He'd been at his desk, composing his next Nightcrawler monologue, when the beautifully dark-pink roses had begun to fade. They had not yet begun to wilt, but the colour seemed to simply evaporate from them. The deep, dark pink simply faded - lighter and lighter - until the roses were a pure, unblemished white. And with the colour had gone the intoxicating scent as well.

LaCroix had stared at the roses, transfixed by the transformation, but when the white was fully revealed, he could not stare at the flowers any longer. They brought to his mind too many memories. After eight hundred and eleven years, delicate white roses like this still reminded him of his beloved Fleur de Brabant. He'd silently cursed under his breath as he couldn't help wondering what these eight centuries might have held for him if he had not acquiesced to Nicholas's plea to not bring his sister across. The one love, it turned out, LaCroix had never been able to forget and, in his infrequently beating heart, he knew she had been the one de Brabant sibling who would not have spent all these years struggling to break free from LaCroix and his gift of immortality.

He'd left the room, unwilling to torture himself with any more of these memories, and he hadn't returned until this evening, until just now. The flowers on his desk remained white. He'd instructed the Cousins to discover what had happened in Toronto last night; what was it in this city that might drain the dark pink color from something. An answer had come to him just after he'd risen at sunset. It was reported that an evil pink energy had been emanating from a condemned church that was known to be the residence of the shiftless-vampire Vachon and, at present, the camp of his fervant band of followers, the Vaqueras.

The evil force had pulled the church into what was presumed to be another dimension two weeks ago, but these roses must have been infected and, for some reason, remained behind. Which added up to three very odd things no one had an answer for. Then, last night, the church suddenly reappeared in this dimension, in the exact same spot from which it had disappeared. And that reappearance seemed to coincide with the pink leeching out of the roses - as if the evil pinkness inside the church had been reclaiming part of itself.

It appeared that was all the explanation to be had; he knew the Cousins well and knew they had done as thorough of a job sussing out the facts as possible. At this point, if there was something they still did not know, then it was something no one knew.

But that still left LaCroix with a half dozen white roses on his desk. He could give them to someone. Ask a Cousin to dispose of them. He could simply throw them in the compostables container. But none of that felt right to him. Somehow each of those things felt like a betrayal to his memories of Fleur.

Then he remembered about the regrets that had been going around. And he recalled his conversation with one of the fans about her friend who'd died. LaCroix stepped all the way into his office and retrieved his laptop computer, and then retired to the library. A mere hour later, he knew what he would do.

He'd had one of the Cousins find a suitable box in which to place the roses, and then the box was tied closed with twine. That is what LaCroix carried as he took flight from the roof of C.E.R.K.

Two thirds of the night was gone by the time he touched down on the snow covered lawn. He walked down the snow-covered row until he came to the third plot in. It was marked with a headstone that was surprisingly plain, but it is rarely the dead who chose what eventually marks their grave, especially the ones who had not yet been done living.

"I'm not one for sentimentality - or talking to headstones - but it's my understanding that in life you were an exceptional man. A 'Renaissance man' more than one person had referred to you as - a rare thing during the actual Renaissance, it is even more rare now. And I appreciate rare specimens of the human race, the men and women who cling to life not because they fear death, but because they desire to take from life everything it will give them and more."

LaCroix untied the twine and opened the box. He scooped up the six white roses and then bent down and laid them at the base of the headstone. Against the icy snow that appeared slightly bluish in the light of the waxing moon, the rose petals appeared to be the color of cream, not in the least bit like the roses that reminded him of Fleur and his time with her all those moonlit nights ago and he knew he'd made the correct decision in coming here to pay his respects.

"Perhaps," he said, "Given the opportunity, I would have considered bringing you across, Mr. Kramer. It might have been interesting to see what a man such as yourself would have done with more time on this Earth."