pass a message to you and your lover --

[slightlyoffchilt]

WHO: Lestat and Frederick Chilton!
WHERE: The Maurtia Falls Psychiatric Hospital for Abnormal Conditions, and specifically Chilton’s office.
WHEN: March 2nd, late evening.
WHAT: The Vampire Chronic Psychological Issues
WARNINGS: TBD.


“I will admit, Lestat, I didn’t think you would come so quickly.”

Chilton sat in his high-backed leather chair, the heels of his elegantly cut shoes propped upwards on the far corner of his desk. A lordling lounging upon his throne, the crown missing from his head. The turn of phrase from his mouth spurred no reconsideration, and Chilton kept his eyes on the vampire.

Heavy drapes had been drawn, despite the fact that sunset had happened nearly an hour ago.

“When we discussed the idea of therapy, it had almost seemed like a lark to you.”

Comments

[youresovein]

"On the contrary," Lestat replied, in a flippant tone indicating that Chilton was in fact completely correct in his assessment. "I'm fully committed to this experience, as a man of the twenty-first century."

Reclining on a sofa with his hands folded low on his chest, hair loose and splayed on the cushion behind him, Lestat made the picture of a stereotypical patient right out of the movies. Just where he'd gotten his idea of the process from.

[slightlyoffchilt]

"Is that so?" Eyes glanced up from his electronic tablet, his stylus poised for note taking. After all, he would say if the inquiry was made about it, Lestat was so noteworthy.

"Good! Glad to hear it. Because I would like to start discussing your mother. In detail."

[youresovein]

The look of caught surprise that flickered across his face was brief but as sharp as a pinprick. It only lasted a moment, though, before he laughed it off, so convincingly amused that it really might have been nothing at all.

"Would you! How wonderfully Freudian. You're committed to giving me the authentic experience, aren't you?"

[slightlyoffchilt]

"And we, of the authentic experience school of thought, would consider that to be quite the dodge."

Chilton was persistent. Perhaps his most evolutionary quality, his most successful technique was that of his endurance -- followed closely by his observation.

He had not missed that brief moment of surprise.

"Were you close to her? Your mother?"

[youresovein]

Quite the dodge. Well, it isn't inaccurate, and so of course Lestat finds himself mildly offended in the way of someone who's just been called out. The smile doesn't drop at all, but there's a slight tensing of his brow, a lift of his chin that indicates a reassessment of the man before him.

And then he tips his head back against the arm of the couch again, his expression softening and growing reflective.

"Close? I don't think anyone was close to her, really. She defied closeness, no matter how I yearned for it. And yet she and I had an understanding unmatched by those around us. We wanted the same things out of life — or, more truly, we'd both been denied them."

Grey eyes cast sidelong back to Chilton. "The closeness we shared was that of two people gazing outward at the horizon. But I loved her enormously all the same."

[slightlyoffchilt]

"And is that why you persistently seek to be the center of attention? In any given room?"

Chilton made a note in his electronic tablet, as if answering the question himself -- with or without the benefit of Lestat's own input.

"You empathized with her. You understood her, and you shared a need with her. But she... Tolerated you? Enjoyed your company?" He glanced up, meeting Lestat's ethereal gaze, and without flinching. This was Chilton's element. "Were you her companion held at an arm's length, or were you her distraction?"

His sharp tongue took no prisoners.

[youresovein]

A proper glare, then, petulant rather than threatening — but warning, still. He's forgetting already that he could avoid the questions, that he's under no obligation to answer or confess one single solitary thing. "Why does it have to be one or the other? And how could I know something like that, anyway?" And, following bait he hadn't realized was set, Lestat continued. "She loved me too. I know she did."

And if there was still just the smallest touch of bitterness two centuries old under that, that she'd never said it — well —

Eyes flicked up and to the side; fingers tensed and relaxed. "I think she envied the freedom I had. It didn't feel like much, in those days, but it was more than she ever had."

[slightlyoffchilt]

"She told you that she loved you?"

