“Mourn Me”
When a vampire died, there was nothing left of them to bury. They disintegrated into ash and dust, shapeless. There was no tombstone, no spot to visit to mourn. There was a part of Patrick that felt like he didn’t have an ounce of mourning left inside of him.
This man...this man had been mourned for once...then twice...and now three times. Shouldn’t it feel easy by now? Shouldn’t he be used to it?
But of course...of course there was the fact that this was permanent. In the past he’d mourned versions of “them”, of the roles he’d wanted them to have in each other’s lives. This was bigger...this was more...this wasn’t about him. The whole world was less than without Philippe Ballard in it. Nothing had color anymore, nothing made sense.
“I should have gone first,” he whispered to the air, to the flowers soaked in moonlight, and the empty place in his chest that still whispered that man’s name. No one else had ever filled it. No one, not for a second. “You would have been able to carry on...you had others to keep you grounded. You would have been alright.”
Fingers slipped into the inner pocket of his coat. Spring in Russia was colder than elsewhere, and the flowers were already showing signs of frostbite. Which he supposed was fitting in the end. He’d come back to this garden, the one where he’d thought they’d begun. In later years he’d come to the conclusion that it had been in this garden that they’d actually began the process of ending, but none of that mattered now.
What mattered was the way the crimson glimmered in the vial he held up in his fingers, the way the moonlight highlighted it as if giving him permission. This time there was no Philippe to strike it from his hands. There was no Philippe and Patrick had always known that he couldn’t live without him. The tang of the blood against his lips was shocking at first...like something rotten, something acidic. It burned his throat on the way down, making his eyes widen, the vial slipping from his grasp.
When his legs gave out, Patrick smiled. He gave into it with a sense of peaceful satisfaction. No more chasing, no more mourning, no more empty ache in his chest. He would either see Philippe again in some...other place, or cease to exist and never feel pain or regret or the vicious pull of love again.
He could feel himself slipping, moonlight caressing his face as his eyes fluttered closed. “Amare.” The last word, the last breath, the last thought.
And he was finally at peace.