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MAY - New Orleans
There was a silence that seemed to seep into the stonework after the last immortal Mikaelson fled the compound, leaving their only heir confused and crying in her mother’s arms. Hayley had no answers for Hope. She had no answers for the factions of New Orleans or for the wolves or for herself. Suddenly, she was the last representative. The last link this city had to those who created it. The last link that her daughter had to the weighty history that sat on her small shoulders.
Hope continued to cry out for her father until she fell into an exhausted and fitful sleep. Each whimper that her child released into the silent Abattoir was another wound in Hayley’s crumbling spirit. She spent five years without them. She had done it before, yes. But she had had an end in sight to keep her sane that time. She had had a daughter to reassure and to promise that she would see her family again some day. She had had cures to hunt down and enemies to fight off and something—anything—to keep her mind away from the vicious spiral it was now in danger of being swept up by.
Thank god she, at least, had Freya. Someone who also understood this pain. The crushing realization that the family she had spent her entire life searching for was now forever broken and ripped from her fingers. The uncertainty of living without a purpose, for what was Hayley’s purpose, now that her only responsibility was to care for her increasingly-independent child? Suppose it is probably now a duty to this city. This power she never wanted now in her firm grip. She would rule this city for the Mikaelsons. She would be Alpha to the Crescents and mother to Hope and the last Immortal Hybrid this abominable town would ever see…
Well, until Hope was ready to take her rightful place.
JULY - Italy
Klaus could only guess that something was wrong with Caroline by the way that she was tearing at the corners of one of her many day-planners.
An immortal being with an infallible memory, she still maintained at least three different planners at any given time in order to best capitalize on the meagre twenty-four hours in a day. One was used to keep track of the goings-on at the school. One to keep track of the more and more lies her forever-youthful appearance has required of her as of late. And the third was for her daughters. Orders for new party dresses and birthday gifts. Crushes and nemeses that each girl was discovering as they grew older. Doctors for Lizzie and extracurriculars for Josie. They were some of the most important things to Caroline. One of the few items she kept in every carry-on bag, lest they chance being lost in transit.
The only other thing she kept such a tight grip on, other than her personal computer, was the engagement and wedding bands from her marriage and the necklace that used to belong to her mother. Now, though, she was nervously tearing at the pages, carelessly destroying the small doodles she had been sketching just prior. He could only chalk it up to having known her for the better part of two decades that Klaus was positive that something was stealing her focus—and likely not something good.
“Love”
Caroline, torn from her spinning mind, looked up when he broke the silence of the quiet, Italian street, “Hmm—what? Did you say something?”
Klaus’ gaze was sure as his blue eyes met hers, “Is something the matter?”
“No. Why would you ask that?”
Klaus allowed the tiniest of smirks to curve up one side of his mouth (even tiny, it was fucking annoying, grating on Caroline’s already frayed nerves), “I do believe we swore never to lie to each other several years ago. If I remember correctly, we were both naked and covered in forest earth at the time,”
Caroline, though, having long ago learned to viciously murder the mutinous butterflies that crept into her stomach when he looked at her like he was now, scowled at Klaus, “You and I both know that’s not what we swore to in that forest,”
“Oh?” Klaus’ smirk finally crested over his entire face, “How could I forget? Could you remind me, love? In detail?”
Whatever witty retort Klaus expected Caroline to spit out to continue their usual banter, he didn’t get it.
“Love?” He asked, again, the smile on his face slowly falling away.
Caroline accidentally tore the cloth napkin in her lap with her supernatural strength, “What?” She snapped, “Stop ‘love’ing me,”
Unable to resist, Klaus grinned, “Never,”
Trying not to blush at his suddenly heartfelt expression (she convinced herself that he was, as always, just sweet-talking her. There was no way he was being entirely sincere), “That’s not what I—ugh, never mind," She schooled her features into something she hoped passed for calm, "I’m fine,”
“Yes, you’re clearly displaying the general affect of one who is ‘fine’”.
Caroline didn’t respond, didn’t tale the bait.
C'mon, Love. It's not like you to back down from a fight...
“Is it the school?” Klaus tried again, “The doppelgänger or the Bennet witch? Elizabeth and Josette?”
Caroline might have had almost two decades of immortality beneath her belt, but she could never top Klaus Mikaelson and his millennia of perfected misdirection and denials, and his well-honed ability to spot when someone is lying to him. He clocked onto the twitch beneath her left eyebrow almost instantly, even from across a bistro table.
Playful smirk falling into something more real, “Something is the matter with your daughters?” He was genuinely worried for the young girls. Not as much as he worried for and longed to be with his own daughter, but he truly loved Caroline, and these girls were a part of her—she loved them with everything inside of her—so he loved them, too. Worried for them, too.
“No—it’s just—it’s fine. We’re handling it,” Caroline looked away from the earnest expression Klaus had really only ever shown to her a few times in twenty years—and never in public.
“Handling what?”
“None of your business,”
“The very fact that I care for you and, by association, your girls, makes it my business,”
“It really doesn’t—“
“I might be able to help,”
Caroline allowed some fire to pierce through her gaze, “Nobody can help, Klaus. Believe me, if I thought you could help me with this, I would have asked years ago, regardless of Ric’s justifiable grudge against you,”
“Humor me,” Klaus implored.
Caroline broke—cracked down the middle and almost snarled, “It’s not a humoring matter. Once again the universe has decided to shit of Caroline Forbes, and this time it isn't runaway parents or unequal friendships or my boyfriends picking something else over me,"
Her vampire flashed in her eyes, glinting in the Venetian sun, and she was only keeping a hold on her humanity through sheer will—one that was crumbling. "One of my daughters will be dead before her twenty-third birthday and I’ve been wasting what little time I have with her scouring the globe for some type of solution—any type of solution—for years and I’ve come up with nothing. I mean, come on." The table cracked beneath her fisted hands, "Why is it that I always get the short end of the stick? I like a guy, he’s still in love with Elena—who's in love with a different Salvatore every other week, for all Matt cared. I like another guy, you and him decide to have a grudge match that sent him fleeing for his life—mostly your fault. Thanks for that, by the way. I need Bonnie’s attention, Elena is in another crisis. I want to be a normal fucking teenager for once, go to college with my best friends? Sucks to suck, your mom's dying, bye bye humanity. I get that shit sorted? Boom, magical, un-asked for, surrogate pregnancy—with twins. Finally pick a guy to spend the rest of my immortal life with? Oops, now he’s human and oops, now he’s dead on our fucking wedding day. My best friends are moving on with their lives and I am biologically incapable of doing the same. So I’m just here, trying to find some way to keep my girls safe because you were right, Klaus. It is okay to love something you don’t understand, and I love them with everything that I am. But I can’t protect them from this…” She’s not crying. She isn’t. There’s just something in her eye (a twig or a branch or something).
Klaus chose to ignore the never-ending drama between the doppelgänger and her sycophants, the inadequate suitors that plague that Hell-dimension known as Mystic Falls, as well as Caroline's quite common struggles as a young immortal in favor of focusing the more horrifying pieces of Caroline’s explosion. The part that strangled the breath in Klaus’ lungs and ignited a paternal fire in his eyes.
Through gritted teeth, he bit out, “What, exactly, do you mean your daughters will be dead by twenty-three?”
Caroline wiped the not tears from her face, tried to claw back the composure that had escaped her several run-on sentences ago, “Well, just one of them.”
Outwardly, that could seem callous, but Klaus knew that Caroline was desperately trying to maintain composure, and feigned apathy was one of her methods.
“Which one? Why? Explain,”
Caroline’s hands were shaking but she made sure her lip was not, “Look—I can’t, okay? I am barely holding it together and I haven’t felt like this since my mother was dying and the last time this happened I turned off my humanity, nearly killed my best friends, and did kill half of Whittemore College, rather than deal, okay?! Please, I don’t want to talk about it, Klaus. Please,”
Caroline very rarely ever begged Klaus for anything (not in decades), and he found himself folding to her quiet pleas. With a resigned sigh, he backed down, “I just…okay, love. I’ll back off,” for now, he thought.
“Thank you,” Caroline sniffled, tried to wipe her nose with the shredded remains of her napkin so Klaus offered her his handkerchief (Elijah had instilled some manners in his heathen siblings, though they would all perish before they ever—ever—admitted that).
Later, when Caroline had scurried off back to her desperate search and Klaus was again alone in his grandiose villa on the canal, he made a call to New Orleans, entirely uncaring for the time difference.
“Sister, whatever insignificant nonsense you’re doing now—"
"Sleeping, Klaus"
"—cease it. I need you to tell me everything you know or have even heard about the Gemini coven. Specifically, why no set of twins ever makes it past the age of twenty-two intact,”
New Orleans
Hayley was…dealing. Hope was flourishing as much as possible up in Mystic Falls and Hayley had more than enough on her new plate that she should have been very well distracted from her own riotous thoughts, but…well, she was dealing, okay?
Sure, her and Klaus had never been besties, usually closer to clawing each others’ eyes out than hugging, but she found herself missing him. Which was weird, honestly, but she didn't pretend her life was normal. When she had been helping Hope pack up her bags to go to school and clearing out the Abattoir of whatever the Mikaelsons had been forced to leave behind, she found a small bundle of papers at the back of an old writing desk and her breath had been stolen from her. The paper was slightly yellowed with age and the creases were no longer perfectly crisp but, scrawled in an elegant script in an ink so dark green it was nearly black were the initials E.M.
Hayley was never one to write letters, really. Hell, for the majority of her life she never even had someone to send a letter to, if she had even wanted to. But she held this small stack of blank notecards and matching envelopes, bundled together with a velvet ribbon, in her shaky hands and knew, instantly, who she’s send her letters to.
She wrote a few pages, rambling on about how Hope settled into school and the most recent council meeting she had attended with Freya and Marcel. She threw in a few funny anecdotes about the kids in her pack and even about a particularly good beignet she had had that morning with her coffee. When she was finished, her thoughts put to paper, she tucked a recent picture of Hope, sitting on her new bed in the private room at school that Caroline had graciously secured for Hope, into the stack of pages and placed the bundle into it’s matching envelope. Sealing it quickly before she thought of another inane piece of information that needed to be added, she addressed it to Klaus Mikaelson. Here's hoping he hadn't been his usual asshoel-ish self and had given Hayley his actual address...
Hayley would sped the next three years sending letters to Klaus. Sometimes he would deign to respond, but usually not. That was okay. She knew he was reading them.
She traced that cursive E for far longer than she would ever admit, chewing on her lower lip and second-guessing herself. Elijah... Elijah, with the horrifying past and centuries of guilt. Elijah with the secret kindness and earnest devotion.
God, she rolled her eyes at herself, fucking grow a pair.
Before she could psych herself out of it, she pulled her cellphone from the back pocket of her jeans. His phone number was number two on her favorites list. Huh, she should probably add the Salvatore School to it, now that she thought of it. Or was it time to get Hope a cellphone? Fuck, do seven year olds even have cellphones yet? She’d be eight soon. How could her tiny baby girl already be old enough to be living far enough away from her that she needed a fucking phone to speak to her? Her breath caught in her throat when she remembered that that was now the only way that Klaus could speak to her. God, this world was terribly unfair, wasn’t it…?
Fuck—focus, Hayley. She found his name beneath Klaus’ and her thumb hovered over it for a few moments too long, but she pressed it.
No dial tone.
What? That can’t be right…
AUGUST - New York City
Marcel arrived to his and Rebekah’s New York apartment to her throwing things around in a rage. Living with Bekah, this wasn’t altogether uncommon, but it was a bit early in the week for something to have so thoroughly pissed her off. He narrowly escaped being decapitated by a coffee table book being hurtled across the room like a frisbee. Then it was a crystal goblet from a set that she had just flown in from fucking Milan.
“Hey, now,” he caught the cup, careful not to let it shatter in his supernatural grip, “We—and by ‘we’ I mean you—just spent a month finding the ‘perfect set of crystal’ and I am not about to trek up and down Madison again for another one,”
Bekah snarled at him, “If I want to have you follow me up and down that blasted street, holding every bag I procure, I fucking will, Marcel,” the way that she spat out his name wasn’t not attractive…
“I love you, so you’re not wrong. I’d just really rather not get beheaded by flying glass before noon on a Tuesday, okay?”
“Perhaps your choice in paramour is ill-advised, then,” she looked down her nose at him as if she smelled something foul, but the corners of her mouth were pulling up as she fought a smile. Damn him.
“I disagree,” Marcel finally got close enough to pry the remaining crystal glass from her clawed fingers and tuck the blonde curls that had fallen into her face back behind her ears, “Now, do you want to tell me what the stemware has done today to upset you?”
“The stemware was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I can see that,” he kissed her on the tip of the nose and she did not melt, okay?! “What’s ‘a matter?”
“My imbecilic brother,”
“You have three, babe,”
“Elijah” she enunciated the syllables as if they offended her greatly, “He has decided that this new lease on his freedom has given him the liberty of turning off his bloody phone. For the gods, I cannot fathom where his brain is 99% of the time. For the first time in a thousand years we cannot be in the same bloody zip code and he thinks now is the right time to change his number?! The gall of that man-child…” she soon trailed off into an ancient language—or three—that Marcel was not fluent in but he could still tell was mostly just curse words directed at her brother.
Now, of course, Marcel knew exactly why Bekah was having such a hard time getting ahold of her brother, and he could tell her that he basically erased everything that made up the immortal jackass, but he really did not care to be beaten to death by his girlfriend before noon on a Tuesday. Who even knew if his new body could be killed, but Rebekah Mikaelson would find a way.
SEPTEMBER - San Francisco
Marcel found himself in California as the summer slipped away into fall. Kol and Davina had decided on San Francisco as their new home and Marcel, obviously, needed to come and inspect their new townhome to make sure his least favorite immortal was treating his pseudo-daughter just as he should. Of course, Davina was more than capable of whipping Kol into shape on her own—a disgusting, intrusive, thought: Kol would probably enjoy that—but Marcel would never have a kid of his own, and he was going to live out his crotchety old man father dreams as much as he damn well pleased, thank you.
At the moment, he was sitting on an annoyingly stylish and comfortable couch—in an annoyingly stylish and comfortable townhouse—glaring down at the left hand of his sort-of-daughter, visible disgust painting his face as he stared at the too-large and too-evil diamond now gracing her small finger.
“Are you absolutely sure, D?”
Davina rolled her eyes so hard Marcel was worried she’d hurt herself, “If I have to answer that question one more time, I’m fucking eloping,”
Marcel snarled, just a bit, “Over my dead—well, dead-er—body. As much as I think your betrothed is Jack the Ripper’s more vile cousin, you’re the only kid I’ve got. I’m walking you down that aisle,”
Honestly, Kol might have been Jack the Ripper, now that Marcel thought about it…
Davina snorted, a smirk on her pouty mouth, “Even though Kol will be the one at the end of that aisle?”
