you're too young & eager to love

More Claudia.

This, in a way, starts at the end, moves backwards, then circles back around. There isn't much structure. Oh well.

--

"If he beckoned you ... "

Madeleine smells of cloves and the ashes of despair - a sadness ripened by madness. She is more silent than Claudia, working with needle and thread with a pious devotion so that Claudia's dresses are quickly transformed into having a woman's cut. She no longer walks like a child, her gestures unnaturally sensual, languid and adult. It startles the pedestrians on the street who assume, for a moment, that the tiny child walking past has acknowledged them with a woman's liquid eyes. It startles Louis who touches her without abandon, lifting her into his solid arms, playing with her silken curls.

"I am not a child." She tells him, not severely. He must remember the forwardness of his proximity. "Only eternally suffered with the body of one." When the guilt touches his bright eyes, she presses her small mouth to his hand, a patient gesture of forgiveness. She lets him know with her silence that she has become accustomed.

It is not without bitterness or regret.



The bitterness surfaces with Armand, the auburn haired immortal brimming with the pain of his detachment. The vampire that Louis will, mistakenly, turn to. And Claudia knows, she understands that desire for difference, for suitable companionship. It makes her laugh with contempt, and how Louis suffered then in the wake of her terrible fury. She holds to his cold hands, watches him with cruel eyes. "And if you left? How would I survive without you as my guise?"

But she is inhuman. She pushes away his solace, refuses his comfort, because there is no comfort to be found. Nothing to ease her restlessness. She was turned too young - unlike him, she can remember nothing of her humanity. She is incapable of it, forged into darkness.

At the request of someone's nostalgia, here's a little bit of Maharet. It's such a teaser, it's so short.

Set at the end of The Queen of the Damned when Lestat is staying at Maharet's compound.

... I typed this up and posted this from my iPhone. That's what Anne Rice does to me. Damn it, I've caught the nostalgia fever!

--


"The wolfkiller." She calls him, amusement lacing her otherwise toneless voice.

Lestat raises his eyes, surprised at her familiarity. She makes a little gesture with her fingers, a flicker of movement that may never have happened at all. There is something so removed from her; she is of the First Brood, a statue unlike the very immortality he possesses. It is painful for him to look upon her - her ancient bearing, so akin to Akasha's. Maharet knows this; she is untroubled by the notion. His is a sadness that she, once, knew intimately.