Chapter Text
The snow took him.
With the last hit - alive, not, alive, not - when the wolf’s carcass fell down on the ground, empty, Lestat landed next to it. The snow treated them the same. Soaked their blood and dampened them where they were warm, still.
Only Lestat, even if he closed his eyes, was not allowed to stay. He could hear the dying gasps of his horse then, again, louder than the thrum in his head.
He could feel – it coming closer. The gaze. He couldn’t really remember when it appeared. Just that - when the wolves were done with his dogs, pieces of skin, of fur still stuck in their teeth as they launched at him - he caught it, across the space between. Almost made him stumble into the open maw of the beast. The gaze stayed through it all and now was just getting closer.
The gaze had a figure attached to it, too. With his vision blurred, sweat and blood clouding his view, Lestat couldn’t tell the details. But. Not an animal. Human, clad in a long red cape. Not a villager. Skin too dark and clothes too rich for this place. You could never see a garment so vibrant and clean there, even on a merchant.
He waited for the silhouette to approach, that little red figure closer but still unfocused. A flower through a fogged window of the carriage. His brothers’ hands. Would it bestow the final strike? Help him up on his feet?
It stepped over him, impassive. And then crouched by his side, where the snow was soaked. A shame, such nice clothes. It reached a hand - small - but not to take his. Brushed a lock of matted hair from his forehead in a weightless gesture so his face was open, exposed. Didn’t hurt. It wanted to see his eyes. Good. Even when his whole face turned ugly with bruises, his eyes were still the same blue. Maybe even more beautiful, then.
Beside all the death and dying, and him, he wanted this stranger to stay, no matter their reason for being there. His arms felt numb and useless ever since they served their main purpose, but he willed his fingers to move, the tips of them digging into the snow. He couldn’t talk yet but he would take the stranger’s hand so they would know not to go.
But as soon as he raised his palm, the hand fled away from his face, like a bird spooked by him shooting at empty air a breath away, when he didn’t quite know how to aim yet. A second, and nothing. Gone. Never there? Gone. Maybe there, but gone. No matter how hard he craned his neck to peer into the darkness between the trees, he could see no traces of his stranger.
What he could see still was the broken shape withering on the ground. His mare, trying to struggle her body into lifting up. This, he knew, would never happen again. He could hear the life seep out of her, but not easy or fast. Slow, painful, it would go on forever, and maybe by that time he’d go, too.
He moved his hand, which had scared the stranger into absence. It was still awkward and stiff, his skin, his bones, the meat of him, trying to will them to regain force, but he did. The rifle lay just a little to the side of him. Fingers wrapped around it, he did what the mare couldn’t do anymore. Forced his body up and saw through that it complied.
/
He met them again. In his room, in the corner.
The servants came in an endless stream of the door opening and the door closing. They brought food, then they took the bucket where he vomited from the smell of it, then, he guessed, they brought more food as the days passed by. Augustine came to tell of the villagers and wolves’ bodies. None of that roused Lestat from the bed.
When he finally opened his eyes - he didn’t know they were closed before that - the room was supposed to be empty. Just him, only his slow breathing and the stench of sweat and blood that he suddenly could not ignore. His beloved dogs were bones buried in the snow that no one would bother to look for, and no one else dared come and stay.
But.
In the chair, a girl. A young girl. He saw that before he saw in her a familiar shape, that same red cloak that cut through the snow as she came to him. She was with him again. She was watching him now like the last time, and he could see her, too, bathed in the morning sunlight, a glowing vision. A small angel with sunset eyes - a wonder to behold - they made his vision swim with tears when he met her gaze; and tight, dark curls framing her round face. His stranger, this strange beauty.
He could not reach out. That mistake from the last time - was she scared of him? Did she find all the blood and dirt to be too repulsive? - he would not repeat. He worked his mouth open instead, found the sliver of voice that’d laid unused with the bile.
“Tu es ici?” He wanted to make sure.
Maybe it was too quiet.
