Lestat: I reject their attempts to confine me to a false binary of good and evil, as though a mere two extremes could ever encompass all that I am, my intricacies, my nuances!
Louis: ....where you going with this, Lestat.
Lestat: I REFUSE to be hated for being evil, for simply being the antithesis of good! Positioned as such not even by any particular choice or deed - despite the dizzying wealth of possibilities I offer to choose from - but rather as a given absolute which springs forth unearned, unasked, unsought...taking root from the mere fact that just as equally do I reject the restrictions of being ‘good.’ How....limiting a palette with which to paint my mark upon the world and throughout history, but only ever in varying shades of two colors and two colors only! How....unrefined a palate to be burdened with, an albatross about my neck as I voyage through all of my tomorrows without end, bequeathed as I am with all of eternity and its endless feast of experiences as sup for me to dine upon....except treacherously, their infinite array of possibilities only ever present themselves to my tongue as insufficiently salted or overwhelmingly sweet, nothing more and nothing less. Certainly nothing other!
Louis: *literally stopped paying attention three words in*
Lestat: Nay, I say! I will not abide the complexity of my motivations, the spectrum that spills forth from all my multi-faceted glory to illuminate all that my shadow has passed over and left forever changed in my wake...I will not tolerate that all of this be eroded to dust by the failure of insipid fools to open their eyes wide enough that they might see the full breadth of it all! That small minds living small lives be allowed to chip away at everything that sets me apart from them til naught is left but mere slivers of a stature like enough to their own insignificance, they too can exist within these narrow margins of ‘good’ and ‘evil’....all while these master craftsmen congratulate themselves for having reshaped something so much vaster than they into an image small enough to fit the confines of their comprehension. Proclaiming their understanding of the world to now be greater than it was before, and what their blunt, unsubtle tools have wrought to be ‘art’....it is unconscionable! How banal a fate for the fingerprint only I can leave upon the windowpane of this world, reduced to an unseemly smudge when once it was a labyrinth of all the paths only I have trod through life, a palimpsest placed atop every page of every story I have been a part of! How plebeian! How pedestrian! How positively....mundane.
Louis: I see. So you object to being called good or evil, moreso the latter since this mostly tends to come up when people react badly to you trying to eat them...
Lestat: Ugh. Louis, please. Must you be so crude? We do not eat people. We....slake our thirsts with their life’s blood.
Louis: Ah. Of course. The way I said it left out all the nuance and complexities.
Lestat: Yes, good. So you do see the problem.
Louis: Absolutely. You don’t want to be reduced to an undescriptive ‘evil’ by people as you’re slaking your thirst with their life’s blood, because who would? Its so minimizing. Now, do you have a preferable alternative as an example? Some other impression of you that can still be summed up briefly enough they can fit it into their dying moments, but that would be more accurate than the simple and unsophisticated ‘evil’?
Lestat: Don’t speak of me as though I’m some kind of uncomprehending child, Louis. I’m perfectly aware of the point you’re oh so cleverly dancing around. Of course I understand why they leap to the word choice they do in the context of things. I’m particular, not deluded. I’m simply saying -
Louis: Agree to disagree.
Lestat: I’m simply saying. Yes, yes, I kill people, oh dear, oh my, this is of course terribly monstrous and well within the parameters of most any perception of evil. Obviously. So yes, I kill people. And what of it? Any common murderer can do the same, its hardly difficult. So for that to be the measure by which the entirety of even just my encounter with an individual is to be made....I simply find it...lacking. It positions me as peers with countless others up to and including a man immortalized for being the first one to do it with nothing more than a rock and for no greater reason than he decided a theoretical deity allegedly liked his brother more than him. That’s hardly distinguished company that anyone would likely be eager to seek, let alone claim, so if I am to be known as a killer, at least let me be known as one of a more unique caliber and befitting of more rarefied company than that.
Louis: Of course. If murderers are to be the company you keep in story or memory, you at least want to be counted among the aristocracy of murderers. As opposed to a mere commoner, obviously.
Lestat: Precisely. Regardless of one’s view of my moral disposition, “he’s evil” says absolutely nothing distinctive about myself in particular. And yet they insist on treating that alone as the only descriptor by which I can be described! There’s a breadth to me, a range, that ‘evil’ utterly fails to encompass. Why must that be the only option of note when I could be described with more specificity as so confounding as to prod men who swear by peace into instead swearing to hunt me to the ends of the earth? Which, of course, I have done. Or perhaps instead, I could be known for laying siege to a man’s mind with ceaseless words that continuously conjure thoughts so unendurable, he’d stab at his own ear drums just for the faintest chance to be rid of them! Which, again, I have done. If I am to be reviled, at least let me be reviled for being so devilishly distracting or so adept at teasing forth the skein of man’s hidden madness....why, men would sooner flee their own homes with me left still inside, the inheriting king of their abandoned castles....just to be free of the havoc I wreck upon their reasoning. Preferring to set themselves in exile than risk having to bear facing me again. Show me the common brute, the loutish murderer, who could possibly claim the same!
Louis: So. In summation: you’re in a mood because your latest victim called you an evil monster and while you don’t object to the veracity of that, you’re insulted because this reduces you to a generalized non-entity of no specific distinction, and the least the people you kill could do is have the decency to hate you for being annoying rather than just plain old evil.
