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Given his terminal illness, a drug habit that nearly killed him, and a preceding career involving no small amount of death threats and unstable psyches, Daniel has accepted his proclivity toward dangerous situations that he often throws himself into against the rational pleas of whatever loved ones he has left in a given year. Going straight from one vampire lair into another is pushing it.
The Talamasca saw no issue in shoving him with a lit match toward what should've been a powder keg, but Claudia and Madeleine agreed to his pitch that they deserved a say in the final story. They’ve only lightly threatened to kill him so far and even let him stay with them for the duration of the interview instead of driving five hours in the snow from his hotel in Anchorage every day.
The cabin consists of one large room and a loft, with decor that has all the coherence of a magpie's nest. There are no multi-course meals, no attentive staff handing him archival materials, no guest room. He’s spent the week eating gas station groceries and sleeping on a couch that doubles as his office. It's more enjoyable than the penthouse in every way.
When they arrive at the crescendo of narrative divergence in the interview, Claudia takes Madeleine’s hand, but her voice never wavers as she describes the trial beat by beat. Lestat’s manipulation of the audience. The psychic assault on their minds when they tried to speak. Her fury growing every second it goes on until it's too sharp for her to reach out for Louis when he's dragged off stage. Madeleine clinging to her as they await their last moments together.
She draws herself out of the memory at that point, tilting her head toward Daniel and meeting his eyes with a vibrantly orange gaze.
“This is enough from us to tell an honest story. We could stop here.”
“I have a few follow-up questions.”
“Your friends with the Talamasca will want a report if I tell you anything else.”
“You’ve got a better lock on my thoughts than Louis.”
“I’m less distracted. Are you going to tell them?”
“Are you going to eat me if I say yes?”
He pauses the recording, waiting to gauge her reaction. He wants the story, they both know that. What does she want? What does she not?
“Louis will know that I survived,” she answers. There’s his angle.
“The Talamasca already know you’re here. If you kill me, they’ll send someone else or they’ll go to Louis directly. I don’t think you can avoid it and the world out there is just getting smaller. It was going to happen eventually. But you could get ahead of it all and have a say in who tells the story. You or Louis? You or Lestat?”
Claudia opens her mouth to speak but stops suddenly when something Madeleine says or does – that Daniel's human perceptions miss – catches her attention and she turns toward her. Madeleine starts to shake her head, but Claudia shushes her, concern evident in her eyes.
“We need to hunt,” Claudia says.
They’re gone before Daniel can reply, coats and boots vanishing along with them as the door swings open and slams shut again without the slightest shift in the cabin’s temperature. The fire still burns and there’s more than enough wood to keep it going through the night. They haven’t left him to drive back to Anchorage or freeze to death. It’s not a no .
He decides to use the time to organize his notes, discarding the pages of the Talamasca’s questions into the bottom of his bag to be crumpled and forgotten. Assholes. They’d rerouted his ticket home while he was at a layover in Berlin. Raglan James had informed him in a thirty-second phone call that they suspected an adolescent vampire they’d been tracking near Anchorage was Claudia and that given the circumstances, he was best positioned to follow up on the lead.
It wasn’t a bad gamble, on their part. Claudia and Madeleine haven’t killed him yet, despite his lack of convoluted shared history of violence and guilt with them or either of them maybe at one point having wanted to fuck him. Perhaps that’s more of an advantage here. He likes them. He likes Claudia, who is not so distant from her diaries and Louis’ memories of her. Daniel remembers his daughters at fourteen and however many years she’s lived, she’s still got all of that swirling angst and pain and determination. Every vampire who feared it would drive her mad had it all wrong; it serves her well.
He dozes off at some point, awakened much later by a sudden burst of cold air when Claudia holds the door open for Madeleine. They move slower now, sated on whatever or whoever their meal was, and at a glance Madeleine seems less waif-ish than before. The pair vanish up the ladder to the loft without acknowledgment.
Daniel opens his laptop again and jots down a few prompting questions, glancing up every few seconds to see if they’re returning or intent on giving him the silent treatment until he leaves.
They don’t make him wait long, breezing back down the stairs after a few minutes and settling back into their seat across from him. They’re practically in each other’s laps, but there’s no stiffness or performance about it, even when Madeleine takes one of Claudia’s hands in both of hers and draws it to rest in her lap. Louis and Armand’s schtick in Dubai feels like a parody next to them.