“Yes, if I must. And he’ll know that I have a getaway car idling at the back of the church and very sharp teeth should he dare to disappoint me in his treatment of you,”
“I’m going to overlook your insinuation that I cannot destroy my future husband all by myself should he piss me off, and say thank you, for wanting me to be your ‘sort-of-daughter’ and offering to protect me from my future failing marriage,”
"Vince and I will go half on your divorce lawyer," Davina threw a jelly bean at him, but he turned honest,“Best decision I ever made, D,”
“I’m also going to remind you that I am quite good at an aneurysm spell, just in case you had any ideas about speaking now instead of holding your peace,”
Marcel gave her an exaggerated pout, “Way to ruin all my fun,”
Davina’s answering chuckle was interrupted when Kol arrived home from whatever crime he spent that day committing, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the picture frames on the wall.
His mood only soured even more when he spotted Marcel on his couch, “You’re here. Bloody perfect,”
Marcel, long past ever being scared of Kol’s temper tantrums—now that Kol couldn't make good on his threats of murder—rolled his eyes and quipped, “What crawled up your ass and died?”
“My bloody brother,”
"Gross"
“Which one?” Davina joked in a near perfect recreation of Marcel’s conversation with Rebekah just last month. Kol’s glare swung over to her, and Davina chuckled at what most would consider a murderous expression on her fiancee's monstrous face “What? It’s a valid question?”
Kol threw his jacket to the floor, “It seems that my morosely masochistic eldest brother has quite taken to the whole ‘only child’ schtick and decided to lose all our phone numbers along with his ability to occupy a room with any of us,”
Davina pushed herself to her feet to talk her fiancee off the proverbial ledge and Marcel refuse to meet either of their eyes.
By the end of the month, Kol was off again on whatever legally-questionable adventure he decided on that morning and Davina found herself back in her townhouse having an annoyingly similar conversation with Vincent.
“And, as much as I think you’re marrying far beneath your worth, how is Kol Mikaelson handling life finally out from beneath his siblings?”
Davina decided to have some fun, “I happen to like debasing myself for him…and with him—“
“Okay, way too much information, girlie—“
Davina’s tinkling laugh covered Vincent’s grumbling, “He spends his new free time coming up with the most ingenious new ideas in the bedr—“
“I will curse you mute, I swear it. Do not test me,”
“Fine, fine. Spoilsport. What’s a girl to do, y’know?”
“I’d recommend not getting into bed with a Mikaelson, but that’s just me,”
“Too late,” Davina laughed. She sobered, then, “Honestly, I’m happy to let him distract himself with me and the grimoires he hunts down and—“
“Bloody murder?” Vincent supplied.
“Probably,” Davina shrugged, the psychopath, “I don’t ask. My hands are hardly clean.”
Vincent scoffed but didn’t disagree. They all had a body-count. Only some of them pretended to actually feel bad about it.
After a few long minutes, Davina sobered, “He spent so long desperate for their approval—even though he’d never admit it. Desperate to be a part of Always and Forever. He had finally decided to focus on his own life. He was finally ready to be on his own…”
“That sounds like a good thing, D”
Davina met his gaze, “The desire to be free of your overbearing family and the reality that you will likely never see their faces ever again are two very different things,”
NOVEMBER - San Francisco
It was a perfect day for a wedding, if you asked Davina. The sun was setting and the air was crisp—none of that oppressive humidity that frizzed her hair and lingered over New Orleans like a foul smog well into the Fall. She wore a long sleeved velvet dress she found in a local vintage shop for twenty bucks and had plucked the wildflowers for her bouquet and Kol’s boutonniere from her neighbors flowerbeds just that morning. She wove a few of the wildflowers into the crown of braids she wore and swept a pale shimmer along her cheekbones and she was ready to marry the love of her life.
If only one of her only friends and her de facto-father could stop skulking at the back of rooms and being so fucking sketchy.
Right now, for example, Vincent was in her private dressing room pretending to "help her get ready"—he definitely was not—so he could keep avoiding Freya.
Y'know what? Fuck it. It was her wedding day, she's allowed an unlimited number of outbursts and demands, and she was going to get the truth out of one of them if she had to beat someone to death with her high-heeled shoe.
Looks like Vincent picked the wrong place to hide.
“Okay, out with it,” she heaved a great sigh and turned away from the mirror to glare at where Vincent was leaning against a low couch and picking at his nail beds. He, at least, was dressed for the occasion in a mustard-colored velvet jacket and smart trousers—unlike Marcel who, at this very moment, was still in track pants and a wife-beater while he face-timed Bekah for the fiftieth time. At the very fucking least.
“What?” Vincent had the audacity to look innocent, the bastard.
“You,” Davina snarled. She rolled her eyes, “I may be vastly younger than you and Marcel—“
“Hey, now,”
“—but I was not, in fact, born yesterday,”
“Look, I know it’s your wedding day and I’m supposed to tolerate your bridezilla behavior with a grimaced smile, but do you mind toning down the sass and telling me why you’re accosting me before you even walk down the aisle?”
Davina was not deterred by his feigned ignorance, “You and Marcel have been keeping some little secret for months and I am fucking sick of it. You both refused to even have a conversation with Hayley and Freya last night and Marcel seems even more desperate to avoid Kol than usual,”
“Maybe he just doesn’t like your chosen life-partner,”
“Or, maybe, you’re both keeping a secret. One so big and bad that it’s forcing you to actually feel sorry for the fucking Mikaelsons,”
“That’s a stretch,”
“But not by much, is it?” Davina crossed the room and got close enough to Vincent that he could see the fire in her blue eyes as she commanded, “Don’t even bother denying it again. You’re keeping a secret that effects my husband and his family. And, sure, I spend most of my day desperate to toss one or all of them off the nearest bridge, but they’re my family now. Tell me what you did,”
Vincent looked away, “Maybe we should wait for Marcel—“
“Uh uh. He’s been avoiding this for months, dodging my calls and making ridiculous excuses not to talk to me when I do get ahold of him. He can bitch about you spilling his secrets on his own time,”
Vincent caved, “Fine,” he sighed, tilting his head back to glare at the ceiling, “But you have to promise to keep a cool head, here,”
“I’ll be a Mikaelson by the end of the day, Vincent. I make no promises,”
Davina stormed into the nearest men’s room, the train of her wedding dress in one hand and a sheepish Vincent on her heels. She found Marcel—still not dressed, you asshole— where he was on the phone with what sounded like Rebekah. Good. She should know what this idiot did, too.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Davina screamed, just barely keeping her flush from spreading down her neck.
“D?” Marcel whirled around, caught off guard.
“No, seriously. I know you were raised by the literal scum of the earth, but have you no sense whatsoever? God, it’s truly a wonder that you made it to 200 without tripping ass-backwards into your own well-earned demise,”
Marcel's surprise melted to match her aggravation with his own, “Well, since I apparently make idiotic decisions on the regular, could you be more specific about which offense pissed you off enough that you’re yelling at me instead of getting married right now?”
Davina glared, enunciating her anger with firm jabs of her manicured finger to his chest, “You unleashed Elijah Mikaelson into the world—someone who is, under normal circumstances, Satan in a three-piece-suit—harboring one quarter of the most powerful black witch ever known, without his memories?!”
Even with her human hearing, Davina could hear Rebekah as she shrieked through Marcel’s still connected phone, “You did WHAT?!”
-
Later, Marcel held his phone well away from his ear to save his eardrums from the damage his girlfriend was trying to inflict.
“You are the biggest fucking imbecile I have ever met, and I grew up with Kol, Finn, and Nik for fucking brothers,”
Davina left Vincent with Marcel, where they could both fucking rot for all she cared, and headed off in search of Hayley. They had made the decision that Hayley and Hope could both attend the wedding as long as Hope stayed at the very back of the room, far away from Kol and his quarter of The Hollow, and did not attend the reception. Hope had been upset over missing out on cake and Kol had promised to compel one of the servers to bring her a whole tier just for herself, secretly just thrilled she even wanted to come to the wedding of her least-involved uncle. Vincent was also not thrilled (not about cake but, like, plagues and shit) but, again, Davina doesn’t give a fuck about his opinions at the moment (or, really, ever).
In order to keep their distance, Hayley and Hope were getting ready across the street in a nearby hotel. No bother. Davina was on the warpath and she could make the trip, the dragging hem of her wedding dress be damned.
Hayley was just finishing up her makeup when Davina magic-ed her way into her locked hotel room. “I need to talk to you,”
“What?” Hayley whirled around, “What are you doing here? Are you running?” She almost seemed eager, the bitch.
“I swear to god, if one more person offers to help me leave Kol at the altar, I’m gutting them like a pig and using their corpse in ritual sacrifice,” Hayley chuckled at her aggravation, but didn't 100% doubt her threat, “Never mind. I need to talk to you about E—“
“Auntie D?” Hope asked, coming in from the adjoining room.
Davina tried to plaster what was a convincing smile onto her face as she turned to the young girl, “Hope, hey. You look so pretty,”
“You do, too,” Hope’s small smile grew bigger, almost bouncing in place, “What are you doing here? Are you running away??”
Hayley snorted a laugh.
“No, kiddo, I very much plan to marry your Uncle Kol today. No matter how many people on my side of the aisle would rather I do anything else,”
“Not just your side of the aisle,” Hayley said beneath her breath.
“Anyway,” Davina ignored her, “could you do me a favor?”
“Mom said I’m not allowed to help you commit crimes against nature but, since it’s your wedding day, I’m willing to risk getting grounded if it’s really important,”
Hayley rolled her eyes, still chuckling.
“No crimes against nature today,” Davina assured, “unless you count marrying onto this fu—ridiculous family, no offense. I just need you to go and find Aunt Freya for me, okay? Tell her I need to talk to her in your mom’s room and to not tell Uncle Kol, okay?”
Hope shrugged, “That seems like a lie, but sure,”
After Hope scurried out of the room, Hayley turned her ‘mom eyes’ onto Davina, “That did seem like a lie, D. What did you need to tell me so badly that you’re delaying your own wedding and sending my kid on pointless errands so she doesn’t listen in?”
Davina sighed, her bone-tiredness weighing her shoulders down, and she hadn’t even made it down the aisle yet, “Not a total lie. I really do need Freya. You would not believe the bullshit that Marcel and Vincent just fessed up to,”
-
Hope did as instructed, sent Freya to her mom and Davina and, job done, was now scoping out the cake table. Kol had promised she'd get her cake... But he was a Mikaelson and one: they lie, and two: Hope was also a Mikaelson and a Mikaelson was really good at doing whatever the fuck they wanted to. They probably wouldn't notice the missing chunk Hope gouged out behind one of the frosting flowers.
It was pretty good cake. Worth it.
-
Marcel—still in the tracksuit—threw his hands into the air, “How many times do I have to tell you people that he asked for this?!”
Hayley’s eyes were more gold than green when she glared right back at him—fully dressed, thank you, “Don’t pretend that either of you did this as a favor to Elijah, Marcel. You both have more than enough motive to hate him and this was just a convenient way to get your justice and keep the moral high-ground,”
-
“What were you thinking?” Vincent was having a similar stand-off with Freya, Davina standing in the corner of the room like the ref at a boxing match (with an annoyingly-satisfied smirk on her face), “Do you grasp how dangerous and short-sighted it was to give into the whims of my quickly-spiraling brother, let alone one carrying one quarter of The Hollow?!”
“Yes, I get it. But it was his idea—“
Freya cut him off, “All of my brothers are idiots. It is, sadly, an incurable family trait that they have suffered since birth. I would have thought you knew that by now and had learned to compensate,”
CHRISTMAS DAY - Colorado
Kol and Davina celebrated Christmas while on their honeymoon. They stowed away in a private bungalow in the snow-capped mountains of Colorado, not a soul in sight (unless you counted the compelled humans in the cellar for Kol to snack on), for weeks. On one of the only times they bothered to get fully dressed, Kol had taken her into town to some random batting cages with a more unhinged grin than usual, but whatever, it was fun.
Most of the time, they sipped expensive wines that Klaus had gifted them from his new home in Italy, bundled themselves beneath cashmere blankets that Bekah had flown in from France, and read the crinkled pages of the ancient grimoires Freya had deemed appropriate to bestowed upon them to celebrate their union. It was a weird family, to be sure, but Davina was still excited to join.
“Darling?” Kol murmured over the crackling fire, combing his fingers through her tangled curls.
“Hm?” Davina hummed back, not turning her head to look at him lest he stop the comforting strokes.
“Since you married me, I can only assume that you remember I am, in fact, a millennia’s old supernatural creature and, as such, I have heightened senses, including hearing?”
“I know. You’re a real cradle-robber, aren’t you?”
“I shan’t apologize for my proclivities, love,”
“Of course not,” Davina chuckled, “What about it?”
Kol smirked at his wife’s head, even though she could not see his face (she could hear it in his voice, though), “So you probably are aware that, even across great distances, when you’re shouting at your guardian and his incompetent accomplice, I can still hear you clear as day,”
Davina’s breath caught, “It did not occur to me at the time,”
“Hm,” Kol hummed, masking his feelings beneath feigned detachment, “Would you mind explaining just what they did concerning my eldest living brother that lead you to shout at them across several city blocks and involve my sisters?”
-
Kol had flashed away, still naked as the day he was born, to destroy several miles of nearby forest, but Davina could not blame him. It was one thing to be physically forced apart from the siblings you had grown with for a thousand years. It was another thing, entirely, to be forcefully ripped from the very fabric of your brother’s consciousness, buried beneath compulsion and lies so deep that there was no hope to ever surface.
It was beyond idiotic to agree to perform an act of magic with no idea if there was a way to reverse it. There had never been a creature as volatile and new as Marcel’s Beast since the dawn of The Originals. Nobody had ever compelled an Original before. It was irresponsible—no, inconceivable—that anybody, let alone Marcel and Vincent—who should know better—ever agreed to humor Elijah’s childish whim for more than a laughable five seconds.
If Elijah was forever altered by this decision, the only reasonable solution would be to recreate new memories with his siblings. People did that every day, overcoming the fragile state of a human’s mind and pushing forward with only hope and a prayer. But Elijah would never again be in the same room as his siblings, would never again hold his niece and walk the streets that he built with his family. There would be no new memories. And, Davina knew, Elijah was a stalwart figure, a lighthouse in the storm of his siblings, but he was, internally, the most fractured. He was the least likely Original to be able to withstand this mental assault. Without his centuries of polished morals and learned dignities, he would be broken down to his baser monster, and the world around him would rain blood. Literally.
Worse, though, he would crumble beneath this pain, this loneliness. Originals were hard to kill, but they were not infallible. Elijah thought himself condemned to this punishment, believed that he deserved to hurt in the very worst ways. He was so annoyingly self-sacrificing that Davina wanted to beat her head—and his—against a wall. Elijah would spend a few decades in his desolation and then he would self-destruct, imploding from the inside out and leveling a small continent in his wake. Make no mistake, Elijah Mikaelson would find a way to die, rather than live out an endless existence entirely alone. He would force himself to withstand for as long as he could, but he would break.
They all would break, eventually.
No, Davina decided. This reality that had been forced upon them at the eleventh hour and in sheer desperation would not be their eternity. Davina would not watch her husband slowly wither beneath his isolation. She would not see Freya live out another lifetime forever mourning the siblings she had only recently found. She would not watch Hayley weep behind closed doors, sobbing into her hands so that her daughter wouldn’t see how truly devastated she was. Davina would not watch Klaus be torn from his daughter and his daughter torn from him. She’d never be best friends with Klaus Mikaelson, but Hope deserved better.
