Claudia Hebert."
The man chuckles as he types into the computer. "Alright James Bond." He turns the laptop in her direction. "Just need you to check if it's spelled correctly."
Claudia nods and let's the man go back to work, twenty minutes later she stores her ID in her pants' pocket along with the credit card and stuffs the folder with her documents under her arm as she leaves the building along with the fledgling.
"So," she says, bumping her shoulder into Claudia's "now that I got you your stuff are you actually gonna come with us?"
Claudia sighs, "Need to go back to store this somewhere safe, maybe tomorrow night?"
The girl laughs. "Sure, I can give you my number and we'll arrange a place to meet."
She pulls out a marker from her purse, grabbing Claudia's arm without permission and pulling her sleeves up. She writes her phone number on Claudia's arm, she doesn't mind too much, she'll wash it off as soon as she gets the chance.
Claudia stops the first group of sixteen year olds she runs into to ask if they know of any hotels nearby. One of the boy's frowns as he struggles to give directions but ultimately ends up guiding her towards a hotel that's a few streets away.
She follows his directions and only stops on the way when she finds a closed down boutique, cheap enough to not count with any security but well-established enough to have some nice clothes displayed on the windows. She sneaks around the back entrance, jiggling the pommel with enough force to break it.
She's got no idea where the light switch is, not that it would be particularly wise to turn the lights on, so she relies on her eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. There's tons of clothes littering every isle, racks brandishing sweaters and longs skirts for the fall season. She pinches the fabric of a one of the sweaters closest to her and frowns when her brain registers fabric so thin she can feel the skin of her fingers through it, instead of the knitted wool she expected. When Claudia inspects the rest of the clothes, no matter if at first glance they look like wool or plaid or cotton it reveals itself to just be flimsy fabric.
Still, she tries a couple of things on. She catches herself adjusting one of the button up's chest area as she stares at herself in the mirror, tightening it so it hugs her figure better; she takes in a deep breath as the confines of her body become obvious to her for the first time in the twenty first century.The few people she had encountered that night hadn't thought her to be younger than sixteen, not from what Claudia could glean from their thoughts anyway, yet now she's deeply aware that she's lost the only kindness utter death has granted her; way easier to forget that you have a body when there's no one around to see it.
The button up stays on, a suede jacket put on top to fight the chilly breeze, the heeled boots give her enough height so that the hem of her skirt doesn't brush against the ground. Not that Claudia is unbiased, but when she looks away from the mirror she looks something like a woman.
She picks up some more stuff from the boutique, all the kinds of things that she's learned along the years make her look taller and fuller. Some of the skirts are way shorter than she ever remembers seeing, even back in her youth when she could hear girls fighting with their mama's about knees being visible all the way from her room; she grabs a couple of them along with a pair of stockings.
The shorter skirts show off more of your legs. She remembers Madeleine saying,kneeling in front of Claudia while her hands mess with the hem of her dress. Makes it look like you have more of them, makes you look taller.
Her pinky had brushed against the inside if Claudia's knee then, making her step away while she let out a laugh as Maddie teased her about being ticklish and promptly forgot which cuts helped with what illusions.
She exits the store without leaving any money on the counter, she had given all her cash to the no-good man in the sketchy house, but she doubted that a place as well kept as this one would suffer much because a pair blouses went missing.A couple of streets later she spots the hotel she was looking for, painted a modest black, around five stories tall, each room counting with a small balcony. To Claudia's surprise, the clerk doesn't question her or do anything of the like when she requests a room, just tries to make small talk about how crowded the city has gotten all of a sudden, which Claudia simply ignores.
She extends her hand out to receive the room's keys, what the receptionist places in front of her is a card; still she rolls with the punches, determined to pass for someone who's been definitively alive for more than four hours, bypassing the elevator to tackle the flights of stairs.
The rooms is slightly more fancy than the one she woke up in. Simple bed and nightstand, yes but there's a dresser with a big, ornate mirror sitting on top, that's without mentioning the little balcony at the left side of the room. Claudia takes a look at herself in the mirror and takes a big breath at the sight, she doesn't really know why.
She draws close to the balcony, opening it's door to lean on the railing.She unties her hair to let it sit on her shoulders as she feels the air whip against her face. She closes her eyes and sobs; the nerves on her face stopped working in hell, her whole body had suddenly gone numb for eternity, except for her ankles, because who ever is in charge of all that probably got off on seeing Claudia suffer.