It wasn't an uncommon malady, these uncommunicative parents. Chilton had treated so many a modern man who yearned for the gentle praise of their mother or father, and it was simple math to identify the signs. He shifted in his chair, leaning on his elbows over the desk.

"And that envy. Did that not ever mutate into resentment?"

He thought himself so clever. The smile set upon his lips echoed his hubris, the silent hymns humming without lips in praise of his oh-so-smart perspective. Master of mind, capable of grasping even this vampiric cognition.

"It is hard, isn't it, when those who made you begin to resent you. Do you know that feeling from both angles?"

[youresovein]

Chilton deserved every inch of that pleased smile, because he truly had struck a nerve. Resentment — well, that was one thing, but to ask a question as pointed and accurate as that? Lestat pushed himself up onto one arm, suspicion writ large on his face.

"Now what are you getting at with a question like that?"

[slightlyoffchilt]

"Nothing untoward, I assure you."

A hollow assurance, at best. His nostrils practically flared at the scent of blood in the air -- wouldn't be Lestat's own blood, but that almost didn't matter. Chilton saw it more as a second coming.

"It isn't an uncommon response. Perhaps one of the most human responses -- and we all started as human."

[youresovein]

Even if he'd been mortal, even without being able to supernaturally sense that sharp interest set like points against his skin, it would have been impossible for Lestat to miss the unique sensation of being dissected. It wasn't something he usually felt around mortals.

"I haven't been human in centuries," Lestat reminded in a low voice, "and there's nothing common about me. Don't forget that, doctor." Long nails traced slow patterns against the upholstery under his fingertips. Restless anxiety beneath a predator's claws.

"I made her a vampire and saved her from death, gave her the freedom she never had as a mortal woman, and in the end she still left. If there was ever any resentment between us, surely it was born out of that dissatisfaction."

[slightlyoffchilt]

"You -- you remade your own mother?" That alone surprised him to a stutter; while Chilton waltz around the words of Oedipal Complex, this revelation tripped up his step. "You gave her a second birth."

And in the end she still left him.

"Have you... Ever regretted your other... Vampiric creations?"

He didn't yet have the word for fledglings formed in his mouth.

[youresovein]

"No." Pronounced yes, spelled Nicki. Shocking, the intensity of it, how badly the sting of his own failures could still ache all this time later. But there was no chance in hell he was going to tear open that particular wound.

A different sort of memory called instead.

"I'd never made another vampire, you see, and I was orphaned the night I was born to darkness. So I had no way of knowing if I was even capable of such creation, or if I could survive the act." Lestat's gaze dropped, reflective, to his own impossibly pale hand, fingers curling and uncurling like the petals of some monstrous flower. "But she was dying. She had come to see me in Paris with the last of her strength, and I could feel how afraid she was, though she was trying so hard to be brave, and I knew I had the power to free her from fear and pain and death."

He wasn't sure, now, whether he was trying to justify it to himself or to Chilton.

[slightlyoffchilt]

"But is that what she wanted?"

Even he couldn't tell if that was something he would want -- yes, he courted and teased for it, there was a moment when he had even whined for it, but his arguments were that of a child's amidst a candy store. It was really just a game and a novelty to Frederick Chilton, the man who everyone tried to kill and yet could not.

He hadn't seriously considered his own mortality.

And Lestat's immortality, he thought, did have its price. That might not be something worth paying as according to every single ethos committed to every single person.

"Or is that what you believe she needed?"

[youresovein]

"I would never," Lestat growled, fingers digging into the arm of the couch as he rose to his feet, "have done this to her against her will. Not for anything."

Silent steps brought him to that desk, palms down flat, looming with that full six feet of height that had been truly impressive in the eighteenth century, when he was still a young man instead of a killer that looked like one. Who was this looking up at him now! Just another mortal, no one at all really, a mildly interesting man who'd had fangs in his throat and lived because it had amused Lestat at the time.

It didn't feel amusing tonight.

"How fearlessly would you meet your death, my friend?"

