In Gwenaëlle's mind, it's a little like a dip in blood pressure, maybe, a dizzying moment where there is the sense that in the split second of time, which is all it is, his appraisal of her seems to last for much longer, like waking up from the smallest of naps but your mind convinced it's been several hours. Disorientation in reverse.
And then it's fine. No sense of lost control, like anything happened that she doesn't know about, just an odd blip, and his relatively mild focus (grading on a scale, here) has film-edit flickered into a broad smile, thrilled.
"One should always," quite seriously, "borrow from Wagner, wherever possible."
And of the things he can read out of Gwenaëlle's thoughts, he only shows his hand with one, retrieving his cigarette case from his pocket and sliding it across the table to her.
"A little nymph. Or, is it, the mélusine? I don't know anything about them," he should add. "I never read many fairytales as a child."
a moment. And something happens in that moment that she hadn't anticipated, but it doesn't feel like harm. It doesn't feel like something that could never be harm, just that it wasn't, and the way that he beams at her after — she's not immune to that. Of course she's not immune to that.
“The fossegrim, the nix,” she says, with a little shiver of her shoulders like she's shaking something off, reaching for the case before she's thought about feeling exposed by the gesture, and then it's already done, so fuck it. (Her lipstick leaves no mark on the filter when she holds it between her lips to light because she has imagined lipstick, not applied any.) “More Germanic, hence the Wagner, but we're of a kind. A kind of kinds. And freshwater is different again to salt, you know.”
He doesn't, or: he didn't, but now he does, insofar as different again actually tells him much of anything besides that there is something out there, in the sea, more than the terrors it already held.
“The funny part is, I didn't, either. Read fairytales, I mean. Or believe in magic. It hasn't stopped feeling like an absurd thing to say to a person,” I'm a fairy, the shape of it in implication and thought and not in this moment spoken aloud, “because I led my whole life thinking I knew what the world was, which is more like vampires than most people like me, I know.”
Ordinary humans, made into walking gods by terror and blood. Well; the ones that last.
“There's a geas on my bloodline. The man who loved us into existence can't tell us what we are unless we ask. My father was adopted, so we never knew there was anything to ask about. And then someone tried to hurt me and I discovered I could stop him.”
This is pointed, though it feels less like a threat to him and more a reminder to herself. She isn't helpless. There are other things she is allowed to feel in this moment than fear, and they are at the edge of it when she breathes out smoke.
Lestat takes up his cigarette case to retrieve his own, an elegant way of doing so—of doing everything—that includes a lighter. (He has long since decided that, even in his public outing of himself, not everyone needs to know everything he can do, and so no unnecessary displays of magic occur.) A pleasing clicking of metal, flashing silver, and then leaning back into his seat.
Which gives her a little space, despite the way he has a pinning way of looking at people.
"I came up as the Enlightenment seized Europe," he says. "We barely believed in God, beneath a monarchy ordained by a church, never mind fairies, mermaids, pixies. Witches were merely women on fire. Vampires?"
A sweep of his hand, aristocratic ways of shrugging. "You could not imagine my abilities of comprehension the moment I met my first one. My education was swift."
of course. She studies him, though there is no gasp in time, no extra moments in which she can do so at her leisure. Her observation of him is made frank with his full awareness of it, the little furrow in her brow, her big eyes and what they hide, bigger, beneath. She imagines him then, a series of possible snapshots like a handful of tarot cards fanned out in her mind,
she imagines his teeth the way hers are. Imagines the blood the way someone who has seen it fall from a body in truth might. Dresses him, in her head, in the fashions of the day.
Absently, she decides she likes his hair. The shape of his voice. She imagines him afraid with a clinical remove, and it feels like an echo, a mirror. The back of a car, the broken shoe pressed into her back, her hands bound behind her.
After a moment, “More than only vampires don't want the spotlight levelled toward them, you know.”
That it worries her is as plain as that it intrigues her, too.
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no subject
In Gwenaëlle's mind, it's a little like a dip in blood pressure, maybe, a dizzying moment where there is the sense that in the split second of time, which is all it is, his appraisal of her seems to last for much longer, like waking up from the smallest of naps but your mind convinced it's been several hours. Disorientation in reverse.
And then it's fine. No sense of lost control, like anything happened that she doesn't know about, just an odd blip, and his relatively mild focus (grading on a scale, here) has film-edit flickered into a broad smile, thrilled.
"One should always," quite seriously, "borrow from Wagner, wherever possible."
And of the things he can read out of Gwenaëlle's thoughts, he only shows his hand with one, retrieving his cigarette case from his pocket and sliding it across the table to her.
"A little nymph. Or, is it, the mélusine? I don't know anything about them," he should add. "I never read many fairytales as a child."
no subject
a moment. And something happens in that moment that she hadn't anticipated, but it doesn't feel like harm. It doesn't feel like something that could never be harm, just that it wasn't, and the way that he beams at her after — she's not immune to that. Of course she's not immune to that.
“The fossegrim, the nix,” she says, with a little shiver of her shoulders like she's shaking something off, reaching for the case before she's thought about feeling exposed by the gesture, and then it's already done, so fuck it. (Her lipstick leaves no mark on the filter when she holds it between her lips to light because she has imagined lipstick, not applied any.) “More Germanic, hence the Wagner, but we're of a kind. A kind of kinds. And freshwater is different again to salt, you know.”
He doesn't, or: he didn't, but now he does, insofar as different again actually tells him much of anything besides that there is something out there, in the sea, more than the terrors it already held.
“The funny part is, I didn't, either. Read fairytales, I mean. Or believe in magic. It hasn't stopped feeling like an absurd thing to say to a person,” I'm a fairy, the shape of it in implication and thought and not in this moment spoken aloud, “because I led my whole life thinking I knew what the world was, which is more like vampires than most people like me, I know.”
Ordinary humans, made into walking gods by terror and blood. Well; the ones that last.
“There's a geas on my bloodline. The man who loved us into existence can't tell us what we are unless we ask. My father was adopted, so we never knew there was anything to ask about. And then someone tried to hurt me and I discovered I could stop him.”
This is pointed, though it feels less like a threat to him and more a reminder to herself. She isn't helpless. There are other things she is allowed to feel in this moment than fear, and they are at the edge of it when she breathes out smoke.
no subject
Which gives her a little space, despite the way he has a pinning way of looking at people.
"I came up as the Enlightenment seized Europe," he says. "We barely believed in God, beneath a monarchy ordained by a church, never mind fairies, mermaids, pixies. Witches were merely women on fire. Vampires?"
A sweep of his hand, aristocratic ways of shrugging. "You could not imagine my abilities of comprehension the moment I met my first one. My education was swift."
no subject
Because—
of course. She studies him, though there is no gasp in time, no extra moments in which she can do so at her leisure. Her observation of him is made frank with his full awareness of it, the little furrow in her brow, her big eyes and what they hide, bigger, beneath. She imagines him then, a series of possible snapshots like a handful of tarot cards fanned out in her mind,
she imagines his teeth the way hers are. Imagines the blood the way someone who has seen it fall from a body in truth might. Dresses him, in her head, in the fashions of the day.
Absently, she decides she likes his hair. The shape of his voice. She imagines him afraid with a clinical remove, and it feels like an echo, a mirror. The back of a car, the broken shoe pressed into her back, her hands bound behind her.
After a moment, “More than only vampires don't want the spotlight levelled toward them, you know.”
That it worries her is as plain as that it intrigues her, too.