“Tu es ici?” he asked again. It scraped out with a bad rotten cough, one that could drown the answer were it ever given. Though when he uncurled his body and looked up again her mouth was the same unmoving line as it was before.
“Tu m’as entendu?” he wheezed out.
One of her brows twitched almost imperceptibly, but nothing about it was a sure reaction. Possibly she was deaf, or not taught any French.
His head rolling to the side, temple to the warm, sticky fabric of the pillow, he tried to conjure the memory of any foreign word his mother had ever uttered in front of him. Except it was always so hard to catch her voice. Every syllable, hard-earned. And he hadn’t earned to be taught Italian or what little English she knew.
Maybe the girl just didn’t see it worth it to speak to him.
/
She was still there when he came to, again and again and again, suddenly feeling his skin, or the itch in the back of his hand, or the growing pain in his stomach or his skull. If he tried, he could make her out in the blur that became his room, moving shade in that same chair, by the window, by the blaze, her back turned to him even when he shifted loudly to get the bucket. He didn’t try to speak again. She never offered a word of her own. Like everything else, except for the light streaming in, she seemed unchanging, her face and her posture fixed. At certain times, she could almost pass as a real-sized doll dragged around the room to only resemble life.
When he couldn’t stand the coldness of sleeping alone anymore, he pulled himself up and went to the kennel. In the last light of the day, the girl following him through the empty yard like a loyal shadow, he could see no footsteps on the snow besides his own heavy trail. When he let the dogs out to run after him, they made no move to sniff her, like she wasn’t there. Maybe, Lestat considered, he was ill, had been ill since the mountain. He had suspected so before, too: but that feeling he seemed to have carried back home seemed so ugly, and she was so lovely, her face turned up to look at the snowed roofs of the castle. It was hard to imagine that she could be born on that night.
/
His mother came some time later. He found that he didn’t mind the intrusion if it was her, and when she crawled on the bed next to him, her smaller body pressed close to his despite the whole state of him, Lestat felt a wave of pleasure pass over. She might have only come because he was not well, but she was there, his confidant once again. He felt a monster, but she understood what he felt, and so it couldn’t have been irredeemably bad.
When the quiet settled over them, he passed his gaze down to the floor, another figure. She was set by the fire, unnoticed. She’d been boring her eyes into his mother ever since she walked in, but Gabrielle made no comment of her.
He squeezed the tips of his mother’s fingers where her hand was set on top of his, a present. Confused, she turned to him to see what’d warrant him to touch her.
“Can you see her?” he whispered, nodding past the bed, hoping that if he just helped her notice she’d know, as always when she cared enough, what he meant.
But her gaze didn’t reach the fire.
“You chose new dogs,” she nodded slowly, as if they, too, didn’t really exist to her before she named them. “That’s good. You can’t let the loss weigh you down.”
He met the girl’s eyes. The most emotion he’d ever witnessed: the corner of her mouth upturned, she seemed to be laughing at him. He liked how sharp just a whisper of her smirk was. Bold. He wanted badly for his mother to see it too, to see what he saw and make it real. But his mother would hate him to be a fool.
In an hour, she made him see what she saw instead: she was dying, and she would die soon.
/
He let the servants sent by his mother clean him up and feed him a small plate. No one else, of course, would’ve gone to hunt while he was laid down. He wondered what stopped his father from sending Augustine into his room again to force him out with a rifle in hand. Could be that he was too proud to let Lestat see so plainly just how much they relied on him, could be that he preferred him closed away until the risk of hysterics passed. He liked to imagine that his prolonged peace had something to do with Gabrielle.
Gabrielle put an end to it, too. When the visitors came, she drew him out of the room, unrelenting.
/
The merchants he saw in the hall were all familiar faces, except one, lit up by the smile blooming on his face. Lestat knew him once too, but not that version, shaped by time into something delicate. Beautiful, Nicolas de Lenfent.
