The Wynne-Yorks have separated, which upon examination appears the usual for them: Emeric holds court wherever he goes, a chaotic riot of enthralling good nature (until it isn't) (but that's later, don't worry about it), and Gwenaëlle—
is not alone, exactly, but no one sitting nearby is important, and when she surveys her immediate surroundings with a moue of faint displeasure and breathes out hard through her nose, the lingering trail of her father's admirers disperse with only the vague, unsettled feeling that they would rather find somewhere else to be. Too quiet, too still, boring, no sense to the lingering on this balcony, although Lestat's appearance upon the stairs nearly derails the last of them descending.
He is dazzling. Gwenaëlle frowns, and then tries not to.
“Mssr de Lioncourt,” she greets him, setting her glass down, her hands tellingly restless in this modern, smoke-free joint. “The man of the hour.”
If he were someone else (who wasn't a fucking vampire) then she might, then she would by habit and inclination divert him to her father, who has found his own diversions for the evening and will be delighted to see monsieur but, equally, may be charmingly convinced during his hangover tomorrow that he certainly did, at some point, probably. He is having a delightful time. A tall, gaunt man who looks as if he has never had a delightful time in all of his life is not far from his side,
but Lestat is a different kind of problem.
Gwenaëlle crosses her knees, sitting slightly forward; a profusion of feathers there at the hem of her scant, sparkling cream slip-dress, the high heels she's wearing enough to likely bring her up to his shoulder if she stood, which she doesn't. Despite the convincing simulacrum of humanity that she wears, there are no hairs on most parts of her body to stand up or otherwise, a predator designed for an entirely different environment, but the sensation lingers, anyway, told in the careful posture, the caution that she regards him with.
It looks alien on her, more ill-fitting than her human-seeming. The call of the void walks in, embodied, and it isn't second nature to her not to leap.
Unwanted company flows around him, a river around an indifferent rock, but the way the warmth of his smile reaches his eyes in crinkles of amusement seem to communicate, he saw that. But, to address her comment: a gesture, hands rolling on his wrists to indicate himself. Indeed, he has arrivéd.
And, perhaps, against type, not immediately gathering a group around himself for a round of congratulations and adulation. It's true that Lestat has the rest of the night for that, could go and seek out Emeric who would surely manufacture it for him. Maybe his ego is such that he is a connoisseur for what he allows to pander it.
The real answer is, he does what he wants whenever.
"Bonsoir," he says, and leans in to deliver a kiss to the cheek and a second to the other, a greeting that the American will find overfamiliar but the French do not. He smells of expensive cologne and, in a very basic sense, blood. The lingering cigarette smoke merely mingles with both.
An arm across the back of the booth, a penchant for lingering in the same space once he is in it. "What were you going to do once you got rid of all your boring friends?"
Leave, probably crosses her mind, but even if in her head (where it is so easily to skim out of the surface level) it doesn't sound true, or at least, not true right now. In another version of today, Lestat de Lioncourt was exactly what they thought he was going to be, some fucking opportunist grifter whose real name is something like Keith or Kevin or at best maybe Kenneth. And Kenneth would have been a dead end waste of time, probably, and they'd have had dinner and drinks because that's really just sort of what happens when her father leaves his property for this long, and she'd have gone to dinner and shown willing and made a few mean jokes about Keith and then she'd have left.
Taken a car, started driving, figured out where she was going to end up when she got there. This was their pressing business for the rest of the week, so if she'd ended up spending several days god only knows where, that'd have been fine, and that's what she recalls with a sort of envious irritation for her selves past and adjacent future — a long night, cool air, bright lights.
The fear that lingers isn't for herself. Her feet aren't nailed to the ground because she's frightened of what happens if she runs, even though she knows that prey runs; her gaze slides in the direction of Daddy, and how incredibly unwise it would be to leave him unattended with a centuries-old French predator.
Her mind helpfully fills in several rude jokes about the ordinary, run of the mill French predators with which he is already certainly acquainted. She smothers the impulse to laugh at any of them, conscious of the arm now behind her, the shape of him beside her. At this distance, the closest that they've been since meeting, there is a perceptible coolness about her — different than a vampire's. Of a different quality. It's brisk, almost; something about her like stepping near cool, fresh water, a clean scent beneath expensive (French) perfume, these mundane and unreal discrepancies. An illumination on vellum, a fantasy of what a woman should be,
if she were in a fit of pique, or something.
“I was thinking about finding out where the smoking balconies are,” she says, instead of I don't have a drink, so I was thinking about rectifying that. That seems like a bad idea, which is different from her not still thinking about it. It sounds sort of fortifying, not confronting the absurd new reality settling into place around her stone cold fucking sober.
"An interesting calculation. Inviting me to separate you from the herd."
She didn't in fact ask him to such a balcony, but social manners would indicate something like it. Having neatly insinuated himself close to her, Lestat stays where he is, and there is something about being close to a vampire that strikes those attuned with any sense of what they're dealing with like they are conversing with a blood-hungry wolf barely concealed by a gentleman suit.
