face pressed up against your longing

It’s hard to know for sure at this stage, but my reading of what she said in that scene is that her spirit is disrupted / called forth to them (willingly or unwillingly) every time one of them talks about her or says her name, so I think the scope of what she knows is actually pretty limited. I think it’s why a lot of her fury and vitriol was aimed at Louis too - he hasn’t really stopped talking about her for the last seventy years (because he genuinely loves her!), but I think that goes to what Jacob was saying after s2 and more recently that Louis’ really always felt like she belonged to him. She’s still the gothic heroine, trapped in the house with the monsters, just where Lestat made her feel that way most when she was alive (and she killed him for it), Louis’ made her feel that way most in her death, a wound that probably started to fester on that stage when she found out Louis had misrepresented, however accidentally or unintentionally, the events of her turning, which is why that came up again here.

so when she is freed from her life, as a vampire, she embraces the opposite. power and freedom became cruelty, selfishness, manipulation — because it is everything she had never had before.

so when lestat wants his mother, she reminds him that she is no longer his mother — anyone’s mother — by suffocating him with her sexuality, forcing him into the position of a lover.

and so lestat shifts. becomes what she wants of him. tries to. if not a son, then a partner, right?

but when he puts a ring on her finger, it is just as bad. just as full of expectation and just as much of a trap. she doesn’t want to be a wife again any more than she wants to be a mother.

Nicki turning Lestat’s line on him and describing their romance as “A great love, not a first love” just before the Lestat and Gabriella flashback. is muse Nicki calling Gabriella Lestat’s first love? oh I’m sick

plus ok, I’m thinking about how Lestat saw the care Gabriella gave him after the wolves as the first moment they were Mother and Son versus Gabriella seeing the wolves as something Lestat did for her and became interested in him sexually afterward