Home / Fan Fiction / V(cough) C(cough) fic / The Chosen of God Part 15

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 Fifteen
by: The Brat Queen
September 19, 2000

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

Rated R for upsetting 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.

Throughout most of my life my father was an imposing presence. Larger, stronger. In control of me and both of my brothers as well. Physically capable of attacking me and causing damage well into my sixteenth year.

He was, however, older. And it was a beautiful quirk of Fate that as I became more my own man he became less of one himself.

His eyesight was the first to go. By the time I reached adolescence he was well and truly blind. He still possessed a keen ability to navigate, however, and this lack of vision did not in any way hamper his ability to do those things which he felt to be important. Highest on this list was, of course, his activities with me. He was able to continue those both from my bedroom and in his study. And as I have said before I did admire his ability to play chess long after his eyesight had gone simply by remembering where all of the pieces were placed. As I think upon it I would even wager that after his blindness he became an even better player than he had been. Perhaps because it helped him think more clearly. Perhaps because he felt that he needed to prove himself. Either way I do remember losing a lot of games.

His health began to fail not long after. Not due to any illness, as had happened with Gabrielle, but solely due to age. He managed to remain something of a strong figure during my early teenaged years but the night that I was brought back from the actors was the final night of true violence from him. I often thought that the beating he gave me in return for my actions took the last of his strength out of him for never again did he try to lash out at me in that manner.

The violence did not stop, of course. It just was not as often as once it was. And what cruelty he was unable to do to me physically was only channeled into other methods of keeping my attention. I was not left wanting in this area by any means.

But it was in these final years of living in my father's house that a curious change came over the relationship. I was now becoming the bigger one, the stronger one, the daring one. And it was because of this that I could go out in the evenings to seduce random strangers and he did not dare try to stop me. My brothers were scandalized by my activities - oh how well I was to come to know that fact - but their protests to my father fell on deaf ears.

It was a curious time, this. In many ways I wonder if he considered this my revenge, or perhaps the revenge of karma if he had believed in such a thing. For now I was well and truly my father's son who had learned his tricks of speech and manipulation and used each one of them against him. I defied him to stop me. Defied him with the full weight of over a decade of being his slave, knowing that by then he was just as trapped with me as I was with him. He did not dare say no.

On the whole I would say this was a state of affairs that you must be nodding along with, fratello, having surely been quite familiar with such a thing yourself.

Of course the crushing irony of all this was the fact that I was to come to regret this freedom and to find myself one night, years later, wishing that I had stayed in his home where at least my enemies were known. Or at least I thought them to be known. But that little bit of punishment was not of my father's doing, and I would even daresay that had he been his old self and had he been aware of what was in store for me, he would have put an immediate stop to it.

For it must be understood that in his own way he loved me and considered us to have an honest love affair. By what split of his own mind he was able to justify this I do not know but it was how he felt about it. And it was because of this that there were such violent misunderstandings between us.

The first of which, as you may guess, was my declaration to join the priesthood.

I do not think I need to describe for you what my brief time in that schooling was like. Suffice it to say it was a world which was clean, and ordered, and people spoke words which were true and without trickery.

By what stupidity I thought I could declare a calling I honestly do not know. I think upon that memory now and say to you that I do not understand this child. I do not understand how he thought that he could do this thing and somehow escape his father's house. Perhaps it was the tenderness of the priests which swayed him, perhaps it was his own delusion that God Himself would protect him.

Perhaps. I'm not sure.

Whatever reason it was the thing was done. I declared my vocation and woke not long after to face Augustin and Charlot looking down upon me with wrath and contempt as they came to drag me summarily home.

But their anger was nothing compared to our father's. Ah, brother, the look of betrayal in my father's eyes - I'd never seen its like before.

I was not to have done this thing. Not just because I had no hope for attaining a respectable ranking in the priesthood and not just because Gabrielle had snuck me away to it without really asking my father's permission. No. I was not to have done it because I was with my father, and he with me. Try to imagine what it would be like, Armand, if you were to ask your erstwhile spouse and companion for a divorce and you will then be able to imagine how my father felt about all of this.

I had turned away from him. Rejected him. Officially declared that I would be happy elsewhere.

I'd broken his heart, quite frankly.

So I was beaten, thrown back into my room, told by all and sundry that I could not leave and there we were. Back to square one.

The next attempt was with the actors, and here now I can tell you it was the arrogance of my youth which told me that I could sneak away with them into the night and none would find me. Stupid thinking, this, since the simplest of questions would have ferreted out the location of the next show and thus my hiding spot as well. But this was the first time I truly tried to rebel against my father and he knew it for what it was.

Again humiliated by my brothers, again brought home to be beaten, again the look of betrayal in my father's eyes.

But that was the last of it. Never again could he attack me in quite the same way and both he and I knew it. As with fathers and sons the entire world over we had had our moment where the balance of power shifted and never returned to how it once was.