But he smiles, displays symmetrical human teeth, blunt and white, and the smile itself reaches his eyes. Friendly. "And I'll tell you, it's delighting to meet someone who isn't trying to see the edges of contact lenses or the misalignment of press-ons," a fanning of the hand behind her as he briefly inspects his nails.
Gwenaëlle at least considers objecting that she did not calculate that at all, thank you — it isn't that she hasn't got manners, it's that when she's rude you know she very likely chose to be — but of all the conversations she might have with him, that quibble seems wasteful. Unproductive. And not even entirely accurate,
she didn't ask him onto a balcony, but if she wanted to allow the implication to stand, there it is. She's not stupid. The things she says are not, often even when she thinks about them barely at all, accidental things. She just doesn't like having it drawn out, implication examined and made explicit. That she finds this discomfiting or irritating— is that the worst thing she's worried he'll do?
(It is an interesting calculation.)
“It serves a different purpose,” she says, after a beat in which she considered playing stupid. She did read the book. Can he really read minds? Don't think about anything. I'm not trying to lull people into a false sense of safety. No, she is. And — is he? “I'm not looking for a spotlight, for a start.”
It has been abundantly clear that she could easily have one, if she wanted; that she would tilt the world toward her like her father does. That she does do that, when she isn't making an effort not to. It'd be easy to frame it purely in terms of self-preservation, but ... this doesn't seem like that.
And then, “Yours looks sort of different from this angle.” His disguise, his spotlight.
"I intend to do everything in my power to convince the world of my true nature,"
is so casually said, nearly a shrug accompanying it, something said before, internalised prior, and therefore a little dull to announce in this moment. Even fangs out and eyes cat-bright, telepathic ability and demonstrations of certain gifts on hand, convincing the world of something is a far cry from convincing the individual.
Mass skepticism will be a fun nut to crack. Here and now, Lestat tips his head, considering her. "But now we see each other, disguises or no, but I don't know what to call you. Besides your name, of course."
Oh, the scary vampire just wants to rewrite the rules of the entire world around them, that's probably fine—
from the very beginning, keep it fucking secret had felt obvious. Lever and hold open every door she could find, get the information for herself, build a whole network of open and closed doors and grandmothers around kitchen tables and books passed down through families and old wives tales worth more than gold and: tell no one who doesn't know. She'd recognised Lestat for what he is almost instantly, but her father hadn't. Emeric, who bends humans around him like flowers toward the sun, thinks himself charming and his daughter beautiful and this gregarious new musician an accomplished showman and all of those things are true, which is enough, unless you know better.
More.
There is an instant of contrariness where she wants to keep that secret still out of no more than pique and the frisson of real fear at the implications of what he's proposing. The tectonic nature of that shift, if he can pull it off. Instantly, how much riskier it feels to connect Emeric's enchanting, spellbinding gift to his.
Her fingers tap against her knee, restless. She considers lighting a cigarette in here just to see if anyone protests.
“It's a little pretentious,” she says, after a moment, “but I like to borrow from Wagner. Rhinedaughter. It's the water of my progenitor.” My, not our, a conscious degree of separation from the thing she patently does share with her father.
For a split second, less than a heartbeat, she relinquishes— not the entirety of her glamour. Enough, though: her teeth, needle-sharp and gleaming all of them, and her eyes, bigger than they were a moment ago and the pupils blown so huge that nothing but a black night of stars stares back at him.
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
is not alone, exactly, but no one sitting nearby is important, and when she surveys her immediate surroundings with a moue of faint displeasure and breathes out hard through her nose, the lingering trail of her father's admirers disperse with only the vague, unsettled feeling that they would rather find somewhere else to be. Too quiet, too still, boring, no sense to the lingering on this balcony, although Lestat's appearance upon the stairs nearly derails the last of them descending.
He is dazzling. Gwenaëlle frowns, and then tries not to.
“Mssr de Lioncourt,” she greets him, setting her glass down, her hands tellingly restless in this modern, smoke-free joint. “The man of the hour.”
If he were someone else (who wasn't a fucking vampire) then she might, then she would by habit and inclination divert him to her father, who has found his own diversions for the evening and will be delighted to see monsieur but, equally, may be charmingly convinced during his hangover tomorrow that he certainly did, at some point, probably. He is having a delightful time. A tall, gaunt man who looks as if he has never had a delightful time in all of his life is not far from his side,
but Lestat is a different kind of problem.
Gwenaëlle crosses her knees, sitting slightly forward; a profusion of feathers there at the hem of her scant, sparkling cream slip-dress, the high heels she's wearing enough to likely bring her up to his shoulder if she stood, which she doesn't. Despite the convincing simulacrum of humanity that she wears, there are no hairs on most parts of her body to stand up or otherwise, a predator designed for an entirely different environment, but the sensation lingers, anyway, told in the careful posture, the caution that she regards him with.
It looks alien on her, more ill-fitting than her human-seeming. The call of the void walks in, embodied, and it isn't second nature to her not to leap.
no subject
And, perhaps, against type, not immediately gathering a group around himself for a round of congratulations and adulation. It's true that Lestat has the rest of the night for that, could go and seek out Emeric who would surely manufacture it for him. Maybe his ego is such that he is a connoisseur for what he allows to pander it.
