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@journalsinblood
~ Journalsinblood ~
Semi-selective, 18+, RP account for Claudia from Interview With The Vampire.
This portrayal takes some inspiration from the books and film but is largely based on the character from the TV show. Not spoiler safe.
Regulations ~ Biography ~ Interest Tracker
@swallowsandamazons - Our Flag Means Death RP blog
Speaking of being back, I would so be down to write ghost Claudia.
Okay so what if… I was back again?
Finally managed to watch the new episode (if a little delayed) and it was AMAZING. I am so stressed for Claudia
@journalsinblood
"you remind me of my sister, claudia. from what i remember of her, i see some of her in you."
Claudia rolled her eyes. The words made a bitterness rile up in her stomach, pushing through her usual bravado. She'd had quite enough of others projecting their own familial dysfunctions on to her. The daughter as the glue to hold together a defective relationship. The little sister to fill the gap for someone who had faced harsh rejection from his family. It wasn't the first time she'd heard those exact words and they hadn't even mattered when it came down to it. They were just words. Words she was sick of hearing. If one thing was for sure, it was that she wasn't about to let them fool her into complacency again. She was her own person and was far too old to be moulded to the paternalistic desires of others "Your sister?" She raised her eyebrows in a mock questioning display. "Sure" She scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest in agitation. The speech was torn from her with venom, dripping with the violence that the words made her feel.
"Paris" Nicolas answered, all his poetry suddenly gone, condensed into a single word. But the way he said the cities name carried a wistful weight of emotions- hope, and joy, and profound sadness.
"But enough about me". Talking anymore about Paris and the coven there was like leading his mind down a dark alley, full of fear and the threat of sudden violence. "What about you? Why do you know how that feels? And- my mistake- I'm not sure I ever actually asked your name. I'm Nicolas". His English has been decent, but his old French accent still bleeds through on his own name.
She helped Nicolas move the bodies into the hole before picking up her shovel again, doing her best to school her features into not showing the impact that the notion of vampires from Paris had on her. There were lots of vampires in Pairs... and she hadn't exactly had a great experience with them when it came down to it. Claudia does her upmost to display the perfect facade of nonchalance as she begins shovelling the dirt back into the hole. "You're right." She answers casually. "About others not being welcoming..." She explained vaguely. "and it's Claudia."
he wants to be able to trust that if he told louis the truth that he wouldn't turn away from him. over 70 years together to be swept aside so easily? as if his betrayal were something minute and forgivable. armand has never been naive, nor unaware of the potential consequences of every action he took. the manipulation, the betrayal, it isn't by some accident. it isn't as if he hadn't had decades to consider whether it was right or wrong. it was only right because it served him ( and claudia, he thought ). but it gave louis an out too. he didn't need to be tied to her or obligated to be at her side ( not if she wasn't there ). and while madeline had been in the picture, he hadn't trusted louis to just let them go. he thought he'd be drawn back like an obligation.
to make matters worse, his mind can be completely locked down and she knows his fear. he knows it, despite how much he tries to swallow it down and keep it at bay. he can put on a confident facade, but there was no stealing the advantage from her. even if he harmed her, she could call out to louis, louis would know what he'd done and it would bury him deeper into a mess that would be difficult to dig himself out of. his gifts could only get him so far. and if he's honest, he doesn't want his relationship stacked on so many lies.
a tower of lies could easily crumble.
❝ that's what you call a choice? don't insult me. ❞ while there may have been some choice there, it isn't enough of one. he either became a part of telling louis or he allowed her to do it and watched it fall apart without any input. the problem is he still saw it spiraling, he couldn't see any good coming from her entering his life. ❝ you're as stubborn as your maker. ❞ with little regard for whether it startles her, armand reaches out to take her upper arm to usher her along. ❝ if i wanted to harm you, i wouldn't have met you here, ❞ he reassures, though he knows he's mostly bound by the mess he's already navigating.
he starts to walk briskly, not quick enough to startle any onlookers, but quick enough that he wants to put the humans behind him. ❝ tell me what became of madeline. ❞ by no means had he felt any attachment to the young vampire. she'd been made for claudia and claudia alone. he'd supported her receiving the dark gift fully. but with claudia alone, and with claudia refusing to speak on her, he can't help but think something happened. and how cruel it must be to suffer loss only to be turned away ( though, that was hardly his fault ). and now, he supposes, turning her away isn't an option.