She examines the ribbon now looped around her wrist, for years she had tried to take it off and each time her hand got stuck on it's way there, for years unable to move her body enough to take out a piece of ribbon from her hair or unclasp the necklace from her neck. Now her hair is loose around her face after being tied up for eighty years.
Fat drops of blood roll around her face, they don't stop when Claudia undresses for the third time that night and flops onto the bed, probably staining the sheets red.
The next night she's awoken from a dreamless sleep by a thundering sound outside the window. Her throat is parched and her temples feel like they're pressing in on her skull but she still manages to get out of bed and peek through the curtains out the rest of the world.
The moon is already high in the black sky, so she probably must've overslept, which is not something she has done since her years as a fledgling. The thing that's primarily grabbing her attention though, is the hoard of vampires crowded outside hotel.
No, that's not right, that would imply that they're stagnant, but the things is that they're rapidly moving in different directions either by foot or air. Their screams are too much and way too loud for Claudia to decipher what it is they're saying, so she picks one mind at random and gets inside.
Incessantly banging on the side of a tour bus, screaming the same stupid chant as all the others "Make more." Then a woman with straight white hair comes out, dissatisfaction clear in her face.
"The show is cancelled, go home."
None of their peer vampires took it well, immediately turning the bus over when no further explanation came-
Ah, so that was that.
She shuts the curtains tight again and flops back in the bed. They would only rage for a couple more hours if Claudia's lucky, then she will be able to snatch a bystander or two, however many is enough to satisfy the ache slowly making itself known in her stomach.Claudia glanced back at the curtain, What had they done to that bus? Who was inside it?
She crosses her arms and presses them hard against her stomach, she knows exactly who was inside that bus, who called off the concert. Better not to think about whatever happened to them, the concert was a bad idea and they had been a foolish lot to even come up with it. At least all this chaos made it so no one had any time to notice that she had come back to life.
She took a deep breath Come back to life, except it just felt like one big joke.
Why now? after she was starting to truly accept her penance. After she had become accustomed to being the shadow of who she was, to seeing the world pass right by her. Why pluck her out from an infinite hell only to plop her into the arms of another, this time without anyone by her side who might try to convince her that it's not torture?
Why take away any chance of finding her?
She chews on her lip, a part of her brain nags at her, insisting that last part may not be true. Maybe Claudia wasn't the only one who got pulled right back to life, maybe her lover has been waiting here for yea- no, no she's not going to do that to herself.She knows that Madeleine is not here, that if she was then Claudia would've known the second she woke up in that room, the minuscule hope of ever getting a reunion finally snuffs out after decades.
The breath Claudia intends on taking turns into a heaving, then a panting. This can't be it, she can't just keep dying and keep coming back alive every few years, her heart squeezed and tossed around as if it were a rag doll.An after all the anguish, there was only one question left in her mind.
Now fucking what?
Lay low, take two souls a night and help spread evil around the world just so she can curl up at dawn, shivering and just so lonely? Nothing to do but eat and come up with a way to keep a roof over her head until the end on the world comes blasting through her door; or take the other alternative, burn a second time so she can go right back to where she started.
She shuts her eyes tight and rubs her hands over it, her aunt had hated it when she did that. You're bound to rub all your eyelashes off, you tell me what good is a girl without pretty eyelashes to frame her eyes.
She digs her fingers in deeper, as if trying to pull her eyes from the sockets. In a one second decision she pulls down at the socket of her left eye with one of her claws, the pain and the blood instantly flooding in.
She whimpers, but keeps pulling. She doesn't know what gouging her eyes out is supposed to do for her, especially since she can just put them back on whenever she pleases, but maybe turning off one of her senses will help her reach the feeling that she doesn't exist.
She likes that feeling, to be able to just drift out from her own body until she's not conscious of the fact she has a conscience. It helped her get by more than a couple times, maybe it might help again.
One of her fingers manage to pull out just a tiny bit of her eyeball out, stabbing it at the same time with her claw. She screams out, the blood flows faster and the pain is so much that her body is vibrating.
She presses the palm of her hand against her eye in a fruitless attempt to stop the pain. It will probably keep smarting until she can get some new blood in her, whenever she can manage to do that, that is.
