“I will wait for you again. I always do.” (Gabi)
she wonders if he knows he lies. not to her; a vulgar impossibility. he has never possessed the discipline for such betrayal. but to himself, oh, endlessly, with a kind of radiant devotion. to wait is to calcify, to become a statue in one’s own mausoleum, and lestat has never endured stillness. not in life, not in unlife, not in any fevered interval between. he moves as flame moves, as hunger moves, finding his little fascinations, his grand obsessions, and burning through them, through the world, like some exquisite, grieving dervish who cannot bear the sound of his own silence.
to be free is to exist without apology. she has tasted the falseness of this place on the air, this night island. shackles everywhere, delicate, gilded, perfumed. the lights, the noise, the endless hum of acquisition and appetite, the soft tyranny of consumption. it disgusts her, this hunger dressed as progress, no less than the life she once inhabited, dismissed, diminished, reduced to a mere vessel. the streets far behind them sing (gaudy, shallow, artificial…), their pleasures contrived and carefully curated. she feels nothing for it. the ocean below them is truer. the waves hurl themselves against the cliffs with a violence that is clean, that asks no permission, that apologizes to no one. a storm approaches. she can feel it before she sees it, the slow gathering of clouds, the pressure in the air, the promise of thunder.
and yet, even this, even the near promise of such spectacle, cannot persuade her to linger. she no longer delays. the cord is cut. cleanly. decisively, as so many things have been severed before. memories from another body, another existence. blood slipping down pale thighs, pooling, staining linen. a voice sharp with command, with fury, ordering yet another trembling handmaiden away. always the same. always the same hand reaching for the knife, the sword, the flame. her own. the only one she has ever trusted.
lestat’s longing coils around her. she feels it as one feels ivy or smoke. tendrils at her ankles, insistent, patient, climbing. up her legs, around her thighs, her waist, insinuating beneath the skin, threading through her and trying to fill all the hollow spaces, pressing against the architecture of her chest. she has not worn skirts in centuries, and yet he clings to them, phantom fabric, memory made into tether. every parting becomes a ritual of detachment.
but she is not gone. not yet.
her hand finds his. a light touch, almost absent-minded, though nothing in her is ever careless. their hands mirror one another as so much else does: structure, proportion, the quiet symmetry of blood that binds them. the shine of his skin so much paler now, marble, like the statues that haunt the corridors of old venetian palaces.
around them, these modern immortals entangle themselves in their politics, their philosophies, their endless indulgences. tedious. they are burdened by thought, by self-importance, by the need to name and justify every impulse. blind, whether by accident or by lestat’s own careful design, to his retreat into that solitary tower of self for these past many weeks.
she sees the door he has closed. she will open it. she will drag him, if necessary, back into motion, into hunger, into the honest violence of existence. and then she will leave. and he, inevitably, gloriously, will find his way again.
