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“Oh my god, Daddy!” Claudia screamed ear-piercingly. (Claudia actually had the potential to cause damage; Louis surreptitiously checked to see if he was bleeding from an ear.)
She thundered down the stairs, eyes locked on the tree through the bannister as soon as her eyeline crossed beneath the first floor.
Vampire children—if there had been any others—got to start Christmas before any other children, they explained to Claudia. Why wait for the clock to strike midnight? Christmas began at sunset on Christmas eve: else how could you wake up from coffin to presents under the tree?
That first year she had been all tentative wide-eyed marvel. The floor around the Christmas tree had been completely covered in presents for Claudia in a radius of over a yard and a half. Unwrapping presents had been a process of hesitancy, building to increasing mania and glee.
This year she raced downstairs starting at mania and glee.
“I think she just made all the other kids in a ten block radius jealous,” Louis chuckled to Lestat as they trailed down the stairs after her.
“As they should be,” Lestat murmured, sliding fingertips down the arm of Louis’s new dark blue striped satin robe. Everyone was still in their sleep clothes, robes, and slippers that had been bought specially for the occasion. It was a party of a sort after all, Lestat observed: they needed to dress appropriately.
Louis and Lestat picked their way over the field of gift-wrapped boxes and packages Claudia had dived into, and settled next to each other on the sofa as Claudia tore through paper and ribbons, screaming with delight.
“She even has my eyes!” Claudia shouted at Louis, waving a porcelain doll that was an exact duplicate of Claudia down to one of her favorite blue dresses.
“But not your volume,” Lestat smiled as he draped an arm along the back of the sofa behind Louis’s shoulders.
She tossed the doll gently into a small mountain of crumpled wrapping paper—“Hey!” Louis laughed—and then she whipped a ribbon off a soft bundle.
“Remind me again how something called an ‘Erector’ is appropriate for our daughter,” Lestat said, eyeing a box in the growing swell of opened toys, clothes, accessories, and diversions.
Louis gave him a smile with his eye roll. “‘Educational, Instructive and Amusing,’” Louis quoted. “I know I’m gonna catch you playing with it, building little models.”
Lestat had leaned in to press his lips to Louis’s ear to whisper something about “playing with it” when Claudia screamed in rapture again, this time at a Bakelite vanity set. “See, I told you she’d like that,” Louis said.
This set off a private betting war on predicting what she would and would not be impressed by.
Unwrapping the short fur cloak with its matching muff and gloves (“See, I just don’t think—” “Mon coeur, how could she not—”): a thrill of delight. (Point Lestat.)
The set of dainty monogrammed handkerchiefs (“They’re just not exciting, Lestat—” “Perhaps, but—”): polite indifference. (Point Louis.) (“Well. They were your idea, Louis.” “They weren’t meant to be exciting, they’re just nice—” “You’re not paying attention!” Claudia hollered.)
The stationery set with its assortment of colored inks—(“Oh, watch this—” “Nh, do you think?”): rapture. (Point Louis.)
The snow globe of a small village—“Oh, surely” “Yes, certainly”—indeed was a hit. (No contest.)
A set of five salesman’s sample porcelain toilets and urinals, the tallest 5”, thrown in as a novelty souvenir from a recent meal: total fascination. (“Who would’ve guessed?” “Not in one thousand years.” “Should you be eating more salesmen?”)
Claudia was examining a new diary when Louis marveled, “How did that dollhouse not knock her on her ass?”
“She hasn’t even gotten to it yet,” Lestat assured him. “There is a minor sea of gifts between her and it at the moment.”
Claudia politely marveled at the many books she’d been given. “Claudia, that book literally has color plates of animals from around the world,” Lestat protested to her deaf ears as she quickly set another book aside, “How— When I was your age—”
“I know you didn’t just say that,” Louis glanced at him.
“Still,” Lestat sniffed.
Louis squinted, “Had paper been invented?”
“We had only clay tablets, and now here we are in the twentieth century blithely throwing around books filled with color illustrations.”
“How did you manage with only your leather loincloth and your club,” Louis murmured, brushing a kiss against his cheek—
“Y’all aren’t paying attention,” Claudia said with an eyeroll. “Look!” She held up a set of three stuffed toys—an elephant, a giraffe, and a rabbit.
They smiled at her indulgently. “They are beautiful, ma petite,” Lestat said, pleased she appreciated one of his contributions. “What will you name them?”
She frowned at them. “…Belvedere, Thomas, and Frances.”
“Marvelous.”
She allowed them to stay close as she moved on, safe within the inner orbit of her galaxy of treasures.