The roar outside hasn't dulled, the majority of mortals are probably already inside their homes due to the crowded space if not for the late hour.She'll probably have to race the sun to catch some business man going to work at five in the morning.
The ache in her stomach grows harder to ignore, calling out for the blood necessary to heal her wounded eye. She'd have to take three men to satisfy her hunger; now, palm still tightly pressed against her eyelid, she thinks she was a fool to only eat one man the night prior.
She sheds her clothing and sinks into the tub of the adjoining bathroom. Submerging herself until the act of breathing is pointless just so she can sputter and come back up the surface when her lungs run out of oxygen anyway.
She dozes off like that, only to wake a couple of hours later, body thrumming with hunger. She goes still, trying to hear out onto the street, nothing. She stumbles out the tub and dries herself off with a towel.
Twenty minutes later she's out on the street, quickly drains a middle aged man who was smoking a cigarette outside of a building, and when that fails to satisfy she catches both the frazzled woman she finds in an alley and the baby she's holding in a bundle in her arms.She spills the contents of both the man's workbag and the woman's diaper bag out onto the streets and takes them back to her room.
Next night she shoves her meager belongings into the bag, checks out the hotel and, after finding an annoying boy to eat, she starts walking south.
After last night's events Claudia's decision to leave Montreal had been made for her, it had become a vampire's nest and concert or not, it would take some time before the city went back to normal.And yeah, she also doesn't wanna ever cross by that damned fancy apartment, or any of it's occupants. Not that she thinks they would stay here, but best to be sure.
So she embarks on the journey to Toronto, big enough city to get lost in the crowd. Near enough for travel to be quick. She spends two days buried underground, the second time she wakes kicking and hyperventilating when her arms, encased by the caked dirt, are unable to move for a couple seconds.
After reaching Toronto, she hastily wipes her pants and washes her face and hands in a public bathroom before renting a room in a hotel for a few weeks with her trusted credit card; she didn't know if the card had a limit or if Lestat would ever notice it was being used by someone else than him, either way it's probably wise to start looking for a job that would support her pick pocketing.
It's not easy to, when the top of your head barely reaches other people's shoulders and the earliest time you're available is seven p. m. yet Claudia manages to strike gold. Twelve days after arriving to the city she decides to venture into a bar a few blocks away from the hotel for a drink, she's just planning on slipping some blood into her beer bottle and people watch before leaving, just her luck that the woman on the other side of the counter takes an interest in her.
Marisol was a woman in her late thirties with tan, muscled skin and black wavy hair she always pulled back into a low pony tail.The warmth in her hazel arms is made more evident by the crow's feet around it, so when she tries to make small talk Claudia has no problem indulging her.
"Do you come from a small town or anything like that?" She asks eventually.
Claudia shrugs. "What makes you think that?"
"You're not a local, obviously." She continues on before Claudia has a chance to interrupt. "But unlike almost every tourist you've made no effort to bring attention to yourself, you haven't drifted out to another table or eyed someone to take back to your hotel room. You're just watching all wide-eyed. Seems like a small town kid stereotype to me."
Claudia clicks her tongue after taking a sip of her beer. "Not a small town, but I grew up sheltered, that's all."
Marisol chuckles."What do your parents think about you being in a big city all by yourself?"
She huffs. "Doesn't really matter what they think."
She pulls the bottle down on the counter after taking a gulp of beer, only to be met eye to eye with Marisol's frown.
"What?"
"You said your name was Claudia, right?"
Dread slams against her like a fright train. "Yeah."
"How old are you Claudia?"
Momentary relief, she licks at her lips. "Nineteen."
Marisol raises her eyebrows and steps back from the counter. "You know, I think I was about your age when I ran away from home.Spent all the money I was able to steal from under my father's nose just on the trip here." She raps a knuckle against the counter. "Don't know where I would've ended up if this old woman I passed by on the street everyday hadn't taken me under her wing."
Claudia raises one eyebrow, amusement peeking from her lips. "You trynna say something to me?"
"You don't look older than seventeen."
Claudia huffs and bites on the inside of her cheek. She makes sure to make eye contact with Marisol as she downs the rest of the beer. "I'm not gonna ask to come stay with you, if that's what you're getting at. Got a pretty nice hotel room I intend on staying."
