Home / Fan Fiction / V(cough) C(cough) fic / The Chosen of God Part 16

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 Sixteen
by: The Brat Queen
September 20, 2000

Characters: Lestat, Armand, Nicolas
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.

I am glad now that I did, for I noticed a passage which did not come to my attention before.

But I'll get to that in a moment.

Nicolas.

Armand if you need to ask who the first love of my life was I shall be greatly disappointed in you. Be that as it may, we must look to Nicolas for the unique and startling creature that he was.

Real love this, and no mistaking it.

My mind runs wildly now, uncertain where to begin.

I knew of Nicolas as a child. He and I being of a comparable age and, due to his family's wealth and my family's title, almost of a comparable peerage. I saw him in lessons, mostly, those given by the village priest to all of us good Catholic children.

I did not keep company with him then or any such thing. I did not, as you might imagine, have any childish playmates. Such things were not done then and of course my father would have never allowed it besides.

But I saw Nicolas enough then that I knew of him and could recognize him when he came to me again years later with my cloak and boots.

His family was an interesting thing. Rich, as I've said, but unlike so many of the bourgeois they kept an interest in royalty. The relationship with my family and the town was often a strained thing - we resented their money, they resented our enforced leadership - but with me and the town it was at times an amicable business relationship.

Nicolas's family, though, was close enough to the old ways to care about titles. Which was why, barring a lack of daughters on either side with which to bring about some kind of marriage (and as I think on it now I can say a marriage between the Lenfent family and my own would not have been an unheard of thing) Monsieur de Lenfent senior was quite happy to discover that his son and the son of the Marquis were spending time together. I suspect that Nicki's father thought of it as the first remotely respectable thing that Nicolas had done in years. I'm sure this is a fact which still brings Nicolas no end of amusement.

I was, as I have said, twenty one or thereabouts when I met Nicolas again. All this you know the details of. Meeting me, dressed in Parisian finery, giving me the cloak, whispering that yes, he was impossible too. All true, that.

But I wonder how much you saw in my words? Did you see me, standing there, utterly infatuated with him? Watching his incredibly handsome form - and you and I both know of his looks, dear brother - with my keen eyes as he, in turn, watched me right back?

That is what did it, you know. More than anything else it was that Nicolas met my eyes.

He was challenging me. Little bastard.

Oh I had to know more of him.

And yes, he had been to Paris and yes he could tell me about a life outside of our town that had actors and singers and men and women so much like ourselves who only wanted to escape. Entirely true.

But there was more to this. Much more. Levels of emotion and interaction unlike anything I had known before.

Who were my lovers then? Young women of the village, older men who were travelers. Above me or beneath me somehow. Never my peers.

Then enter Nicolas. The draper's son. A man at odds with his own father in so many ways like my own. And that he would have these fights with his father over music - as at the time I considered my own fights to be over acting - only drew me closer and infatuated me even more.

The first day we spent together was, I think, the first time I had been truly myself since I had strutted out upon the stage with the players. It was I who sat there and spoke to him, asking him to tell me all he knew about Paris and flirting with him as shamelessly as he did with me. Why did he do it? I never knew entirely for sure. That he found me attractive was obvious, but there was more to it than that. Nicolas liked me. I could tell that he found me charming and interesting and there was something within me that managed to break through his ironic and cynical nature and made him smile and even a little vulnerable.

He called me "Monsieur" for hours. Me. A poverty-stricken harecatcher who could barely sign his own name. Who had been a diapered toddling youth with him years ago! "Monsieur," a word of respect, of deference, his way, I know now, of showing me how different I truly was for Nicolas was never one to feel overly respectful of anything at all.

We drank and there was not the danger in this for me that there might normally have been. The part of my mind which only came out in my drinking had been broken, locked away from years of denial and then, I believe, snapped out of my conscious attention the day I went out to kill the wolves. In front of Nicolas I was only Lestat, the wolfkiller, the handsome lad who sat beside him and listened to him with as rapt an attention as he listened to me.

So there was no trace of my father, there, in this meeting. Or in many of our meetings long after. I spoke with him of my home, yes, but our conversations were very much alike. We were cursed at, misunderstood, tormented by fathers who failed to understand us. Nicolas's father threatened to break his hands. Mine had actually done so years ago. We felt a kinship in that.

