☞ botanical headcanons { open }
gladiolus : describe a moment from your muse’s life that they will never forget .
The first moment Lestat saw Louis, it was from across the street, on the same night Lestat caught him on his front doorstep and drank from him. The night was warm and the air was thick with the Louisiana heat, the smell of the river and the mud rolling through the streets on what little breeze there was. Louis was standing across the street, under the balcony of a foul tavern that he had only just stepped out of. It was raining, but Louis did not notice it. To Lestat, he looked like the sinking wreck of a ship, with only the rudder left to spin above the waves. Louis' clothes had been slept in, they were wrinkled. The shirt was only linen, undone and limp at the collar, so that Lestat could see the white skin which lay beneath it. Like a vampire’s skin. It looked as though someone had been running her fingers through his hair; one of the prostitutes Louis never went to bed with.
And he looked like an angel. Almost as beautiful then as he later became to Lestat, and Lestat wanted him at once. He loved him at once. Shadows fell everywhere, but because Louis stood before the windows of that place, he could see him perfectly. His cheeks were red with drink, and he was turning his head, one way, and then the other, so that his curls fell out around his chin. More than all that, Lestat could hear Louis, for the first, and almost the last, time. After he turned Louis into one of his "silent ones", Lestat mourned that loss for a long time. An exquisite misery ran through Louis like blood, and it was a suffering that, in that moment, to Lestat, bordered on the beautiful and the saintlike. (Of course, his opinion of Louis' melancholy quickly soured.) It was like a symphony, and Lestat listened to it as he followed Louis' stumbling pace all the way home, that night, knowing that he would either make Louis his eternal companion, or condemn him to death.
lilac : what was your muse’s childhood like ? how has their upbringing affected them as they’ve aged ?
In two words: not great! Lestat lived his childhood -- in fact, his entire mortal life -- in poverty, as the seventh of seventh children (four surviving) born to a Marquis whose ancestral funds had long since dried up, leaving the family without much more than a crumbling, draughty chateau. Dressed in moth-eaten rags and ancient yellow lace, Lestat's later materialism developed, in part, from a profound sense of loss and entitlement; he was, technically, an aristocrat and part of the noblesse d'épée, and found this status completely at odds with how they lived. Basically, he thought he deserved better, and he wanted better. And more than that, he wanted an education, and he wanted love, both of which he was deprived of. These three great lacks were foundational, for Lestat.
Around the age of twelve, was briefly educated in a nearby monastery, where he learned only the rudiments of reading and writing -- he could manage a few prayers, write his name. When he soon expressed his desire to go on as a brother there and continue his education, his father and brothers brought him home at once, and burned his books in the courtyard of the chateau. By way of compensation, his mother gave him a gun, and Lestat took over the task of hunting the nearby mountain and valley for the family's game. All this laid two things deep in Lestat: a hatred of book-learning and all associated with it, stemmed from a long-standing jealousy and longing, and a talent for killing. Still, he tried to escape life at the chateau once more, at sixteen, when he ran away with a troupe of Italian actors who passed through his village -- and was swiftly caught and brought home again.
About love, finally, for whoever feels like reading all of this long, long response, Lestat was raised in a home devoid of it. His father was a brutish and distant figure; his mother, a much younger, educated woman of Italian nobility, had no love or concern for any of the sons she dutifully bore her husband. He had his first friend, outside of his hunting dogs, at twenty, when a local bourgeois' son, Nicolas, returned to their village from Paris. Living without it, Lestat craved it: and he never lets go of that, of wanting to be loved! He will always want to be loved, in any shape or form, though when it comes to loving in return he is ill-practiced and unsteady. And, as a vampire, permanently caught in all these traps, stubborn and largely unchanging.