Marisol opens her mouth, Claudia beats her to the punch. "But," she lowers her head, fashioning her mouth into a nearly imperceptible pout. "if you need any help wrangling this place, then I'm here."
She spends the rest of the week learning how to make drinks under Marisol's piercing eye. By next week the counter is all hers from 1 to 4 a. m.
Claudia learns to endure again, she chats with the regulars who interest her and dutifully serves with drinks the ones who don't. Early in the evening, before she even goes out hunting, she'll pass right by the flea market and pick up a few books that she pours over right before going to coffin; before her shift she wanders around the streets to people watch and more often than not ends up at college bars and listens to everyone willing to speak to her, from the philosophizing of lonely seniors to the rants of plastered girls.
Sometimes whoever is in charge of the music of the bar will really love rock music, one band in particular, so Claudia learns to recognize the songs within the first few seconds and gets out to smoke a cig before that oh so familiar voice flows through the speakers. Other times the drunk girls will mistake Claudia's interest for the other kind of interest and she will have to push them away, feeling like she's doing something to betray Madeleine.
Is she unspoken for? Is that something you become after you haven't seen the love of your life in eighty years and have stopped being in the same astral plane as her for four months? Claudia doesn't feel like she is, no matter how much time passes this all just feels like some type of trial run and that anytime now she will go back to real life.Or whatever real life used to look like for her.
It's on times like this, when she starts getting existential, that she goes to Marisol, who probably thinks she's having a breakdown about leaving her parents so young; and even though se couldn't be more wrong she'll still sit next to Claudia and rubs her shoulders while she cries her eyes out; so it's not like Claudia is being understood, but she's bring comforted, which is all the same thing to her.
It doesn't take too long for other vamps to find her, she starts wearing sunglasses for the first time in her life just so she can avoid being accosted by all the newbies who treat their transformation as a badge of honor. At first it had seemed mildly interesting to her, vampires conglomerating in their own places, but the last time Claudia had tried to do something akin joining a vampire community things had ended something awful, and anyway, once she figures who it is that owns all this places her interest vanishes in a matter of seconds.
Not like the ancient ones would ever deign to visit shitty bars with blood filled pints, anyway.
Six months after her resurrection, when she's slumped down against one of the bar's booth with the straw of her Bloody Mary trapped between her teeth, that yet another vampire walks right up to her. She half-heartedly looks up from the notebook she was scribbling on and her heart seizes when she sees it's a tall woman with with red curls.She takes a look again and her heart breaks even more.
The curls are too tight, the eyes are too green, the walk too graceless.
The woman's smile is blinding and annoyingly fake. "Can I take a seat?"
Claudia shrugs and goes back to her notes. "Do whatever you want."
She chuckles as she sits down, leather creaking against denim. "Yes, god bless bodily autonomy."
Claudia hums and sips on her drink, hoping the woman will catch the hint an go away. She's not in the mood to entertain anyone tonight, least of all this woman.
"I'm Jesse, it's a pleasure to meet you."
Well, the vampire is definitely not going away now. "Claudia."
"Oh, I know, heard a lot about you."
Her mouth goes dry in tandem with her heart beating faster. She turns sharply to look at the woman, Jesse. "What?"
She smirks. "Well, read actually, but you know all about that."
Of course she does, Claudia had bought a copy of the book a couple weeks back, then set it on fire as soon as she got home. "What do you want, an autograph?"
"A chat, more like. We both know that the fact you're in that book is not the most interesting about you." Claudia lets out a sardonic laugh, her limbs feel like they're being eaten away by fire, Jesse continues on. "There's not a lot of records on people coming back to life you know? Even less of vampires. There's only you, in fact."
"So?" Claudia snaps. "What's it to you? you probably didn't even know vampires were real up until the last month."
"I've known for the past two years, if you must know. " She pushes her hair behind her ear. "My boss put me on task to do a follow up on your dad's book." She grimaces. "Well, I was one of the people, lots of agents got put on your dad's case."
Claudia frowns. "Your boss?"
Jesse nods."David Talbot, at the time, he's dead now." She huffs. "Just hold on a second."
She digs around in her jacket pocket, producing a thin business card she drops unceremoniously on the table.Claudia takes it in between her fingers.