We drank wine and talked together and he ran home to get his violin and played for me and I knew I was utterly and undeniably in love with him. And he with me for it was not the wine alone which drew our chairs closer together and which had us touching and kissing one another long before the alcohol had taken away our sanity. He kissed me first, I believe, which impressed me as well.

Ah God. I did love him Armand. Well and truly. For him I threw my entire life away. I had taken all of my other lovers right up until the point of meeting him. And then after that night I stopped. I did not go back to those inns and taverns, I did not even make love with my pretty young maidens. I was devoted to Nicolas. And this was an emotion which even blotted out my father's light. Whatever little I could remember of our time together was now well and truly lost, locked away inside of my mind so tightly that only the most unusual of moments could make me remember it. I mean for the love of God, I brought Nicolas into the house! Into my room! And on the self same bed where I had been taken by my father I now took my lover, Nicki, with the two of us laughing like lovestruck teenagers and muffling each other's cries so we would not be caught.

Such a thing would never have happened if my father had been more like himself. But by then he had become so old and enfeebled that he was easily forgotten. Sometimes - sometimes - I could remember him, but never fully the whys and wherefores of it all. And if he understood the depths of my feelings for Nicolas and how this arrogant violinist had taken his place he never said or showed.

With Nicki I had a true love affair. And I think Nicki's love of me in return surprised himself. Cynics do not feel such things, you know. But I managed to make him happy in spite of himself and I think for that he loved me even more, however much the incongruity of it all bemused him.

Should I tell you more about this time? Most of it can be guessed. I continued my role as hunter and provider for my family and then, when such things were done, I was with Nicolas talking, drinking, fighting and falling completely in love. The days and nights did not end without our hands upon one another. We were usually colossally drunk, it is true, but the emotions were no lie.

Nicolas was not a romantic lover. For all that he was a musician it was I who provided our relationship with poetry. Which set up an interesting balance between the two of us later - me trying to use pretty words to lure him out of his depressions of practicality, he trying to use plain speech to bring me back from my morbid flights of fancy. In this, like so many other things, we were perfect for one another.

I could not help but feel even more love for him in the fact that he truly should have had any lover but me. It was not, from my end of things, a bad match. But for him to have fallen in love with the uneducated son of a poor Marquis - I needn't tell you that most of his Parisian university friends thought that he had lost his mind. He had gone into school to study law. He'd dropped out of school to become a musician and the companion of my disgraced self. More than a few of them commented that the choice had to be due to Nicki's love of alcohol or my abilities in the bedroom. Nicolas, ever my defender, was always ready with a wonderfully cutting remark for just these occasions. And this was never truly cruel. Whatever their words were for me I did not care. Nicki only kept time with them for a change of pace. When we were in Paris our time was mostly spent in the theatre and in our tiny apartment.

I skip ahead of things, though, to speak of Paris. There is a more important matter to discuss first.

Someone once told me, and I have now come to believe him, that at the age of twenty one I had my first breakdown. A mental collapse. You must know of the moment I am referring to - me, with Nicolas in our private room at the inn, with my hands to my ears hiccupping the word "Oh!" again and again for it was all I could articulate.

I speak now with the experience and understanding of 200 years, Armand. I talk of this now as I have come to know it, not as I knew it then.

Then I knew only that this darkness had come over me, a sickness of my heart and mind which tainted everything I knew or did. How I spoke of it then, in my book, was my sole understanding. Things had shadows to them which should not. I looked upon a world which should hold beauty and saw only the danger and despair.

Can you guess, Armand, where the thoughts were coming from? Ah yes, my supposedly locked-away secret. The rest of my mind, coming to the forefront again all to happy to remind me that I should not, could not trust what my eyes saw.

My mind in those weeks was chaotic. Thoughts and feelings thrust themselves upon me which I could not bear to see. I disliked sleep and though Nicki tried to return me to my bed and encourage rest from me I could not sit still. Ask young Lestat what he felt and he would say that he hated his room. That being inside of it was like a prison and to lie down upon that bed was to invite the darkness to smother him and take his soul away.

