#creative writers

How did we get here?

I ask myself nearly

Every time I open my eyes

And drink in the world before me.

To think the same sun that

Warms my puffy cheeks

Is the same light that

Illuminates a bird dying far from home.

How did I make it this far?

I ask myself every day

As I roll out of the nest

I have made for myself on my bed.

I think I cannot decide

What I like best.

There is so much to choose,

And so much more to hate.

I tried being vulnerable,

Opened my chest and exposed

My brittle lungs doing their best.

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

I cannot hear them calling me back,

Into the fold, where I am safe and small.

How can I learn to give less

Of myself up

When no one asked for me on a plate?

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

Am I the predators that preyed

Upon my virgin flesh?

Or am I the things

Projected on me,

By those who hate themselves?

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

Who am I?

The Sun Still Bleeds | For Louis

by The Vampire Lestat on Roleplay//Lives

The Performance

The room was small, much too small for the fever already moving through it, and yet I loved it for that very inadequacy, loved the low ceiling blackened by old smoke, the sweating walls, the bottles crowded together on little tables like cheap glass reliquaries, the mortal warmth gathered so densely before the stage that the air itself seemed to pulse. They had come for noise, for spectacle, for the glittering monster they believed they knew from posters and records and impossible rumors, and perhaps I had given them enough of myself over the past few months that they were not entirely wrong. I had taught them to want me. I had taught them to scream my name as if it were a charm against death, and in that little room, with its cheap chandeliers trembling above their heads and its velvet curtains faded to the color of old wine, I felt the old intoxication of it rise in me, bright and cruel and delicious.

Adoration has a sound. Mortals think it is applause, but they are wrong. Applause is only the body’s clumsy attempt to translate it. True adoration begins before the hands strike together. It is in the arrested breath, the dilation of the eye, the strange obedience that falls over a crowd when they sense that something beautiful is about to happen and have not yet decided whether beauty will save them or devour them.

I stood just beyond the curtain with the guitar resting against my body and my hand curled lightly around the neck of it, feeling the vibration of the room before the first note had been played. Behind me the band waited in silence. They were good, these boys and girls I had gathered around me, mortal for the most part, talented enough to be vain and frightened enough of me to be disciplined. The pianist sat with her pale hands resting above the keys, not touching them yet. The drummer’s sticks lay crossed upon his knee. The guitarist to my left watched the darkness ahead with that peculiar blankness musicians have before they become conduits for sound. To them, this was a performance. To me, it was an old form of prayer.

Then I saw him.

Not fully at first. No, Louis would never offer himself so readily to light. He had chosen a place halfway back, near one of the brick pillars where shadow pooled despite the lamps and the hot gold wash of the stage. Another man might have mistaken him for part of the room, for a handsome stranger with a dark coat and a stillness too severe for such a place. But I knew the line of his body before I knew my own reflection. I knew the angle of his face, the grave patience of his mouth, the way he could make refusal look like composure and grief look like judgment. The light touched him reluctantly, as if even light understood it must ask permission.

For one instant, the centuries closed around my throat.

He had come.

I had imagined his absence so completely that his presence seemed at first like another cruelty of my own mind, a phantom summoned by vanity, desire, old guilt. How many times had I made him appear where he was not? In the polished black flank of a limousine. In the window of a hotel looking down upon some city I did not care to remember. In the face of a boy turning his head in a crowd. I had found him in strangers and lost him again in the same second. But this was no trick. He stood there in the heat and smoke among the living, and his eyes were on me.

I should have laughed. I should have swept onto that stage with all my customary magnificence and punished him for it, punished him for daring to come where I could see him and not coming closer, for making an altar of the distance between us. Instead I felt something far older than pride move through me, something almost tender, and tenderness in me has always been dangerous.

The lights died. The crowd gave itself to darkness with a soft collective gasp. Then the piano began. Four chords, only that, widely spaced and allowed to bloom until the last overtone trembled in the bones. I had asked for restraint there. I had insisted on it. Let them wait, I had said. Let the first notes come as if from another room, another century. And as those chords passed through the darkness, the little club began to alter around me, not in truth perhaps, but truth is a tedious little tyrant and perception has always had better manners. The smoke rising from the crowd became incense. The rafters became the ribs of a vault. The cheap metal rigs that held the lights became black iron candelabra. Faces turned upward, flushed and eager, became the faces of penitents waiting for absolution from a god who had already sinned too beautifully to forgive them.

I have stood in cathedrals when the candles were the only stars left in the world. I have heard monks sing in chapels so remote that the snow outside seemed older than the language of the hymn. I have sat beneath gold-leafed saints and marble Christs, watched priests lift cups of wine with hands that trembled from age, faith, or terror, and I have wondered, often with amusement and sometimes with envy, what it must be to believe that salvation comes when summoned. But that night, in that shabby sanctuary of amplifiers and stained floors, I understood again that worship does not belong to churches. It belongs wherever longing finds a shape.

And my longing had a name.