Davina Claire—Davina Mikaelson, now—was a witch born to the most powerful coven in history, former Regent of the Nine Covens and heir to the Ancestors. Married into an ancient family steeped in ancient magic. Wife to a former witch and now sister to one of only two living Mikaelson witches. She had died and been restored. Twice. She was living proof that all magic had a price, yes, but all magic also had a loophole. A clever way that the universe devised to unravel any spell, any curse, until it was rendered null. Davina would not rest until she saw her new family made whole. The universe could either get with the program or get out of her fucking way.
JANUARY - Greece
Her worn boots echoed in the cavernous room as she dodged broken glass and puddles of blood seeping into the old wood. Countless precious artifacts were strewn about in various stages of destruction, rich fabrics torn at the seams and priceless paintings splattered with bodily fluids and ripped from their frames. On the wall furthest from the door, Klaus Mikaelson was leaning in feigned nonchalance, muddy boots crossed at the ankles as he sipped from a crystal decanter that was, miraculously, not shattered. Hayley hoped that the smile she offered to him in greeting was doing a good job of concealing her riotous emotions.
Hayley had taken a few weeks in righteous indignation. Punched Marcel in the face and leveled a large portion of forest out in the Bayou in her anger but, alone in her bed in a house that was built by the man she loved most, now forever stolen from her without her even knowing, she had grown more sad than angry sooner than she'd have liked.
Once she reached his side, Hayley slid down the wall to his left, snagging the bottle from his bloody fingers and taking a hefty swallow instead of speaking. She did reach over and squeeze his hand with her free one, though.
“Oh, I’m honored,” Klaus drawled, “that you made the trip yourself, this time. Although, out of all of my ex-lovers, Caroline is usually the one most sunshiny enough to lift a blackened soul into the light,”
Hayley forced a chuckle, a false smile on her mouth,“I’m not here to lift your ‘blackened soul', Klaus. I’m here because you’re pretty much the only person on earth who will just let me be sad for a while."
Klaus scoffed, a snarl on his monstrous face, “Oh, and what are you so sad about, Hayley? You can still see our daughter whenever you please—“
“I’m not here about Hope,” Hayley cut him off, sniffing back the burn threatening at the back of her red eyes.
Klaus finally looked at her, staring for several moments until a light flickered on behind his eyes, “Who told you?”
Hayley did not have to ask how Klaus guessed, he knew her better than almost anyone living. Only one other being on earth knew her tells better. Or, at least, he used to.
“Davina,” she answered, “Who told you?”
“Nobody had to tell me,” Klaus scoffed, “There is no one alive or dead who knows my noble brother better than I do. I knew how this would end before even he did,”
Hayley looked at him, finally, seeing an ancient pain painted across his face. They both did not speak for several moments.
“I went to see him,” Klaus confessed.
Hayley’s head whipped around. A shaky,"What? —“
Klaus squeezed his eyes together, as if he already knew exactly how idiotic his actions had been but had been unable to stop himself, “I know! I know! Biblical plagues and burning worlds, blood raining from the sky. I am fucking aware! But—“ his sentence abruptly halted, choked in his tightening throat.
“He’s your best friend,” she understood.
Even through a clenched jaw, Klaus could not stop the tear that fell from his eye, “He was,”
Hayley took a hefty swig from the bottle to steel herself to ask a dangerous question, but she needed the answer more than she needed to live in her denial, “How bad is it?”
Clearly pained, Klaus stole the bottle back, “I watched him play piano and drank my overpriced merlot for long enough that it turned to blood in my glass and the thunder outside rattled the chandelier. I dropped my largest bill in any currency in his little tip jar and he looked at me…” Hayley’s gaze sharpened, eager, “He looked at me like I was nothing to him. Because I am nothing to him,”
More long moments of unspoken tears and silent gulps from a quickly-depleting bottle, they both stared straight ahead with unseeing eyes .
“I can’t believe he did it,” Hayley admitted, finally, “I can’t believe he just…erased his family. I mean, you, Hope, Always and Forever—”
“And you,”
Hayley looked away, denied, “It’s not about me,”
“It’s okay to admit it, Little Wolf. Mikaelsons are selfish by nature—“
“I’m not a Mikael—“
“You are,” Klaus enunciated, “to me. You are—were—to Elijah. That matters.”
Hayley saw the earnestness in his eyes, held his hand even tighter. She turned away again, slumped even further into herself, but allowed her head to rest against Klaus' shoulder.
“Always and Forever...”
“Now you’re getting it,”
JANUARY - New Orleans
Davina has been back from her honeymoon for approximately seven minutes before she stormed her way into Marcel’s downtown apartment. Marcel and Josh are both mid-bite, halfway through two oversized sandwiches and, for some strange reason, two diet cokes for two immortal people with immortal constitutions…whatever.
“Faction meeting,” Davina barked, “Tomorrow at 11 and you will be there,” she points her tiny, bony finger (on a hand now sporting a wedding ring to match her offensively large and evil engagement ring, to add insult to Marcel's injury) at Marcel and he had the audacity to roll his eyes.
He must be, genuinely, brain damaged.
Before he can swallow his unchewed food and make some remark Davina will make him regret, she cuts him off, “Zip it. You’re still on my shit list,”
She gives Marcel her angriest, most exasperated glare, holds it for several seconds, then turns and blows Josh a kiss.
Marcel, clearly lacking any self-preservation instincts whatsoever, finally speaks, “You seem tense, D. New husband not living up yo your expectations?”
Davina’s glare only grew more sinister, a tiny smirk pulling up one side of her mouth. He walked right into this one, “My husband has had a millennia to perfect the art of satisfying a witch, so I’m quite relaxed, thank you,” Marcel shuddered, but she did not feel bad for him, “Unlike some people, I happen to possess the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time without falling, ass over tits, into some asinine decision. Somewhere between orgasms nine and fourteen, I decided to fix this disaster you’ve made for us,”
“Okay, firstly, my walking you down the aisle and begrudgingly entrusting you to Kol Fucking Mikaelson for as long as you both may live was not me consenting to you continuously spilling the dirty details of my own pseudo-daughter’s sex life with my mortal enemy,”
Josh snorted, “Would have thought that would be Elijah, TBH. What, with the whole heart-ripping, murder-y thing…”
Marcel’s groan could shake the apartment’s glass.
Davina cocks an eyebrow, “Is he still your mortal enemy if he doesn’t remember that you exist?”
Josh chokes on his diet soda, “Wait, what?”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” Davina winked at Josh, “Right now, I’m tired, cranky, sort of hungry, and an hour late for another promised orgasm at the hands of Kol Fucking Mikaelson—“
“Gross, D!”
“Faction meeting,” Davina enunciates, “The Abattoir. 11 AM, tomorrow, and not a second after. Understood?”
“God,” Marcel groaned, “Who died and made you King of New Orleans?”
“I could start with you,”
-
Everyone arrived at the faction meeting on time (good for Marcel, he’s learning), all somewhat grumpy and somewhat confused by the decreed, unexpected meeting called by someone not even on the council, but they showed up.
Davina pushed herself to her feet and laid her palms on the table, somehow meeting everyone’s eyes all at the same time, her blue ice cold, “Here’s how this is going to go. We’re all going to clean up our own messes for once in this family’s fucking existence,”
Hayley and Freya are slightly taken aback, but seem to be in agreement, Vincent had his mask of indifferent superiority plastered firmly on his face, and Marcel rolled his eyes.
Davina’s glare zeroed in on him and his somewhat-unwilling partner in crime, “You both helped erase Elijah’s memories. God knows he can’t help, even if he wanted to, so you both are going to swallow your pride and figure out a way to lift the compulsion without waking The Hollow or obliterating Elijah’s mind in the process. And do it quickly; I don’t know how either of you overlooked the risk of a memory-free Mikaelson roaming the earth who cant remember his time-earned polished morals. France will rain blood before long, and it will have nothing to do with the demon inside his head,”
Marcel and Vincent don’t argue that point, but they also will not concede that they made a mistake. Typical.
Davina’s pulls Freya into her stare-down, “The Hollow has been plaguing these lands alive and dead for thousands of years. We made it possible for her to cross over when we took out the Ancestors and she used Hayley’s blood to restore her physical form. So we are going to figure out how to nullify and destroy The Hollow,” as if it was actually that easy, sure.
“Freya, you know more about blood-curses and ancient magics than anyone living,” not to mention some of the truly disgusting grimoires she reads for fun, but Davina didn’t say that part out loud, “so you’ll cover that end. Inadu was born here and she draws her power from New Orleans soil, but I was raised in a fanatical cult obsessed with ancestral magic; I know it better than anything else. I will work on using her connection to these parts against her; maybe reabsorb her back into New Orleans, herself, rather than just putting her in a new person and continuing this ridiculous cycle,”
“Vincent has had the most direct contact with The Hollow and her followers,” Davina turns her stare back onto the Regent, “Figure out some way to take her coven down from the inside. I’m not planning to go toe-to-toe with her, potentially destroy myself to get her back onto the astral plane, only for another douchebag in a leather duster to bring her back,”
Marcel, the dick, argues, “Why do me and Vincent have two jobs and Hayley has none?” He turns his annoyance on the Alpha who, up to this point, had remained completely silent, “You don’t want to help? You fighting with your baby daddy again?”
Hayley’s eyes flash gold for half a second, “Well, I’m certainly not fighting with the man I love, considering you erased every memory he had of me,”
Freya interrupts before any blood could be spilled, “Hayley actually has the hardest job of all…”
Hayley sneered, “Babysitting,”
“Keeping the family safe from the world,” Freya enunciates, “and the world safe from them while we try to fix this clusterfuck,”
“Klaus will paint the Continent red with his anger, growing more and more unhinged until he snaps, entirely,” Davina is sure of this.
“Too late,” Marcel said under his breath. Unfortunately for him—and his shins—the alpha across from him has supernatural hearing and steel-capped boots on.
“Who knows what Elijah will do since you ripped his common sense and loyalties and honor from his mind and left him in self-imposed isolation to drown in his own loneliness and melancholia until he snaps and France burns,” Davina’s eyes flash with her judgmental fury, “And Hope…” her eyes grow softer as they shift back to Hayley.
“Hope is her father’s daughter,” Hayley confirms, not quite able to keep the smile from the corners of her eyes, “She is brave and cocky and prideful and kind of an asshole, sometimes, even at eight-years-old. If we don’t fix this, one day my daughter will try to do it herself and who knows what kind of collateral damage that will throw at this city? At this family?”
The silence around table lasts for several breathless moments, until Vincent finally deigns to speak.
“If we’re focusing our energy on the Mikaelsons and The Hollow, who’s running the council? Leading the city?”
Davina finally smiled, “I guess that makes Josh…what was it again, Marcel? Oh, yes, King of New Orleans. I’d say he’s earned it for being the only one left with half his humanity and more than just two braincells to rub together,”
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, and, it can be reasoned, neither can their plan to decimate one of the world’s vilest creatures. Vincent and Marcel threw themselves into testing the limits of the Beast’s compulsion, only succeeding in creating a new line of amnesiac vampires to roam the city at night. Fantastic. At least they had Josh to help curb the infantile bloodlust.
Freya and Davina spent every spare moment scouring grimoires and hunting down every last piece of the Hollow’s descendants, with limited success. They had successfully relieved several covens of trench-coated sociopaths but hadn't gotten far on a way to deal with The Hollow, herself. Unfortunately, with a demon like Inadu, there really was no practice dummy to work against and test their fluctuating hypotheses. Everything was theoretical and it was driving both Freya and Davina back into their early graves trying to imagine every which way this thing could blow up in their faces without any actual explosions.
Both problems came down to simplicities, really. There was no mind like Elijah’s; none of the other Mikaelsons were willing to allow such an intrusion into their own minds—nor would Freya and Davina entertain that idea in the first place—no creature on earth possessed the same complicated combination of ancient Original also harboring one quarter of an evil, ancient witch. There was no way to know how to reverse the magic locking his memories away without just…trying to reverse the magic. The same was true with The Hollow. The only way to test the magics that Davina and Freya were cooking up to see if they would be effective would be to…test them against The Hollow. But, to do that, The Hollow would have to be whole again, and every last one of them was terrified of that very concept.
It took them two years before they were willing to try this.
Hope turned nine, and then she turned ten, and Klaus grew more and more despondent, roiling away in a sea of his own torment, kept from nearly everything that he cared about. Hope stopped asking when her father would be back, sinking into her new/old reality of pretending to be Hope Marshall, only child to single-mother Hayley, a regular little witch, nothing special about her background at all…
Hayley grew more and more concerned, for her daughter and also her entire family, distracting herself from the quiet compound by sleeping out in the Bayou when Hope was in Mystic Falls, nothing but her pack and the moon to drown out the thoughts she could never fully quiet. How close to the proverbial edge was Klaus getting? Was Hope still telling her about her nightmares and fears and confusions, or had she begun to perfect the Mikaelson art of self-repression until self-destruction?
Was Elijah okay, wherever he was? She couldn’t resist tracking him down, herself. She needed to lay her eyes on him to assure herself that he was whole—or, at least, as whole as someone with their past ripped from the very fabric of their soul could ever be. She hadn’t planned to introduce (re-introduce, ouch) herself. Had planned to listen to his piano and pine from a secluded corner of the little bar and be back to New Orleans before he ever knew she was there. She had been so overcome by the look of him that she had forgotten that, memories or not, he was still an immortal vampire who was exceptionally good at spotting other, strange immortals sipping, suspiciously, on one glass of wine over four hours. One who kept looking at him like the very sight of him physically pained her.
She’d told him her name was Andrea.
She’d cried until she made it back to New Orleans.
Klaus was also, surely, not okay. More and more of her letters were being sent back to her, unopened; many of her calls now ignored. He was pulling away from Hope, too, and Hayley would be pissed with him about that if she didn’t understand the instinctual desire to protect your child from everything painful and dangerous in the world—even if that thing was you.
The Salvatore School
As a headmistress (even an increasingly absent one, as the years dragged on), Caroline prided herself on being conscious of every one of her students. But there were a few that she paid a special attention to. Her daughters, obviously. Also a young witch in the lower school who was always picked second to her best friend, twisting herself into knots trying to be perfect so that, someday, she might be someone’s favorite (Caroline might be projecting).
Hope Mikaelson. Ric chose to ignore the real reason that Caroline was so concerned with Hope. He focused on how she was a creature never seen in the supernatural world before, nobody knew what she was capable of, she needed a more watchful eye on her lest she turn out like her father… But Caroline loved Hope because Hope was her father and Caroline loved Klaus in a secret, private way, hidden from almost everyone still in Caroline’s life, but true all the same. Caroline worried for her because she worried for Klaus. Caroline took care of Hope because her father could not.
Caroline’s knuckles rapped on Hope’s cracked bedroom door (Ric decreed that every student in the lower schools were not allowed to fully close and lock their doors, for safety or whatever).