Claudia was only here because she didn't know exactly how Louis would react to the lie either. Truth be told, she felt afraid of it. The hurt she had caused him 70 years ago had only been a concept until now. She had dreamt about his reaction, the heart wrenching breaking of a soul split in two that she had felt at leaving reflected on the face of the first person she'd ever loved. But she had always woken up. It had always been a thought. Now, she was alone in the world and craved her family unit again- the knowledge that someone fit against her spirit so perfectly. How long could you truly hold an immortal to a bargain like that? All prison sentences had a statute of limitation. A life sentence couldn't be much more than 70 years. She had served that with due diligence and now, surely she deserved her rehabilitation. Surely she deserved her Louis even if it meant sharing him. But there was a bridge to burn first. She would have to tell Louis what really happened and it wouldn't just be a nightmare anymore. It wouldn't just be a thought. She hadn't initially been able to put words to why she'd come to Armand first but now it was becoming clear. They had both lied to Louis. They had both torn apart the stability her and him had forged in fire. It might be nice to have a companion in the ash, someone at her side even if it wasn't someone she particularly felt a spark of warmth for. She had the upper hand to manipulate that outcome. All she could hope was that Armand would cave to it. A sharp breath escaped Claudia at the mention of her maker, quickly followed by the harsh grasp on her. Her features schooled into a scowl. Maybe the grasp wasn't harsh. Maybe she was simply on edge and waiting for Armand to act against the threat she posed. Still, as they began walking together, she pulled her arm with equal firmness from his hold and stepped away from him- finding the closeness uneasy. "You don't need to know." She retorted, venom dripping from her tone which she had previously been doing her best to keep even and composed. Armands earlier fire was reflected with refracted intensity in the eyes of the younger vampire. She kept with his pace, using every step as an attempt to steady herself. "She died." Claudia eventually concludes as a mastered flat note. Maybe it would help her case if he realised the sentence he'd passed on her really was one of death.
Daniel couldn't stop himself from laughing at Claudia's reaction. He couldn't fault her for acting childish at times; he was turned into a vampire after his brain was fully developed and he still acted childish. The gagging was the sort of thing he might have done.
"Oh, c'mon. You're gonna compare us to them?" Them being Louis and Lestat. Maybe there were some similarities, but Daniel didn't consider his relationship with Armand to be as dramatic. "We have lives outside of each other. We may be codependent, but we're not on their level of codependency. Though I gotta give Louis credit for having the balls to slit Lestat's throat. I couldn't do it to Armand."
"Now who doesn't get the meaning of the story?" She hiccupped a small laugh at her own words, not moving to sit upright now the point had been made. Respect for Daniel in this moment had quite literally bled from her posture. Instead, she crossed her arms and looked at him from where she sat slouched in her chair. "How's that life outside of it going for you?" Claudia pressed. She wasn't sure exactly where she wanted this conversation to go. Why should she care where Daniel ended up? He was vaguely entertaining to her, a blip of humour in the onslaught of otherwise dreary immortal days. She wondered briefly if that was what Armand saw in him. A respite to indulge in no matter how temporary it might be. The problem was, however, that it was no longer quite so temporary.
"Of course not" Nicolas said, when she insisted she wasn't frightened. Part of him thought maybe she should have been, but if all the old ones had died off or disappeared, maybe she really had nothing to be frightened of.