The spotlight rose upon me, slow and warm, and the room erupted. My name struck the walls. It came from mouths painted black and red, from throats raw with drink, from bodies pressed close enough to share heat, pulse, hunger.

Lestat. Lestat. LESTAT! 

They called to me as if I had come to bless THEM. Perhaps I had. I looked over them, smiling, giving them the face they had paid to see, the immortal radiance, the insolent mouth, the golden hair made almost white by the stage lamps, the creature who could make damnation look enviable.

But I sang to Louis.

The first words left me softly, scarcely more than breath against the microphone, and yet the room heard them. Of course it did. I have always known how to make a whisper carry farther than a scream.

“You lit your candles just to curse my name,” I sang, and I felt rather than saw the crowd lean toward me.

The lyric had been written in another city, in another fit of wounded grandeur, with a bottle of blood wine I could not taste and a piano I had not meant to touch until dawn. I had told myself, absurdly, that it was not about him. I had told myself many things over the years. The lies we tell ourselves should at least have the decency to be entertaining.

I watched him while I sang of chapel light and chains, of prayers turned inside out, of the old names he had given me, devil, king, ruin, beloved. The mortal crowd received the words with the greedy innocence of those who believe passion is made more noble by being vague. They could attach their own sorrows to it. They could think of husbands, wives, dead girls, vanished boys, all the little mortal apocalypses that feel eternal until time proves otherwise. But Louis knew. Louis, with his terrible stillness, knew every word had been sharpened for him.

The bass entered beneath the piano, low and patient, a dark river opening under stone. The drum came after, not a beat at first but a pulse, brushed and muted, like a heart heard through a wall. How many heartbeats had I heard since Magnus tore me from the human world and left me blazing in my own terror? Millions. I had heard them racing in fear, slowing in sleep, rising in desire. I had heard the last ruined flutter of men who deserved death and children who did not. Yet the heartbeat that ruled me still was one that had ended long ago in a church, beneath my mouth, beneath my hands, in a moment I had called a gift because I could not bear to call it theft.

Louis stood motionless as the verse unfolded, and his stillness wounded me more deeply than any visible grief might have done. I wanted him to tremble. I wanted him to turn away. I wanted him to betray himself. There is vanity even in suffering, and mine is exquisite. But he only listened, and in that listening there was a kind of mercy so severe I almost despised him for it.

When the guitars entered, they did so like weather. No crude violence, no vulgar assault. A long swell first, bright at the edges, then the slow accumulation of distortion until the air around me seemed to thicken and glow. The drummer lifted the pulse into something larger, the toms rolling like distant thunder caught under the earth. The organ rose beneath it all, immense and solemn, and the room changed again. It was no longer merely a club dreaming itself into a church. It had become a cathedral built out of desire, and I its golden blasphemy, singing from the altar with a black guitar and a mouth full of old wounds.

The chorus opened, and I gave them my voice.

There are moments when singing is not performance, not even expression, but release from the prison of the body. The note climbed out of me and took with it centuries of pride, anger, abandonment, hunger. It carried Magnus and his fire. It carried Paris. It carried Nicolas, poor doomed Nicolas, and Gabrielle’s cold courage, and all the nights I had walked alone beneath indifferent stars pretending loneliness was a form of freedom. It carried New Orleans in its wet heat, its gaslit streets, its rooms fragrant with dust and flowers and resentment. It carried Louis before death, Louis after death, Louis laughing, Louis accusing, Louis looking at me as if I were the answer to a prayer he hated himself for making.

“Because the sun still bleeds,” I sang, and the crowd answered me though they did not know the song. They caught the phrase as if it had been waiting inside them all along. Their voices rose, uncertain at first, then bolder, ragged, mortal, beautiful.

Louis moved then. Not much. It would have meant nothing to anyone else. His hand tightened around the untouched glass he held. His head lowered the smallest degree, and the light struck his cheekbone, his mouth, the dark, deliberate line of his gaze. My heart, had it still been governed by mortal law, might have stopped from the sight of him. As it was, something in me opened with an almost unbearable sweetness.

I smiled at him. Not the smile for the crowd. Not the bright predatory thing that made them scream and reach for me as if I were salvation with painted eyes. This was smaller, and therefore more dangerous. A smile meant to say, you hear it, don’t you? You hear what you have made of me?

The second verse came more easily, and with it came cruelty, because ease in me so often turns cruel. I sang of sorrow worn like a tailored suit, of saints grown tired of confession, of angels resigning their posts. I let my hand slide down the microphone stand as if it were the stem of a chalice. I let the audience adore me. I let them see the flash of my rings, the gleam of my teeth, the theatrical arch of my back as the guitar answered my voice. Why should I not? I was magnificent. I knew it. Even grief, when it passed through me, came out burnished and arranged. This too was part of the truth Louis had always hated. I could make beauty out of anything, even our ruin, perhaps especially our ruin.