“Hey, Hope,” Caroline’s gentle voice did not spook the child, who was steadfastly scrubbing a chalk pentagram from her wood floorboards (the original wood floors, over two hundred years old, Caroline forced herself to only cringe internally), “Do you have a minute?”
The ten-year-old scowled at her half-cleaned floor, “If you’re here to play peacemaker between me and my father, no,”
Caroline pushed her way into the room, closing and locking the door behind her (Ric could fucking deal), “I’m here to make sure that you’re okay. Klaus Mikaelson is on my shit list; he can clean up his own messes for a change,”
“That’s new,” Hope scoffed, “I’m shocked he’s not groveling at your feet, to be honest. He’s kinda obsessed with you,”
“He can grovel to my voicemail until I am suitably convinced that he has seen the error of his ways,”
“My father will never believe that he’s ever wrong, Ms. Salvatore,” Hope still wouldn’t look at her, “He’ll probably just try to bribe you with diamonds or, like, a drawing,”
Caroline wasn’t sure if Hope knew much about her and Klaus’ past (she really really hoped she didn’t know every last detail...), but she had either heard some of the stories or she was scarily good at predicting her father’s behavior.
Hope’s blue eyes (her father’s eyes) were red-rimmed when they, eventually, met Caroline’s, and her determination to remain strong faltered at the genuine concern and kindness she saw there, “He told me he didn’t want to see me anymore…I’m supposed to be his daughter, his Littlest Wolf. He promised to be there for me, Always and Forever, but clearly that means jack shit when he’d rather play mass-murderer than father,”
“He’s actually pretty good at multitasking,” Caroline muttered beneath her breath. She pushed herself off of Hope’s bed to kneel on the floor beside her. When she spoke, she spoke clearly, making sure that Hope heard her next words, “As the one and only member of the ‘see the good in Klaus the Great Evil ™’ club, can I offer you some insight into the mind of your father? Maybe help you understand his thinking, just a tiny bit?”
Hope gave a hesitant nod.
“Now, I’m not the most well-versed on the intricacies of the Mikaelson mind and, sadly, those that are are scattered to the four corners of the earth, so I’ll have to do my best here…”
“Okay…” Hope hedged with all the enthusiasm a despondent almost-teenager could muster.
“The man that you were born to is the opposite of perfect,” nearly a decade of dealing with young minds, Caroline had learned to be blunt when necessary, “I’ve literally watched him paint towns in blood and eviscerate innocent people as he went, without a care,” Hope wasn’t sure where she was going with this… “But that’s not all that there is inside of him. I caught a tiny glimpse of the good still clinging to his heart when he was the only one in this entire town to see how smart I was instead of just the pretty blonde distraction. That I was worth more than being second choice forever. Even my lifelong friends couldn’t see it, but he did,”
“I finally saw that person I always knew he had buried beneath a thousand years of pain and torment the day he told me about you,” Caroline reached forward to gently graze Hope’s flushed cheek, “The way he spoke of his beautiful, miraculous little baby who was the very embodiment of everything goof inside of him… He loved you long before he even knew or understood it. He looked into your eyes—his eyes—and wanted to be better so that he could be worthy of having you for his daughter. I’d like to believe, for the most part, that he has largely succeeded in that endeavor,”
Hope’s tears fell and she brushed them away in frustration, “How does that all lead to him refusing to ever speak to me again, then?”
“He doesn’t know how to do this,” Caroline placed her hand atop Hope’s clenched fist, “Even when he was being awful to them, and them to him, he was never kept from his siblings permanently. Nothing was that powerful. They vowed to be together forever, and now they aren’t. That was already a blow. But to be separated from the brightest part of his world, you, and without a family to keep him from his baser instincts, he’s—“
“Raining blood?”
Caroline snorted before she could help herself, “Yeah, probably. And he—“
“Doesn’t want me to see something that would change how I see him? It wouldn’t,”
“Knowing that your father does bad things and witnessing it are two very different things, Hope,” Caroline cautioned, “You looking a him and seeing the monster he’s always believed himself to be and deciding he was not worthy enough to be your father would only confirm what he has always feared and believed,”
“But I wouldn’t do that—“
“He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t understand it. So he’s going to be stupid for a while, because men—especially Mikaelson men—get really stupid when they’re scared or sad. And I’m sorry you’re sad, too, because of it,”
After a while, “He is being really stupid, Ms. Salvatore,”
Caroline pulled Hope into her, allowing her to rest her flushed cheek against Caroline’s shoulder, “Yeah, he does that sometimes. I’m 99% sure it’ll pass,"
New Orleans
Freya works, primarily, from the Abattoir, but Davina finds herself most comfortable at the Claire crypt. It was where she was first sacrificed by her coven, it was where her body laid while she was on the other side, and it is where she was resurrected, an unwilling accomplice to Inadu’s twisted game. But there was something steeped into the stone walls and twisted into the weeds creeping through the cracks in the corners. She felt at peace here, felt the closest to her magic here. It was where she knew she could do the best work. And she was trying to pull off some serious shit at the moment, okay?
“So, I think I’ve figured out how to get her back onto the astral plane,” Freya said, nonchalant, one random Thursday, as if that wasn’t one third of the impossible puzzle they’d been trying to solve for more than two years now.
“What?” Davina’s head snapped up.
Freya allowed one of her rare smiles to creep over her face, “To kill the Hollow we have to kill the host—or, hosts in this regard—“
Davina’s smile fell, “Your siblings are immortal,”
Freya did not deny it, “Yes. But their physiology doesn’t stop the body from dying, it just brings them back. They do die, they just don’t stay dead for long, so—“
“For however long they stay dead, The Hollow is a spirit again,” Davina saw where Freya was going with this, “And if you and Vincent can consecrate her before your siblings wake back up—“
“She’d be subject to the imposed afterlife of any New Orleans witch who dies on consecrated ground,” There was a hesitation in Freya’s eyes as she told Davina the next piece of the plan, “And, where the Ancestors are, La Gemme Vital is never too far out of reach,”
Davina understood Freya’s trepidation around this particular subject, but had long since forgiven Freya for her own actions against her, “Inadu’s tribe split her into four pieces and scattered them across the world—that’s why it had to be four Mikaelsons—and it kept her down for thousands of years, but she was still able to claw her way back to this realm. I’d like to see her try to piece back together a shattered soul,”
“My thoughts exactly,”
Davina shook her head, “But whatever is left of the Ancestors won’t help us. They hate her but they also hate all of us, especially me,”
“Which is why you will also be an Ancestor when we send The Hollow back to the astral plane,”
“Wait, what?”
Freya allowed her mask to slip, allowed Davina to see her desperation, but also her confidence, “We need an Ancestor to help with La Gemme Vital—it’s the only way,”
Davina allowed her frustration to color her voice, “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before, Freya,”
“I said I was sorry about—I told you why I had to—“
“Ugh,” Davina groaned, “I know. Old wounds,” she shook herself from her spiral, “So, I die…”
“Only temporarily,” Freya rushed, “Believe me, I tried to find a work around where it was me—was even going to let you do the honors as a full-circle moment—but I’m not, technically, a New Orleans witch. I wasn’t born to one of the Nine Covens, I might not be consecrated as an Ancestor…”
“But I will be,”
“I asked Keelin and she said we have, max, five minutes for you to get in, shred the bitch, and get back out before you cannot be saved,”
“That’s comforting,” Davina rubbed between her eyebrows where she could feel a stress-migraine building, “You have to tell Kol, though. You think I’m touchy about my mortality…”
-
“Absolutely not,” Kol snarled.
“I wasn’t asking,” Davina was long past ever being scared of Kol’s monstrous face.
King of snark, “Neither was I,”
“Kol—“
“No! Under no circumstances are you going to willingly kill yourself on the off chance that we can deal with a problem that we already have a solution for,”
Davina’s glare matched her husband’s, “Okay, first of all, the ‘solution’ we currently have sucks and will only lead to Hope never seeing her father again and Klaus destroying the world. God knows what Elijah is desecrating, off in amnesia-land. Secondly, I don’t plan to stay dead. But we need a New Orleans witch on the other side that will be willing to help us and, unfortunately, we’ve pissed off every last witch in this city, dead or alive. I’m the only candidate,”
“You literally decimated the place the last time you were there,”
“And yet,” Davina argued, “I am still our best bet, here. I was raised a Quarter Witch. I was a Harvest Girl. I was Regent of the Nine Covens. Hell, I’ve been a fucking Ancestor before. Somebody has to be over there to either find La Gemme Vital or convince one of them to help us,”
“I do not like this, Davina Claire,” Kol groaned.
Davina slid into his space, wrapping her hands around his clenched fist and drawing him into her, “Davina Mikaelson,”
Kol sighed, laid a forceful kiss against her forehead and breathed in her scent as if already planning to never smell that sweet ambrosia ever again. Eyes still closed, he promised, “I swear to all the gods, Davina Mikaelson, if you do not come back, I’m finding a way to stay dead, even if the Hollow walks free,”
“That’s fair,”
Vincent was being driven to insanity. Quickly.
“Okay, walk me through this one more time before I agree to reunite the four ancient beings I told you to never reunite under threat of actual plague and the end of all things,”
Freya’s stare was cold and sure, “We need to get them all back together and then we stake them—“
“Kill them?”
“Temporarily,” Freya confirmed.
Davina jumped in, “At the same time, Freya and you have to cast your own spells on The Hollow, forcing her to die with her hosts and consecrating her as a New Orleans Ancestor. That’s how we’ll make sure she ends up on the other side,”
“There’s no way she stays dead when the Mikaelsons come back. If that would have worked, we could have done that years ago,”
Davina shook her head, “But she won’t come back until she had some place to come back to; until they do. Until the Mikaelsons wake, she will, effectively, be a dead New Orleans witch on consecrated ground. She’d be with the Ancestors,”
“Once she’s with them, we use La Gemme Vital to shred her soul into so many pieces, even she could never fuse them back together,”
“She fused your shredded soul back together,” Vincent countered, gesturing at Davina, “And anyway, you need an Ancestor to use La Gemme Vital, one who is on our side. Plus I destroyed their afterlife, took away their power,” his thoughts swirled when his eye met Davina’s, “I’m pretty sure the only person they hate more than me is you,”
Davina took a deep breath, “We’ll have an Ancestor on our side if I’m an Ancestor,”
“Okay, no” Vincent threw his hands up, “We’re going to put a pause on all that nope you just spat out your mouth, girlie. I’m doing no such spell on The Hollow when one of the minds is already compromised,”
“And who’s fault is it that one of the hosts is compromised, again?”
“Fuck,” Vincent looked to the ceiling as if asking, personally, why god did this to him, “I know. I’m just saying, if we’re doing this—if—I’m not taking part until we lift the compulsion on Elijah Mikaelson,”
“Already ahead of you,” Freya assured, “I have my top dogs on it,”
It was inappropriate, sure. But Davina couldn’t choke down her laugh.
THE NIGHT BEFORE - Venice
Klaus was so beyond done.
“Why does he need his memories back before we do this, anyway?” His petulant voice echoed around his villa.
Freya was also done—especially with her utterly ridiculous baby brothers.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Klaus continued, “we can just do this little spell without his consent and then he can fuck back off to that dive bar and we can go on with our lives, four siblings and a traitor unleashed back unto the world,”
“Except, dick, that he is your brother and he is hurting and I, for one, do not want him to just fuck back off to France!” Hayley was here as the muscle, and she was done, too.
Klaus exploded, “He chose to be alone, Hayley. Or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t,” Hayley flinched, her world flashing through her eyes, “Have you forgotten the series of events that lead up to him making that decision?”
“He made a vow and he broke it,” Klaus thundered, undeterred, “I do not care why he did that or anything at all, now. He is not my brother, so I do not have to care any longer,”
“First of all,” Freya cut in, “he is still your brother, Niklaus. I do not care what any of you do, you are my family. What he did was to protect himself. He knew he would be unable to shoulder this pain alone, so he decided not to shoulder it at all. Sure, that was probably not the best decision he could have made,” Klaus snorted, “but it is the one he made and we need to accept it. The same way that I accept your killing of Mikael and Finn’s killing Kol. The same way that Bekah forgave the slaughter of our mother and the thousand years of lies to cover it up. The same way you forgave Bekah for the betrayal with Marcel. This family’s curse is our brokenness and the damage we inflict upon each other with our own shattered edges. This was Elijah’s brittle edges finally giving way. And, yeah, we were all cut in the process, but can you honestly blame him for finally being selfish for once in his immortal existence? All of us have been greedy and selfish since the day we were born, so I’d say it’s been a long time coming. Wouldn’t you?”
Klaus chose to ignore the crux of her point, “Secondly…?”
“Fine,” Freya threw her hands up, “Be a bastard. Secondly, if there is other magic at play inside of Elijah’s mind while we try to pull The Hollow from it, it could fuck with the spell and not work. Vincent and I weighed all of the variables; Elijah must have his compulsion lifted before we do the rest of the spell,”
Klaus lowered himself into one of his few dining chairs not yet smashed into kindling. Leaning back on the two back legs, Klaus put his dirty boots on the table in front of him, “You could have lead with that, sister,”
Hayley kicked the chair out from underneath him.
Monosque
Elijah was packing the spare pieces of sheet music into his worn leather satchel when she came upon him. The patrons were long gone and he had compelled the bartender to return to his home to rest after he had used him as his dinner, and Elijah had believed himself to be alone. At a thousand years old, memories of those centuries or not, it was hard to sneak up on him.
When he whirled around to catch his oncoming attacker, he wrapped his fist around the delicate neck of… “Andrea?”
“Damn,” Hayley muttered, “I was hoping your senses were dulled along with your memory,”
Elijah’s hackles rose even more. He had only met this girl once before and he had surely not confessed to his missing memories at that time, “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I was trying to kidnap you…”
Elijah chuckled beneath his breath, an unconscious smile falling over his face at the sheer idea of this woman trying to catch him unaware.
“Oh, were you? Whatever could you need an amnesiac vampire for?”
Hayley’s eyes took on a hurt that Elijah did not understand, “Oh, you have no idea how much I need you,”
He squinted, head tilting to one side in slight confusion. Before he could ponder that puzzling piece of information, her gaze flickered to something over his shoulder, and Elijah felt another approaching attack. Honestly, they could try a bit harder to give him a challenge. There was no creature on this earth faster he was—
Before Elijah could turn away from the girl and face his assailant, his head is caught in a grip as strong—maybe stronger—than even his own. He cannot see who has hold of him, but he can smell worn leather and hear the rustle of necklaces rubbing against each other. He can feel the cool metal of a heavy bracelet and smell the paint and blood beneath fingernails digging into his neck.
“Hello, brother,” Klaus breathed, allowing himself less than a second to revel in the sight of his oldest friend.
Elijah crumpled to the floor.
The Abattoir
“Tell me,” Davina groaned, glaring down at the floor where the pile of body that was Elijah Mikaelson used to lay as if it personally offended her (honestly, it probably did), “that you were not both on the same flight. There is a finite amount of time that you can be near each other without actual plagues. I’m shocked you didn’t turn the entirety of the Atlantic into blood,”
Klaus, Elijah, and Hayley (one of them unconscious with a continuously broken neck) had been back on New Orleans soil for less than an hour and, already, Klaus was ready to commit grievous murder.