He stopped his digging and pondered her question. "Hard to say" he said, apparently not content with giving her a simple answer. "They weren't all just one thing. Neither was I." He stopped staring into the middle distance as he thought and moved to help her lift the bodies. "From when I first met them to when we parted ways, they were lost and desperate, creative and inspired, pitying and cruel. And I was food and family and failure to them."
Claudia found that listening to Nicolas talk was like trying to comprehend a high culture poem. She understood vaguely what he was saying between lilting and metrical words but every time she tried to reach for a solid conclusion, a tangible answer... it slipped between her fingers. She didn't want to push. The vampires she had met this far could easily turn to being hostile and defensive. While bizarre, this interaction had been going well and she didn't want to change that. "I know how that feels." She responded instead of pushing, hooking her arms under that of one of her corpses and dragging it over to the hole. She did know, even if she didn't comprehensively understand. She knew what it was like to be looked down on, she new what it was like to be used as a muse and then tossed aside when her well of usefulness ran dry. As though to punctuate the thought, she through the body into the hole. "Where'd you meet them?"
"Long ago" Nicolas answers. He has to remind himself that, however fresh the memories were in his mind, they were old. The Children of Darkness had been in stray tatters and on the cusp of disbanding centuries ago. It was possible there were none left that knew the old laws, much less enforced them. "If nobody's given you trouble for it, then maybe it's a forgotten relic. Like the old sumptuary laws. I'm sorry- I don't mean to frighten you with ghost stories of things that don't matter anymore. Just be careful when you travel. Most vampires are territorial things."
It looked like they were reaching a sensible depth to rid themselves of the bodies that Claudia had created. She appreciated the help. No doubt it would have taken her twice as long unassisted but she was still unsure of what to make of this company. She didn't understand half of what he was saying. Perhaps he really was crazy. "I ain't frightened." She scoffed, crawling out of the hole all claws and knees. She made her way over to the neat pile of dead flesh propped up by a tree. "Just wondering." She hummed thoughtfully, picking up the limp hand of one of her victims before turning back to Nicolas. "What were those long ago vampires like?"
"No, he doesn't ignore me," Daniel agreed, "For one, we love each other, even though we both hate each other too. And it's the whole maker-fledgling connection. I think it might be different for us because I'm the only one he's ever made and he never wanted to do it in the first place. I'd have to guess that's part of why he resents me."
There was a lot more he could say; the whole story of his life since the night he met Louis and how Armand had completely taken it over. But it was a long story that Daniel didn't feel like telling, and he doubted Claudia wanted to hear.
For all the serious conversation, Claudia can't help a comical gagging sound at the notion of Daniel and Armand loving each other. She likes to think that it's only her biological clock thats stilted by the dark gift. It does, however, seem in moments like this that she really is just a 14 year old girl with the same aversions and comedic timing. Most of the time, she manages to keep up (there abouts) with her actual age but the fact of the matter is that she doesn't like Armand and she's not going to pretend to just because she finds Daniel vaguely entertaining. "I haven't heard this one before." Claudia remarked sarcastically with an eye roll as she sat back, slumping in her chair.
"To talk. To apologize, maybe." Daniel couldn't be held responsible for what he did when he was coked out of his mind, but there was some probable cause for guilt when the little girl he tore apart was here, in the flesh. It was easier to make snide remarks than get to the meat of an issue, to pull out the rot from the muscle, but it had to be done. He's only here to talk. She deserves as much. Claudia gives him the Kubrick Stare and he gazes back with sleepy, pale eyes. "If I'd have known you were alive, maybe I'd -" No, he couldn't say that. He was lying. The dead, nor the living, held no particular thrall over Daniel and he's reminded that he wrote several hit pieces about alive people that had made their lives hell; This was the last thing he wanted for her. "I could steal them back for you. Pretty sure no one's in Dubai right now. He's got photograph's, too." Claudia looked different in those photo's. She looked every bit the haunted, hunted animal she had been. The Claudia sitting before him is guarded still, but there's look of a creature biding it's time in her expression that he can't ignore. "I can't undo what I've done, but I have resources to get you what you're owed."
