The joke is accepted with grace and an exhale out to communicate amusement, and maybe it's a little like an elder lion allowing a cub to get his teeth into his tail. Moving it around to bait it, capable of sinking big fangs in otherwise.

Which makes the question complicated. He is not a fledgling any longer. He'd rejected Armand so ardently to begin with. Poised on stage and feeling a shadow cross his mind, as dark and cold as his maker that it had been like he'd come back to life, and that thing like love he had felt did not make an appearance.

But Lestat doesn't sit with the question for too long, doesn't let it tangle up. He gives a laugh, light, for this hypothetical. "All the annoying fledgling things, I'm sure. Demand to know the meaning of life. The meaning of my making. The things he did, the places he'd seen. That is," he adds, a look side long, "if I do not judge that the best thing would be is to chop his head off."

All very near and dear, these topics. He adds, "But I don't think I would. Even if I did judge that."