So little mattered to me anymore. Survival, that was all it seemed. And not even my survival so much as my species' survival. Death would be more of a blessing than anything else, but it was blessing I would deny myself.

I knew that if everything proved successful, that Michael's blood would keep death from me for so many more years. But I still injected it into my own veins. I still accepted it. It would also endure my species' survival.

Yet there was something else to it, something else that drove me to do it. I would never know my own child, the child stolen from my centuries ago. But this, this would make me what that child would have been, had it been born. And this, this drove me to near madness trying to find the human Corvinus bloodline.

I thought of my child, of Sonja, as the needle pierced my skin, as the blood entered my system. They were always on my mind in truth. But now, now I was so close to victory, and all I could see was the memory of when I learned I would be a father.

And then, he spoke, alerting me he was conscious yet again. His voice cutting through the memory, through the determination and focus on winning this insidious war. And his voice, barely above a whisper, spoke of the memories I had so long yearned to forget and to avenge.

"They forced you to watch her die," his said with realization in his tone, the pieces now falling into place in his mind. "Sonja."

Her name. Her name, spoken aloud by another. When had I last heard it from another's lips, instead of my own cries and screams and gasps in the night, alone where none of the others could hear me? Surely it had been nearly as long ago as the last time I had seen her face before my eyes and not in my mind.

"That's what started the war."

Oh, if only it were that simple, Michael, if only it were. So much more to it than that, so much more pain and suffering, so many lives stolen simply because Viktor was too frightened of a new breed.

"I saw it happen as if I were there," he explained, and my eyes met his briefly before I had to look away. He had seen my pain, my despair and he had felt it. I was barely able to look in the mirror, much less this young American's pitying eyes.

For some strange reason, I spoke. I still do not know why exactly I spoke. Perhaps it was because the memories were centuries old and still as fresh as the day they happened. Perhaps because the wounds still poured crimson floods, because I still felt rain on clear nights alone with myself. Perhaps because he was the only one who could come close to understanding what I had lost, simply because he had seen it happen. Perhaps out of pity for him as well, forced into this war by my own ruthlessness.

Perhaps just simply, all of the above.

In truth, the reason doesn't really matter, does it? I slowly began to explain to him what he had seen, why it had taken place. But so much I had to leave out, so much he would never hear from me, only would learn slowly by any memories he had after the night was through.

But as I spoke, as I told him off the past, everything came back to me, the past brought alive in my mind.

And as I told him the history he was now a part of, it was relived in my mind. From the very beginning to the very end.

Strange how I would only be forced to watch it play out yet again, in the present. But first I went back. I went back to her, to us, to how it all began, to the events that would bring about the very night history repeated itself.