Claudia looked away from Daniel now, the empathy of his words making her stomach churn. He'd written her as crazed and twisted. Corrupted by the blood of her maker and the clock that wouldn't keep ticking, no matter how much she begged. The truth of what was that maybe she was. Maybe she had been back then, in Louis' memory. The shocking part was that she didn't mind being written like that. Her diaries were morbid and it was Louis' story to tell. The bit that sat like sour blood in the pit of her belly was the fact Daniel was apologising for writing her like that. He was looking at her now and seeing that, while the brutal murderer was still there, there was the face of a little girl staring back at him. It was something people always struggled to reconcile with even if she'd literally bared her soul to them as she had unintentionally done to Daniel. It pissed her off that he had read her diaries, yes. Maybe that deserved an apology... but those books were Louis' to do with what he thought best. That was part of the bargain she'd drawn with Armand before leaving. "If I wanted them back I'd get them myself." She spoke, eyes distracted from her previous stare. Her voice was cold, almost uninterested when before there had been joyful antagonism. "You usually apologise to folks you write about?"
Hearing the curiosity in her tone, Nicolas pauses for a moment, looking at her with brow furrowed. "I thought you knew" he said. He was a little surprised. Even if the old ways were literally dying out, he assumed she would have some idea, however vague, that her status as a child vampire was at least unusual, and often unwelcome.
Nicolas doesn't remember the exact wording of all of the laws, but he heard them referenced often enough. "Something something, curse must never be bestowed upon the crippled, the maimed or children. Blah blah blah, lead the mad ones into the fire". He gestured at her and then himself. "Child. Mad." He announced his own insanity casually, as if it was just another trait, like his brown eyes or long hair. "We are 'not properly made' you and I, which means we have only the protection we can grant ourselves."
Claudia faltered again in her digging, not doing particularly well at displaying the nonchalant air she was hoping for. Nobody told her there were rules like that. It wasn't like Claudia didn't know there was something fundamentally wrong with her creation. The hole of hunger that ate away at her constantly was one indication of that. It was what had led her into this mess in the first place. Too many bodies to clean up from too much hunger. But she was getting better. There were rarely reckless onslaughts of violence these days. She had learnt to temper her hunger just as any other vampire must of done. The only difference was that hers was a little stronger to start with. Add to that the fact that the man in front of her didn't seem particularly mad and you had a whole vortex of confusion. "You met others like us then? They tell you all that stuff?" She asked, trying to keep the sensible pondering at the surface and the deep uneasiness down below.
She is everything he had imagined her to be when he first read the diaries. Of course, different in many ways. A child but with a mind as old and sharp as Louis' himself, perhaps more as she seems to be more in control of herself. Simply better at it by training herself, or the gift of womanhood. His daughters were the same when they hid things from him, and they did so many times. "San Francisco in the 1970s. That first interview. I have the scars that prove it happened and the tapes but I recall barely nothing, now it could have been the drugs but I am sure I only had one drink that night and it was paid by Louis himself before he took me to his apartment."
That's where the memories seem to mesh and dissapear. He remembers the trembling hand on his tape recording after Louis proved himself a vampire. His mind recalls hearing the tales of vampirism and wandering why Louis didn't appreciate it, and he certainly remembers being tossed around like a ragdoll when he asked for the gift in turn. Daniel had begged him in that moment, he knows. He had said something related to how being a human sucks. He is still on the fence about that one thing.
"So yes, I do think partially, this is about me. A small part, I'm only human after all." A fleeting singular moment in over 100 years for Louis, 40 give or take since they met and there had to be a reason why he was brought back. "I don't suppose you could go in there and ask them so we can all go back to our lives, can't you?" He asks in turn, his hands finally stopping the violent shake enough so he can reorganize his notes and write on the computer the new recordings they had.
