WATERFALLS
Becky Durden

“And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you.”

Look, I’m not too sure what this is. I’m trying to feel my way back into character after a writing hiatus (RL, lack of internet and good ol’ writer’s block to blame). Then there was this program on about jazz, which got me thinking about Louis(?) and, well, it produced this…

It’s *not* a proper BS…it’s, well, have a look…

Disclaimer: The bush made me do it!

Spoilers: QotD (not the crap movie)

Dedicated to: Sally. Because I can’t stop thinking of you and yes, we all still miss you.

***
”And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you.”

-- Sunlight on the Garden (cannot remember poet. Yeats? MacNeice?)

***
Lestat—

***

There was a jazz funeral wandering through the French Quarter last night. I was up and about even as the last flames of sunset were disappearing over the horizon. I stood and watched it for a while, immersing myself in the eerie sense of history that the music brought up. The procession was coming to an end, and I wished I had missed it. As usual, it brought up a plethora of memories and thoughts for me that somehow always come back to Louis.

He is the most effortless living embodiment of that New Orleans heyday yet. Louis is the living member of the vampires who was raised in the colonial savagery that pervades the atmosphere of this garden city even now. Louis’s tragedies; the death of Paul, his wish to die, Claudia and his hurt, are all evoked in that music. When I hear the sound of that haunting music, I don’t feel the hurt so much. I feel like an outsider looking in. For me, sadness and grief at my lost mortality is evoked when I visit Paris and see the same cobble-stoned roads and architecture that abounded when I was an actor.

But Louis… he spends just about all of his time in New Orleans. This man is the essence of that bourgeois excess that they still try to create now. He is so much a part of New Orleans and its history that sometimes it’s very difficult for me to see him as anything but.

I see him sitting there, reading, as usual—The God of Small Things—a tale of a time, and a place, totally alien to him. I doubt if he even knew a handful of things about India as a mortal.

And I think:

What are you, really? Some beguiling reminder of the Romantic era or the scruffy modern wraith sitting before me now? How can you be both? Was I right to pluck you out of that time, those familiar places? Where is your Creole swagger, your bourgeois sensibilities? Why do you *feel* so much and so deeply? How can you retain that grace and yes, even that stubborn diffidence of your race and yet weep at the sight of a rose dying in the frosty silence of a night?

He can immerse himself in these times and these sensibilities as much as he wants—to me he is still Louis. He is still a drunken planter that one night caught my attention. And yet he fits his vampiric form so easily! He is beguiling and savage and erotic, leading me in a gentle dance almost the exact opposite of Akasha, and yet strangely similar.

For me, he is a gentleman, a reminder of a time and a place long gone but echoed in his slender and dusty form. And then he is the passionate, human conscience I sought to create to guide me through the years.

He understood it all, even if he could not explain it, as a mortal. In that short time between his brother’s death and being taken by me, something profound and sometimes ugly showed itself to his wounded soul. He was an enigma of passion and questioning that could find no answer in some savage little outpost in the eighteenth century. His questions still have no answers today—that doesn’t mean that one day, they won’t be satisfied. And he sits, and he bides his time.

Sometimes, I think, yes, he was made for me. His physical beauty, his need to know and understand were made for immortality. Such a creature cannot be caged in time and forced to accept the trappings of his life. He was a dark angel always, destined to accompany me on the Devil’s Road.

And then sometimes, I think that maybe he was a man who didn’t so much chase a waterfall as was plunged into one by me.

And sometimes, when the room has been in the midst of a comfortable silence for a while, he will put down his book, like he is doing now. He will walk over to me, and, risking my rejection (it never comes), he sits down next to me and leans his head against my shoulder. I feel the comfortable weight of him against me, the curiously domestic scent of shampoo and worn clothing from him—and it gets like one of those glorious summer days of my mortality—I stop thinking such thoughts and simply thrill at the notion that, whatever fate conspired, I am sitting here, with him.