I drank, but the drinking naturally did not help. I attempted sobriety and found the world too crisp and painful. I write of this time now and remember for perhaps the first time in years that once again I attacked my own flesh, although not in front of Nicolas.

Nicki was beside himself. He attempted to talk some sort of calmness back into me. Failing that he played music for me, made love to me and upon a few occasions slapping me as one would any hysteric. He had no idea of what was going on. He knew only that his lover was out of control and that he did not know why.

Finally the fit left me, but not its aftermath. Though I could not remember fully what I had seen the emotions of it lingered still. Thus began habits of mine which last to this very day - my dislike of people behind me, my horror at rooms which are too dark. Although brave and foolhardy on so many things I became, in some things, skittish. I wept at moments which had no cause. Nicolas's loving hands became, at times, too much to bear. For months after the fact I experimented with him in secret, never revealing to him the truth that his touch had in many ways become strange to me. I attempted pushing him away, I attempted bringing him even closer. For the record my final decision was to damp down on all but the worst of my emotions and lead myself through drunken denial about the rest. It took only the slightest of subterfuges to ease what I felt to be the worries in Nicki's mind. I could not bear to feel his lips around me and so when he began to move in such a direction I would quickly turn the tables and take him in my mouth instead. It was with things such as this that I thought to regain control of my situation.

(And it is worth noting that my inability to withstand oral pleasure lasted with me for years. It was only through the patience and beauty of my loving Louis that I could joyfully submit myself to such a thing again - even though of course for our kind now it is merely a sexual pantomime.)

We ran away to Paris not long after that, as you know. How much Gabrielle knew of my situation and how much that influenced her to provide the money to me I could not say. But she did, and we went and started our lives over.

Can I describe the bliss of Paris again? Freedom. First and foremost it was freedom. Miles away from my father's house and I knew, confused as I was, that in spite of it all he would not send my brothers after me. Rumors came to us of our having been disowned and I agreed to this thing for Nicki's sake even though I knew for me it was not true. Valere would never disown me. Cursed me, perhaps, might possibly have finally committed me to a sanitarium if I had ever returned, but never, ever would he disown me.

I was with Nicolas then. And he himself would curse me roundly for this moment of oversentimentality but brother we were as good as married in those days. I think happily back to our tiny apartment with its little fire and lumpy mattress that was a perfect fit. Even our friends in the theatre understood it. Though there was a great deal of flirting and even a bit of lovemaking amongst our little incestuous group it was still known that Nicolas and I had eyes truly for one another.

And I think between us both I was the greater flirt, particularly with my leading ladies, but Nicki knew it to be my way and paid it no heed. I say all this to explain why, much later, he would hold the opinions that he did about the likelihood that I had run away with some heiress. In his heart of hearts he knew I would never do such a thing. Not to him. It was only some of our neighbors and friends who thought me tomcat enough to leave my poor musician lover for the life of a kept man.

To be fair, if I had never met Nicolas it's entirely possible I would have. I was bound and determined to leave that village somehow.

I am again jumping ahead of things, though, to talk about that time. That was later, after Magnus had taken me. We are still in the first flush of Parisian harmony between Nicolas and myself and I want to discuss just a bit more about it.

On our own at last, away from our families, Nicki and I became even more of ourselves for we had to use every one of our wits and abilities to keep food in our stomachs and a roof over our heads. We did in fact live hand to mouth for quite some time.

What is interesting here, though, was the contrast between us both. In education Nicki was my undeniable superior. He could read and speak several languages fluently. He could work columns of figures and look through our meager cash to provide us with a budget - something he regularly had to rework when I would grasp his hand and plead with him for tickets to see just one more show. I do not think I could count the times when Nicki threw away his meticulous financial organizing simply to please me.

Those were Nicki's strengths. His father had been a merchant, Nicki himself nearly a lawyer. For us, then, he was the planner. The one who took our schemes and reworked them into something resembling reality. This was a necessary thing.

But he was not, as you might be tempted to think, the only one of us who could contribute to this living situation.