“You said before that you broke them up,” Claudia says, reading his thoughts. Daniel doesn’t have it in him to be annoyed at this point.
“Kind of a house of cards situation. I was a conveniently timed wind.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Honeymoon phases are harder to topple.”
“Hm.”
“If you want to tell him the rest of the story, we should begin,” Madeleine says. “I want the truth known, but I don’t want to dwell on it.”
“You two talked, I take it?”
“We’ve agreed it’s best to tell you what happened,” Claudia says.
Daniel starts the recorder. “Alright. Session Eight with the vampire Claudia and the vampire Madeleine. Picking up where we left off… You’re awaiting your execution. Armand claims he and Lestat and everyone else in that theater watched you die. Louis believed you were dead. But here you are.”
“Here we are,” Claudia echoes. “It starts the same as he probably told you. Santiago flies to the roof and opens the skylight.”
The pair seem to melt even closer together in the loveseat.
“I’d never felt the sun before,” Madeleine's eyes stay on her and Claudia's hands. “Claudia had kept me from the harms that other fledglings might stumble into blindly.”
“You couldn’t–” Claudia looks at her, her breath catching slightly. “You fall. I try to hold you up.”
“Do you remember anything about the crowd? Or Lestat?”
“Lestat is still on stage. Everyone in the audience is watching. If they say anything, I can’t hear them, but I try to look at them all. I want to leave them haunted. I feel Madeleine start to slip away in my arms and I panic and then…”
“We are gone.”
“So you did die?” he asks and can’t stop himself from typing Lesbian Jesus Vampires?? into his notes .
“No,” Madeleine looks up at Claudia with utter adoration. “She takes me a thousand miles away, in a wink.”
“You teleported out of the theater.”
Claudia is visibly annoyed by his skepticism, “Yes. Just like Louis lit your laptop on fire and read your mind, and Armand flew and took an icepick to your memories. I was on fire and wanted nothing more than for us to be in the darkest, coldest place I could remember– a cave in Romania that Louis and I visited before we got to Paris.”
“No one noticed you two just vanishing? A dozen vampires, hundreds of years of experience between them, and none of them had ever heard of a teleporting gift?”
“There was plenty of ash left behind and our clothes didn’t travel with us. No reason to assume we hadn’t died, and no way of knowing where we’d gone if they had noticed. If any of them suspected, they didn’t tell Louis before he killed them.”
“What about the mystical bond between maker and fledgling?”
“And the bond remains,” Madeleine says, “but I only notice it in passing, and less as time goes on. Easy to dismiss as lingering guilt.”
“Our thoughts disappearing so suddenly might’ve felt like death, if he didn’t have reason to believe otherwise,” Claudia adds.
Daniel leans back to look at the pair of them. It's ridiculous, but they're not bullshitting him, and to Claudia’s point, it's hardly more of a stretch than any other vampiric power– fire, flight, teleportation, lobotomy. Presumably, he’ll find out about ice powers or weather control next.
“Alright. You two disappear from the theater, reappear in Romania. Where do you go from there?”
“Nowhere,” Claudia says. “The moment the burning stops, the pain becomes something new. Worse, somehow. Before, it felt about to reach its peak, a force about to pull me down and out of the pain into whatever is beyond death. Now the burn is slow, rotting.”
Daniel pictures Louis in San Francisco, so badly burned he’d created a memory of a corpse to make sense of it.
“What’s that?” Claudia sits up straight, dropping Madeleine’s hand.
Fucking vampires.
“It’d be faster if you just pick through my memories,” Daniel mutters, which isn't really meant as an invitation, but Claudia does just that.
She flips through each memory, provoking a stomach-churning reliving of it all in Daniel's mind before she discards it and moves on to the next. Pages made of gray matter in a book she’s only interested in skimming for the worst bits.
He can feel her withdraw, but none of them say anything. No snark, no horror. Just silence stretching out as Claudia’s expression settles into something purposefully empty.
There’s a hundred questions he doesn’t ask.
“It was worse for us,” she says finally.
The pain never goes away. It thrums through every vein and organ in her body and when it recedes just enough for her to think, she’s met by an endless, mundane silence where once there had always been noise.
There is nothing left.
She waits to die.
Waits.
And waits.