Lestat: .....when you say it like that, of course it sounds silly.
Louis: Yes, yes, sorry, I forgot. Once again, its my lack of nuance that’s the problem.
Lestat: Ugh, fine! You win as usual, Louis! Once more, you have ripped through the fragile veil of my whims and forced my gaze upon the callous, uncaring stone of truth that lies underneath! I’m simply an absurd man who cares about absurd things and rather than be indulged, far better that we erect a town square right here in our parlor for the sole purpose of hosting a stage more appropriate for the ridicule I so richly deserve! Obviously my feelings aren’t reason enough for something to matter and there’s nothing of merit by which to remember me at all, so in the event I do perish, you of course have my permission to memorialize me with a headstone proclaiming: Here lies the vampire Lestat. He was very evil. Nothing more. That’s it. Just evil. And now he’s dead. There. Are you happy now?
Louis: For the record, if you were to prefer being thought of as annoying rather than a more generic evil, then I would tell you that you’ve achieved your aims admirably and have earned that distinction a hundred times over. Just this night alone.
Lestat: Oh, please. You’re only saying that now to make me feel better.
Louis: I’m really not. Only a truly ridiculous child of a man, prone to fits of dramatic frenzy over the most baffling of matters, would even think to consider that an attempt at appeasement. I can with complete sincerity, confirm that you are without a doubt, the most spectacularly unbearable spectacle of a man that I have ever met, with none I can think of even cresting the horizon to rate as a distant second by comparison. You’re so insufferable, even I sometimes wrestle with the desire to kill you, not for any particular evil deed, but simply because you’re being that unendurable and my patience is near its end. And I’m one of the only people who’s known you longer than a day and likes you any of the time and has any patience for your shenanigans. Yes, I said shenanigans, because only you, of all those I’ve met in this world and that I might describe as monstrous, only you manage to straddle the balance between the monstrous and the absurd, dually prone to both the greatest of sins and the most ridiculous of shenanigans. In fact, nobody else I’ve ever met would even think to try! You are perhaps the literal only man in existence, in all of history, who has ever thought that a border shared by both ‘vile’ and ‘ridiculous’ might possibly even exist. Let alone decided to seek it out and stake his claim there as no one else ever has before or since. And there is not a single other person in the world I can ever imagine saying any of all that too instead.
Lestat: *blushes*
Lestat: Well now I feel like we should go out on the town. Let’s make a night of it!
Louis: Oh hell no. I have gone through the entire quota of foolishness I can handle in one sitting, and then some. I’m going to bed, otherwise we’re gonna end up seeing that patience I was talking about actually put to the test.
Lestat: Fine, go enjoy your lonely coffin and your solitude. Rile me up and then leave with nothing done about it and nothing to be done until you next wake. A tease, that’s what you are, Louis. A cruel and wicked tease who lures men to the edge of ruin and then leaves them poised, trembling, on that very same edge. Anticipating and dreading the fall to come in equal measure, but frozen as flies trapped in amber til you return to set them free with that one final push.
Louis: Sure. That’s the dynamic here.
Lestat: Hurry up and abandon me to my Purgatory, so you can at least return sooner than late. You haven’t even left yet and I’m bored already.
Louis: Good night Lestat.
Lestat: Its actually going to be a wretched and unbearable night now, but yes, I suppose it is still a night all the same.
Louis: Oh, actually, one last thing before I forget....I couldn’t help but notice earlier. You’d think someone who considers an indiscriminate palate that can only pick out two tastes to be such a terrible thing to be stuck with for eternity....well, someone with that view of things seems like they’d see a vampire’s lack of taste buds as something worth warning a man about before turning him into a vampire for all eternity. Weird, that.
Lestat: Oh, for - How many times must I apologize about the jambalaya, Louis? How. Many. Times?
Louis: Not sure, I just know we’re not there yet. I’ll let you know when we reach it.
20 notes
·
View notes
I want Charles to win.
Not when Max has damage. Or Max's car is not performing. Or Max DNFs.
I want Charles to win.
By fighting Max for P1. By having to cleverly plan when to pass Max or whoever else may be in front of him. By driving brilliantly to keep all other drivers behind him.
I want Charles to win.
When everyone is at their best. When there are no circumstances that give him an advantage. No Lap 1 bowling taking out top competitors. No convenient safety car. No team orders to give him the lead.
I want Charles to win.
And get full credit for his outstanding race craft. Kudos for his superior tyre management. Admiration for his smart strategizing.
I want Charles to win.
Not once, but over and over and over again. Setting fastest laps. Getting Grand Slams. Having the fastest pit stop. Beating records set by Lauda, Schumacher, Hamilton, Verstappen.
I want Charles to win.
So I can see him winking as he receives his medal. Fill with pride as he raises his trophy. Watch him fondly look down at his team while the Monegasque anthem plays. Join the Italians as they passionately belt out their anthem.
I want Charles to win.
Until everyone but me is sick of seeing him on that top step. Until no one calls into question his abilities as a top-notch F1 driver. Until every up-and-coming driver aspires to be like him.
Yes, I may be delusional, unrealistic, off my rocker, or in la la land, but I am a Charles-fan, which means...
I want Charles to win
Petit | 26 March 2024
428 notes
·
View notes