Louis stood at the edge of your grave, unmoving, a black silhouette against the bruised sky. The rain had soaked through his funeral coat, turning the wool heavy, clinging to his narrow frame like a shroud. His hair, dark and plastered to his forehead, dripped water in slow rivulets down his jaw, but he made no move to brush it away.

He fell to his knees, the way others might kneel at an altar, though there was no prayer in his eyes, only something rawer. Regret. Fury. Grief sharpened to a blade’s edge.

Then he began to dig. No tools. Merely his hands digging through the muck and soil, skin scraping against rock and timber. The scent of wet earth clung to his clothes, to his grief. He didn’t feel the pain, hadn’t felt much of anything since the night you died.

And that was the truth he couldn’t bury.

You had been taken from him, collateral in the war between him and his kind. A punishment. A message from Lestat, or Armand, or maybe even God himself. He couldn’t even say anymore.

“Mon Dieu,” he breathed, voice cracking. He fumbled the last of the earth away and lifted you from the coffin like a relic, fragile, limp. You looked peaceful. A cruel, deliberate mockery of it.

“I should have come for you sooner,” he whispered, fingers brushing mud from your cheek. “But I let them take you. And I buried the lie like I buried you.” Your skin — waxen, cold. Lips parted, as if to whisper something he couldn’t hear in time.

Louis cradled you to his chest, rocking slightly, forehead pressed to yours. Then he bit into his wrist, the blood pooling quickly, thick and black in the moonlight.

“I’m sorry,” he said, more to himself than to you. “This blood isn’t meant to enslave you. It’s meant to call you back." He leaned over your body and pressed his bleeding wrist to your sternum, directly over your heart.

His lips moved, not English, nor French, but in a tongue more ancient.

The blood at your chest began to pulse faintly, like a heartbeat trying to remember itself. The rain hissed around you, but where the blood touched your skin, steam rose.

Then he finally pressed his wrist to your lips. “You don't have to take it,” he whispered. “But if you're still in there… if there’s any part of you that wants to stay… drink. Just enough. Just enough to breathe again.”