Why did I not run away again? Many reasons. My brothers could have still hunted me down. I was not scared of them - I refused to give them that, Charlot especially - but I was practical enough to realize the uselessness of trying.

Also I think I enjoyed my new status. I enjoyed knowing I could torment him and make him watch me do as I damn well pleased. After all, he could not stop me. Did not dare to for fear of what I might do to him in return.

Did the relationship between us stop? Of course not. It did, however, become more infrequent. Particularly due to the fact that he became more and more physically incapable of participating in it and due to the fact that his increasing feebleness meant that for anything to occur I would have to come to him willingly and of my own volition.

Rare. But not unheard of.

And this, too, I know you understand.

So at the moment in which I met Nicolas de Lenfent I was in quite a unique position. My living arrangements with my father had become a pale shadow of what they had once been. In my father's place was Augustin, who did not ever attempt to truly cuckold my father's position with me but who did take it upon himself to condemn and chastise me as my father once had. It was an odd attempt at keeping some semblance of normalcy within the house. Lestat was the rebellious one. Someone had to look down upon him and punish him. My father did not so Agustin did.

This did not, you understand, amount to more than the occasional yelling match. Other than the times when he kidnapped me home again there was never any sort of violence or physical altercation between Augustin and myself.

And to this day I am convinced that with time, with my own mortality, Augustin and I could have become friends.

I don't envy my brother the position he must have had. That he had full knowledge of our living situation is, to me, unquestionable. But this was one thing in a long line of what made our family life impossible and Augustin, as heir, bore the full weight of it. He spent his life believing that it would be he who carried on our family name, who took over when our father died, who would bear the title of le Marquis de Lioncourt.

Of course he would dislike me. The youngest son, attached to our father in a way that he could not understand or even hope to compete with - in this you could argue that it was I who was attempting to cuckold him. Our father was not meant to notice me, to even care about me in one way or another. But our father was obsessed with me to a degree that none of my brothers ever saw or understood. Understandable that Augustin would hate me for this.

And, too, for the way that I tried to run things when I became of an age to do so. It was not my job to do so. My every attempt was, in fact, a direct insult to him. That I only did these things because he was such a failure at them was entirely besides the point. They were his to do. Not mine.

Of course I was blindingly ignorant of all that back then. These petty royal dynamics seemed so foolish to me and thus I ignored them willingly. Which, I am sure, shocks you to your core. Yes, brother, I was the rulebreaker even then. I thundered at the dinner table just as easily as my father did about how things were to be done and why the house should be run in the manner that I demanded.

It is only now that I understand what Augustin went through, and how he must have looked at me, and why he would have resented me so. Fine for me to pout and complain and say these things. I had the ability to do so. I had freedoms that he did not. I had advantages that he would never know. I did not understand then but I know full well now how trapped he was. He could not run away to Paris with his favorite lover from the village. He had to stay and take responsibility for the shambles that our family had become. Our father on one side of him, me on another. My God what a nightmare.

I think on Augustin now and remember a man as oddly out of his time as I was. He was of a wider frame than mine and I am certain that in his youth he had the build of an ox. I never saw him as such, however, since his body had fallen soft by the time I was old enough to notice such things. His hair and eyes were dark, just like our father's. Dark, pure brown. And he often wore a beard, which of course was entirely out of fashion for the time but what did we know of the jewel like beauty that men in Paris displayed in those days? Our family was firmly entrenched in centuries past and Augustin looked quite at home in our castle of rusting swords and armor. I imagine he would have been much happier back then, when our castle was first built and our family placed within it. I do not doubt he would have ruled well in such a time. It was his misfortune to be born when I was, in an age when the villagers held more wealth and power than we and knew it.

I feel sad for him, thinking that he died in the Revolution. That was not fair. For Charlot to have been killed thanks to one of the villagers is for me a comical working of justice and a thought entirely likely to make me burst out into laughter, if not for the fact that they killed his wife and children as well and that was not a fate that they deserved.

But Augustin could have been a good ruler. Centuries ago. Your time, in fact, Armand, or perhaps even a little earlier. He was a plain man who could comprehend a plain role. He was not meant to suffer through the dramatics that was life with my father and I. It was beyond him. I do not resent him for doing the best that he was able to.

Forgive me, fratello, I was going to speak of Nicolas tonight. I was going to tell you about meeting him for the first time and falling in love with him and of what he knew of the life that I lead. But I am afraid I can not do justice to such a thing. I am caught in a moment of longing. Longing that Augustin could have lived a bit longer and that he and I could have known one another honestly. But perhaps it is better this way. My memories of him can be fond because he did not live long enough to dispute them. In any event there is nothing that can be done to change it.

And so my mind now goes in two directions. Nicolas, and New Orleans. Do I speak of my musician lover or of the moment when I came back to my father once more?

I'm not certain. We shall have to see.

L.

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