Hello Lovely! What stood out to you as Nicky and Lestat being actual lovers and not just best buds? I expected a very hot and heavy relationship before reading the TVL, but didn't really perceive it that way after reading (which was probably wrong). I got that they loved each other and I may have totally misinterpreted, but they seemed like best buds so close they would share a toothbrush or a bed if they had to just to be on their own in Paris. I guess I expected more "romantic action" because though I didn't get a lot of romance vibes between Louis and Lestat either in IWTV, I assumed why there wasn't was because the vampires don't have actual sex. However, that would not have been the case with Nicky and Lestat who were human and it seems like Anne could have made the nature of their relationship so much more clear. Also, I haven't read past TVL but I hear the later books have more of a romantic connotation between Lestat and Louis?
Well, Anne confirmed they were lovers.
Lestat tends to keep a lot of the more intimate, meaningful things private. This trait extends to both Nicki and Louis and also the most painful elements of all the trauma Lestat has suffered. However, there were several telling moments in which Lestat indicated what Nicki means to him.
The first instance is when Gabrielle is telling Lestat about Nicki’s history and how he’d failed in law school in Paris when he discovered the violin and studied with Mozart. She also tells Lestat that Nicki’s father is against his wishes to be a musician and threatens to break Nicki’s hands even though his playing is good.
I gave a little gasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that.
Since this is Lestat recalling this moment, when he uses the phrase “loved him already”, that indicates Lestat is saying he loved Nicki as early as their first meeting when Nicki gifted him the red velvet cloak lined with the fur of the wolves. It alludes to the fact Lestat genuinely falls in love with him later.
Once Lestat strikes up the relationship with Nicki, at Gabrielle’s insistence, they start talking for hours and the conversation delves into religion, which Nicki has no use for.
I was beginning to understand why he was so sarcastic and cynical. He had only recently lost that old faith. He was bitter about it. But no matter how deadening was this sarcasm of his, a great energy poured out of him, an irrepressible passion. And this drew me to him. I think I loved him. Another two glasses of wine and I might say something absolutely ridiculous like that.
Lestat is falling for him. They talk about the witches’ place and the conversation moves to Nicki telling Lestat that Paris is a hellhole too, but Lestat disagrees.
“Ah, you are a dreamer!” he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled….He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk. “My lord, the wolfkiller,” he whispered.
I mean, that speaks for itself. And the entire exchange when Lestat begins pouring out his soul to Nicki is quite touching.
Lestat is literally tossing pebbles at his window like a lovestruck kid. After that, Lestat says when he wasn’t out hunting, his life was with Nicolas. When they run away to Paris together, Lestat says it would be far more serious than what he’d done before when he tried to escape.
We weren’t boys anymore, we were men. Our fathers would curse us, and this was something neither of us could laugh off.
The implications of that statement are a lot. For one, two grown men running away together in that time period would’ve been a scandal. For another, their actual relationship was, not only scandalous, but illegal back then. Lestat is aware of this, and he knows anyone finding out would have devastating consequences for them both.
Lestat is happy with Nicki in Paris, but Nicki is struggling. They still disagree on the concept of goodness, but Nicki tells Lestat that he loves him.
“Lestat, I love you,” Nicki said gravely. “I love you as I have loved few people in my life, but in a real way you’re a fool with all your ideas about goodness.”
The conversation continues, Nicki telling Lestat that he only believes in weakness and strength and good art and bad art and what they’re doing is bad art, which has nothing to do with goodness. Lestat, again, disagrees but he bites back the argument. Nicki tells Lestat that if goodness exists, then Nicki is the opposite of goodness. Nicki says himself that he’s evil. Again, Lestat is hurt and disagrees. This is when Nicki tells Lestat that he’s the light.
“You have a radiance in you, Lestat,” he said. “And it draws everyone to you. It’s there even when you’re angry, or discouraged—“
“Poetry,” I said. “We’re both tired.”
“No, it’s true,” he said. “You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.”
“You’re the mad one,” I said. “If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music—which of course you play for yourself—you wouldn’t see darkness, Nicki. You’d see an illumination that is all your own. Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.”
Lestat sees beauty in Nicki, and he loves him for it. This conflict about Lestat’s light will later be the catalyst for their relationship combusting after Lestat turns Nicki and he shows his true colors in that he always hated Lestat and blamed Lestat’s light (his true self) for being the cause of Nicki’s darkness.
In the meantime, Magnus has been stalking Lestat at the theater, and Lestat confides in Nicki that he’s scared of this unknown being.
I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me. “Let’s go to bed,” he said softly.
And this is the night Magnus abducts Lestat and he screams out for Nicki as Magnus is spiriting him away.
Once Lestat becomes a vampire, he stays away from Nicki in fear of hurting him. However, he sends him money and gifts and buys him a nice apartment and a Stradivarius violin. He watches over Nicki from afar outside his window, and he realizes Nicki’s darkness was even deeper and more severe than Lestat ever realized.
And in the lengthening silence, I felt the depth of Nicki’s anguish, I knew it as if I were peering into his skull. And I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear delving into his soul without his knowing it. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from sensing a vast secret terrain inside him, grimmer perhaps than I had ever dreamed, and his words came back to me that the darkness in him was like the darkness I’d seen at the inn, and that he tried to conceal it from me.
He had recognized in my monster self something that he knew and loved.
He eventually seeks Nicki out at the theater after this encounter.
