It's not perfect, Louis had told his early fumble.
How searing, these words, never mind that they were told to this soldier as a kind of casus belli for extramarital cocksucking. It's not perfect, when Lestat knew it could be. If only Louis allowed it to be. If only he understood how hard won their home was, how perfect, how perfectly fragile. How it only broke apart because Lestat had held it so tightly.
A belief he'd had, anyway, for a while. And then there's this: the bedrock knowledge that Lestat is innately impossible to love. Stupid and vain, spoiled and selfish, violent and weak, retreating to his worst instincts at every sign of conflict, of uncertainty. In the midst of it all, the swift knifing of memory and knowledge, overlapping until it's Louis with a violin in his hands, playing Satanic things, and Nicki sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, considering the sunrise, other memories come up like blood spray.
New details. Daniel standing over Louis in the karaoke bar, pretending to inspect his bruises. Here, a hotel room, the one in New York, a short but telling stretch of silence of psychic conversation he cannot hear, held eye contact. These little witnessed intimacies are ordinary, dull, but painted in bright jealous colours, twisting hurt held barely quiet in Lestat's chest, a kind of sustained flagellation. He deserves this. Louis, who only came back to America when Daniel was in danger, who would like him to hang around anyway. Perhaps in the same way Daniel is entertaining Armand's cries for attention. Perhaps they are the same.
Currently frozen suspended in the air. Too stunned to express outward feeling beyond the trickle of blood from his mouth. But then—it's only half a blink, but he detects anyway, head tipping to look at Armand through a non-bloodied eye.
Like Armand is holding a snake, but with a grip on the tail by accident, the psychic assault is fast, biting, designed to stun.
Dirt. Dense around him. He is starving. He is barely cognizant, drifting in and out of a half-dreamed daze, a permanent sun-stupor. He has never gone into the ground, but this is what it's like. So cold it doesn't feel like anything, so well embraced that there is no up and down, that one can imagine that the universe entire is just an infinity of tightly-packed earth. A death's sleep. What rouses a vampire out of one?
'Purpose,' is not quite delivered in language, transmitted too intimately for that. But imagine it is, as if Lestat could speak in a soft and patient cadence in this moment, he might try to. 'A reason for rising. A person who wants you to.'
Disruption. Something above, but different to the way sometimes things are above. A presence.
'This is why you never slept.'
Dirt shifting. Strong hands that push through the earth as though it were formed of glitter and packing peanuts.
no subject
How searing, these words, never mind that they were told to this soldier as a kind of casus belli for extramarital cocksucking. It's not perfect, when Lestat knew it could be. If only Louis allowed it to be. If only he understood how hard won their home was, how perfect, how perfectly fragile. How it only broke apart because Lestat had held it so tightly.
A belief he'd had, anyway, for a while. And then there's this: the bedrock knowledge that Lestat is innately impossible to love. Stupid and vain, spoiled and selfish, violent and weak, retreating to his worst instincts at every sign of conflict, of uncertainty. In the midst of it all, the swift knifing of memory and knowledge, overlapping until it's Louis with a violin in his hands, playing Satanic things, and Nicki sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, considering the sunrise, other memories come up like blood spray.
New details. Daniel standing over Louis in the karaoke bar, pretending to inspect his bruises. Here, a hotel room, the one in New York, a short but telling stretch of silence of psychic conversation he cannot hear, held eye contact. These little witnessed intimacies are ordinary, dull, but painted in bright jealous colours, twisting hurt held barely quiet in Lestat's chest, a kind of sustained flagellation. He deserves this. Louis, who only came back to America when Daniel was in danger, who would like him to hang around anyway. Perhaps in the same way Daniel is entertaining Armand's cries for attention. Perhaps they are the same.
Currently frozen suspended in the air. Too stunned to express outward feeling beyond the trickle of blood from his mouth. But then—it's only half a blink, but he detects anyway, head tipping to look at Armand through a non-bloodied eye.
Like Armand is holding a snake, but with a grip on the tail by accident, the psychic assault is fast, biting, designed to stun.
Dirt. Dense around him. He is starving. He is barely cognizant, drifting in and out of a half-dreamed daze, a permanent sun-stupor. He has never gone into the ground, but this is what it's like. So cold it doesn't feel like anything, so well embraced that there is no up and down, that one can imagine that the universe entire is just an infinity of tightly-packed earth. A death's sleep. What rouses a vampire out of one?
'Purpose,' is not quite delivered in language, transmitted too intimately for that. But imagine it is, as if Lestat could speak in a soft and patient cadence in this moment, he might try to. 'A reason for rising. A person who wants you to.'
Disruption. Something above, but different to the way sometimes things are above. A presence.
'This is why you never slept.'
Dirt shifting. Strong hands that push through the earth as though it were formed of glitter and packing peanuts.
'Who would come for you?'