Rorschach can't know how vulnerable he sounds in that handful of words. It isn't their tone, which scrapes and grinds as his voice does, or even in the words themselves. It is everything Lestat imagines surrounding them, a span of years that must seem long to this man even though they're no more than a mote in history's eyes.

Loneliness is a shadow Lestat knows well. He's known it since he was a nearly forgotten mortal child, a perpetual stranger even within his own house, and he's tasted it from an unnumbered stream of bared human throats. He has found it behind every locked gate of every rigid man who builds high walls around himself, a starving, skulking shame that only grows the more it is denied.

A clever, sensitive mind enclosed in a gristly knuckle of a body, infested with a plague of violent and suspicious thoughts, hidden behind that ever-shifting mask. How great must the hollow teeth that gnaw his bones be?

"I've cultivated an eye for hidden quality," he thinks, as lightly as if none of these other thoughts have occurred to him. There will be no pity or feigned sympathy on his part, no pat extended to the surly dog on the chain. Taming such a beast begins with convincing it to accept your presence, inch by inch, as if the approach is an incidental thing. "It's my love of secrets, I suspect. I adore knowing things no one else does."