Fides Infractus

_{...Do not forgive me. Do not seek me out. Do not waste another moment of love on me. Despise me only- as I despise myself. I wish that you will be a better creature than I have been, and do more kindness and less harm.
-Leland}
Her hands began shaking uncontrollably, and she gripped the heavy writing desk, the inked letters on the page crinkling beneath her fingertips. There was a ragged, rhythmic sound in her ears, and she realized moments later it was her own breathing. How long had it been since she last drew breath? But now it was simply happening, unbidden, as if her life once again depended on it.
Still gripping the sheet of vellum, she backed away from the desk and sank onto a cushioned bench, a dark and abyssal panic tearing at the edges of her thoughts. Even as her heart commanded her to run, to find him, to bring him home and forgive him, she could not summon the will to stand up. After all this time, after so many years as her constant companion, he had abandoned her to an eternity of night, and hunger, and loneliness. Tears, thick and scarlet and warm, pooled in her eyes, and although she opened her mouth to scream or moan or make any sound at all, she could not. And even now, she could still feel the pull of his blood on her own, and in her heart, a pain and guilt that she knew could only be his.

Oh noes, DRAMA!! After well over a century of being her consort and mentor and general reason for continued eternal living, Leland left Claris. This is TOTALLY DEVASTATING, guys! But he must have had a good reason, right? RIGHT?!

Well, this is the whole situation, so I guess you can decide for yourself whether he did or not. As always, feel free to skip if plot's not your thang, since this is a bit of an incoming text wall.

While hunting down a couple of troublesome initiates of the Cainite Heresy, Claris was trapped inside a burning building, and Leland, in the grip of rotschreck (that's a panic frenzy for those of you who don't know VtM ), saved her. Claris is pretty exceptionally empathic, especially with him, and so while he was carrying her out of the fire she accidentally glimpsed his surface memory. He was flashing back to when he was alive, and his wife and daughter were trapped in their house when it was set aflame by Roman soldiers, and he saved them. This was the most she had ever found out about his centuries-dead human family, and it turned out to really be more than she ever wanted to know; Leland's dead wife, Brenna, looked almost exactly like Claris.

Now, this is kind of freaky, but nothing she couldn't eventually have dealt with. When Leland came back to himself, he could tell something was bothering her, and (because she basically can't lie to him about her feelings since they're blood-bound and fully aware of what the other is feeling at the time) she was forced to explain that she had... learned a little more than she wanted to. They went home together without much further conversation, and he went right to his study and started writing, which is what he does when he's... distressed. She went to sleep early. When she woke up, he wasn't in bed with her, and when she went to check the study he wasn't there, but a few key books were missing and there was a letter on his desk for her.

Summed up neatly, the letter basically explained that when he first saw Claris as a mortal, she reminded him impossibly of his wife. Remember the feral Gangrel girl Leland had been tracking to Claris's village, who dragged her out of her lord's manor, chased her into the woods and drained her nearly dry so Claris would have died if Leland hadn't come along and made her a vampire? Leland let the girl in, intending to use Claris as bait to lure her... and if Claris was horribly injured or nearly killed, then he could Embrace her, and he'd have a childe who... surprise surprise... just happened to look almost exactly like his wife. Whenever Claris would ask, years later, how and why Leland chose her, he claimed it wasn't he who chose her, but fate and coincidence, and that he was doing the truly egalitarian and non-elitist thing by allowing circumstance to do the selection. He really did believe that on the surface, but unconsciously, he knew why he picked her as a childe, and it's been guilting him since that very first night, which is part of why he was so adamant about doing right by her, treating her as an individual and encouraging her: so he could alleviate the guilt of having used up someone else's natural life for a totally selfish reason. Her finding out brought over a century's worth of buried guilt back at once, and so instead of handling this like a rational person, he decided to leave her. And to make matters worse, it'll be years before their blood bond erodes, so the entire time they're just going to be acutely aware of each other's misery.

Leland of Bremenium: expert problem-solver.

_{Textures by ~dazzle-textures [link] and from CGTextures. Letter text by ~Arthulin.}