“Relax, Little Witch,” Klaus assured her, the patronizing bastard, “We took two planes,”
“You still shouldn’t have risked it,”
Klaus allowed some venom to seep into his expression, “Newly-acquired last name or no, I do not take orders from you,”
"I've been married for two years, asshole"
Before it could come to blows, Vincent sauntered into the room, “Okay, enough. We have all four pieces of The Hollow back in New Orleans. We have less than 48 hours before we go full apocalypse, here, so can we please focus?”
Freya moved to join Vincent at the altar they had erected in the center of the Abattoir’s courtyard, exactly where they were standing when they split The Hollow into four pieces.
“It’s not safe to pull The Hollow from Elijah’s mind until the compulsion is lifted, so that’s step one,” Vincent continued, “Next—“
“We have a problem,” Hayley stormed in, looking pissed.
“Oh, what the fuck, now?” Vincent’s pained voice bordered on a whine. Why had he decided to help these people, again? Oh, yeah. The fate of the world. Right.
“Elijah is awake—and pissed not to be in France, by the way—and he’s refusing to lift the compulsion,”
-
Elijah might have been interested in hearing out his forgotten family if they hadn’t cracked his neck and dragged him across several international borders without his consent. I mean, probably not, but the chance wasn’t zero. Now, they could all go fuck themselves, for all he cared.
-
“Fix it,” Klaus growled at Marcel, his hybrid on full display.
Marcel wasn’t backing down from the fight, “How many times do I have to tell you? The only reason I was even able to get into his head in the first place was because he wanted me to. Without his cooperation, even I can’t get through,”
“If you’re trying to tell me that my brother has a thick skull, I am already intimately aware,”
“Then get it through yours. The only way I’m getting through to lift the compulsion is if he agrees. So get out of my face and go talk to your brother,”
-
For the first time in three years, the four immortal Mikaelsons stood in the same room.
Pacing in the hallway outside, Davina frantically pulled her hands through her hair and cast worried eyes at Hayley.
“How long can they stay in there before, like, fire and brimstone and shit start happening?”
“Not nearly long enough for the copious amounts of therapy that they all desperately need,” Vincent muttered, nursing a coffee that he wished was a stiff drink.
“Luckily,” Marcel snarked, “Klaus has always been quite good at manipulating Elijah into doing his bidding,”
“Yeah, but what about an Elijah who can’t remember to be loyal to him…?”
-
Inside, Elijah stared at three vastly different, and yet, curiously familiar faces.
“Why am I here?”
The girl stepped forward, resplendent in a blood-red dress and pointed shoes that click on the cold stone flooring, “You’re our brother,”
“Biologically,” Elijah countered, “I figured that out a year ago and never came calling. Take the hint,”
The tallest one, furthest from them all and with a wicked, venomous smile on his face, finally spoke, “Oh, bullshit, ‘Lijah. Funnily enough, I actually know you better than you know yourself right now. You want to be here,”
“It sounds to me like your brother was a weakling, always bowing down to this family’s theatrics. I asked around and the consensus was stark. This family is an abomination against nature,”
“Actually, that’s really just Nik…” an Elijah with his memories would have laughed at Bekah’s witty remark.
“Shut up, Bekah,” Klaus finally deigned to speak.
“Tell me where I’m wrong,”
Kol laughed, “Yeah, Nik—“
“Enough,” Elijah snarled, “Why would I want to rejoin this ridiculous nonsense?”
Bekah’s eyes shimmered in the candlelight, “Because you’re our brother, Always and Forever, and if you could remember that, you would know how much your word meant to you, how much a promise to your family meant to you. And you would not forsake us,”
“So you’re saying, if I had my memories, my loyalties would place me right back beneath your boots for me to roll over and behave? No thanks, sister,” a tear finally fell from Bekah’s lashes at the cruel way Elijah twisted what used to be an endearment.
“Okay, enough of this,” Klaus stalked forward, “You do not have to be our brother. You do not have to ever see us again, should you decide we really are the vermin you believe us to be, but there are things resting on this decision that you could never understand without those very memories you are so eager to leave behind. Right now, there is a child growing up isolated and fearful and without the majority of her family, and we have a solution, but we need you to help us,”
Elijah opened his mouth to spit out another retort, but Klaus continued, “And, since I am the only one of us being realistic, here, I know that appealing to your compassion is futile in every way, so I will appeal to your fear. You crave the peace of your new life? If you stand between me and my daughter, you will never know peace again. I will make it my mission to destroy anything you ever touch. Anyone you even glance at will become dust beneath my boots. I will rain ashes upon your house and blood will drip from your walls and you will know it is all because you have allowed yourself to become nothing more than our bitter, selfish, old crone of a mother; relying on magic to solve all of your problems, damn the consequences to your forgotten family. I’d offer the testimony of those I hunted for centuries but, sadly, most of my enemies are long dead at my hand,”
Klaus gets right into his face, makes sure he really sees the truth in his ice blue, fiery eyes, “Every tear that Hope sheds in loneliness will be another piece in your house of cards crumbling. Every milestone that I am forced to miss, forced to experience through the retellings of her mother, will be bricks thrown through the panes of glass you call your house. You steal my child from me, I will find a way to end your pathetic existence and you will thank me for the mercy of death when I am through with you. Do you understand me, brother?”
Elijah stared back at his demonic family, silent. Then, “I will speak with Marcellus,”
“What?”
Through the closed door, “What?”
“I have reason to speak with the beast currently listening in on a private conversation,”
Marcel pushed his way into the room, rolling his eyes already, “You beckoned?”
Elijah spoke only to him, “I will allow you to lift the compulsion on my mind—“
Bekah let out a cry, “Oh, thank—“
Elijah spoke over her brief joy, “Under the condition that you replace it when whatever magical idiocy my siblings are droning on about is at its end,”
“What?”
Kol tried, “Be reasonable, ‘Lijah—“
“You won’t want me to put it back once you remember, man,” Marcel tried to assure.
“Yes,” Elijah rolled his own cold eyes, “I’m gathering that my thousand years have made me quite the doormat to my siblings. One who will probably resign himself to staying at their poisonous sides for another thousand years. But you will replace the compulsion, even if I do not request it. Even if I demand the opposite. Do I have your word?
Marcel glanced, slightly nervous, at the ancient, broken monsters surrounding him, “Uh…yeah, I guess,”
-
Marcel, Vincent, and Elijah found themselves back together for the first time in three years. In nearly the exact same positions, too.
Elijah stood, stoic, facing Marcel but seeing nothing. Vincent stood behind him, hands hovering on either side of Elijah’s head, face locked in a grimace with the effort necessary to breach an Original’s mind. Marcel faced them both, gaze locked on Elijah’s, but there was no getting through.
It was clear that Elijah was trying. Beads of sweat pooled along his hairline and his fists were clenched hard enough to shatter bone. But allowing this intrusion went against every instinct that this immortal creature possessed, and trying to will his mind open was the hardest thing he had ever done. Elijah did not want to open up his mind. He did not want these poisonous memories shoved back into his consciousness. He did not want to allow these immortal giants back into the life he had carefully crafted together in France.
But he also did not want to stare into Rebekah Mikaelson’s tear-filled eyes, ignoring that quiet nagging at the back of his mind that told him he must comfort her. He did not want to have another verbal sparring with Kol and his acidic tongue. He did not want a vengeful Klaus Mikaelson to chase him across the globe for the next thousand years, harboring a grudge so large it could level a continent—and would. He would remember them for exactly as long as it was necessary to rid himself and the world of whatever evil was in all four of them (well, whatever evil was there on top of their own) and then he would forget again, and this destructive calamity of a family could fuck right back out of his orbit. Forever.
Suddenly, Elijah found himself in a long hallway of many doors, each one with a different totem or marking to represent some memory that Elijah no longer had. Even without that history, Elijah instinctually feared the one at the furthest end, blood-red and dripping in pain and suffering and monstrousness. A nervous tick he never lost, even without his memories: Elijah pulled at his shirt cuffs, straightened his collar, and pulled his shoulders back in a show of confidence he did not actually possess. His dress shoes made soft noises as he made his way slowly closer and closer to that damnable door. He fiddled with his cufflinks rather than allow his hands to shake.
The door burned where he finally laid his palm, a sting so deep it caused goosebumps to cover Elijah’s entire body. But Elijah Mikaelson had withstood centuries of pain and had practice thinking beyond it. Or—did he have that practice? He could not remember it but…something was pushing at that wall inside his mind he feared to breach. Memories of cowering beneath an unfeeling mother, chained to a door, a young woman’s body cooling at his feet. Memories of a leather strap against the fragile flesh of a child. Blood staining his hands and dripping from his teeth. Countless lives lost at his own hand. At the hand of his family. Centuries of torment that he did not want to have back. Why was he doing this again?
Elijah Mikaelson let go of the door.
-
Elijah’s body crumpled to the floor.
“Shit,” Marcel swore, both of his hands coming up to cradle his own aching head. He saw flashes of a never-ending hallway, doors in either side. Of Elijah standing at one dripping in dark red. He saw Elijah lay his hand against his past and then let go.
“What the fuck,” Vincent groaned, “We do not have time for this. Wake him the fuck up, Marcel,”
“Fuck-okay!” Marcel shook him once. Then he shook him again. Then he rolled him onto his back and stared into unseeing eyes.
Elijah Mikaelson was trapped inside of his own mind.
Son of a bitch.
Hah! Literally.
-
Freya scowled at where Marcel and Vincent stood at the front of the gathering, her siblings in various stages of hostility and vitriol.
“Something in Elijah’s mind would not let us in,”
“And you think that something is…” Hayley asked in a clipped voice.
“We think it’s Elijah,” Vincent answered.
“So the traitorous wretch reneged on our agreement—“ Klaus jumped straight to rage.
“Not, exactly,” Marcel hedged, “He was trying to let me in. I think I was in there for a second, but then something pushed me back out. And whatever that thing was, it trapped Elijah in there with it,”
“So Elijah trapped himself in his own mind?”
“Was it The Hollow?”
“So go and get him!”
“How hard can it be to infiltrate a mind, you useless—“
Vincent spoke over them all, “Look. To be real with you all, I never thought the compulsion would worth on Elijah’s mind to begin with. That’s why we had to involve me and, even then, it was a hail Mary…”
“But, obviously,” Freya retorted, “it did work. My brother does not remember the last thousand years,”
“Did it work?” Vincent countered, “I mean, did it truly work? Maybe. But not completely,”
A lightbulb flickered in Davina’s eyes where she stood at the back of the group, “You didn’t erase the memories, you locked them behind a wall,”
“Oh, god,” Hayley broke in, groaning, “Not a wall. A door. Elijah’s mental mindfuck is a never-ending hallway of doors,”
“That’s what it looked like,”
“So compel him to open the door, Marcellus,” Klaus demanded.
“You don’t understand, Klaus,” Hayley rounded to meet his glare, “As someone who once had to track him down inside of just a few of those memories, he has a pretty damn good reason to want to keep them closed. There’s no forcing them open. Elijah needs to do it willingly,”
-
Klaus was behaving like a child—like his own child. Hope shared her father’s eyes and, apparently, his petulance, too. Someone needed to go into Elijah’s mind. Someone strong enough to breach Elijah’s defenses and speak to his very soul. Someone with enough emotional resonance to overcome the gaping hole where Elijah’s core memories used to be. It had to be Klaus.
But Klaus was behaving like a child.
“That is not my brother,” he raged at Hayley’s glare, shouting, “My brother died the day he decided he’d rather forget every one of us than live with the Mikaelson name. He swore an oath to be there for us, always and forever, and then promptly desecrated that very vow,”
“And you haven’t?” Hayley bordered on shrieking, “Don’t stand here and pretend that you have not stomped on those promises way more than he has over the last thousand years,”
“The difference is I was never supposed to be the honorable one. Nobody expected me to stick to my word. Nobody relied on my promises of protection and family,”
“It’s not fair to hold him to standards that you, yourself, can’t live up to, Niklaus,” Freya scolded.
“You wouldn’t understand—“
“Oh, don’t even try that bullshit with me,” Hayley cut him off, “I’ve watched you for long enough, raised a child with you, died for you and for your brother and for our daughter. I know your selfishness and your anger, but that’s not what I see here,” Hayley marched right up to Klaus’ snarling face, her voice strangely kind, “No, this is your sadness. This is your pain. Do not pretend that I don’t know, when I’m the only one who you’ve let see you cry since Cami died,”
It was a low blow, Klaus winced.
“I let him see me cry. He was the only one in a thousand years,” Klaus whispered, “and he threw it all away, anyway,”
“I know,” Hayley gripped his hand in her sure grasp, “I know he hurt you. And you only know how to answer pain with pain. But he can’t be the honorable brother right now, okay? He can’t be the one to forgive pain that he does not remember. You have to try to live up to the standard he set for nearly your entire life,”
-
Elijah was still staring at the red door when he felt a breach. He felt the tendrils of hostility and familiarity and riotous supernova that he could recognize anywhere, memories or not, and he knew it was Niklaus. In here, the wall between Elijah and his past was paper-thin, and he could catch wisps of memory like scents on the wind, he could almost taste the bonds he forced himself to forget. Out of everything, the memory of Niklaus was the strongest.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well, right now, I’m lamenting the fact that Hayley was right. Your mind really is just an endless hallway of fucking doors…”
Elijah turned to glare at the brother he did not want to remember, “Did you come here to insult the inside of my own head? Because you can fuck off,”
“Open the door, Elijah, and I will walk out with you,”
“Obviously,” Elijah snapped, “if I could do that, I would have done so by this moment,”
“You may not remember the centuries we have shared, but I do. It is not that you cannot. It’s that you are afraid to,”
Elijah bristled, “I am not—“
“You are,” Klaus stood, steadfast, “you are not my brother anymore. But he did more for me in a thousand years than I could ever repay. So consider my being here reparations to the ghost of the brother I have lost,”
“What—“
“Open the door, Elijah. I will help you,”
For the briefest of moments, Klaus saw something familiar flicker in Elijah's eyes.
“On three?”
