Chapter Text
Amanda Anderson was the type of woman people prayed they would never meet. Millionaires and mobsters alike trembled in fear at the thought of her appearing on their doorstep. Her name was mentioned in the same breath as death.
To be entirely clear, Amanda was an IRS agent.
Unfortunately, the downside of working as a collection agent for the IRS (besides the palpable public displeasure every time she announced her job title) was that, in between on-site visits where she got to interrogate scumbags hiding undisclosed assets, there really wasn’t a whole lot to do. Currently, all she was doing was reclining in a rickety swivel chair held together by duct tape and a prayer, heels propped up on her cubicle desk.
Honestly, after fifteen years of service, why was she still stuck in a damn cubicle? After all the shit she went through, Uncle Sam could’ve at least sprung for an office with an actual functioning door. Was a little privacy too much to ask?
“Heya Mandy, what’cha doing?” Amanda’s coworker Jack, who was sitting in the next cubicle over, rolled his chair up next to hers.
“Um.” Quickly minimizing the tabs where she’d been reading some extremely not safe for work stories, she hit a few buttons on her keyboard, swiftly bringing up a tax return. “Checking for, uh, discrepancies.”
“Huh.” He leaned over her shoulder, uncomfortably close, and peered at her monitor. “Find anything unusual?”
“Actually, yeah. There’s this one guy that keeps popping up everywhere: Niklaus Mikaelson.”
She’d been investigating Mikaelson for a while, and the more she looked, the weirder it got. And to make matters even worse, she couldn’t get in contact with him! Lord knew she tried. She’d sent letters, but they were returned, marked as ‘undeliverable.’ She’d tried to call, but his cell phone number hadn’t been in service since the nineties. She even attempted to send an email – but apparently, the man didn’t have one. He must’ve been a fossil or something, because there was virtually no information about him online – no social media, no LinkedIn, not even a picture.
Clicking her mouse, she gestured to the computer. “Here, take a look at this. Back in 1911, Niklaus Mikaelson apparently owned, like, half of fucking New Orleans. Then in 1922, he acquired a warehouse in Chicago. After that, he just kind of disappeared for several decades before reappearing in the sixties as the leader of some weird cult compound where everybody did drugs.”
Jack side-eyed her. “And how do you know that?”
She rolled her eyes back at him. “He had to pay property tax on the place, duh. Plus, there’s, like, a podcast about all the people who kept going mysteriously missing there.”
“No, I mean, how’d you get tax information from 1922?”
“Oh, that? Janice started digitizing a lot of old files recently.” Amanda gave a little salute to Janice, who was currently feeding old papers into the scanner. “You’re doing the Lord’s work, Jan!”
Janice gave a little finger wave back, frowning in disappointment as the scanner jammed again. She smacked it hard on the side with a strength belying her petite frame, successfully restarting the machine.
“Anyway…” Amanda drawled out, drawing Jack’s attention back to her. “This Niklaus guy is really fucking weird. I mean, we have records of him dating back to the early 1900s, and he’s still active. He just bought a place in the Middle-of-Nowheresville, Virginia.”
“This year?” Jack frowned, stroking his chin in thought. “So, even assuming he was pretty young – like twenty – back when he bought property in New Orleans, that’d make him…” He paused, counting on his fingers.
“A hundred and twenty. It’d make him a hundred and twenty,” she said, rolling her eyes. “How the hell you managed to get a job here when you can’t even count, I’ll never know.”
“Yeah, yeah. Not all of us can be as smart as you, Miss ‘I Double Majored in Accounting and Statistics.’”
She shrugged. “What can I say? People lie; numbers never do.” She swiveled her chair back and forth, causing the flimsy plastic joints to groan under her weight. “Anyway, the point is, Niklaus Mikaelson is either the oldest living person on Earth –”
“Or a vampire!” Jack blurted out enthusiastically.
She shot him a glare that highly suggested he was an idiot. “Have you been watching Twilight again?”
He smirked unrepentantly. “Don’t tell me you don’t think Carlisle is a hot vampire daddy. I mean, I’d let him penetrate me with his –”
“Jack!”
“What? I was going to say his fangs.”
She shook her head exasperatedly. “You’re incorrigible. And no, Niklaus Mikaelson – if that even is his name – isn’t a vampire, just some lowlife committing tax fraud.” She stood up, cracking her knuckles dramatically. “And I think it’s about time I paid him a visit.”
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By the time she arrived at Mystic Falls, Amanda was tired, hungry, and just about ready to kill Niklaus Mikaelson. What should have been a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Washington, DC to Mystic Falls had morphed into an eight-hour-long disaster.
First, she'd gotten stuck behind some idiot on the freeway going fifty-five in a seventy. By the time she’d finally passed said idiot, traffic had slowed to a crawl due to a three-car pileup ahead. Just when the traffic thinned, her car’s engine stalled, leaving her stranded for an hour-and-a-half at a rural gas station that stank of cigarettes and stale urine while she waited for a mechanic to fix her car. She could’ve fixed the damn thing herself if the guy would only give her the parts, but no, a customer wasn’t allowed to work on their own car. Liability issue, apparently. Which made sense, but damn did it suck.
