Not the typo for “hands”… Freud? FREUD!…

Ready to reblog for when TV Gabrielle does this.

Also, these are the calibre of changes….

Typos.

Before we get going though, sometimes it is nice to do one just in love, without all the horror... Louis and Lestat by wonderful @toriangeli - thank you, always.

I forgot all the stiff surly things I had planned to say and I just took him in my arms. We embraced the way we never had in the past. We held each other the way Gabrielle and I used to do. And then I ran my hands over his hair and his face, just letting myself really see him, as if he belonged to me. And he did the same. Seems we were talking and not talking.  True silent voices that didn't have any words. Nodding a little. And I could feel him brimming with affection and a feverish satisfaction that seemed almost as strong as my own. But he was quiet suddenly, and his face became a little drawn. "I thought you were dead and gone, you know," he said. It was barely audible. "How did you find me here?" I asked. "You wanted me to," he answered. Flash of innocent confusion. He gave a slow shrug of the shoulders. Everything he did was magnetizing me just the way it had over a century ago. Fingers so long and delicate, yet hands so strong. "You let me see you and you let me follow you," he said. "You drove up and down Divisadero Street looking for me."

Might imagine I'm Louis, reading this for the first time as I read my proof...?

Ok, Saturday morning post to indicate my feelings on morality and The Vampire Chronicles, by means of using a character nobody cares about, and so nothing is invested in it for anyone... it is also a book I haven't read in a while, so I'll be talking on it from a very general perspective.

At the start of ToTBT, Lestat is in Miami and he is tracking serious criminals to feed on, only hunting the evildoer and spending a long time tracking and stalking and knowing the evildoer before killing them. He tracks one such criminal, eventually goes in for the kill and it's deeply dissatisfying to Lestat because Lestat wants to be retribution and vengeance and justice and evil incarnate itself to his evil prey. He wants to drain his prey while the prey can know he knows they are evil and he wants them to know he is evil and them to know that evil has come for their evil.

This particular guy is just insane and so he doesn't really know what he's doing when he kills, he doesn't understand the psychological resonance Lestat wants to give in killing him, he doesn't understand what Lestat is, or anything at all. He is just mad. And so Lestat cannot feel any satisfaction in killing the guy and it's doubly bad as he can't feel he has truly even killed the evildoer when this guy is just insane. It's a disaster.

In killing the guy though, Lestat saves a little old lady who would have been his next victim... temporarily. We do not know this little old lady outside of this event.

But Lestat loves her instantly. He can know her with his preternatural skills and he can know the entirety of her life - who she was, who she is now, who she truthfully is in her soul and the essence of herself, rather than just how others would perceive her this very day. She even has the same taste in literature as him. He likes her. He loves her. He loves her mind.

And he wants her. And he is not satiated. And so, in desire and in love, he kills her.

And he gives her a very sexy, sensual death. And she's a total stranger to us, the reader. But we are supposed to feel about it. Personally I feel a conflicted mix of emotions. You want that death for yourself. You want her to live. You love the beauty of her death. You want Lestat to have spared her and hate that he killed her. You hate that Lestat killed her for what is means for his self too. You love that death for her. You understand that although she is old, she is nowhere near as old as Lestat and her life was not over. She could have lived and Lestat had literally spared her. She is a stranger, but her death is still A Tragedy - to us and to Lestat too.

You understand that Lestat didn't want to kill her. You understand that Lestat wanted her. You understand that her death is simultaneously beautiful and terrible. You understand that Lestat wanted nothing more than her death as well.

I don't even remember if the lady has a name. But I love her. Lestat takes her life in love. But he takes her innocent, intelligent, beautiful and meaningful life.

And personally, I love to think about the smallest of moments like this. To think on them isn't judging Lestat. Nor is it absolving him. Nor does he need absolving. He did only what is his nature and he has psychological reasons too. But you can think on how awful it is as well, and Lestat invites that about everything he does. It's seeing what he did as terrible and beautiful and because we can feel these complicated and opposite emotions towards a monster who does truly terrible things, perhaps we can also forgive other humans and, ultimately our own selves for our imperfections, our own, lesser horrors.

I dunno.... I wanna talk on topics like these all of the time. Mmmm.... here I am Lestat if you want to kill me this way too. I am ready.

(Disclaimer: I haven't looked at my copy of ToTBT for this, it's just how I recall this sensual, beautiful, awful killing. And of course this killing is read in the context of Lestat also being suicidal following events with Akasha... and also... it's one of countless thousands of killings of random humans all the vampires have done, of course....)

You say he’s *just* DreamStat, Louis’ imagining…

But in The Vampire Lestat, Lestat is incessantly harking back to:

“Spring was approaching, the mountains were dappled with green, the apple orchard starting back to life. And Nicolas and I were always together.”

Especially as a baby-vampire, and as Nicolas meets his tragic, inevitable demise & Lestat loses his all-too-brief (& sad) connections to mortal life. And so the possibility of it becomes a fairytale of Nicolas & Eve’s Apples & what even was it to be human? (For you Lestat, mainly sorrow! And so you cling to the one aspect of joy & acceptance & art & possibility you experienced with Nicki as if it holds All Mortal Possibility you have now lost eternally…. When really it would have ended in tragedy always. Yet it’s forever untainted by mortal reality… and forever corrupted by monstrous reality.)

It cannot be coincidence that “Apple” is what Louis gets DreamStat to say here! It just can’t!

Spring.

“The apple orchard starting back to life. And Nicolas and I were always together.”

Just as it’s not coincidence that the score to this scene is the music Lestat is teaching himself on his plank piano in S2E8, n around a century later…

And Nicolas, more my self than anyone truly knows. People perceive me as sweet and happy. And I relate to Lestat in this aspect too. For people perceive him as the optimist, while internally he is less so. And it’s no lie, for I *am* am idealist! Don’t shatter my idealism with cynicism, I beg you!!! And nobody perceives Nicolas as “the optimist”. (And *he* is a cynic, alas for him.) But never did a fictional character express how I feel about myself as Nicki does. Not any character. And never did any real person understand how I feel about myself as Nicki would, either.

I wonder whether Lestat relates to Nicki partially as I do?

But in most respects I am more Nicolas than Lestat. I am quiet & music is to me as it is to Nicki &….