-
When the door finally gives way, it is into a damp cave, etchings of runes along the walls made in child-sized hands. He sees flashes of young smiles and shared secrets between children. Flashes of the heavy hand of a father on his small body and, more often, on the body of his younger brother. He sees a wild boy, honey-blonde curls and bright eyes, berry paint staining his fingers and anger in his face even as he cowers beneath their father’s fists. Then he sees a girl, long brown hair and a malevolent mischief in her eyes as she dances between two brothers like a game. He sees her body as she lays, empty, at his feet. He sees a promise beneath what used to be a great oak, now only ashes. He sees pain and strife, a thousand years of monstrous deeds done and done to him. He sees his sister, her childlike smile turned sour and cold. He sees his youngest brother, sees his anguish as he is forever separated from his own magic, and how he took his pain out on the world, repaying his poisoned existence in bloodshed as red as his anger. He watches his best friend, his brother, spend centuries yearning for pieces of himself locked away by their own mother. He spends centuries lamenting his part in that misdeed. He watches his family love and laugh and grow. He sees them scream and cry and torment. He watches cities born and burned at his feet. He sees New Orleans born, molded into the first real home he remembered having in generations. He sees it smoldering in the distance as they flee once more. He sees an angry girl, moonlight in her veins, ready to destroy the world for the child she did not want to love. He remembers that night in the cemetery, remembers the silent vow he made to that beating heart only he could hear. First, he admired Hayley’s ferocity. Then, he marvels at her courage. After, he falls in love with her hidden kindness, the vulnerability she allowed him to see in her. Hayley Marshall is the most beautiful thing he has seen in a thousand years and he would burn the world down again, just to never again have to see her laid, broken, in his brother’s arms, an angry slash across her delicate throat. He watches her and his brother hold their daughter in their arms. Watches the love they could never have expected or imagined as it is pained across Niklaus’ face. He watches his brother give up his freedom and his body so that Hayley and Hope could flee, so that his siblings might not succumb to the death finally knocking at their door. He sees Freya, the sister they had all forgotten, as she leaned over his prone body and woke him from his years-long slumber. He sees Kol and Bekah, monsters across their faces as they helped him finally pull their brother from Marcellus’ beastly clutches. He sees a few brief moments of tranquility, hidden away in the country with his family. He sees Hope, suddenly a person, not just a child too small for his hands. Watches as she experiences the world around her with a purity, a newness he had long-thought stolen from their cursed family. He sees Hayley, again, laid beneath him, but not broken this time. He watches a cruel blue light slither into the cracks in their foundations and poison everything he holds dear. He watches a city and his family decimated by a witch far older and eviler than his mother or her sister. He sees the fear in Hayley's; breaks at the realization that it was now him she feared. He sees the faces of his siblings, determination and sadness on their ancient faces, as they stand with him around a child’s body. He feels the agony of knowing that this might be the last time he will look into their eyes again. But their eyes are colored that same sickly blue as the witch trying to destroy them and then the world. He watches as he begs his enemyfriendfamily for the salvation of forgetting.
And then he remembers.
“Elijah?”
Hayley.
-
“Elijah?”
“I—I, um…”
“Great job, Marcellus. You fried his brain,”
“Or, maybe, he’s fucking processing a thousand memories in the space of five fucking seconds,”
“Elijah?” Hayley tried again, her eyes kinder than he deserved, “Are you okay?”
“I—“ Elijah choked on centuries, “I think so. I apologize for my discombobulation,”
Kol snorted, “Yeah, that’s ‘Lijah, alright. Can’t tell you what his middle name is, but spits out ‘discombobulation’”.
“None of us have middle names,” Elijah ground his fingers against his temples, trying to will away the raging headache building behind his yes.
Elijah would not—could not—look at any of them. None, except… “Brother?”
Klaus ignored the plea in Elijah’s gaze, “We do not have time for this. A few more hours together and the skies will rain blood and the river will catch fire,”
“Unfortunately, Klaus isn’t far off that mark,” Vincent piped up.
And, as if summoned by Vincent's ominous tone, the sound of crackling lightning and rolling thunder and sudden, heavy rainfall began echoing around the cavernous room.
“We have to move on to the next step,” Freya decided.
-
The siblings, once again, stand in a circle, this time with sharpened wood poised at their breast. Most involved would have believed Marcel or Davina to be the ones most likely to resist this, driving a stake through the heart of the one they love the very most, but it is Hayley who cannot hold back the tears.
She casts her worried eyes on Klaus and he tries to offer her assurances, “It’s alright, Little Wolf. It’ll be but a tiny cat-nap for me,”
Her nose is red and her eyes shimmer in the candlelight, “We have no idea what The Hollow has done to you these last three years. What if you’re different now? What if we did all this and I still have to raise our daughter alone?”
Marcel, wood in his own hand pointed at Rebekah, snarks, “You didn’t think of this before we brought the fucking plagues to New Orleans?”
Klaus ignores his, as is his usual, “Everything is going to be fine,” he assures Hayley (and since the fuck when was he the optimistic one?), “And, even if it is not, I know that you will be the best mother Hope could ever ask for,”
“But—“
“Hayley,” Elijah cuts in, imploring her with his wounded eyes, Freya stood before him, “We trust you,”
The plan is brutally simple and not at all easy. The Mikaelsons will return; there is no question of white oak on this table. There will be no hasty sacrifices to forever decimate this family. Whether or not The Hollow will be able to cling onto their souls as they are returned is the real question. Davina believes she has a plan for that. Her husband is less convinced.
“If I wake up and you are dead—again—then I will find some way to resurrect you—again—and I will not be a very warm welcome,” Kol stared deep into Davina’s sure eyes.
“Deal,” she winked, kissed him light, and drove the stake through his chest.
Four stakes pierced ancient hearts simultaneously and four Originals crumpled to the floor, dead.
-
As soon as the Mikaelsons were down, Vincent and Freya watched as that poisonous blue light tried to slither out of the four Mikaelsons and they pushed. Vincent muttered words beneath his breath in ancient creole and runes carved themselves into the stone altar on their own, designed to force the four pieces of ancient witch back into one; trap it and contain. Freya siphoned Marcel’s beast for extra power, her fists clenched tight around her magic as she consecrated a spirit without a body to burn. They called on the Ancestral plane and on the magic in the soil beneath their feet. They only had one shot at this, so they played for keeps. The Hollow fought against them, twisting and turning, trying to find an escape path, but their very futures relied on Inadu following the Mikaelsons to the other side, and Vincent would be damned if The Hollow would back him into a corner. Not again.
Vincent felt the slightest give, the tiniest weakening in The Hollow's considerable strength.
"Davina, now," he groaned around clenched teeth.
One last glance at the greyed corpse of her husband, praying that it won't actually be her last. Davina had died and been resurrected twice. More than most people, supernatural or not, could ever say. Still, there was always risks and Davina had long since taught herself to compartmentalize those, focus on what needs to happen right now and worry about the rest later.
Keelin was at the ready, a syringe full of questionable sciences and even more questionable magic, poised for Davina's delicate neck. But she hesitated, too. How could you blame her? “Are you sure?” she asked.
Davina grit her teeth, looking away from her husband to briefly lock eyes with Marcel, a silent goodbye.
Her head whipped around to meet Keelin's wary gaze, no more time for hesitation, “Do it,”
Marcel tried not to wince at the sound her body made as it fell to the cold stone floor. He looked at his watch.
“Five minutes,”
-
Oh, Davina did not miss this greyscale Hell-dimension. Granted, there had been several more vicious dead there to greet her the first time she remembers being here, but it still fucking sucks. Her watch doesn’t work here, because of fucking course it doesn’t, so she isn’t about to waste her five minutes.
The Claire crypt, where Kol had elected to move the majority of his darker objects was, blessedly, fully stocked when Davina found it. Nothing seemed to work on this plane except for magic, and these artifacts were practically dripping in magical potential. And, considering what they were al trying to pull off today, Davina needed all the magic she could get.
“Davina Claire,” a scratchy voice croaked behind her.
Awesome. Guests.
Behind her stood two women, obviously dead and in dated clothing (if you could even call the torn scraps of fabric clothing). Davina did not recognize them, and they were not anybody she had ever personally pissed off, but that did not mean they were about to be welcoming.
“Yep,” maybe she should cut down on the snark, but, other than coffee, it’s pretty much all she runs on.
“You do not belong here,”
“Funny, the last time I was here everyone seemed pretty determined to keep me here for the rest of forever, so that’s new,”
“You desecrate the laws of magic,”
Davina rolled her eyes,“I mean, I’m not about to deny that. But I’m kinda on a time crunch so, if you wanna, like, write down your list of grievances, I promise to look it over when I’m out of here,” she jerked her thumb over her shoulder, “I need to get back to something,”
“There are no ways for a witch to leave this realm once she arrives—“
“Well, actually—“
“So, it would appear, that you have all the time in the world to hear our list of grievances,”
“Ooh, I’m so scared,” Davina rolled her eyes again, “Not including the Harvest, did you both miss that time I came back from the dead before?”
“That was the work of a very powerful witch, one who has no compunction about destroying her ties to nature. She is not here, now, so she cannot steal you from your fate again,”
“Are you sure about that?”
-
The very moment that The Hollow left the mortal realm, anybody still currently breathing could physically feel the way the room got lighter, the air easier to breathe. Freya and Vincent were both gasping at the effort they'd just exuded to contain The Hollow, to force Inadu's spirit back to the astral plane and, simultaneously, consecrate her. Even Marcel was slightly winded from Freya siphoning him of so much magic. Hayley was pacing between the four dead immortals checking for even the slightest hint of color returning to their greyed complexions. Marcel resumed his own vigil over Rebekah, but his eyes were focused, pained, on how broken and small Davina looked where her body laid on the floor, and how quiet her heart now was.
"Four Minutes,"
-
Davina grew more and more frantic as she sifted through Kol’s stash. Fuck, she should have made Kol draw her a fucking map or something. Her husband had had a millennia to accumulate a veritable mountain of dark objects and they all looked the fucking same in this bleak, grey lighting. Come on, was it day? Night? Who the fuck knows?
Whatever breath was still in Davina’s lungs was stolen from her as she felt this plane grow even colder than it already was. Davina knew that this was a good thing, this means that at least one of her and Freya’s theoretical assumptions had been proven correct. Inadu was killed along with the Mikaelsons and Vincent and Freya had been able to consecrate her. She was now subject to the rules of the ancestral plane. Only thing left was for Davina to shatter her soul, and not die (er-die more?) trying. Only problem was Davina had two unhelpful spirits at her back and, exactly, no La Gemme Vital in her hands. Awesome.
“Inadu has returned,” one of the crones breathed, and Davina was not sure if she sounded scared or excited by that prospect.
“But not for long,” the other spirit countered, “We are no longer strong enough to hold her here,”
Davina rounded on them, “No shit. But, if you would stop hovering and bitching at me for ‘desecrating magic’, or whatever, you’d see that I have a plan,”
“You,” they sneered at her, “have a plan?”
“Yep,”
-
Inadu was pissed. She had spent thousands of years clawing her way out of this purgatory, only to end up right where her mother put her all those years ago? She'd had a plan. One that included raining torment onto the earth, forever, until she was satisfied. It was simple. It was a good plan and these Mikaelsons were really fucking with it. First they put up such a fight about her stealing the child’s body. But Inadu won that fight fair and square with a carefully executed plan that was, if you asked her, brilliant. Then they figured out some asinine way to circumvent her, splitting her into pieces and scattering them across the globe. The only hint of life she could taste through their skin was when one of them cracked and got to close to another one. It was infrequent and, honestly, fucking annoying.
All Inadu wanted to do was get her power back and consume everything in front of her. Was that really so much to ask? After everything that her tribe stole from her, everything that she had to suffer trapped on the other side, didn’t she deserve to have her fun?
She would return, could already taste her restoration the more and more color returned to her hosts. She’d come back and she’d be ready to make them pay for their slights. This time it was personal.
-
“Look,” Davina snarled, “You both might be fine to stay here, forever, toiling in your own uselessness for the rest of time, but I am not. I am here to save my family and finally put an end to one of the vilest witches ever to walk these lands, including myself. She is the real abomination, here, not you or me. She does not even deserve this endless existence. All I need is to get what I came here for and I can wipe her from the very fabric of this reality forever,”
“That’s presumptuous, Davina Claire”
“Everything I do is presumptuous,” Davina snarked, “That’s kind of why you all hate me so much. I’m not willing to compromise, not satisfied living under your arbitrary rules, wasting the remainder of my life. I refuse to cower to the laws of nature, and if that makes me evil, so be it. But there is nothing that I could ever dream of doing that would make me as monstrous as The Hollow. Everybody has to know by now that she will never stop, she will never give up and play dead. We have to put a stop to her, ourselves,”
“That was a beautiful speech, Davina,” a shiver raced down Davina’s spine at the childlike voice behind her, “But there’s no way to keep me here,” Inadu’s gaze pierced into Davina’s when she finally turned around, “You and I both know that,”
The Hollow stood before her, back in her original form, angry glare beneath heavy brows. She was barefoot and swaying where she stood, as if she were too weak to truly stand. Davina remembered what Kol had told her; that wasn’t a good sign.
“If it’s anything like what I remember of the other side, you’ll know when your time is up. I could feel the closer that my mother came to reviving me. I could taste the closer you got. The closer that you are to waking in the real world, the weaker your body will feel on the other side. Lean into that feeling. That is how you will pull yourself out. If you find yourself getting stronger, more comfortable, you know you’re in trouble,”
Davina laid her hand over Kol’s, “I remember, Kol. I know what it feels like when you’re going to come back, and I know what it feels like when you’re not. If I start to feel too strong—“
“You’ll what?” Kol cut her off, “You and I both know that if your body decided to stay there, there’s nothing anybody could do to bring you back,”
“I’ll just have to be quick, then, won’t I?”
Inadu was weakening more and more the longer she stood before Davina. But Davina could feel herself growing stronger. The question was, really, who would outlast the other?
-
Marcel pushed the stake back into Rebekah’s heart before she could regain her complexion. Keelin was getting more and more agitated where she paced in front of Davina’s body and Vincent and Freya were both trying to glare their way into victory. Marcel seemed to be the only one being realistic.
“Keelin?” Freya asked.
“It’s been too long,” Keelin stressed, “If she stays down any longer, there’s nothing for her to come back to,”
“They need more time,” Vincent countered.
“There is no more time,”
-
“It was an interesting theory, I’ll give you that,” Inadu smirked, “But the second my lovely hosts regain their immortal lives, I will be pulled from here, and I will make it my mission to make sure you don’t make the same trip,”
“So sure, Inadu?” Davina might be bluffing, “Are you really so confident?”
“Please,” Inadu scoffed, “You’re all running around playing checkers while I’m playing chess,”
“Who said I’m playing a game at all? You made a mistake when you targeted this family. You, single-handedly, insured your failure when you targeted the only child of a family of immortals. The only thing they believe in is playing the long game. Playing to win. But I am not playing games anymore,”
“Little girl, you are not even on the board,”
Behind her, Davina felt the two spirits, the only Ancestors left in a decimated realm step up to her back. Without words, one reached into thin air and pulled out an ancient weapon. An axe, hand carved thousands of years ago and stained with rust-colored blood. The other one pulled out La Gemme Vital.
Davina wrapped her hands around both, “Are you sure about that?”
-
Klaus bolted up from his prone form, gasping for unneeded air and eyes shooting around the room. Hayley was at his side instantly, shushing him in her attempts to calm his racing mind.
“Did it work?” He gasped.
She doesn’t answer him. Three more gasps echo around the room in the lingering silence, four Original vampires once again among the undead.
“What happened?” Klaus demanded of Hayley. Of anybody.
Freya was comforting Elijah, Vincent was pulling Kol Mikaelson to his shaky feet. Marcel was, simultaneously, holding tight onto Rebekah and also staring longing at Davina’s unmoving body.
“It’s been six minutes,”
-
The Hollow’s evil eyes widened in actual alarm, but Davina could not focus on the satisfaction of her fear right now. The two remaining Ancestors stood on either side of her, offering her the strength that she needed. They all chanted the same words beneath their breath, and the grey sky of the other side crackled with electricity not of its own making. An unnatural wind whipped through her hair as Davina stared into the face of our evil. She had done this once before, but she had forgotten how wrong it felt to be casting this type of magic in a land so steeped in history.