TALAMASCA
We watch and we are always here.
Claudia frowns, she vaguely remembers the name, though all she cared to know about them was that they were mortals way too preoccupied with immortals' business.
She repeats her question. "What do you want? Put me under a microscope to study me?"
Jesse sighs. "I've been studying you, Claudia, ever since we got the first notice that Daniel Molloy was interviewing your dad."
"Stop calling him that."
Jesse freezes, but after a second or two she shrugs. "After Mr. Du Lac's interview, I was sent out to poke around Rue Royale. See if there were any rogue spirits hanging around."
"You were looking for me." Claudia says.
Jesse gives her a sympathetic nod. "Yeah, I'm one of their best seers and they figured out if you were somewhere then it was there."
Claudia laughs. "Of course." Who wouldn't want to spend eternity on the house they were trapped in for the majority of their life?
"But there wasn't anything there, obviously, except for your dolls."
"I know."
A conscious decision, they probably have been sitting in the exact same way she had arranged them since the last time Lestat had gifted her one, Claudia had considered burning them shortly before leaving to Europe but ended up deeming it too dramatic.
She sucks on her teeth. "How'd you find me then?"
Jesse settles her elbows down on the table. "We'll you weren't there, but your dolls were, traces of you." She gnaws on her lip. "I've been trying to see where those traces lead, but it came at a stalemate, and then I was put on another case." She looks up at Claudia. "And then a couple months ago, while I was on a hospital bed and all the blood was being sucked out of me I felt it. Felt you."
Claudia laughs. "And how did you know it was me?"
Jesse shrugs. "Because I assumed it was a fluke at first, but I knew I'd be betraying my work if I didn't follow up on it and try to reach out to you one more time. So I took one of the dolls-"
"You took the dolls."
She shrugs. "Needed an object tied to you, and the diaries were inaccessible at the moment, so…" She shrugs again.
Claudia huffs, guess the dolls were not undisturbed either then.
"But what I'm trying to get at is that I felt you, alive. Told myself I was doing something wrong, and yet I looked for similar cases in our data files, talked to the spirits, to my aunt; came to the same conclusion. That whole myth about vampires coming back to life was bullshit, until you."
Claudia presses her lips together, then smiles as she turns away from here "Congratulations then, you figured it out and got to gloat about it too. Good for you, I guess."
She stands up to leave, then Jesse's fingers close around her wrist.
"Please"
Claudia turns to look back at Jess, who's mouth is fashioned into a perfect pout, she stands still.
"You wanted to know about the history of vampires right? The book said you were."
"Yes."
Jesse nods. "Good, that's good, because I know someone who can tell you all about it."
Claudia scoffs, tugging her wrist out of Jesse's grip. "Wow, you'll say anything to make me give you that interview."
"I'd call it more of a questionnaire, maybe, I don't know. But I'm not lying, my aunt, my maker, she could tell you."
Claudia is about to turn and go when an image is pushed into her mind, two red haired women standing afraid in front of a regal queen who's eyes are anything but human.
She stops in her tracks, shuts her eyes tight, there's a new image: the two women from before, sitting at the side of a corpse, clutching a brain an a heart each.
"I'm not lying and you know it, so please."
"Why are you so interested about this?" Jesse stays silent, so Claudia sighs and reaches out to grab her things from the booth. "You're lucky this is my off night."
The journey to Jesse's hotel room is short, her room is decently spacious and immediately upon arriving she procures two glasses and pours in a finger of whiskey before filling them the rest of the way with blood.
"You can sit" She says, nodding towards the couch.
Claudia does as told, crossing her legs and accepting the glass of blood. She takes a sip, probably shouldn't drink more spiked blood than she already has tonight, but she's also doubtful she'll be able to make it through this while sober.
"So," She says when Jesse sits next to her and takes a sip of her own. "How are we gonna do this?"
Jesse grabs a notepad and pen that were lying on a nearside table. "Why don't you just tell me about your first night back, how that went?"
She nods, takes a big gulp from the glass, and starts talking.
Jesse puts down the notepad after making Claudia describe how ash turned to flesh for the twentieth time. "And you really have no idea in who's apartment you woke up?"
She clears her throat, "No, doesn't make much of a difference I think."
