this looks like harlequin makeup to me which makes me wonder how much of this is active self harm and reliving the build up to his worst trauma over and over again to punish himself
and then coupled with this clip of nicki writing what appears to be MINE in blood (from his severed hands?), is this haunting about lestat internalizing nicki's jealous resentment that he was the one who deserved lestat's natural talent and fame, that he was owed it and lestat took it from him?
coupled w the netflix promo vid with delainey in the yellow dress and burn makeup and this cliip with burned hands
makes sam choosing "failure" as the one word to describe lestat's season even more exciting. when louis hallucinated lestat in s2, he only had the murder wound in 201 if i recall correctly, but with two diff outfits we can assume that these are distinct scenes and possibly distinct episodes, as the yellow dress with face burns was recent and a diff filming day to this. and burned hands claudia's outfit is from 107 scene where lesclo play piano together, which makes me think anything of lestat leads to death, whether that's being his fledgling or learning from him or counting him as your family. thinking of that scene as the domestic vision louis just wanted all along, but not only is that moment performative, now it's tangled in lestat's rolodex with the ever-present proof that this -- the failure who watches his daughter burn to death in front of him, the failure that his daughter had to plot to kill to escape from -- is always what's on the other end of things, no matter how pretty and intricate and thrilling the performance might be in the moment. severed hands, burned hands, this is always what lestat's hands do. yay
