I commissioned this art from @cielmue. Commission your own!
I wanted to play this one with my cheap violin, to intentionally hamper myself a little. Can I express anything?
"Ah, Lestat," he said. He sat back on the bench. He was smiling at me in the most endearing way. He looked wonderfully handsome. "Next you'll be seeing ghosts. You have the strongest imagination of anyone I've ever known."
"There are no ghosts," I think I answered softly. "And I have precious little imagination, in fact, I’m of such a practical nature that I can hardly endure the unknown as you know!” I scowled at our little fire. I laid a few more lumps of coal on it. I knew I'd have to open the window soon for a little air.
All the humour had gone out of Nicolas.
"How in the hell could he know about the wolves? And how could you..."
"I told you already, I don't know!" I said. I sat thinking and not saying anything, disgusted, maybe, at how ridiculous it all seemed.
And then as we remained silent together, and the fire was the only sound or movement in the room, the name, Wolfkiller, came to me very distinctly as if someone had spoken it.
But nobody had.
I looked at Nicki, painfully aware that his lips had never moved, and I think all the blood drained from my face. I felt not the dread of death as I had on so many other nights, but an emotion that was really alien to me: fear.
I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me gently.
"It's someone from one of the big theatres," he said, “And I want you to promise me one thing."
"What? " I asked. I half heard him. He kissed my cheek again.
“That when you’re a very famous actor and spend all of our time performing in the Queen's private theatre, you’ll still have a glass of wine with me now and then. We’ll meet at the Blind Cupid on the left bank and we’ll go on with ‘our conversation.'"
I laughed.
"After what you said last night?" I asked. “About being such an evil fellow? I wouldn't allow myself to be seen with you!"
He got sombre suddenly. Almost frighteningly so.
"Don't ever give up on me, Lestat,” he said.
"I love you too much," I whispered. "You know that."
(I love SO much how Anne wrote, “All of OUR time.” It might be a typo, but within it lies truth.)
“Now, my love, now's the moment. I can swallow the life that beats from your heart and send you into the oblivion in which nothing may ever be understood or forgiven, or I can bring you to me. I pushed him backwards. I held him to me like a crushed thing. But the vision wouldn't stop.”
For this full-of-feeling art by @cielmue
Nicolas says,
"He pressed me closer to him, crushed me into himself as hard as he could - as if he could squeeze the bird from me. My only friend. It seemed he believed that by forcing her out, he could free me from the thing that had broken me.
He did not know her name. He did not understand that the bird was me - and I was her. He saw only something terrifying that he believed had harmed me. If he could exorcise her, perhaps he could revive me... restore me to the human he had once loved.
...
For one moment, I thought I heard a sound. The resonant aftersound of a chord I had once played on my violin... echoing beyond life itself, already fading before I could catch any feeling from it. Fading into a final silence."
Discarded Lestat and Nicki’s fripperies for this one! Even Nicki’s violin…