Home / Fan Fiction / V(cough) C(cough) fic / The Chosen of God Part 10

DISCLAIMER: The following stories are all non-profit, amateur efforts not intended to infringe on the rights of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, David Geffen, Warner Brothers, Geffen Pictures, Knopf, Randomhouse, the city of New Orleans, the U.S. Constitution, any copyright holders that I might not have thought of or even a certain author who shall remain nameless but who has a set of initials which are, coincidentally enough, just one letter off from spelling "B.S."

Part Ten
by: The Brat Queen

Winner: Best Lestat '98-'99!

Characters: Lestat, Armand
Spoilers: Up to TotBT
Description: In response to Jester of God, Lestat tells his life story.

Rated R for upsetting adult content

Warning: CoG contains triggering elements. If you know what "triggering" means you may wish to not read this. If you don't then just be warned that it and Jester of God are very similar.

This is out of order, fratello, at least if we are speaking of these things chronologically. So I will ask your forgiveness and indulgence. But the mood strikes me and in truth I feel I should follow.

The night I didn't die.

You know it. It was the day I went into the Gobi, never to come back.

Or I hoped to never come back.

Louis has asked me, both outright and in that quiet, polite way of his, why I did this. Why did I try to kill myself and why did I not say goodbye to him. Why, of all things, I said goodbye to David Talbot instead.

Call it an odd mood of mine, but I'd like to answer him.

I'll get back to my father's house later.

Let us move the clock ahead and take another look at our hero. Here he is, in the birth of the 1990s, the epitome of everything vampires are meant to be. He is strong, perhaps even more powerful than the most ancient ones, and he is alive. Which for vampires at the time was saying a lot.

He wants to die.

Oh I know what I said after the fact. Pretty little lies to the world and myself. Flash of a quick smile and a nod to let the world know I was never that serious. Never truly that desperate, vulnerable and weak. I just wanted a tan to compliment my hair color. How like me.

I wanted to die.

And perhaps you can understand this, fratello.

You, former leader of the Damned. Leader of the damned still, in your own heart. You never gave that up. We both know it. You must have known the death I wanted.

I'm not sure if Louis ever did. Perhaps. In his own way.

Why? No Lady MacBeth, me. I had no blood on my hands.

That's what bothered me.

It has been argued to me, with intermittent success, that in my time with Akasha I did not have a choice. That in no way could I have stopped it.

Perhaps. But that didn't stop me from enjoying it.

I wanted it, Armand. When the slaughter began I wanted my share. I killed and killed and killed until the world was death and it was not enough. Their lives did not matter, their deaths did not matter. I wanted a world of death and I created it. There was nothing more to be done.

Do the math, if you will. Argue that those I kill even to this very day are no different from those I killed in that time. Argue that the numbers even out, when you take into account my time underground. Argue it all you like.

It doesn't matter.

In my heart I murdered. I did not drink their blood, I did not live from their lives. I murdered. Complete, utter murder for no good reason save my own pleasure. I was no different from that pissant Azim when it comes down to it.

Do the elders mock this self-indulgent guilt, do you think? I can't help but wonder if Pandora reads something of this and shakes her head, wondering why it bothers me so. To the Children of the Millenium this malady of mortality must seem needless.

But it is mine and my cross to bear. I'll wear it with the addiction of two hundred years.

Can the question really be why I wanted to die? Is that really the matter of dispute? Surely it can be understood the horror I felt at myself, the pain of living with myself. Oh yes, I could look into the mirror and proclaim myself the Vampire Lestat once more. Ducky. What a bastard.

The Vampire Lestat had to die.

Of myself I could not say. I was nowhere to be found, really, so it did not matter. The one voice I allowed myself was this vote that The Vampire Lestat was to be no more. He needed to die, I was the only one who could kill him.

So I did.

Death in the Gobi. Perfect for him. Burned alive, as he should have been. Burned as I had burned myself time and time again in my father's house, torn from my body as I had so many times torn my own skin.

Three days of such torture was, for him, as they say, a good start. It didn't last longer but it was enough.