What Nicki knew of in education he was completely and utterly lacking in what might today be called a sense of street smarts. He was not naïve by any means, but unlike me he knew nothing of how to actually live amongst people as poor as we now were. Like many his age he had been trained how to fight but his skills here were of duels and fencing. He could sit in a salon and play a hand of poker with his fellow students but he did not know how to sit in a rotting tavern and hold his own amongst men who might cheerfully cut his throat for having an intolerable amount of aces.

I do not say this to portray Nicolas as a babe in the woods. He was no such thing. I say this to point out that I had things which I was able to contribute as well, and to also reveal that much of what I did surprised him.

Did I move myself into the roughest bars of Paris and add to our finances by playing the card shark? No, of course not. I dedicated myself to the theater almost as soon as we crossed the city lines. But in matters of safety and weaponry it was I who took charge. And while I think he wondered how, exactly, a castle-dweller like myself could know such things he did not go so far as to ask me. Instead he saved his thoughts for the occasional comment about my status as a dreamer contrasting rather interestingly with my quick hand at drawing a knife. I think in some ways he was impressed that it was one of the few things which I dealt with in a manner which bore some resemblance to realism.

And we draw to a conclusion on this particular chapter of my life by saying that no, my melancholy had not left me and that all the words I wrote of still fearing the darkness and shying away from public executions and corpses decaying in the streets was all true. I still obsessed over this nightmare and Nicolas did what he could to comfort me or, finding that he couldn't, dismissing me and simply telling me to stop.

I do not think unfondly of him for this thing. I would have probably done much the same if it had been me.

This is not the last time I will write to you about Nicki but it is, I think, the brunt of what you must know about him and our time together. Except for one thing.

Which brings me to your letter.

I will speak this bluntly: did Nicki know?

That is the question I think we can all see upon the table and it falls to me now to answer it.

Had you asked me but a day ago I would have said no. For two hundred years I would have said no. I would have sworn on my very soul that the secret of my father and I had remained a secret, unknown even to myself until years later. I did not tell Nicolas about it. At best Nicki knew that my father had beaten me. But such things were so common back then that it would have meant nothing, if not for the fact that he immediately understood it all because of what went on between him and his father.

And the first time that I read that letter you wrote and saw the comments about Nicolas eluding his captors and attempting to go back home in order to destroy his family as only a vampire could I thought to myself "Yes, of course it would be so. For him that would be amusing."

I do not know why I did not see your mention of my own family.

But that is what you wrote, Armand, and in fact you said it many times and called it a "certainty" that were he to return home it would be my family who he would attack and merely "possible" that he might go after his own. You expressed no doubt whatsoever about this thing.

So. He knew.

In the blessed clarity of hindsight I can wager to figure it out. That he knew of my other nighttime activities is a certainty. My reputation in the village for bedding any man or woman who caught my eye was a well known one and a bit of gossip he was most likely to have gotten as soon as his father pulled him home. We were peers, after all, people would have been happy to speak of my life to him.

So he knew that I slept with women and with men and that my male companions tended towards the scandalous. We did not speak about this overmuch but I know for certain that he was aware of it because some mentions were made between us of how all of that was given up once I had found him. And, though he did not say it, I knew the small part of his soul which was romantic was pleased by this fact.

What, then, gave him the final picture? Look over my words now and you can probably guess it. My breakdown. My hysterics. The things I became terrified of because of it and the things I reacted to in manners where were entirely out of proportion.

Nicki might not have been as familiar with the gutter as I was, but he wasn't stupid. The most rudimentary knowledge of rape and aristocratic family relations would have been enough to piece the puzzle together for him. And let us not forget that Nicki benefited from actually having met my family in person.

Did he know the full picture? Probably not. But he knew enough, I suspect. Certainly enough to know better than to attempt to speak about it with me. God knows how such a conversation as that would have ended.

That in his time of ultimate madness he thought of nothing save attempting to sever this last familial tie for me is, I think, the final word that needs to be said on the subject of our relationship and of our feelings for one another.

There will be more of him, as I've promised, but that is the heart and soul of the matter. Nicolas de Lenfent, my first honest love.

I wasn't to know anything like it until I met Louis. And Louis, of course, was like nothing else in the world.

L.

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