The real answer is, he does what he wants whenever.
"Bonsoir," he says, and leans in to deliver a kiss to the cheek and a second to the other, a greeting that the American will find overfamiliar but the French do not. He smells of expensive cologne and, in a very basic sense, blood. The lingering cigarette smoke merely mingles with both.
An arm across the back of the booth, a penchant for lingering in the same space once he is in it. "What were you going to do once you got rid of all your boring friends?"
no subject
Taken a car, started driving, figured out where she was going to end up when she got there. This was their pressing business for the rest of the week, so if she'd ended up spending several days god only knows where, that'd have been fine, and that's what she recalls with a sort of envious irritation for her selves past and adjacent future — a long night, cool air, bright lights.
The fear that lingers isn't for herself. Her feet aren't nailed to the ground because she's frightened of what happens if she runs, even though she knows that prey runs; her gaze slides in the direction of Daddy, and how incredibly unwise it would be to leave him unattended with a centuries-old French predator.
Her mind helpfully fills in several rude jokes about the ordinary, run of the mill French predators with which he is already certainly acquainted. She smothers the impulse to laugh at any of them, conscious of the arm now behind her, the shape of him beside her. At this distance, the closest that they've been since meeting, there is a perceptible coolness about her — different than a vampire's. Of a different quality. It's brisk, almost; something about her like stepping near cool, fresh water, a clean scent beneath expensive (French) perfume, these mundane and unreal discrepancies. An illumination on vellum, a fantasy of what a woman should be,
if she were in a fit of pique, or something.
“I was thinking about finding out where the smoking balconies are,” she says, instead of I don't have a drink, so I was thinking about rectifying that. That seems like a bad idea, which is different from her not still thinking about it. It sounds sort of fortifying, not confronting the absurd new reality settling into place around her stone cold fucking sober.
no subject
She didn't in fact ask him to such a balcony, but social manners would indicate something like it. Having neatly insinuated himself close to her, Lestat stays where he is, and there is something about being close to a vampire that strikes those attuned with any sense of what they're dealing with like they are conversing with a blood-hungry wolf barely concealed by a gentleman suit.
But he smiles, displays symmetrical human teeth, blunt and white, and the smile itself reaches his eyes. Friendly. "And I'll tell you, it's delighting to meet someone who isn't trying to see the edges of contact lenses or the misalignment of press-ons," a fanning of the hand behind her as he briefly inspects his nails.
"Your disguise is better."
no subject
she didn't ask him onto a balcony, but if she wanted to allow the implication to stand, there it is. She's not stupid. The things she says are not, often even when she thinks about them barely at all, accidental things. She just doesn't like having it drawn out, implication examined and made explicit. That she finds this discomfiting or irritating— is that the worst thing she's worried he'll do?
(It is an interesting calculation.)
“It serves a different purpose,” she says, after a beat in which she considered playing stupid. She did read the book. Can he really read minds? Don't think about anything. I'm not trying to lull people into a false sense of safety. No, she is. And — is he? “I'm not looking for a spotlight, for a start.”
It has been abundantly clear that she could easily have one, if she wanted; that she would tilt the world toward her like her father does. That she does do that, when she isn't making an effort not to. It'd be easy to frame it purely in terms of self-preservation, but ... this doesn't seem like that.
And then, “Yours looks sort of different from this angle.” His disguise, his spotlight.
no subject
is so casually said, nearly a shrug accompanying it, something said before, internalised prior, and therefore a little dull to announce in this moment. Even fangs out and eyes cat-bright, telepathic ability and demonstrations of certain gifts on hand, convincing the world of something is a far cry from convincing the individual.
Mass skepticism will be a fun nut to crack. Here and now, Lestat tips his head, considering her. "But now we see each other, disguises or no, but I don't know what to call you. Besides your name, of course."
no subject
from the very beginning, keep it fucking secret had felt obvious. Lever and hold open every door she could find, get the information for herself, build a whole network of open and closed doors and grandmothers around kitchen tables and books passed down through families and old wives tales worth more than gold and: tell no one who doesn't know. She'd recognised Lestat for what he is almost instantly, but her father hadn't. Emeric, who bends humans around him like flowers toward the sun, thinks himself charming and his daughter beautiful and this gregarious new musician an accomplished showman and all of those things are true, which is enough, unless you know better.
More.
There is an instant of contrariness where she wants to keep that secret still out of no more than pique and the frisson of real fear at the implications of what he's proposing. The tectonic nature of that shift, if he can pull it off. Instantly, how much riskier it feels to connect Emeric's enchanting, spellbinding gift to his.
Her fingers tap against her knee, restless. She considers lighting a cigarette in here just to see if anyone protests.
“It's a little pretentious,” she says, after a moment, “but I like to borrow from Wagner. Rhinedaughter. It's the water of my progenitor.” My, not our, a conscious degree of separation from the thing she patently does share with her father.
For a split second, less than a heartbeat, she relinquishes— not the entirety of her glamour. Enough, though: her teeth, needle-sharp and gleaming all of them, and her eyes, bigger than they were a moment ago and the pupils blown so huge that nothing but a black night of stars stares back at him.
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.