“What are you doing?” The Hollow demanded, “You’ll kill us all,”
If Davina hadn’t already been in the middle of much more important words, she would have had some sarcastic quip on her mouth. Something along the lines of, ‘if that’s the bargain, I can live with it,’. She would kill Inadu. She would kill the old crones at her side. She might even shred herself into nothing. She could live with that. Or—not live, she supposed.
She had to finish the spell, that was the most important part. Inadu must be shattered into atoms, for only dust could be a fitting end for a creature so destructive. It was satisfying to watch the growing fear spreading across The Hollow’s face. Inadu had managed to hurt nearly every person Davina cared about (and some she didn't exactly like, but still didn't deserve this shit). So Davina used Freya's sadness, Vincent's frustration, Hayley's desperation, and Klaus' anger. She used Marcel's aggravation, Rebekah's fear, Kol's regrets, and Elijah's loneliness. She used Hope's broken, keening cries and her own fury, pulled it from her soul and pushed it into the glowing orb in her hands and, every moment, La Gemme Vital grew brighter. It was a bomb primed for detonation. The Hollow grew closer and closer to ruin.
Davina had done this before, but it was even more satisfying the second time.
She held onto the tiredness slipping away from her, trusting in the words of her husband and the assurances he tried to convince them both of.
All at once, everything stopped. The wind screeched to a halt and the lightning in the sky froze mid-strike. The bomb she gripped in her hand glowed ever-bright and Davina could taste the oncoming destruction. Inadu’s face froze in abject terror and Davina offered her a smile as her parting gift. The very moment that Davina felt the first crack in this world, she pulled herself into the darkness creeping along her vision. Light danced in front of her and she heard the faintest cries of a destroyed woman. The pop of the lightning was deafening in her ears, and every hair on her body stood on end at the electricity.
The very last thing Davina ever saw of this cursed land was the sky as it grew both lighter and darker at the same time.
-
Anything glass abruptly shattered. Sparks rained from the ceiling and gusts of wind whistled through the empty windows. Every creature, living or dead, held their breath at once. Nobody moved, in fear of breaking some precious spell, as if the dominoes were not already laid, ready to fall however they choose. For the longest, briefest moment, nobody knew if they won or lost.
The Hollow’s personal grimoire—that rotting, poisoned, monstrosity of a book, that had remained impossible to tarnish for over two thousand years—crumbled into ash in Vincent’s clenched fist. Vincent choked on his hope.
“Oh my god,” someone dared to breathe.
“Did that—“
“Lord…”
“Vincent! Did it work?!”
Vincent’s only answer was a hard glare at Keelin, “Now!” He commanded. Keelin (already at the fucking ready—she'd wanted to do this a while ago) plunged the syringe, filled with adrenaline, questionable herbs from Freya’s questionable collection, and a good deal of Kol Mikaelson’s blood, directly into Davina’s sternum.
Nobody moved.
Tears of abject terror stung at Kol’s eyes, but he refused to blink them away. Refused to look at anything other than the love of his life, laid broken and breathless on the cold stone floors, for even a moment.
Nobody breathed.
Davina bolted upright, gasping for breath as if her life depended on it. Which, it did, so...
Marcel crumpled into Rebekah’s arms. Hayley breathed a shaky breath. Freya squeezed her eyes shut in sweet relief. Kol could not look away from his wife.
“It worked,” Vincent breathed.
-
“Hayley,” Klaus’ voice broke the trembling silence.
Hayley did not hear him. Did not hear anything except the blood pulsing in her ears.
“Hayley,”
“It worked,” she seemed to be mumbling to herself, “Oh, my god it worked—I—“
Klaus was not above begging, not for this, “Hayley,”
Her head snapped around to look at him so quickly, it was a miracle her neck did not snap, “Fuck—right—I just—I need to call…Caroline?”
Klaus was already at her side, nearly bruising her arm in his tightening fist, “Call her from the car—please, Hayley—“
“Klaus” Hayley breathed.
“Can we please go and get our daughter?”
-
“Marcellus,”
Marcel had to use everything inside of him not to groan out an exasperated ‘what, now?’.
Elijah continued, “Do you recall the vow you made to me before you lifted the compulsion?” Um, yeah, Marcel isn’t the one with memory problems, here…
“Look, man. You really don’t—“
“Quite right,” Elijah cut in, “I do not. I know that you gave me your word that you would replace it, regardless of whatever I said once restored to my memories, but I am asking for you to break that vow. Please—“
“I’m gonna stop you right there,” Marcel interrupted, “I wasn’t gonna stick to that, anyway. I may or may not have been using the fact that you couldn’t remember that I don’t give two shits about ‘my word’—or any vow I make to any Mikaelson—against you. It’s, honestly, been nothing but a headache, you being the amnesiac asshole of the family, and I am not about to go back to that nightmare. Sorry, not sorry,”
“On this, I cannot disagree,”
“First time for everything, I guess,”
The Salvatore School
Hope was hiding in one of the back acres, a piece of charcoal staining her fingers as she sketched intricate markings into the broken wing of a butterfly. She wasn’t supposed to be out in the woods without a grownup, but she didn’t care. All day something had been nagging at her, itching beneath her skin. Her body knew something was very wrong—more wrong that it had been for the last three years, and that was a lot—and she couldn’t have sat in a classroom and listened to Dr. Saltzman drone on about some war that her family probably had a hand in starting for hours, if her life depended on it. So, instead, she had grabbed her sketchbook, stole one of the bologna sandwiches from the kitchen and a soda she wasn’t supposed to have, and trekked a few miles into the Salvatore School’s vast acres of forest.
Nobody should have been able to find her before dark. Not unless they used magic or one of the wolves to sniff her out.
“Hope,” so faint it could have been a whisper on the wind, Hope heard her name. She worked harder on shading her butterfly.
“Hope,” the voice was growing more and more difficult to ignore, and Hope was getting annoyed. Today is so not her day.
Finally, with a heaving sigh, Hope called back, “Ms. Salvatore? Over here,”
Caroline flashed into view at vampiric speed, the tension in her worried brow giving way to slight annoyance and overwhelming motherly concern. Before her hair had settled back around her face, she was running her gentle hands over Hope as if to check for injury. She brushed dirt from her jacket and rearranged her tangled braid, sweeping her from head to toe and back to assure herself that Hope was fine.
Honestly, it was just Mystic Falls. Hope didn’t really see why she wasn’t allowed to be out here alone. Or why Caroline was always so concerned about it.
Caroline huffed and fixed a stern look onto her forever-youthful face, “How many times do I have to tell you to let an adult know if you’re planning to skip classes to come sketch in the woods?”
“Telling an adult would kind of negate the point of skipping class, Ms. Salvatore,” really, it was anybody’s guess which parent Hope got her sass from.
Caroline had her theory, “God, you are your father’s daughter,” she smiled.
Usually, in this town and at this school, when someone looked at Hope and compared her to her family, it was meant as an insult. Caroline was the only one who ever said it like a compliment.
“Actually, my mother has more of a truancy record than my father,”
“Your father was born before truancy was even a concept, so that’s a moot point,”
Hope always found it nice that Caroline’s wit could keep up with her own.
“I’m just saying that I come by it naturally,”
Something strange colored Caroline’s face, and she almost seemed to be growing weepy, “You do…”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Caroline shook herself out of her stupor, “Nothing. It’s fine—I’ll tell you later. You have visitors coming. They’re probably running cyclists off the road as we speak to get here as fast as possible,”
“Who’s visiting? Freya was here last month for Coven Day and mom came two weekends ago,”
“Just come with me,”
-
Klaus practically ripped the old wooden doors from their hinges in his haste to lay his own eyes on Hope for the first time in three years. Hayley was quick on his heels, her own anxieties laid bare on her usually guarded face. Like all the planets and the stars had finally aligned, the moment Klaus breathed in the crisp air behind the school, Caroline stepped from the treeline, Hope clinging to her side.
“Dad?”
-
The car had been silent ever since Hope had succumbed to her over-exhaustion. Her tiny body hadn’t been able to withstand all of the memories and magic and happiness suddenly thrust upon her, and she had crashed before they crossed the border back into Louisiana. Hayley and Klaus had long-since grown out of their need to put up a front, had outlasted their initial hostility toward each other, and were now quite comfortable to exist in total silence. Klaus was driving, much slower than he had been on his way toward his baby girl (still faster than most cops would appreciate, but no longer in a desperate race against the very fabric of time).
Hayley did not notice Klaus’ gradual slowing, but sh felt the pavement beneath the tires shift into loose gravel and then dirt, so she peeked out the window in curiosity, and then glanced over at Klaus. He had pulled them over into a lookout; a cliff, about 100 meters up, overlooking a forest of green trees. It was dark, but neither Hayley or Klaus needed actual light to see great distances any longer. Not since they had both died. Hayley did not question Klaus, she had grown so accustomed to his swirling emotions that they did not catch her off-guard. Well, usually. He is still a Mikaelson after all.
Klaus pushed oped the driver’s door and climbed out, motioned with his head that Hayley should follow him, before moving to lean over the wooden guardrail and gaze out at the scenery before him. Hayley followed.
“Klaus?”
“Yes, Little Wolf?” He did not look at her, but Hayley could feel his care for her in the gentle words. Klaus was hardly ever gentle, only with those people he considered precious. Hayley hadn’t been considered precious in quite some time, maybe ever.
“I’m so happy that you have your family back,” it was an obvious statement. Few people had worked harder to right the Mikaelson family than Hayley Marshall, few people had even bothered to care for the ancient monsters. Hayley cared for them. Hayley loved them.
When Klaus takes his eyes from the crescent moon hanging over their heads to look at Hayley, his eyebrows draw inward in concern at the hint of pain in her eyes.
Klaus did not have to ask what was bothering her, “Little Wolf, how many times to I have to remind you that you are a part of that family?” He ran his finger over her delicate cheekbone, “You saved us—me—more than most could ever say, and…well, even if you hadn't, I’ve…grown fond of your presence. Abrasive and disruptive as that presence is,”
Hayley snorted, “Well, believe it or not, I’ve grown fond of your general asshole-ishness, too. And I am happy to be a part of your horrifying family,” Hayley offered Klaus a genuine smile, before pain settled over her eyes again, "But…what about Elijah?”
Klaus looked back at the moon. Hayley knew that he was not ignoring her, knew that he was almost always battling a raging storm inside of his own mind, and needed time to sort through everything he was feeling, to find the truth. She glanced back to see Hope still slumbering against the rear window. She gave Klaus as long as he needed.
“Can I tell you something in confidence, Little Wolf?”
Hayley rolled her eyes, “If that means ’don’t blab whatever I’m about to say’, sure,”
The tiniest smile cracked Klaus’ stoic facade, “When I helped Elijah bust through that door—the red one, where he had stuffed all of his most painful memories—well…I had to go through there to get out as well,” Klaus winced, “I watched a thousand years of history through my brother’s eyes and…I understand, I think, why he chose to have nothing, rather than have just those memories and suffocating isolation. I’ve always been the selfish one, I’ve never tried to see things that have happened—things that I have made happen—through my own brother’s eyes. Never had to witness the world hurt him, over and over again, for a millennia. I thought, before, that when he woke, I would toss him around the room, get a few good hits in so he could feel the pain he made me feel, until the smallest bits of my bloodlust was sated,” Klaus looked back at Hayley where she leaned against the barrier and, bless her, there was not an ounce of judgement in her gaze, “But…no. I think I will take him into my arms, hold him. Tight enough to confirm to myself and to him that he is my brother and I love him and we will never be forced apart again. Tight enough to convey my sorrow for the pain he has experienced. Tight enough for him to know that I ached at the absence of him in my life. Tight enough for him to know that I do not forgive him because there is nothing to forgive. He is my brother. When I see him again, I will say that he is my brother and I have missed him, terribly…”
Klaus and Hayley stood at that lookout for an unknowable amount of time, staring at the moon, her head resting against the worn shoulder of his leather jacket. Words were not needed for the comfort to surround them.
The Abattoir
Elijah already knew that his decision making, as of late, was altogether less sound than he was used to inside of his mind. As fucked as a never-ending hallway of doors, each leading to some gruesome, horrifying, emotionally-devastating memory that he had sealed away forever, lest they destroy him, sounded on paper, his stupid hallway had protected him for about a thousand years. Right up until the time that that stupid hallway, and the demons hidden behind its doors, cost Elijah the greatest love he never thought he’d find. He had Hayley, really had her, for what felt like a breath, and then they shattered beneath the weight of his past before he could even really hold it in his too-strong hands. He would never admit it to himself, let alone his overbearing siblings, but a large part of his desire to erase his past was because he did not think he’d be able to cope with this particular heartache. Whatever he had had with Tatia, Katerina, Celeste, there was something different about what he felt for Hayley Marshall. It made her more painful to lose.
He leaned against the upper railing of the Abattoir, a place Elijah had been sure he would never be again. Beneath him, he could hear the sounds of his siblings reacquainting themselves with each other. Bekah, as much as she had longed to be free of everything Mikaelson, had desperately missed her family, and was, if his supernatural hearing was still intact post-Hollow, currently demanding a play-by-play of Kol and Davina’s wedding that she had been forced to miss. As if she hadn’t forced Marcellus to record every second of that day under pain of death. Hm, perhaps she would be willing to share that video…
He should be down there with them. Should be drinking bourbon with his family and reminiscing. But he couldn’t. For one, he was still attempting to wrap his shattered mind around the millennia of memories once again swirling around his head. Every fucking door in that cursed hallway had been blown from their hinges by The Hollow and the compulsion and, strangely, Niklaus coming to rescue him from a prison of Elijah’s own making.
Also—and he would never admit this to anybody; another fucking secret wouldn’t hurt any more than he already was—he had woken up in that room, Hollow-free, new/old memories threatening to drown him, and the pain he had managed to stave off for years finally crashing over him, and his brother and Hayley had taken all of five seconds to confirm that nobody was dead before they flashed away at vampiric speed. Rationally, Elijah knew that Niklaus had been forced away from his daughter—again—for just as long as he had been forced away from Elijah. That he wanted nothing more in that moment than to hold his baby girl in his arms again. Elijah supported that. Elijah wanted that for his brother. But Elijah was terrified that all that talk in his mental maze had been bluster, Niklaus doing what he had to so that Elijah could take part in the ritual to rid them all of The Hollow and the great burden of separation hanging over their heads. And now, having gotten what he was after, would cast Elijah aside as recompense for his slights against him and the family.
Niklaus had never been able to let a grudge go, had never been able to accept slights against him as being done in innocence. It was entirely likely that Niklaus would always believe Elijah’s decision to erase that ancient promise of Always and Forever to be the greatest slight, would forever cast Elijah as the villain, the traitor amongst family that Niklaus could never let close to him again. And Elijah did not know how to be a Mikaelson without his brother. Hell, that had been the entire point of the compulsion, anyway. Well…not the entire point. He also needed a way to forget the fear in Hayley’s eyes the last time he saw them; how the green shuttered closed as she was forced to protect herself from him. He loved her with everything inside of himself, and she was frightened of him. It was more painful than a physical blow, more damaging than shedding his daylight ring and walking into the noon-day sun. If he was to be isolated from everything—everyone—he could use as a balm to that wound, he needed the wound to be forgotten, or he would have spent the last thousand days searching for a way to end himself for good.
