Anonymous :
What do you love and hate about Lestat Louie?
Louis remained perfectly still, the sleek, minimalist lines of the Dubai penthouse blurring at the edges of his vision as his mind slipped backward through the centuries. For the longest time, he had clung to his resentment like a drowning man clutching a rotted piece of driftwood. He had weaponised his own misery, wearing his Catholic guilt like a heavy suit of armour against the cold reality of what he had become. ( Back in the suffocating, oppressive heat of Louisiana, he had genuinely believed himself a damned creature, the tragic victim of a cruel, capricious French aristocrat who had stolen his mortal soul for mere amusement. He had punished Lestat for that perceived theft, starving himself on rodents, weeping over the lifeless bodies of strangers, and throwing his fragile, hypocritical morality into his maker’s face at every given opportunity. ) The hatred had been a familiar, comforting ache, a distraction from the terrifying vastness of eternity. He had despised the blood, the endless hunger, the sheer, unrelenting violence of their shared existence, utterly blind to the heavy iron chains Lestat had actually severed. Louis leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. His green eyes fixated on a memory only he could see, his voice slicing through the quiet stillness of the room.
‘I spent decades drowning in a puddle of my own self-pity. I looked at the immortal body he gave me and saw only a velvet-lined coffin. I treated the Dark Gift as a punishment, a divine curse inflicted upon a sinner who had failed to save his own brother. I hated him with a fiery, righteous indignation because I genuinely believed he had condemned me to hell. I did not possess the foresight, nor the emotional maturity, to comprehend the absolute liberation he had placed directly into my palms. I was a Black man in early twentieth-century America, suffocating under the weight of society’s prejudices, pretending to be a legitimate businessman while catering to the vices of white men who would gladly string me up from a tree if I forgot my place. And yet, I had the sheer audacity to look at the man who made me a god, and call him the monster.’
A heavy, profound silence filled the room, swallowing the last syllables of his confession. The stark realisation had not arrived overnight; it had bled into his veins slowly, over decades of wandering the earth, observing the frail, fleeting nature of mortal lives flickering out like cheap candles in a draught. Lestat had not destroyed his life; Lestat had ripped him away from a society specifically designed to crush him. ( The Frenchman had handed him the brute strength of an apex predator, the speed of a striking viper, and a mind entirely unclouded by the petty, exhausting neuroses of human existence. When Louis finally stopped fighting the core nature of his own blood, when he finally allowed himself to see the terrifying beauty in the hunt and the exquisite, unparalleled intimacy of the kill, the animosity dissolved into something far more profound. ) He began to truly understand the sheer magnitude of Lestat’s offering. It was not a curse. It was an elevation. And with that understanding came a love so fiercely rooted in his dead heart that neither time, nor betrayal, nor fire could eradicate it. A soft, genuine reverence shifted the harsh angles of his face. He lifted his gaze to the rain-streaked glass, watching the artificial city lights bleed into the downpour.
‘He gave me the world. He looked at a broken, grieving mortal drowning in the restrictive squalor of his own era, and he pulled me into the stratosphere. He gave me the power to walk through the night utterly unafraid, to possess an endurance that outlasts empires. I hated him because I was entirely too weak to understand the immense, terrifying scale of what he had bestowed upon me. But once the veil dropped, once I finally understood that the Dark Gift was exactly that, a gift, my hatred transformed entirely. I love him for having the vision I lacked. I love him for enduring my endless, pathetic moralising, for patiently waiting centuries for me to finally open my eyes and appreciate the breathtaking, bloody canvas he had laid at my feet. He did not condemn me to the shadows. He set me free within them.’
