I’m working on super cool duo short-haired-Claudia and long-haired-Benji!
Of course, no fedoras allowed. I really don’t know what the hell was thinking AR when she decided that fedoras were cool. 🤷🏻♀️ Berets are better XD *thinks of all Gucci stuff*
Also: do I need to make Benji darker? I feel this level of pale is good enough, but Im not that sure (and I don’t want his skin to end up looking too red?)
Marius and Daniel Molloy content- Inspired by many fun conversations. I suppose there is an order to this- Marius gets onto Daniel for being messy with his constant crafting, forces him to take a damn bath, and then gifts him a rather expensive model locomotive. I think in his phases of vampiric madness he rarely talks except when he’s got a really good quip. Marius sees him being especially bent out of shape and pulled into his crafts and decides to remind the fledgling of his fledgling that he cares.
Photoshop and spare minutes over the past several, several days…
Letters. Letters from everyone I have loved, of course, and I have many of them stored in a metal strongbox under the bed: Gabrielle, David, Armand, Marius, etc. Words scratched onto paper where no one can take them back, no one can accuse me of making them up or exaggerating the words uttered.
-pause-
But the real objet d’obsession?
There is a box that is…hidden from me, tucked under a floorboard in the office (remember, that room once was Louis’ bedroom). In it are letters to me from Louis. Written over a century ago, on parchment that might crumple in your hand had it not been sealed in a box for so long. His beautiful copperplate hand, neat as his tutors intended it to be, writing words meant for me. Letters never sent, if you will, letters I’m not meant to know exist. Love letters, letters written in a blind rage, sensual confessions, everyday observations.
I’m waiting for the night he chooses to share them with me, but I know it might never come. Does he even remember that they are there? It may be that he thinks them burned long ago–though if Claudia’s diary might survive, why not these?
When we’ve had a particularly cruel argument, when we’ve crawled our way to Hell and back again, when we’ve clawed each other down to the quick, I go and dig them out again. His centuries-old innocence is a balm to my heart.
-shrugs-
It’s stupid, and he’d be furious if he knew. He’d not speak to me for months, frankly, and I’d deserve it.
…But I do treasure them, especially when his voice feels far away to me, or when we are separated. There, contained in parchment, is the person Louis once was: a young man who was furious and confused and sometimes in love. And I’m so happy that he still exists, even if it’s only in a box under the floorboards.
god, yes, Daniel who has at this point never stopped to even consider how the passing of trends could impact in his life/afterlife, and Armand who thinks he has grasped the importance of the difference between timeless and The Worst by now. thank you for giving me the excuse to draw mullet Daniel again
“Lis. That’s what Lestat calls me. French for lily. I didn’t like it at first. I remember the first time he called me that, I got upset. I thought it was condescending of him. I’m not his delicate little flower, I used to think. But it wasn’t something he just threw around, I began to notice. He used it rather sparingly, only saying it when he spoke softly and genuinely. And I came to love it. He didn’t use it for anyone else. See, he would use other french terms when trying to get a meal out of someone. He would seduce them, calling them mon coeur, and mon amour. But lis was reserved for me. No one had done that for me before. No one had ever called me anything but Louis. And so I grew to love it. And I still do love it. He still calls me lis when he wants my undivided attention, or when he wants to calm me down. It’s become one of my favorite words, and nothing sounds better than hearing it whispered in his voice. His lily.”
Lost Photographs from Daniel’s Missing Luggage, or,
Glimpses of an Unlife
I’m taking stupid photos at SFO when all the televisions flash red for breaking news. Jeez, I think, another bombing or political scandal. We’re being warned about graphic footage. Huh. New York’s getting two more inches of snow. Well, that sucks.
I must be dreaming, because his face—that’s Armand’s face on the screen!
This is wrong.
The footage is shaky and I can feel the panic threading its way through my body as I watch, helpless, when he screams something at the plaza. Even though I don’t know what’s going on, I know it’s him. It’s the way his hair curls when there’s snow on it, and it’s when—it’s wh—
New York’s getting two more inches of snow and, and they won’t—everyone is staring at me. Everyone, and they—it’s just two more inches of snow in New York. Have I fucked up? Did someone see my fangs—New York’s getting two more inches of snow and the footage keeps looping. I’m being yanked backwards and someone’s shoved me onto my knees and the floor slams into my jaw and suddenly I hear screaming.
It’s me. I’m screaming. Daniel Molloy is now screaming at Gate 7. Daniel Molloy is now screaming at Gate 7. They’re cuffing me and I can’t—
“FUCKING—TURN IT OFF!” I scream at them in ugly, gulping sobs, and someone gags me with a leather strap and one of them figures it out and tries to call on his walkie talkie but they won’t turn me away I can’t look away that’s not what he’s supposed to look like he doesn’t like the cold but now he’s burning.