And then there was only Nicolas and I didn’t care….I smelled the blood pumping in him, and for one heady moment I felt love and only love obliterating every recollection of the horrors that had deformed me. Every evil rapture, every new power with its gratification, seemed unreal. Maybe I felt a profound joy, too, that I could still love, if I’d ever doubted it, and that a tragic victory had been confirmed.
He’s also horrified when he wants Nicki’s blood and realizes his physical strength could now really and truly harm Nicki.
No one was safe from me now, no matter how innocent. And that included my dear friends at Renaud’s and it included my beloved Nicki.
Lestat is still worried about Nicki and trying to find ways to take care of him. When Nicki gets kidnapped by Armand’s coven, Lestat is enraged.
The rage building in me was absolutely silent. It will be rage until I have proof that it must be grief, I thought. Then I wasn’t thinking.
Lestat immediately goes to rescue him, he’s enraged again when he’s sees the bruises on Nicki and that they’ve drained him, he busts up Armand’s entire coven, and then he takes Nicki to a nearby inn, making sure he’s got food for him and blankets to keep him warm before taking him back to the tower with Gabrielle.
Before Nicki guilts Lestat into turning him, Lestat is trying to see his Nicki through the madness, malice, and rage.
I tried to see him in the shadows of the room, and not it—the love for him, the aching, wrenching months of longing for him, the hideous and unshakable human need for him, the lust. I tried to see the mortal who didn’t know what he was saying as he glared at me.
And an awful self-consciousness came over me. Silent and lethal, I felt myself flooded with the power I had over him and his knowledge of it, and my love for him heated the sense of power, driving it towards a scorching embarrassment which suddenly changed into something else.
“Come to me, Nicki,” I whispered. I lifted both hands to beckon. “If you want it, you must come…”
Lestat realizes after he turns Nicki that he can’t stand the sight of him, but that all goes out the window when Nicki runs away from Lestat and Gabrielle after being like an animated corpse.
If I had doubted up until this moment that I loved him, I had been lying to myself.
They find him at Renaud’s and that’s when shit truly hits the fan between Lestat and Nicki. Lestat later refers to his relationship with Nicolas as “….the little miracle of love turned into hate.”
There’s so much in that. Lestat believes it’s a miracle that anyone could ever love him, but it was inevitable everyone would grow to hate him, because he thinks he’s a monster now. When Nicki later kills himself, Lestat grieves and blames himself.
It was I who did it, I who seduced him, made him what he was, and left him there. It was I who subverted the path his life might have taken. And so in dark obscurity, removed from its human course, it comes to this.
In Prince Lestat, Lestat refers to Nicki as having been his only mortal friend and his “greatest failure.” He’s still blaming himself all those years later for what happened to Nicki.
For me, none of that reads as best buds. 😏
And yes, The Vampire Lestat and subsequent books make it clear that Louis is the love of Lestat’s life. The entire reason Lestat even became a rockstar and wrote his book was for Louis and to protect Louis.
Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self-destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas….Yet Louis gained a hold over me far more powerful than Nicolas had ever had. Even in his cruelest moments, Louis touched the tenderness in me, seducing me with his staggering dependence, his infatuation with my every gesture and every spoken word. And his naïveté conquered me always….And I wonder sometimes if I didn’t look to Louis to punish me for what had happened to Nicki, if I didn’t create Louis to be my conscience and to mete out year in and year out the penance I felt I deserved. But I loved him, plain and simple.
And I had always loved him, hadn’t I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?
From Queen Of The Damned:
There was so much I wanted to say to him, to ask him. Yet I couldn’t find the words really, or a way to begin. He had always had so many questions; and now he had his answers, more answers perhaps than he could ever have wanted; and what had this done to his soul? Stupidly I stared at him. How perfect he seemed to me as he stood there waiting with such kindness and such patience. And then, like a fool, I came out with it.
“Do you love me now?” I asked. He smiled; oh, it was excruciating to see his face soften and brighten simultaneously when he smiled. “Yes,” he said.
From Tale Of The Body Thief:
His beauty has always maddened me. I think I idealize him in my mind when I’m not with him; but then when I see him again I’m overcome.
I would have defied heaven to help Louis!
My Louis, I could never deny you anything….
The only name on my lips was Louis. Louis. I could not for a moment forget Louis.
If anything in the world could have truly comforted me, he would have been the thing—with just the beguiling tilt of his narrow head or the way that he kept looking at me, protecting me obviously with a confidential calm from what he must have feared for me, and for him, and perhaps for all of us.
“Drink now, Louis,” he commanded.
“Harder, yes, take it from me,” came Lestat’s low insistent command. He spoke in French now. “Harder, more of it, take it, take all that I have to give.”
From Prince Lestat And The Realms Of Atlantis:
Louis was standing in the door of the room opposite, across the hall. I drew in my breath. I didn’t say a word….I was unable to speak….He crossed the hall and put his arms around me and kissed me on the lips. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he asked. Nothing mocking or mean in the tone. Shocked. Unable to respond.
Yet I felt closer to him than to any other visible being in the world.
Louis knew what I couldn’t confide, and he was respectful of it, and comforting and patient. Louis never failed me.
And finally, bringing it all full circle from Blood Communion:
Lestat with the light and the darkness, his guilt about Nicki, and this beautifully understanding reaction from Louis.
“I have no gift for being miserable,” I said.
“I know,” he said. He laughed. Such a human face. Such a lovely face.
If you want further elaboration on all this, as if this post wasn’t long enough 😅, I’ve talked about it more in-depth.
Loustat Are Home To Each Other
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
blakekathryn
romaincrisis
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