#this excerpt kinda reveals where they are too oop hahah

[pynkhues]

Please post the reunion fic!! I don't want to rush you, obviously, but I'm so eager to finally read it! Hope the class is great. :)

(x)

The class was intense, but good, anon, thank you!! And yes! I'm just proofreading now, but feel pretty on track to finally post the reunion fic. It's somehow ended up being 26k words, hahah. 🙈

Have a little excerpt while you wait:

-

Claudia.

The thought closes his throat now.

Foolish, he thinks, he’d only just been remembering her, but that was Europe, that was after, and this feels - - different. To try to imagine her as a girl, because his daughter had been too old for games like that, even at 14 when Louis had brought her home. Felt them silly, preferred even then to play tea and sympathy with her dolls or jump rope or play music or write for endless evenings in her diaries. A girl when they’d made her, yes, but a childhood he should’ve been a part of already somewhere behind her. Years missed out on even then, of first steps and words and stories (had he ever even gotten to carry her in his arms beyond the night he’d carried her home?), his daughter and his sister always second to the stranger, just as Lestat had said she was that night he’d made her for him, dragged from a house Louis had as good as burned down himself.

The feeling then, dark, bitter, always there but somehow, suddenly, bottomless in its depth. It loosens the grip of childhood and whispers in the ear of his father guilt, for he was never mother or maker or the Black angel she’d called him that night, but the thief of death, saved her from a fire just so a century later she could - -

No.

Louis exhales a roughened breath, shakes his head, tries to knock the thought out of himself as he finds his feet again, shuffling from the outdoor living section of the store to the promise of green. A cart of plants first, then another, then what feels like a forest of them, hundreds of ferns and figs and pots of climbing vines, plants brought in from the gardening section, protected in this concrete cell from the wilds of the hurricane outside, and for a moment, it almost brings him something like peace. A distraction from tonight’s own odyssey of recollection, unravelling in the hallowed halls of his head.

He touches a rubber leafed peperomia, a shaggy stemmed monkey-tail cactus, feels the frail slip of sunshine in a marigold petal, and it doesn’t surprise him, exactly, to find his thoughts straying to Armand’s tenderly cultivated magnolia tree, the roots left to creep beneath the stones of Louis’ only place of solace. Years of deception counted in inches grown, in new branches, in every deciduous season.

It sparks - - something, Louis thinks, inhaling deeper, tasting the pollen of the flowers here on his tongue, smelling the mixing fragrances like the perfume his mother once wore, and he turns, thinks to lose himself in it for a while, only to stop in his path to temporary oblivion. There, among the parlor palms, stands Lestat, his robe loose again and hanging, his shoulders a little hunched, his hair curling wet at the back of his neck, and something in Louis jumps. A little Claudia where his heart should be, skipping rope in the courtyard of his chest, and he tries not to think of the way everything except him seems to slip away to nothing as Louis slowly closes the distance between them again. Lestat ever the will-o'-the-wisp to Louis’ tired and lonely traveler.