[slightlyoffchilt]

Most nights Chilton would shrink from this ethereal threat, with his eyes too vibrant and his skin too like marble. Most nights would have Chilton with his spine pressed into some hard surface, as a garbled plea strung his larynx. Most nights.

But not this night.

Chilton leaned into the threat.

"How many men have tried already to kill me? Disemboweled, shot, tortured to near death -- and yet, here I remain. As unfazed as the sun during a cloudless day."

His smile edged with mania.

"You remember the sun, don't you?"

[youresovein]

Damn the sun.

Too fast for human eyes to track, cold fingers touched Chilton's throat, an encircling grip as immovable as granite. Too gentle to bruise, impossible to escape. He was no animal, but he would demand his due respect as a monster.

"Are you hoping I'll finish what they couldn't?"

Fingers uncurled, the backs of his knuckles brushing the artery. Possessive, but not fond at all; a flick of the pen underlining his message, that this man's death belonged to Lestat, when and how he chose.

"I assure you, I'm better at it than any man you've ever known."

[slightlyoffchilt]

Chilton couldn't answer, when Lestat had him by the throat. It wasn't the gentle pressure that petrified his muscles, nor was it the concrete endurance; rather, it was the suddenness, the striking as lightning would to grip him so quickly. To enthrall him. And then when Lestat stroked against his vein, Chilton closed his eyes.

He took a shuddering breath.

"I would be quick to claim my prize, were I you."

Possessiveness was easy to identify; it was a reflection he witnessed too often. And that alone was the only card he had to play.

[youresovein]

Lestat let the pause linger for long seconds. Truly, he did not know what he wanted. There would be something carnally satisfying about following through on his threat, but then where did that leave him? Indecision battered his confidence; his brow furrowed and his expression grew troubled, divided as he was.

"Is that the end you seek? To be a prize?"

It was nothing but a guess, the first thing he could think to say to unbalance the man. His eyelashes lowered, gaze fixated on that pulsing beat, the steady fragile drum of it beneath his hand.

"You want to be remembered. There's nothing stopping me from tearing you to pieces, from draining every last drop of blood from your body right here and now... but there's an immortality in that, isn't there?"

[slightlyoffchilt]

"And what's wrong with that? Being remembered?"

He took the bait, swallowed it whole, and it slid smoothly down his throat. Better to be a prize than ignored, better to be implicitly wanted -- and if he were to be in the possession of an entity like Lestat, then that only amplified Chilton's limelight craving.

Chilton took a deeper breath, his pulse throbbing with the movement of blood.

"We are imPorts," he whispered. "What if I were to return? You would owe me a blood debt."

Not necessarily something to bet against, but Chilton wasn't thinking straight. His smile cut into his own bottom lip, the look too sharp to be coy.

[youresovein]

At that, Lestat laughed, a harsh exhale. His fingers tightened just so, just enough to nearly hurt, maybe to leave just the slightest bruises in the morning as a reminder—

And the vampire was halfway across the office in a silent instant, as quickly as if he'd never been there at all, bracing one arm against the back of the couch as he laughed.

"A blood debt! You!" Lestat drew his hand to his face, blond curls falling across his shoulders. Oh, that was too good! Another fit of laughter took him, the ridiculousness of it hitting him all at once, hysteria rushing in to fill the raw and aching space the mortal's words had carved out just minutes earlier. As if he ever would! "And what on earth would you do with a thing like that, hm?"

[slightlyoffchilt]

"I haven't decided yet!"

The first utterly honest thing he said all evening, and it was spat out like an ill-tasting macaroon. Chilton gripped the chair arm beneath him, holding tightly for emotional support. The drastic drop in proximity had him reeling still.

"But I know -- I know I would make it worth my while," he concluded, the whisper of a threat trailing his words. Lestat deserved his full potential, didn't he? And the haunting sound of that unearthly laughter -- Chilton would remember that whenever he eventually laid his claim.

And he did so deeply way to lay his claim now.

He ran his thumb over his lower lip, his eyes still on Lestat. The pressure around his throat eased to a gentle throbbing.

"So." The air was still. "Shall we again, next week?"