#159 Burden of Memory (Forever Knight)

[erebusbeck]

Theme Prompt: #159-Memory
Title: Burden of Memory
Fandom: Forever Knight
Rating/Warnings: PG/R (mention of violence and kinda incest but no actual of either)
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 470
Summary: Lacroix remembers a trauma

You’d think he’d have perfect recall, being a vampire and all. It didn’t always work that way. Some things were too mundane to remember, like who he had eaten on July 2, 1325. Some things were too traumatic to want to remember, like his mortal childhood. After nearly two thousand years, he’d probably forgotten more than he remembered.

Lucien Lacroix sat at the bar of his club and swirled the blood in his wine glass and considered Nicholas’ recent brush with lack of memory. He’d been shot in the head which had scrambled his memories and pushed others to the blackness only to be retrieved as he’d healed. With some help from Lacroix.

He wondered if he had told Nicholas the truth in all things or whether his own faulty memory had colored what he’d told the younger vampire. They had a difficult relationship and he could only hope that this incident did not make it worse.

“I can’t seem to remember anything about your Maker, Lacroix.” Nicholas had said.

Lacroix shuddered and drank the last of his blood. He’d never told anyone of his Maker and never would. Even now, the last memory of her was crystal clear. That was his burden. That was his penance. Divia, his beautiful, mortal, daughter made vampire by a traveling ‘healer’. She had brought him across. He was her father and her son. Standing in that tomb, discussing her killing her own Maker, discussing…. He shuddered again.

“Lucius, I want us both to experience everything that our nature offers without restriction. You don’t understand, do you? We are free to do as we please. To kill as often as we desire. Bathe in mortal flesh and blood. To do everything that is forbidden. No one can stop us. Everything we lust after can be ours. Including love. Let us do what must not be done. Make love to me, Father.”

He pushed away from the bar and, momentarily, tried to run away from the memory. Even he had been disgusted. He, who, as a mortal, had slaughtered thousands as a General in the Emperor’s army. He, who had tortured and killed thousands as a vampire of twenty years. He’d seen the scythe and acted, beheading her before she’d had a chance to realize what was happening.

He’d put her in the sarcophagus and tried to lock that memory away. Without much success. That memory haunted him. She haunted him. “It’s just a memory,” he said out loud as if reminding himself of that would make the memory less painful. “It’s just a memory,” he repeated as if saying that would reduce the feeling of dread he got every time he thought of it.

“She is just a memory.” Dead and buried and unable to really affect him at all.

The End.