In any case, both Niklaus and Hayley were gone. Elijah had his memories and they were both just gone. Forgotten again only, this time, forced to understand the loneliness, feel the destitution. He should go downstairs, drink bourbon with Bekah and Kol and forget, again, the pain. But he was, honestly, too sad for company. He longed for the small flat in Monosque and the quiet in the bar of a slow night. He longed for the peace of no longer bearing the weight of his sins, the thousand yeas of hurting.
In honesty, he longed for his brother and his love. But they were not here, so he would long for things that were.
Piercing his melancholia, Elijah caught a whiff of old leather, of muddy boots, of paint beneath fingernails. He heard the swish of distressed denim rubbing together and the slightly heightened heart rate of an Original hybrid. He turned around and he could taste the hope trying to claw its way up his throat, pushed it down with everything that he had because he would not be able to handle a let down in his current state. Elijah had been ready to beg, to fall to his knees and beg his brother for mercy, for salvation. For understanding. For love.
But Niklaus did not look like fury or aggravation or—Elijah's deepest fear—indifference. He sees...well he sees things that are quite unbelievable. He sees his own feelings reflected back in ice blue eyes. He sees a strange mixture of sadness and hopefulness and trepidation. He sees a deep longing that Elijah knows better than anything else. He sees his brother, his usually-guarded heart cracked open for just Elijah to see, a secret they have kept between just them for a thousand years.
Elijah hears a thousand words, a thousand salvations in one word. It says 'I'm sorry'. It says 'I've missed you, terribly'. It says 'please, never leave me again'. It both begs for and offers forgiveness. It is a panacea to a wound so deep you feel hollow. It is warmth when all you can remember is cold.
“Brother,”
It says 'I love you', 'I need you'. It says 'welcome home'.
-
Hope had gotten a second wind when she stepped back into her family home. Bekah had swooped in first, blonde hair flying at supernatural speeds in her haste to pull Hope into her arms for the first time in years. God, she had grown. No longer that infant in her arms or the child hidden away in the country. She looked like Hayley, but Nik’s eyes twinkled in her childlike face and her smile was—just like Kol’s (or hers)—closer to a smirk. She was beautiful and innocent and sharp and a Mikaelson, bless her.
Kol had always been the least emotionally-expressive of his siblings (not including his frequent bouts of rage and bloodlust, thank you very much), but his eyes burned with the threat of tears when Davina pulled Hope into a hug. He had resigned himself to a life with just his wife and he was, genuinely, happy with just that for the rest of forever. But he found himself more indebted to Davina Claire—Mikaelson—than ever before. And to Freya and Vincent and…sort of Marcellus, he supposed…gross.
Freya rested her head against Keelin’s shoulder and smiled at her niece, blue eyes twinkling with the magic in her veins and the abject joy of her family, once again whole and in front of her. She chuckled, watching Hope sneakily slip off her dampening bracelet and release shimmering butterflies into the courtyard, the only thing that could truly express how she was feeling. Bekah delighted at the lights and Davina added her own swirls to the borealis stretching across the sky above them and even Vincent cracked a smile at the reunion happening at his feet. This was why they fought. This is what Freya searched for for a thousand years. It was everything she ever wanted and also nothing she could have ever dreamed.
-
A thousand years of heightened hearing, he still did not pick up on the slow beat of Hayley’s heart or the soft footfalls she left against the old stonework of the floor. Perhaps he was so focused on looking over his shoulder, that he did not foresee her ambushing him head-on. Well, ‘ambush’ might be too harsh a word. More like laying-in-wait; she was simply leaning against the wall he was rounding, a tiny smirk on her perfect mouth, a softness in her green eyes that she reserved for those she loved. Was it possible that Elijah still qualified?
“Hey, Elijah,”
Elijah’s eyes, still red-rimmed from his emotional reunion with Niklaus, widened at the surprise.
“Um…“
Hayley chuckled beneath her breath, “Have you spent so long finding ways to get away from me that you didn’t come up with what you’d say when I finally caught you? You should’ve figured it was inevitable; I am a predator, after all,”
“I was unaware,” Elijah forced out through the lump in his throat, “that you would wish to speak with me at all. Not after everything,”
Hayley pushed off the wall and stepped closer to him. Close enough that Elijah could feel her warmth and melt in her presence.
Hayley cocked her eyebrow, “‘Everything’ as in the red door in your mental maze, and everything locked behind it? Or 'everything' as in the piss-poor timing of the demonic witch that forced you away from me before we could talk about it? Or, maybe, when you say 'everything' you mean you deciding to erase your memories of everything we ever shared together?”
Elijah attempted to appear unaffected, “I was actually referring to the unholy trinity of all three,”
“Well,” Hayley smiled (a real smile), “since you haven’t figured out what to say to me, yet, how about I talk?”
A shaky nod.
“I’m sorry,”
Elijah nearly fell over. Out of everything he could have ever imagined her saying to him in that moment, an apology never registered as a possibility. What could she possible be apologizing to him for?
“What? You do not have to ap—“
“Shh, I’m still speaking,” she cut him off, a brief flash of that predator she mentioned in her sharpening eyes, “I’m sorry about this whole shitty mess. I’m not sorry that I let the red door scare me because, honestly, the shit you’ve done is scary,” Elijah winced, “I allowed myself to forget that you had a past further back than when you met me. I was so in love with you that I was caught totally off-guard and I’m sorry that I hurt you by pulling away. I’m even sorrier that some ancient bitch out for my daughter’s fucking skin with the world’s worst timing stole my attention before we could talk about it all, about how we were feeling. I am so, desperately, sorry that you were forced away from the only family you have ever known and that you didn’t believe you still had me,”
She brushed her fingers over his cheek and Elijah melted.
“I understand,” Hayley whispered, her gentle voice lighter than a caress, “why you felt like you had to protect your mind by locking it all away. It hurts me, but I understand. I’m just sorry that you ever had to doubt my love for you at all,”
Elijah’s heart was slamming against his breastplate so hard Hayley could surely hear it, could probably see his pulse in the veins of his neck. This couldn’t be real. Was this still some dream inside of his mind. Did he fall into one of the rare, blessedly-gentle, memories in his hallway of nightmares? If he had, he did not want to wake from it.
He rushed to deny these impossible feelings, “You don’t—“
Hayley was having none of it, “I love you, Elijah Mikaelson. I love the man who vowed to protect a girl he had never met and stuck to his word. I love the man who let me go when he thought I was better off without him. I love the man that fought by my side and was willing to risk everything to save me and my daughter. I love the man who makes me feel cherished for the first time in my entire life. I love the man who doesn’t see my past whenever he looks at me. I love your terrifying past. Because everything that happened to us both, the things that we did that we aren’t proud of, the things that we would do again; everything that led us to that moment in the cemetery was worth it if we get this,” She allowed her tears to fall, but her voice did not shake, even as she nearly begged, “So, please, can we just, finally, let ourselves be happy, Elijah? Because I am so tired of always fighting, but I will fight for this,”
Elijah kissed her before this impossible reality could shatter. Whatever this delusion Elijah had created for himself, whatever mirage this was, Elijah allowed himself to fall into it. He let his own tears fall as he cradled Hayley’s miraculous face in his monstrous hands and she did not flinch away from him. He kissed her like it was the last kiss they'd ever share, and was secretly terrified it might be. His grip on her hair was too tight and she was leaving scratch marks along his shoulders and neck, feral in their want for each other. They could have kissed for minutes, hours, days, millennia, Elijah would not know it. Elijah cradled her face and begged her to destroy him with her love, the only thing he can remember wanting in all his thousand years. He happily allowed the tidal wave that is Hayley Marshall to crash over him. The water of her filled his lungs, and it was like, drowning in her, he could finally breathe.
Through hazy eyes, drugged by her love and her touch and her kiss, he gasped out, “You are a very good fighter,” Hayley snorted through her smile and Elijah could not stop his own from stretching across his face, “But…maybe we don’t have to fight on this front? Because I love you, too, Hayley. More than I can comprehend, more than I could ever put into words. And I will never deserve you, but I know a battle against you is one I will never win. One I do not wish to…”
He rejoiced at the happiness he saw in her green eyes.
“I’m really glad you finally figured that out,”
Christmas, Two Years Later
“Happy Christmas, Uncle Kol,” Hope spoke from behind him, somehow sneaking up on a Original Vampire.
Kol had been hiding in the courtyard, absently listening to the sounds of New Orleans and also his family celebrating inside. They had all gathered the night prior, tossed their wishes into the fire and ate a large meal to celebrate their reunion. Kol and Davina had decided to split their time between California and New Orleans, much to Marcel’s disappointment, who’d attempted to bribe Davina with a penthouse in The Cauldron he offered to begrudgingly allow Kol to also live in. He and Davina both still craved their independence, the possibilities of their new love and life and the adventures that they wanted to go on together. But Kol, in his three years isolated from his family, realized that he did not always want to be without them. Sure, they were largely annoying and overbearing and his exclusion from the whole Always and Forever bullshit still stung, even a thousand years later, but he was finally allowed to look beyond it. He was not currently stuffed into a coffin, nor was he dead, nor was he harboring one quarter of an evil witch hell-bent on destroying his entire family and then the world. He was allowed to find some pieces of himself he had thought forever stolen from him with his magic.
It turns out, ironically, that more of Kol loved his siblings than hated them. Who would have guessed?
Kol did not have to fake his mischievous smile when he met Hope’s twinkling eyes, “Ooh, let me guess,” he made a great show of accepting the package in her hands. It was heavy and vaguely rectangular, it did not rattle when he shook it, nor did it feel hollow, hmmm, “Something magical?”
Hope held her fingers up, pinched close together. So, kind of magical. Interesting…
“Dark magic?” Kol’s eagerness for evil would have been concerning, if Hope had not already been quite used to it with her family. She shook her head and laughed at his disappointed pout.
“But it’s something I want?” Kol hedged.
Hope vigorously nodded her head, curls bouncing, “Auntie D helped me get it for you,”
Kol rolled his eyes, “Honestly, that could work out for or against me, here,”
“I think you’ll like it,” Hope reassured him that this was not some cruel trick at the hands of his beloved wife, “It’s something you are not supposed to have, I stole it from some of your least-favorite people, and it disparages everyone in our entire family,”
Kol lit up with an unhinged grin, practically giddy. Those really were three of his very favorite things on the face of the earth. He ripped off the festive wrappings with supernatural speed and childlike glee.
In his eager fingers, he found a leather-bound journal, clearly used and smelling vaguely familiar beyond the usual smell of parchment and ink. Like too much hair gel and teenaged angst. Curious, he cracked open the front cover and nearly exclaimed in delight.
‘Property of S. Salvatore’
Hope laughed at the obvious joy on her uncle’s usually sardonic and sarcastic face, “If anyone asks—especially Ms. Salvatore—this is just a duplicate and the original one is still back at the school,” Hope reconsidered, “Actually, to be safe, if she asks, just deny ever having seen this,”
The leather page marker was tucked toward the back of the pages and Kol flipped right to it. He could fucking cry at the words he read.
‘Klaus; the Great Evil’
Kol swept Hope into a hug nearly too tight, “I have never loved you more than this very minute,” he stressed, “I don’t care what your mother or Davina say, name a crime and I will teach you how to get away with it,”
Almost everyone in the family was steadfastly against Kol teaching Hope his nefarious ways before she is old enough to vote. Kol does not give two shits, though, so tough.
“Deal!” Hope’s delight almost matched Kol’s. She really wanted to learn how to pick locks without magic, so she can get into some of those locked doors at school without alerting any of the magical adults always keeping an extra wary eye on her.
Kol flashes away from her after a final squeeze and cackle, hollering for his siblings inside.
“Everyone,” Hope heard his demand for attention, “gather round! I have a bedtime story for this most festive evening!”
The Bayou, Three Years Later
Honestly, it was almost a miracle that Hope made it to fifteen before taking a life. Considering her family’s more than checkered past, she should have been covered in blood before she could walk. Well, actually, she was, but it was the blood of her mother rather than the blood of an innocent and it hadn’t been her fault that time. This time it was. She should have been more careful. She should have worn her dampening bracelet like those much older and wiser than her had told her to. But she was a Mikaelson, and a Mikaelson is never very good at conforming to boundaries. The bright side is, though, that a Mikaelson is as good at covering up their numerous crimes as they are bad at controlling themselves. And her mistake—if you could really call it just a mistake—was all but forgotten (literally) before she had finished wiping the literal and metaphorical blood from her shaking hands. The only thing they couldn’t fix—not now or ever again—was the way that her bones would break beneath the light of the next full moon.
Lafayette Cemetery
Freya and Keelin had been married for a week and it was really the best decision Freya had ever made in her thousand years. Sure, she was still pessimistic and prone to bouts of hysteria, as was her heredity—she was a Mikaelson, after all—but, suddenly, she couldn’t imagine a world in which she wasn’t Keelin’s wife. She had never believed herself capable of this genuine happiness, never trusted the universe to stop fucking her over long enough for her to find real peace. Now, she had everything she had ever wanted.
Well, almost everything.
Freya tossed her coffee cup into a nearby trash can and made her way into the cemetery. The Nine Covens really preferred Freya to keep herself and her messes out of their most sacred spaces, but she had business with the Regent and she had it on good authority that Vincent was conducting business between the crypts today. Good authority being Hayley, who had seen him like fifteen minutes ago, according to her text.
When Freya found him, Vincent was leaning against an altar, holed up in one of the open crypts that they liked to use as a base of operations other than the church, flipping through a worn grimoire and muttering to himself in both French and Creole beneath his breath.
“Hey,”
Vincent no longer immediately assumed suspicion when seeing a Mikaelson (well, certain Mikaelsons), so he offered her a slightly confused smirk (he never really smiled).
“Back from your honeymoon already?”
Freya shot him a conspiratorial wink, “My honeymoon is a one-bedroom across the river and my wife does need to rest sometimes. So I figured I could make the trip to see an old friend,”
“The old friend really could have waited longer than a week,”
Freya almost seemed nervous, which was a weird look on her, “I couldn’t,”
Vincent couldn’t resist, his voice void of emotion, “An impatient Mikaelson? I’m shocked. Truly,”
“Honestly, I’ve waited for this for about nine hundred years, so I think I’m done now,” she took a deep breath, steeled herself for disappointment, “I need a favor,”
“The last time I did a Mikaelson a favor, I ended up erasing every memory he ever had and nearly destroying him and this city in the process,”
“I’m 75% sure that won’t happen this time,”
“Oh, goodie,” Vincent rolled his eyes, “A whole 75%. I’m so excited,”
“If it’s the Mikaelson name that concerns you,” Freya’s hands shook, “I promise to give the baby Keelin’s last name. Or we could hyphenate to… Malreaux-Griffith?”
Vincent had thought himself long past ever being surprised by a Mikaelson. He was wrong.