When it was done, when I crawled out of that hole of Hell, I felt him buried in there. The bastard was still under all that sand, a corpse. Me, I was alive.

So I thought.

Raglan James was, I know now, his revenge. The Vampire Lestat did not die. He is still me, and I he. And the part of him that was left to speak inside of me after this attempt at slightly extroverted suicide took revenge on that part of me which was guilt-ridden and overly sentimental. The result of it was the logical extreme - trapped inside of a body as weak and stupidly vulnerable as I felt. Doomed to die a slow and proper death, as I felt I deserved. Banish the vampire, die like cattle.

The keenness with which I hate myself surprises me at times, and often draws a bit of self-admiration.

Trial by fire and ice, all self-inflicted, all with the hope of destroying that which I hated inside of me.

And perhaps to this extent it can be said that I did not want to die, as I wrote in my book was the case. Not truly. Instead I was punishing myself as was apt for the crime. One cut, one burn was not enough. For a crime such as this I needed torture. When none offered, I happily supplied it.

Thus explains Lestat's time of second mortality.

But we are also explaining a bit before.

Louis hurt me. Not deliberately, my God never that. No.

And in truth, Armand, the emotions are still so raw that I still cannot force my mind to focus on them. I can only speak of them vaguely, as though they never really happened. I can only surmise the words to be true because they do not feel themselves to be a lie.

But when I look at it I can say that Louis would have destroyed me. Being with him would have killed me. The scant time we spent together was enough to keep me sane but more than that and I think I would have died.

How could I touch him? My beautiful one, how could I corrupt him?

I was diseased, monstrous. I lived in horror of the memory of my strong arms around his frail form that night in New Orleans when we left Night Island by way of the U.K. He could have died in my arms and I would have never felt it. Like air to me, like nothing. So far beyond the human immortality that he valued so much, I was now the very epitome of everything vampirism represented to him and which he hated in turn.

I felt his contempt and condemnation of me, even if he never felt it himself. He didn’t need to. My imagination is active enough to cover such discrepancies between my emotions and my reality.

And how can this even be said? How could it even be brought up in conversation? How could I turn to him and say what I was about to do without explaining the why of it?

I held a secret hope that he never knew what I had done with Akasha. It was in the book, true, but not enough, truly, to paint the full picture. Like with my father's house, I used only broad strokes.

But I knew with Louis it would be enough.

That Louis knows what happened to me I do not doubt. Even though to this very day I have never told him the blow by blow of it. Louis can look at me and know my soul, never fear that.

But I could not confirm it for him. Or myself. Could not speak aloud the words which would admit finally the beast that I was. Could not hurt him with that reality, nor myself with his reaction to it.

And, stupidly, if I did not tell him I was dying perhaps in some way I would still live. In his mind at least I could still perhaps be the man he felt worthy enough for his occasional company, the man he cared for enough to sit still and watch a video with, from time to time.

Perhaps.

And, too, I was just a coward. One must admit the simplicity of that as well.

Craven coward, I did not tell him. I ran away. Which is far less than he ever deserved from me. Even as a monster, he deserved the right of my death more than I ever have. If nothing else I should have been brave enough to give him the first shot at my black heart.

But I couldn't bear the knowledge of that. Couldn't die thinking Louis truly and utterly hated me as much as he should have. So I fled, and denied him that which he deserved, and hurt him as he should not have been hurt, and it is as simple as that.

David was my last will and testament.

He was a scholar, so his opinion did not matter. His opinion was meant to be historical and not much more. I could talk to him and feel that I was not giving myself over to judge and jury. And that, moreover, whatever I gave would be recorded for any who cared after my demise.

That he helped when I needed it was a fluke.

That I turned him into a vampire was perhaps the last known act of The Vampire Lestat. His last known warning of why others should never befriend me too much. I will strike out at anyone close to me, no matter what they do.

But it was nothing, an afterthought. I didn't care, so I told him. That's all.

And thus explains my rather demented and pathetic little suicide. It wasn't the first time I'd thought such thoughts and we both know it wasn't the last.

I can't help but wonder what would happen if I truly could die.

Or perhaps the universe prefers me here.

One can never know.

L.