Something alive sniffs her hand and her fingers close around it on instinct. Her healing skin reopens with every movement. Bringing the rat to her mouth drags on into minutes, but the effect of the blood is instant when she finally sinks her fangs in.
Claudia opens her eyes, her senses and memories rushing back. A shape lies beside her that must be Madeleine, but there’s nowhere on her body left untouched by the sun and too many places where skin and muscle have charred away to leave only bone. She is unrecognizable, unmoving, but not dead. There'd be no point to anything if she's dead.
Claudia looks around the cave and sees another rat in grasping distance. When she reaches for it, the wounds on her back tear open, but she forces herself to keep rolling forward and snatch the rat in one motion. She screams through the pain but doesn't stop until it's in her hand and she's crouched above Madeleine.
She doesn't bite when Claudia brings the rat to her charred lips, so Claudia bites it herself and holds the bleeding animal over Madeleine's mouth, tipping her head up to make sure the blood reaches her throat.
Madeleine’s eyes snap open, glazed over with pain.
I’m here. It’s okay, I’m here, just drink. Claudia pleads. Madeleine’s eyes roll back in her head, but her lips move slightly as she tastes the blood. That’s it. You’re doing so good.
On it goes, one rat at a time until Claudia has enough strength to snatch a bat that lands on the wall near them. Claudia doesn't try to keep track of time. However long it is, it becomes clear that what lives in the cave isn’t enough to sustain them. The population of rats and bats and other small animals dwindles. Their healing slows from an already imperceptible pace. Madeleine struggles to move, even as Claudia regains enough muscle to stumble around the cave. She can sit up if Claudia helps, but anything else takes more energy than she’s been left with. They speak only with their thoughts, but they have few to spare for their past when the possibility of a future is slipping out of their grasp.
And then, a miracle:
The thoughts of a young man lured to the cave by rumors of a haunting. Unearthly screams have been heard from the cave for years, but no one has ventured inside. He’s terrified, but his desire for admiration among his peers is stronger than his survival instincts.
Claudia locks onto his mind and whispers ghostly words as she picks through his memories and draws him in.
She hasn’t had even a rat in days when she jumps out from the shadows and sinks her teeth into his neck. When he doesn't lose his footing, she realizes she overestimated her strength. Her hunger got the better of her. He struggles to throw her off him and Claudia can feel her grip slipping. She’s going to lose him and he could bring back dozens of mortals to kill them, set the cave on fire–
The man gasps, stumbling as another set of fangs sinks into his neck. Madeleine stands on the other side of him, trapping him between them. The added pain is enough for Claudia to get to an angle where she can kick his leg, hard. All three of them go down. Madeleine tumbles to the side, but Claudia drinks fast and the man doesn’t try to get up again. Madeleine crawls back over latches on his arm to drink.
Claudia barely remembers to stop before his heart does and has to pull Madeleine off him. They stare at each other for a moment, light returning to both their eyes. Remembering what they truly are. Claudia kisses Madeleine, bloodied mouth on bloodied mouth.
"Thank you," Claudia gasps between kisses.
The man’s mother enters the cave a few days later, delirious with worry as she shouts his name.
They drain her too.
Claudia takes the man’s clothes, shearing off the extra length of his pants and punching new holes in his belt to keep them up on her hips.
“ Tu es belle ,” Madeleine murmurs as Claudia guides the mother’s blouse over her shoulders, her breath hitching as the fabric rests over her unhealed skin. She’s still raw and bleeding in places and she sways when Claudia steps away to get the skirt.
Claudia is quick to turn back and steady her, “I’ve got you.”
“You’ve got me,” Madeleine repeats as she steps into the skirt. Her voice is firm, though her grip is impossibly fragile on Claudia’s arm.
She cradles Madeleine’s face and says, “We’re going to leave this place. We’re going to hunt and get strong again. And then we’re going to kill every one of those bastards who hurt us.”
“Yes,” Madeleine puts her hands over Claudia’s, "yes."
They don’t make it more than a few miles out of the cave before Madeleine has to stop, her unused muscles giving way. Claudia carries her another few miles to a farm where they drink cattle until they’re sated and dawn creeps over the horizon. They crawl under hay bales to wait for nightfall again.
They eat the farmer, his wife, and the stableboy. Claudia feels stronger and Madeleine makes it a little further that night, until they near a village and find another place to sleep undisturbed.
