lestat mongkhon >> d7 >> fin

There's one thing about Lestat that is undeniable: you cannot live without him. 

Like a dog, he always finds his way home. Proper groomed, you would never look the hell hound inside of him in the eyes. Exteriors are everything; quite literally, perception is reality. Lestat is handsome - pretty, even. A grin to make you weak at the knees he'll cut you off at, soft eyes that sharpen against the grindstone at the sight of easy prey. He'd lead you to believe he, the shepherd, here to guide the gentle pasture sheep back to their pens. 

Instead, he is no more than the loathly stray mutt. 

Carnally, instinctually, gnawing at scraps on the sidewalks. There's an omen waiting to be contracted from it all, something that'll infect his psyche down to the roots until it's no longer hideable. A rotting, from the stem of his spine to the gums of his teeth. Something broods in this boy that is incomprehensible, like mold on the bathroom ceiling - watching it fester, breathing it in, feeling it spread. 

But... what? What can I do of this? 

On the steps of a childhood home, a young boy sits on its steps. A new family lives there now, yet the key still rests in his hand. Chipped; the locks have been replaced sometime in the last four months. You can change the locks, you can repaint the door and replace the smashed bedroom window. You can clean the soot, and blood, and cat piss, but you can't rid yourself of a boy who only loves in the past tense. 

His roots always lead him back here; the cracked kitchen tiles, the vanity that shows vampires and not ghosts. The attic that always must remained locked, his sister's room and the porcelain dolls that stare and stare and stare. The boy rocks back and forth, knees pulled to his chest as he sits on the slab beneath the first door. Thoughts come and go, but the feeling is so pervasive, invading a bit of him he wish would die already. 

The bit of him that is convinced things could be different. 

There's one thing Lestat and the past have in common - the harder you run from it, the better the chase. There are days he hides from it like a child from a monster, and there are days he runs towards it like a waif to roadkill.  There are days it's as if it was never even there, and there are days it's as if there was never anything other than it. He can't tell them apart every time; sometimes he can't even tell himself apart from it all. 

In a way, he is who has loved him: no one. In a way, if no one loves you, if you have never experienced true nuture, then everyone must love you. In the absence of its entirety, how would he ever tell the difference? There's a spinning in his head that convinces himself that this must be it - a bravado, a jewel encased in glass. 

Fragility: somewhere along the way, Lestat decides to love himself most. 

It's a starving act, having no resources. The walking dead are no use to him; his family is lifeless, perhaps they've been dead all along, to him, to themselves, to the world. He would vanish in between their breaths, and as transient as the air around them, he'd go in and out of their lives. A stowaway to a runaway to an outsider altogether, until the only reason he would return at all would be to take what he needed. 

They could never provide that - that essence that he craves. And he has tried, and tried, and tried again but the blood always runs dry. No one ever lasts Lestat, of no fault of his own, for with each new wound there's just a crater inside his psyche that digs itself deeper.  Lestat has been hated, and he has been idolized. And with ease, he moves between the two, a trick of perception. He toys with the string he keeps you on between his finger; leash, noose, leash, noose. 

Leash.

Noose. 

Neither will matter, for all that waits is the scissors he'll cut you out with when a new source comes along. 

And they always do; pleasure playing with you - your favorite rockstar.