Memory. It was a funny thing. Louis had been picking at such a thing when the event in question happened- the twisting and contorting of facial expressions swiftly smoothed into a look of compliance. A mask of adoration. Louis had never been one to see through such things. That had been Claudia's job... and then she'd left. And maybe she shouldn't have. She'd seen the warnings signs of past habits rearing their ugly heads back in Paris but she'd been too selfish to care and she had hoped that Louis would have enough experience to slip away from the confines of by himself this time. Now, she found herself sat in a prison that seemed perfectly constructed for him and suspicious again of secrets held by people close to him. The suspicion digs cold claws into the back of her neck. Claudia does her best to smooth her features and the nagging sensation she knows is becoming apparent on them. "That go well for you earlier, did it?" Claudia asked a little sharply now, her uneasiness getting the better of her. The subtlety of the violence was perhaps the most disturbing part. There had been no blood, no bared teeth, just a silent invasion of someones mind. Twisting and coiling and expanding in the brain, pushing up agains the sides and bruising the nerves. Louis had snapped before, of course he had, but watching what he'd done to Daniel had been something else. No, she wouldn't be asking either of them what was really going on. Daniel was her best bet. "What do you think went on in San Francisco?" She asked, voice more measured now. She needed to fill in the gaps and see if the puzzle would form by itself.
"Would you rather I be mean to you? I'm being nice because I like you. And, frankly, because I don't want to get on your bad side." Daniel wasn't one to lie about being afraid, and Claudia scared him. He knew what she did to Lestat, and he didn't want to end up on the receiving end of her fury. He didn't want to get on the bad side of any vampires, for the matter. He'd seen enough vampire drama and it never ended well. Better to stay on the sidelines. "His favorite pastime is using me for crazy plans. That's why I was dying by the time I turned 30. At least now it's harder for him to kill me. But his crazy plans don't involve you. Honestly, he mostly pretends you don't exist."
"Probably best." Claudia laughed. Her and Armand had settled into an uneasy agreement that kept the peace but it didn't mean she had to like him. He'd driven a wedge between her and the one person she had ever felt she could lean on. For a while, she'd hoped Madeline could fill the gap that had left in her life but it had been gaping- a black hole absorbing any light she tried to feed it without any impact. No, she didn't like Armand. The best they could do was just ignore each other "He don't ignore you, though." She noted, a sly tone entering her voice. "Why's that?"
If you couldn’t tell already… I watched the new episode and I am QUAKING. I will from here on out be considering Alice!Armand canon.
"Contrary to popular belief, not all of us have a delicate palate." Daniel might not be as cruel or macabre as Claudia or as volatile as Lestat is, but he wasn't sensitive and he craved the darkness something awful. He used to think it was the drugs, the sex, but it was neither of those things. He just wanted to write, and read, dark material. He found comfort that there were things in this world older and uglier than the swarm of darkness he had hiding under his skin. "Not a grudge, no. Just trying to get you to drop the act and give me the time of day." He has no mind for the newspaper and Claudia. He folds up the paper, sighing, before sitting back up and turning his body towards her; much to the dismay of his cracking joints. "I never asked to read those journals. He told me you were dead. Are you sure you aren't the one with a grudge, Claudia? Because you seem a little on edge. Did I write you in an unfair light? Pissed off because I wrote what your brother told me to?"
Faltering slightly, Claudia shifted in her seat. She moved to sit back, pulling away from her intent look in Daniels direction. Daniel had been told she was dead because, up until very recently, that was what Louis had thought. As the lie had unwoven, Claudia had been able to bleed her way back into this old life but that didn't mean it was comfortable. She felt constantly like everything was lined with knives that hung ready to cut her open at the slightest misstep. Louis was angry with her but the elation at finding she was alive had largely overcome that, at least for now. Other parties were not so enthused at her arrival and she knew it. "The time of day for what?" She asked defensively, slumping back against the seat now and crossing her arms over her chest. She dropped her chin and continued looking at Daniel analytically. "You already got my side." From the diaries. The diaries she hadn't given him permission to read. The diaries that she had carved open her chest into and let her own life force etch the narrative of.