They stick to the edges of the mortal world as they travel and pick off whoever is unfortunate enough to cross their paths.
They get a sense of where and when they are and start toward France.
Once, they stumble upon an argument in a cottage out of town. It's reaching a tipping point, about to cascade into violence. Claudia rips the door off its hinges, tears the man away from his daughter, and drinks him dry. Madeleine distracts the woman and daughter, lulling them to sleep before joining Claudia. When they finish, they clean up in silence and leave no trace that he or they were ever there.
They keep moving.
At last, they hop a freight train that will carry them across the border and shuffle crates around to create a semblance of a coffin in the box car. As they drift off, Claudia catches a breeze of anxious thoughts, far too tangled to make sense of.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I can still feel Louis," Madeleine's voice is distant. "His grief. It makes me want to take you to him again, but that’s where it went wrong last time. All this… all my fault.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You would think I would learn not to be soft, after all this. In so many ways I'm not, but in this…” she strokes the back of Claudia's hand, “in love? I cannot help but want you to have your family back.”
“You’re my family now. Nowhere else I’d want to be.”
“I made us look back and you burned because of it. How can you forgive me for that? How can you not hate me?”
Claudia has never heard anything that's felt more wrong. She pulls Madeleine around to face her, “Because I hate Lestat. I hate Armand. I hate Santiago and the rest of them. That’s more than enough places to put my hate. Why would I put it with you when you’re the only good thing I’ve had?”
“And Louis?”
“Let him grieve.”
Claudia still feels her hesitation, but she nods and relaxes into Claudia's touch when she runs her fingers through her hair. The train rolls on as they drift off together.
There are no vampires left in Paris. They stand in front of the burned shell of the theater and know with certainty that this is Louis’ work.
“We could stay,” Claudia says. Reclaim the city and build a coven of their own.
“I don’t think you mean that.”
“Just passing through then?”
“ Oui . And I have something for you, for this trip.”
Madeleine hands Claudia a small package wrapped in newspaper. The diary inside is made of smooth leather and sturdy pages and has a fountain pen tied to the cover with a ribbon.
The theater regulars who’d once worn costumes in her likeness are among those who never left the city, even after the theater burned. They’re easy to pick off and seem almost to think this is one last part of the show. Claudia writes Encore down twice and rolls her eyes the second time it happens.
They clean through Paris and read minds and break into city archives. More than two dozen patrons are abroad now. Germany, Spain, England. They cross the ocean back to America.
There are five in New York, two in Boston, one in Seattle. Seven scattered across small towns in the midwest whose names she doesn’t bother remembering.
The book fills with apologies and denials and pleading.
The last one is in Alaska. A woman who only barely remembers the events of the theater; she’d been far too intoxicated for the memories to stick but she still tastes bitter. Madeleine finishes draining her while Claudia watches with her diary in hand.
They burn it afterward.
“We stayed in Alaska after that. We became creatures that haunted the woods. It wasn’t hard to disguise our kills.”
“All those decades, you never told Louis you were alive.”
“After Madeleine and I had it out, it never crossed my mind again.”
“I have a hard time believing that.”
“We were dying in that cave for years. I watched Madeleine return to me from the brink of nonexistence, in agony for all of it. When I thought of Louis, I only thought of his responsibility in all of it. He wanted to be free of the burden of me. I let him be free.”
“So what's the story, then, Claudia? Is it his or yours?”
“We are survivors. If you’re gonna write it all down, tell them that. You can tell him that too. I survived him. And Lestat and Armand and Santiago and Bruce and every other motherfucker that crossed me. That’s the story.”
Claudia sits back, surveying him. Unreadable again.
“You want to set my laptop on fire too? Make it a du Lac tradition?”
“Do what you like with it. We won’t be here much longer.”
“Do you want to tell Louis about this first or should I?”
“He can find me if he wants. I’m not going to chase him down.”
Don’t drain the messenger, Daniel thinks preemptively toward Louis.
He stops the recording and slides his laptop back into the bag, Talamasca papers crushed like he knew they would be. He holds out his hand.
Madeleine takes it first, “Thank you.”
Claudia doesn’t thank him, but she shakes his hand with a preternaturally strong grip as a final reminder of what she is before he leaves.
He gets back into the SUV the Talamasca rented for him, watching the glimmering light of the cabin from outside, and heads for Anchorage.