And yet, as I sang, I remembered the pianoforte. The old one. My beloved instrument, scarred by his hand. That little wound in the lacquer had enraged me not because wood mattered more than he did, though he believed that for a while, and perhaps I let him. It enraged me because he had finally marked something of mine in a way that could not be kissed away, bought back, polished smooth by apology or charm. He had left evidence. He had said, in the only language left to him then, I was here, I was hurt, and you did not see it. I understood that too late, as I have understood so many things too late. Immortality grants endless years but no guarantee of wisdom. It merely gives our follies better costumes.

The bridge came, and I lifted one hand. The band vanished around me. No drums. No guitars. No choir. Only the piano, exposed and tender, sounding now less like accompaniment than a memory trying not to break. The crowd quieted so quickly that the silence seemed supernatural. Perhaps it was. Perhaps I had called it down. I could have done so. I cannot always tell where performance ends and power begins.

“History forgets empires,” I sang, but the line left me almost spoken, worn thin at the edges.

I thought of all the cities I had watched change their names, all the kings whose portraits had outlived their bloodlines, all the lovers who had sworn eternity with mortal tongues and been dust before the century turned. Empires do vanish. Cathedrals burn. Languages collapse into museums. Names become footnotes, then less than footnotes. Yet I remembered the exact sound Louis made the first time he understood hunger. I remembered the weight of his body when he stumbled in those first new hours. I remembered the look in his eyes when he asked if this was life now, and I answered yes because no gentler truth existed.

My voice lowered. “And every song I ever wrote,” I sang, “was trying to bring you home.”

There. I had done it. No metaphor broad enough to hide inside. No theatrical veil thick enough to save me. The words stood naked between us. For the first time that night, Louis looked away. The pain of it was instant and absurdly youthful. Then he looked back. And there he was again, leaving the shelter of shadow by a single step, perhaps no more than that, but toward the light, toward the stage, toward me. Had I been human I might have wept. Being what I am, I sang.

The final chorus rose not because I commanded it but because the room could no longer contain anything smaller. The guitars returned in great shining waves. The drums opened beneath them. The organ thundered. The choir entered like a host of splendid liars announcing Heaven at the gates of Hell. The crowd surged to its feet, bodies pressed together, hands lifted, faces wet with tears they would later blame on drink, nostalgia, youth, anything but the truth. Mortals will do almost anything to avoid admitting they have brushed against the eternal.

But I knew. I knew what had happened in that room. For a few blazing minutes, we had made a kingdom out of sound. I sang as if the song could cross every year between us, as if it could repair what blood and pride and silence had broken, as if there were some note I had not yet found that might enter Louis where apology could not. I sang to the boy who had knelt in a church and called me devil. I sang to the immortal who had stood before a mirror with a stranger’s blood on his mouth and seen damnation staring back. I sang to the lover who had asked me never to let him leave, and to the man who had left me in every way that mattered while remaining close enough to touch.

The last refrain came softer than the grandeur before it, because even I know that the truest things should not be shouted forever.

Louis.

I did not sing his name loudly. I barely sang it at all. Still, it passed through the microphone and into the room, and the crowd received it without understanding why it seemed to alter the air. His name became a final chord inside the chord, a secret sutured through the open wound of the song.

The band fell away one instrument at a time. First the guitars, their last notes bending upward like sparks carried into dark. Then the drums, leaving only the echo of the pulse. Then the choir, dissolving into breath. The organ faded last among them, reluctant, immense, until finally only the piano remained. One chord. Another. A final note suspended above us with such delicate persistence that even the mortals seemed afraid to breathe it away.

Then silence.

How strange silence is after music. Not emptiness, never that. Silence after music is full of everything the music has awakened and refused to resolve. No one applauded at first. They stood there stunned, obedient to something they could not name. I lowered my hand from the strings. The guitar was still warm against me. The lights burned my skin pleasantly. Smoke moved in slow banners above the crowd.

I looked at Louis. The centuries did not vanish. I am not sentimental enough to pretend that one song could undo them. They remained between us, vast and glittering and terrible, crowded with every cruelty, every tenderness, every failure we had made sacred by surviving it. But he was there, and he had heard me, and there are nights when that is as near to absolution as monsters are permitted to come.

The applause began at last.

It rose slowly, then all at once, until the little room shook with it. They screamed for me. They stamped their feet. They cried out my name with the helpless gratitude of the living, who love most passionately what reminds them they will die. I bowed to them because I am generous, and because I am vain, and because they had, in their small mortal way, served their purpose beautifully. But when I lifted my head, I was still looking at Louis.

The song had never belonged to them.

The Song

make me a creative director

make me a creative director

make me a creative director

make me a creative director

NOW NOW NOW

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my characters: ):

me: :D

Characters: why did you project your own mental struggles onto us

Me: i did what

I guess I made myself small,

So that I could fit in your pocket.

So it goes - so they say -

My heart remained too big for me to fit.

If only we had a little more time,

I might find comfort in your absence.

I did not know I could love this much;

Now that you're gone I wish I could forget.

I need to hold onto the pieces that remain,

Despite their edges which cut and burrow.

Nothing to stop me from walking

Into the sun, yet here in shadow I remain.