Belvedere, Louis mouthed to Lestat, who smiled beatifically at him.
Louis smirked at Lestat when she screamed over the beaded clutches he’d commissioned that Lestat had decreed she would find too stuffy. There was a minor derailment when Claudia accidentally broke most of the contents of a box full of glass miniatures in a mad rush—“That’s why you gotta slow down, Little Miss,” Louis said gently as he dabbed at her tears—but she was quickly distracted with an ornate jewelry box full of wonders as if nothing had ever happened.
Eventually she beached upon the shore of the fantastical dollhouse, marveling at the tiny electric lights, complete with a compliment of furniture, themed rooms, a functioning rolltop desk with usable drawers, bookcases full of real miniature books, impossibly small wine glasses, china plates, and real silver cutlery.
(They’d wistfully wanted a miniature of their Rue Royale townhome, but killing its maker wouldn’t have erased the foolish glaring physical evidence of their secret coffin rooms.) (Lestat said it would almost be worth it to see what she would burn in the mandatory working miniature incinerator.)
Lestat surveyed the ocean of gifts and their glittering detritus now that it was over. “Was it like this for you?”
Louis gave him a wild look. “Oh, hell no. I mean—yeah, we had money, but this is insane. I admit it’s insane.”
Lestat shrugged, tightening his arm around Louis’s shoulders. “If we can, why shouldn’t we.”
“Right?” Louis leaned into him, and Lestat met his lips in a soft kiss.
“I’m hungry,” Claudia announced.
“Then why aren’t you dressed to go out?”
“It is not as if you don’t have ten new dresses, Claudia,” Lestat teased.
“Y’all aren’t dressed either. I’m going to be dressed half an hour before you guys finish!”
Louis gave a warning look to Lestat and his notoriously wandering hands when Louis was at his wardrobe. “I think we can make it in ten tonight.”
“By the time you have emerged from your room, we will have perished from boredom waiting for you,” Lestat said, rising and shuffling through the low tide of paper.
—
They invited a quartet of tourists back to share in some holiday libations, treated Claudia by plying them with too much champagne, then played games after the feast (Louis had been gifted a crate of rabbits from Lestat, necks shaved in an act of total devotion). Claudia tipsily decimated Louis and Lestat at her new Pirate and Traveler board game, then they meandered through her Venetian Fortune Teller card game.
No winner was declared at charades, in which Louis could not keep up with Lestat and Claudia’s increasingly dramatic enactments of their phrases. In the spirit of the season, the two of them tacitly and diplomatically called it a three-way tie. By then the pile of loot had been calling to Claudia more and more, and she was happy to abandon them to be reunited with it.
“At least half of it,” Louis laughed. “Take at least half of it upstairs before you go to coffin, and we’ll get the rest tomorrow.” He was making his way around the room collecting crumpled Christmas paper and ribbons and string for the trash. Lestat was lost in the Erector set.
In the end, none of it made it upstairs except for Belvedere the elephant, who Louis trailed after them with as Lestat carried a sleeping Claudia upstairs to coffin. She had crashed out alongside her dollhouse an hour before dawn.
—
Louis and Lestat went to coffin early, changing back into their Christmas sleepwear one last time: it would still be Christmas in the evening.
“Guessing there weren’t a lot of games of charades at your family’s Christmases,” Louis said as they lay in Louis’s coffin, cozy before pulling the lid down on their cocoon.
“I remember the Parisian holiday balls and parties,” Lestat elided, twining their ankles together. “Fantastic, sparkling affairs.” He smiled, tracing a fingertip over Louis’s jaw. “This was more meaningful.”
“Yeah?” Louis’s hand was absently playing with the buttons of Lestat’s shirt, and Lestat was trying to keep his breathing even. “I never even dreamed of having this,” he marveled. “I dunno, maybe I would’ve broken and settled for reasons I can’t imagine. Sounds like a nightmare.” Louis was lost in Lestat’s eyes. “I feel lucky.”
“Presents, champagne, games,” Lestat said with wide eyes and a devious smile as he brushed his thumb over Louis’s cheek. “And we didn’t have to go to mass.”
“Family,” Louis murmured, shifting quite close on the pillow so that their breath mingled. Louis had started undoing Lestat’s buttons.
“I don’t know how we’re outdoing this next year,” Lestat whispered, near enough to almost tease a kiss, their noses brushing.
“We really are going to have to buy her a pony,” Louis hummed as he brushed their lips together.
“Louis, there is no way we could eat all of that before dawn.”
“Well, not with that attitude.” Louis pulled the coffin lid down as Lestat caved first and pressed into the kiss, both of them deepening it as soon as it had begun.