Unseen, the girl walked up so close to him Lestat almost embarrassed himself by calling out to her. While Nicolas started his speech, his eyes shining and trained on Lestat, like he was happy to be there, present with him, she circled him like predator circles the prey.
He could only glance an edge of her expression - eyebrows down, mouth twisted. Confused. Then she turned back to Lestat, caught his gaze, for just a second, incredulous. Judging. For a second, he only existed as a finish point of her attention.
“Monsieur, we beg you to accept this,” Nicolas said, and his outstretched hand made her step back, away, out of Lestat’s view. For the first time since he saw her again in his room he felt like she might disappear again, dissolve into the crowd. Nicolas shook the red fur lined cloak, anchoring Lestat’s attention back to him. His smile turned small and soft, like Lestat’s hesitance to take it warmed him even more.
Lestat accepted the gifts.
“Now he will really be impossible,” Augustine noted, bitter, when the cloak landed on Lestat’s shoulders.
Nicolas’ arms brought Lestat closer. He was saying something Lestat would remember a century later, something magnificent, but Lestat could not hear him. Pressed against him in a parting kiss, he caught a flash of red across the room. What he thought for a moment was his reflection in the mirror - his girl, still, again, always watching.
/
After that, his days alternated between hunting and Nicolas. In the morning, he’d remember the weight of the rifle, the careful steps on the forest floor, the rush of the moment when he hit the trigger and waited, frozen, to see if it’d been a mistake. It rarely was.
The hunting never put her off. The thump of bodies, smell of blood, dwindling whimpers. She never once looked away. When he brought his gains home and watched the old woman in the kitchen work the flesh open, she stood right next to him, tracing the used, metodic movements of her thin gray hands. In a rare moment when they set around the table as family, with Lestat - she took a seat across from him and watched everyone eat, too, hand clasped around an invisible knife. In her ever present cloak, head held high, she looked more fit for the ebbing image of greatness the walls still presented than Augustine ever did.
Nicolas she didn’t like, or didn’t care much about. Certainly less than about a dead duck. The rest of Lestat’s day was his, ever since they shared that first bottle of wine. Nights were, too.
His music she found unimpressive. His speeches, repellent. The rest of him, boring. All that, Lestat learnt to read from her face.
When the evening started she would leave to haunt the halls, just out of reach. One of the first nights, scared, Lestat jumped away from Nicki and spilt the wine all over him, following her retreat.
But she went along with them on the night when they visited the witches’ place. Nicki played, as he promised, and Lestat, perched on the burned stump, drank and drank. She watched the blackened circle of earth, lost in thought. Then she moved.
For a mad moment, when everything except her seemed to go far away, he felt sharp indignation at Nicolas for failing to move her with his music. She was walking farther away from them now, where the stakes still stood, and Lestat realized, with horror, her hand reaching for the charred wood, that he never should’ve taken her there.
The wine burnt his mouth when it came out, spilling by his feet. Heaving, he ran after her; a lone figure inside the circle, shadows closing in on her; Nicki snatched his hand, tried to tug Lestat to his chest. Angry for the first time in Nicki’s presence, Lestat pushed the violin out of Nicolas’ arms, his most dear possession, meeting with the frozen ground.
Free, he tumbled down to the center and caught her where she stood, stricken, in his arms; their first touch.
/
“So you spent your time like a couple of adolescents who just learnt about alcohol and sex and emotional crises,” Daniel says, sardonic, on the screen of his weird camera machine.
Lestat tries to remember to smirk. He was talking, about Nicki. He tries to remember what it was exactly he said last, too - except maybe the second drugged rookie was a little excessive and still hasn’t cleared out of his system - out of the corner of his eye, he sees weird flashes of red.
“We engaged in philosophical discourse on the nature of art and the divine,” he remarks. “And drank and had sex, bien sûr, I see no shame in that. We took what we could out of this drub life we were both forced back into, Daniel, which shouldn’t be so unfamiliar to you.”
He and Nicki, he thinks.
He and Nicki.