“So what if we had to sleep on lumpy pallets, and the neighbors woke us up with fighting.” -Lestat, The Vampire Lestat
Was it the first night? The second? Third? It had all been a whirlwind to me, the excitement of arriving in Paris, the world suddenly such a different place from where I’d spent the last 21 years. People everywhere, the stench of shit and piss in the streets, the sounds of horses and church bells and music everywhere. How I loved it.
We’d rented a tiny room at the top floor of a building–one bed, two windows, a shelf and a basin in which to wash. Such a small space! Such heaven to me, such cramped and glorious beauty.
The first night we’d made wild, happy love, tumbling into the lumpy, uncomfortable bed twisted and entwined and endlessly delighted in each other. The bells of a church chimed the hour in the distance, the moonlight spilling into the little window and onto the floor of the flat. I remember this image as I drifted off to sleep, a strange thought coming to me that I hoped my mother was okay, that she was becoming well again, perhaps.
It was maybe an hour later that I was roused, abruptly, by shouts. The wall above our head thudded as something hit it–something heavy.
“Nicolas–” I shook him, then, his eyes snapping open.
“What is it? What the hell–?” He sat up, nearly conking heads with me, both of us turned to face the wall behind the headboard.
The screaming continued, followed by the shattering of glass. I know my eyes widened, then–I’d experienced plenty of abuse and yelling in my years, yes, but never had I been privy to the violent fighting of complete strangers, not in such an intimate way. I’d grown up in a damn castle, for God’s sake–the walls were thick and the place devoured sound.
Then Nicolas began to laugh.
I snapped my eyes to his, “How can you laugh? It’s terrible!”
He fell back against the bedclothes, snatching my pillow as he laughed and throwing it at me.
A Wintery, Storm Blown Sigh – La maison sur l’Île Saint-Louis
Fandom: Vampire Chronicles Rating: Not Rated Relationships: Lestat de Lioncourt/Louis de Pointe du Lac Characters: Lestat de Lioncourt, Louis de Pointe du Lac, Brian Callahan (OC), Armand (Vampire Chronicles), Additional Tags: Angst, Backstory, Drama, Romance Series: Part 3 of Torn, Frayed and Mended Summary:
Part 3 of the series Torn, Frayed & Mended -Lestat and Louis clear the air of a buried past ; they quit the tower and make their way to Paris.
Sorry for the delay in posting…Happy New Year, everyone.
I can’t speak for Daniel’s transition, but from what he told me, what made it into the record that I compiled as the novel Queen of the Damned… he originally wanted the Dark Gift because he fell in love with Louis’ story, and wanted a seat at our table, so to speak. When he met Armand, it became about wanting to be with Armand, made so much more frustrating because of Armand’s struggle to accept Daniel, whether to bring him over.
Then, when that had been overcome, there was Daniel as a fledgling; there are so many physical and emotional changes that happen to a vampire during that time that few of us really experience it as a very “graceful” time. I famously vomited up my own blood and then, in a state of delirium, licked it off the stone floor of a filthy cell full of rotten corpses! Among many other grotesque things that happened in those first nights.* Two exceptions to the awkward fledgling phase: Gabrielle and Claudia, who both bloomed in their own ways, very gracefully, as fledgling vampiresses.
Advice…
One thing is for sure, satisfaction is not guaranteed, ma petite. In every sense of the phrase.
The process itself is dangerous. It’s called the Dark “Trick” for a reason. Your maker has to kill you first. It’s extremely erotic, but extremely painful. They have to actually forcibly pull your life away entirely – and you’ll fight them through it if you want to survive – and then feed a demon, a kind of cancer, into your body and soul. We still don’t know if it’s contamination or evolution. And it doesn’t always work.
There are worse things than death.
//ooc: *@gairid/@vampchronfic has such a beautiful and tragic story about another thing Lestat did in those first nights, that you really should read it, We Are Our Own Saviors (Chapters 15-16). #Damn you and your perfect headcanon perfection ;A;
Lestat continues after the jump, cut for length.
♛The other aspect of being a vampire: Killing. Few people seem to realize how customer-service oriented this lifestyle really is. You’ll have to kill people, or practice the Little Drink (most fledglings have difficulty stopping mid-kill). If you are able to master it, you’ll spend even more nightly time pursuing more victims than just the few that would satisfy you if you killed them. Killing means you have to find fewer, but still, victims. Louis refused to choose, feeling unworthy of making that choice. Could you do it? Really? Or, you can not choose. As he later was able to embrace. Could you do that?
Louis’ practice of drinking animal blood as a substitute for human blood for his first few years, I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons he was so weak for so long. And so cranky! For whatever reason, animal blood is just not as satisfying for us as human blood is, and I would speculate that it has something to do with the difference in souls. Not to say animal souls are lesser; Mojo had more soul than so many humans I’ve met. But there is a difference. So the animal solution is the vampire equivalent of eating fast food, and it takes its toll.
Those are the main concerns, that young naive mortals should consider seriously before they agree to become one of us. There are many more, but these seem to be required for everyone. Should you be offered the choice to take the Dark Gift, your maker would be having these conversations with you, specific to you, and to them, about other considerations.
I-want-my-IWTV 