"I think it does." Jesse replies. "I think you woke up there because that's where your ashes were stored."
Claudia scoffs, bringing the nearly empty glass to her mouth again. "Who would ever keep my-"
She doesn't finish the sentence, a memory surges up through her mind and ruins her train of thought. Armand storing a leather pouch inside a suitcase, away from Louis' eye. She sucks on her lips, the fucker, could never be satisfied when it comes to taking Claudia's life in his own hands and it's not like Claudia could ever return the favor. "It's nothing, doesn't matter.You think you could pour me another glass?"
Jesse nods, standing up to fill the glass again before placing it in Claudia's hands. "You're right, it doesn't matter who it was, what matters is what it caused." Jesse looks down at her notes again. "So you said you broke out of the circle at the seance, right?"
Claudia takes a gulp from the glass, drinking sluggishly. "Yeah, you think that's what did it?"
Jesse licks her lips and nods "Yes, you managed to break out into the human world , and seeing as your ashes were so close to your spirit it was able to cling to it and transform it back into a body. " She taps her pen against the arm of the couch. "The question is, why did you break out of the circle?"
Claudia sinks back into the couch, looking intently at the girl in front of her. "Because," she pauses, "because I couldn't bear to be stuck there, looking at their faces."
"And because?"
Claudia swallows. "Because," She blinks again. "I wanted to find her, maybe she was out there and I wanted to find her."
"Find who?"
She closes her eyes to stop the tears from coming, they show up regardless. "Maddie."
Jesse ruffles through her notes. "Madeleine, you mean your companion Madeleine."
Claudia nods. "But she wasn't there, she's nowhere."
"Claudia, I don't understand, I would've thought she was with you."
Claudia would've thought so too, it's the way things should be, after all the bullshit she's. been put through she deserves to be with her person, it's why she's never been happier than that year out of Paris. "But she's not, she's not, she's not-"
She looks up again, for a moment Jesse's curls are looser, her eyes are brown, her posture isn't slouched and Claudia feels like things could be alright. Then the world rights itself back up again and she feels like throwing up.
She stumbles out to the balcony and jumps down until her heels hit the pavement, she slumps against the wall and falls down until she's sitting on the ground.
"Claudia! Claudia what are you doing?" There's a rustling, next thing she knows Jesse is standing in front of her, face the perfect picture of confusion. "What happened?"
She takes a big breath, tries to sit upright and gives up when the nausea hits. "I don't think I can do this."
A choked sound "You can, we don't have to talk about everything today-"
"No, I can't do this." She gestures towards herself. "I can't be me anymore, and I can't be anyone else and now I'm just-" She breaks down into a sob, she hates that she's breaking down in front of a girl who sees Claudia as nothing more than an object of study, even though she doesn't know anything.
"You don't have to think about what you are, just take things slow, just be you."
"Of course you think it's that simple."
"I know it's not, but it's the only way." She sighs. "Let me take you back home."
Claudia doesn't say anything, but she doesn't budge when Jesse picks her up in her arms and after a few minutes manages to send her a mental picture of her hotel room and of the keys stored inside her purse.
"If you want to keep going with this, then just go to my hotel tomorrow, I'll be waiting"
The door closes shut, Claudia wipes at her tears as she waters the flowers she had brought the night before last, careful to not let it spill down the vase.After that, she toes off her boots and lies face down on the bed and inhales deeply, then exhales after a few seconds. She falls asleep like that, measuring her breath.
Next night she wakes up with a headache, whole body sore, still, she gets up by seven and forces herself to the shower. The headache doesn't go away until she drains a couple of men taking their leave from the gym.
She had more than embarrassed herself last night, and in front of a stranger to make things worse. She can't believe a stranger had to carry her home because she started feeling bad about Maddie; a part of her wants to forget last night ever happened and yet, it's like there's something stuck in her soul that won't come out unless she actually talks this through with someone.
She's known nothing heals a broken heart quite like a listening ear since she was young, part of why she had started writing down in diaries. She had considered buying one a couple of months ago, after leaving Marisol's apartment, then her mind conjured up the picture of all the little kids dressed as Baby Lulu, of those bloody pages as they burned, and promptly shut down that idea.
But now, her thoughts had nowhere to go, they just went round and round and round, slowly eroding her brain. And having someone to listen, who knew all of it, felt nice.
