Chapter Text
Outside the stone walls of the university, the September sun is a blinding, unforgiving white, blaching the color from the townhouses and turning the pavement into a furnace.
I’m running. My lungs are burning and my pulse is frantic against my ribs. At twenty-two years old, I’m a junior with a perfect GPA and a crushing sense of punctuality that I’ve just managed to violate on the most important day of the semester. This isn’t just a class, it’s the seminar. The one everyone whispered about in the library. Introduction to Existential Ethics, taught by the man the department both fears and worships: Professor Lestat de Lioncourt.
I reach the heavy oak doors of the lecture hall, my hand slippery with sweat as I grab the handle. I take a second to try and smooth my hair -a useless gesture as the humidity has already turned it into a wild, disheveled thicket- and realize my button-down shirt is crooked, the third button forced into the fourth hole.
I don’t have time to fix it. I push the door open.
The sound of the hinges is a gunshot in the dead silence of the hall. The air inside is a shock- cold, dry and smelling of floor wax and old, expensive tobacco. It’s a vaulted room, Gothic and imposing, with rows of tiered mahogany benches that seem to swallow the light.
A hundred heads turn in unison. A hundred pairs of eyes judge my late entry, my flushed face and my ruined shirt. But my gaze is pulled, like metal to a magnet, to the front of the room.
He’s standing behind a lectern, though he isn’t leaning on it. He’s draped against it, looking more like a bored prince than a faculty member. He’s wearing a charcoal suit that fits him with a terrifying, tailored precision and his hair is a shock of gold against the dark wood of the shelves behind him.
He stops mid-sentence. He doesn’t look annoyed. He looks interested.
“Welcome.” he says, his voice a rich, melodic baritone that carries a faint, untraceable accent- something European, something old. “Do find a seat, Monsieur…?”
“Louis.” I stammer, my voice cracking. “Louis de Pointe du Lac. I’m sorry, I-”
“Louis,” he repeats and gestures vaguely toward the back of the room with a hand adorned by heavy gold rings. “Please. We were just discussing the utility of the nightmare.”
I stumble up the stairs, my face burning with a heat that has nothing to do with the Louisiana sun. I find a spot in the very last row, sliding into the shadows as far as I can go. My heart is still performing a frantic, irregular rhythm. I pull out my notebook. I try to focus.
Professor de Lioncourt resumes his lecture. He doesn’t use notes or a PowerPoint. He paces the front of the room with the fluid, rhythmic grace of a panther in a cage.
“The common mistake of the moralist,” he says, his eyes roaming the room but never quite landing on anyone. “Is the belief that the monster is an anomaly. An accident. A glitch in the divine plan.” he pauses, leaning forward, the fluorescent lights catching the sharp, beautiful angles of his face. “I submit to you that the monster is a necessity. Without the shadow, the light has no context. Without the predator, the prey has no reason to evolve. We need the thing under the bed. We need it to tell us who we are.”
He’s absolutely brilliant. I can feel the weight of his intellect pressing against the room, a literal force of nature. But as he speaks, something in me begins to bristle. He’s romanticizing the dark. He’s talking about pain and fear as if they’re mere aesthetic choices.
“The monster isn’t a teacher.” I hear a voice say.
It takes me a second to realize the voice is mine.
The hall goes silent again. Professor de Lioncourt stops his pacing. He turns slowly, his gaze climbing the tiers of benches until it finds me, tucked away in the shadows of the rafters.
“Go on, Louis.” he murmurs. It’s not a dismissal. It’s an invitation to step onto the stage with him.
I swallow hard, my throat dry. “You’re talking about the monster as a catalyst for growth. But that’s a luxury of the survivor. To the person being devoured, the monster is just… an end. There is no aesthetic in a slaughterhouse. There’s only the neurological reality of terror. You’re citing Nietzsche and Milton, but you’re ignoring the victim’s perspective.”
The professor doesn’t blink. He stands perfectly still, his blue eyes locked on mine. In the dim light, they look almost translucent. For a long, agonizing moment, the only sound in the room is the hum of the air conditioning.
Then, he smiles.
It isn’t a kind smike. It’s the smile of a man who has just found something he didn’t know he was looking for.
“The victim’s perspective.” he repeats. “How very… empathetic of you, Louis. You want to ground the sublime in the visceral. You want the blood on the floor to matter more than the poetry of the blade.”
“I want the truth.” I say, my voice gaining a sudden, sharp edge. “I don’t think the truth is found in a lecture hall. I think it’s found the moment the predator catches you. And there’s nothing beautiful about that.”
Professor de Lioncourt takes a step toward the benches. The rest of the class has ceased to exist. The vaulted ceiling, the mahogany wood, the hundred other students- they’re just a blur. There is only him and the electric current running between us.
“And yet,” he whispers, though his voice carries perfectly to the back row. “Here you are. You walked into this room late, disheveled and clearly haunted by something… And your first instinct wasn’t to hide. It was to bite back. You say there’s nothing beautiful about the strike, Louis? Then why does your pulse look like a symphony in your neck right now?”
I freeze. I can feel the heat of my own blood. He’s right. I’m terrified, but I’ve never felt more awake.
“Class dismissed.” he says suddenly, without looking away from me.
There’s a collective rustle of bags and shuffling feet as the other students, confused and eager to escape the tension, start to pour out of the hall. They whisper to each other, casting glances at the back row, but I don’t move. I’m paralyzed by the sheer gravity of his gaze.
One by one, the students leave. The heavy oak doors creak open and shut, open and shut, until finally, the last one clicks into place.
The silence that follows is absolute.
Professor de Lioncourt is still standing at the front of the room. He hasn’t moved an inch. He stays there, leaning against the lectern, his hands in his pockets, watching me. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t ask me to stay or leave.
He just watches.
I grip the edge of the mahogany bench until my knuckles are white. I want to leave. I want to run back into the New Orleans sun and pretend I never walked through these doors. But I know, with a terrifying, visceral certainty, that it’s too late.
“See you on Thursday, Louis de Pointe du Lac.” Professor de Lioncourt says quietly. He doesn’t wait for an answer. He turns and walks into the shadows of the department office behind the lectern, leaving me alone in the cold, vaulted silence of the hall.
I sit there for a long time, the New Orleans humidity waiting for me outside, but for the first time in my life, I’m not in a hurry to leave the dark.