devilsfool:

I’ve detailed one moment, when I was mortal, and with Nicolas in the inn. The realization of nothing, of endless darkness with no explanation or answer for suffering… I’ve learned since that these are called ‘panic attacks.’ We didn’t have such words, then. 

Another instance was when I was young. I think I might have been eight, maybe ten years old? I was being punished, though I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what I’d done. Most things, especially simple things, were enough reason to punish me, I suppose. I’m sure I wasn’t an easy child, and my father was not an easy man by any stretch of the imagination. 

He’d had my brothers lock me in my bedroom. But Charles, in a fit of charming cruelty, locked me not only into my bedroom but also into the wooden trunk at the foot of my bed. 

Oh, God, the panic. Have you been locked in a very small space before? And I don’t mean a coffin–a coffin, especially as a vampire, is a different experience. I mean a small, confined space into which you know you are not meant to be placed. I beat at the inside of the trunk for hours, crying and screaming to be released–but it was a castle, n’est-ce pas? Who was going to hear me outside the great stone walls of my room? 

Eventually, my nurse came to find me as night fell. It must have been when I did not appear at the table in the great hall with the rest of my family. What had they done when asked where I was, my idiot brothers? She didn’t even have the key, poor woman. From what I came to understand, Gabrielle finally forced its surrender (she has since told me that she slapped him; I find that satisfying) and came to my bedroom herself to free me. 

One happy family, non?