She jumps up Jesse's balcony and bangs on the door, Jesse cracks it open in less than a second.
"If I say it stops, then it stops." Claudia says before Jesse can get a word in. "You don't poke around for things you don't wanna know, and you tell my why you're asking me these questions."
Jesse nods. "That's ok."
"And, I want proof that you're telling the truth about your aunt, that you're not using me just to get what you want. I have the control here, you understand?"
Jesse nods, again. "And maybe it's better if we leave alcohol out of this from now on."
Claudia chuckles. "Yeah, that too."
Jesse steps back. "Come in."
Jesse is good, way easier to be around than the Paris coven, especially now that Claudia has learned her lessons about other vampires. She's a bitch sometimes; not that she means to, sometimes she simply forgets to be kind and ignores the rules laid out for her, but she apologizes when Claudia calls her out about it. She feels real, she lets Claudia know what she's looking from her and asks for it instead of studying Claudia's every expression in order to get something from it.
Sometimes they will do stupid things, like debate the pros and cons of feeding from bags versus hunting every night and Claudia feels like she's normal again whenever Jesse's nose wrinkles when she brings up the souvenirs she used to keep.
"But didn't they smell bad?"
"You get used to it quickly."
Jesse frowns "No, I don't even understand how it is your parents didn't notice."
Claudia's breath hitches, she picks at the edge of her dress. "They were focused on other stuff, I guess."
Jesse goes silent and Claudia prepares herself for the inevitable question.
"Do you think you'll ever contact them?"
Claudia shakes her head. "No, no, I don't. Already said everything I had to say to them and I don't-" she inhales hastily. "I don't even know how they would react, the bastards would probably think it was some kind of miracle.Not in a thousand years."
"And on year 1001?"
Claudia licks at her lips and looks out the window, they're out there. She's heard their names passed around by other vampires when she's got nothing better to do but listen to their thoughts, they're the last vestige of Claudia's old life, as much as blessing as it is a curse.
"I don't know, maybe. Just- if they ever find out then it's gonna be because I told them, don't want your Talamasca folks to intervene on that."
Jesse nods, catching the implicit order. "I haven't even told them about our meetings, I'm sure they know, but I haven't told them."
Claudia lets out laugh. "What are you waiting for?"
Jesse licks at her lips. "I'm waiting until we both get what we want out of this."
Claudia hums. "Think you'll be waiting a good while then."
Slowly, until Claudia can't discern the start and the end of it, her visits to Jesse starts to feel less like an interview and more like a visit to a friend. They talk about Claudia's past, yes, but she will also tell Jesse about her day to day; the florist who gifted her a rose, the bar attendant who tried to start a fight during her shift, the new books she's been reading.
And she gets to learn more about Jesse too, her parents who were not really her parents, all the visits she's paid to her family members around the world, the letters to her aunt.
So Claudia feels more calm than she would've otherwise as Jesse's eyes scan down the pages Claudia's gifted her. The pages she had frantically scrawled on last night on the floor of her new apartment; a story she had made up on the fly, but that said way too much about Claudia nonetheless.
"This," Jesse says, finally. "Claudia this is amazing! Honestly, I need more."
Claudia scoffs. "You don't gotta butter me up, you know?"
"I'm not." She shuffles through the pages again. "I always knew that you were a good writer, but-" She looks back at Claudia. "I think you can do something great with this."
A grin splits her face open. "Yeah, I was thinking on expanding on it, maybe."
Jesse nods. "You should." A smile creeps up her face. "And I know a place where you can do that."
Claudia raises her eyebrows."What?"
Jesse stands up, messing with the drawers beneath her bookshelf. "I got a letter from my aunt yesterday, an invitation, more like. She wants me to go to her house on the country with her this summer, and Mael and you."
Claudia tilts her head. "Seriously?"
"Yes, says she's ready to talk to you, ready for you to ask your questions."
Jesse hands her the letter, which Claudia receives with shaky hands, eyes quickly swallowing up the letters.And it was there, in plain sight, the offer to answer the questions she has lived with since she was fifteen. She's grown enough since then to know that this knowledge won't fix up her life, but she still craves it as if it were air.
Spending the summer with her newfound friend and her weird family in a house by the countryside, surrounded by books, it doesn't feel like the end of the world.