merciful-death:

Betray him…  Yes, of course, I have.  That is unarguable.  Do you think I don’t ponder it, anonym?  That I am without regret?

I watched him bleed before me, become a husk of himself, and I did nothing to stop it.  I was paralyzed in place, unable to move, unsure of what I should have done.  Ah—but it started before that, did it not?  I knew of her plans, yet I did nothing to warn him of them.  I allowed myself to become a bystander in his attempted murder.  I was as guilty of it as she was, and for that, I should have burned with her.

It was I that carried his wrapped body, lowered it into the swamps.  I knew in that moment that I should have followed him, let myself become a meal for the alligators, yet I did not.  But that too was what I deserved.  I was then and still am incapable of truly serving myself justice; my ego is too large to let myself simply die.

We reunited during that horrible moment in time at the theatre, but I believed he had perished after that point.  Armand let me think such.  I thought of Lestat often, of my failures.  Of my incapability to fully accept it all for what it was—that I had loved him so dearly.  It was not until much later that I learned he lived.

And his mortal episode; he has not forgotten that yet and I suppose he never will.  He would state it to be another traitorous action of mine, and perhaps he is correct.  I did, in fact, leave him to die.  I believed he could live a mortal life with that woman, become a normal human being, give her children, grow old with her, let his soul be purified and continue on into whatever may lie beyond.  That was what I saw when I stared into that foreign face, and how could I deny him what could be paradise?  Mon Dieu, yes, I have failed him so many times.  I have taken a knife to his back in the most severe of ways.  How could I be asked to do it again?  To steal away what he could have had?

I do not believe he realizes even now what a torturous decision that was for me to make.  Deep within myself, I wanted so desperately to take him into my arms, to somehow oblige him, drink from him, allow him to drink from me, make him immortal so that he would not die, be it in the next day or decades from that point.  To envision him aging to death, growing frail and ill, non, it was unbearable to think of, but it was what I felt would be just—to let him live and have the sun.  To run from him as I did, see my little house go up in flames from his rage in distance…  It was one of the hardest moments of this eternity I am living.

Had he found me again and pleaded once more, I would have relented and given him the blood.  I could not have refused him a second time.

But that betrayal, in my own thoughts, was done out of the greatest love.  To let him go and suffer centuries without knowing he lives somewhere on this Earth would have been my greatest sacrifice.

Okay. OKAY. So people throw around “ *DYING* ” alot, but this post was a knife to the heart. TO THE HEART. “Why don’t you place the knife here, why don’t you turn it?” (L. dPdL, IWTV)

SO VERY GOOD.