To make matters worse, the Chipotle she’d eaten while waiting didn’t sit well with her stomach (then again, it was Chipotle; she really should’ve expected that) – not to mention, she’d somehow managed to smear some mysterious red sauce from her burrito all over her T-shirt. And when she finally made it to Mystic Falls, the motel she was staying at told her that her room was ‘temporarily unavailable’ due to a plumbing problem, but they should have it ready in another hour or two, and that she was more than welcome to hang out in the lobby while waiting for her room.
Yeah, fuck that.
Amanda decided that if she had to stay up this late travelling for work, then Niklaus Mikaelson would just have to deal with the IRS knocking on his door in the middle of the night.
As she pulled up to Niklaus’ mansion in her old, beat-up Toyota Camry, she frowned. The place looked like it had seen better days. It could definitely use some renovations. Maybe that’s what Niklaus bought this place for: to fix it up? Was he one of those house flippers, maybe? Hell if she knew. She parked her car and walked up to the doors of the mansion, only to be halted by a man with an oddly vacant look in his eyes.
“You can’t go in.”
She sighed. This was really not her day. “Is Niklaus Mikaelson here?”
“No.”
Of-fucking-course not. Because that would just be too easy, wouldn’t it?
“Mind telling me where he is, then?”
The man blinked, his gaze slowly scanning her sauce-splattered shirt. “Are you another one of those bloodsuckers?”
Bloodsucker? Not the first time she’d been called that; God knows she’d heard worse during the fifteen years she worked for the IRS.
“Sure, that’s one way to put it.” Though personally, she preferred the incredibly creative curses an old woman had spewed at her once, calling her a ‘money demon spawned from the depths of hell that suckles on the teat of society until all the good, honest taxpayers are drained into lifeless husks.’ (Never mind that said little old lady definitely hadn’t been a ‘good, honest taxpayer’ herself.) Regardless, the phrase slapped. She’d had it printed on a T-shirt and everything.
“He’s inhabiting Alaric Saltzman,” the man droned monotonically.
What a weird way to phrase that. Perhaps English wasn’t his first language? Either way, it seemed like Niklaus was visiting this Alaric person (whoever he was) and inhabiting his home, so that’s where she needed to go next.
Amanda stared at the man, waiting for more information, but alas, he wasn’t so forthcoming. He just stood there, gazing off aimlessly into the distance.
“Could you tell me where Alaric’s place is?” She paused, waiting for a response that never came. “Or at least how to get there?”
But the man was unresponsive, standing there guarding the mansion like it was his life’s purpose.
She huffed. “Great. Another wild goose chase.” Every time she thought this day couldn’t get any worse, she was proven wrong. At least Amanda could access property records for her job, so hopefully she would be able to find Niklaus Mikaelson soon. Because if she didn’t, Mr. Mikaelson was gonna find himself facing the most terrifying threat of all: a pissed-off tax collector.
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“Formas hominum inter sese commutate…”
The witches’ rhythmic chanting enveloped Klaus, magic crackling in the air, causing his hair to stand on end. He closed his eyes as he breathed in the power, reveling in it.
Finally. He had the moonstone. He had a wolf. A witch. And though Elena may not believe it yet, he would have her, too. Now all he needed to do was get out of Alaric’s godawful body and back into his own; it was starting to get uncomfortable, like clothes half a size too small. Was this how a woman felt when she took off her bra after wearing it all day? If so, he sympathized.
With a jolt, his soul was shoved back into his own body the way one might stuff a Thanksgiving turkey, his skin rippling in almost imperceptible waves. Cracking his neck, he shook out the stiffness in his limbs and strode out of the trunk as Maddox opened the door for him.
“Now that’s more like it,” Klaus said with a smirk, eyes narrowing shiftily as he contemplated his dastardly plans –
Rap-a-tap-tap!
Klaus looked over at the door of Alaric’s apartment with annoyance. “Expecting someone, are we?” He quirked an eyebrow, watching as both Greta and Maddox shook their heads in denial. Turning his focus to Katerina, he asked, “No? How about you, then, love? Been inviting guests over while I was gone?”
“No, Klaus, I wouldn’t…” she stammered out frantic denials.
Rap-a-tap-tap!
“Niklaus Mikaelson? Open up!” A woman’s voice rang through the apartment.
“Ah, it would seem I am the one our mysterious visitor is here to greet.” He turned to look at Katerina, holding up one finger to his lips. “Do be quiet, darling, hmm? I would so hate to spoil this conversation.”
He wasn’t quite sure who he expected to see when he opened up the door. A witch, perhaps. Or one of the doppelgänger’s little high school friends. Even Elena herself, offering herself up on Klaus’ sacrificial altar, he might have expected, but this? The woman standing before him was…
Divine.
There was simply no other way to put it. How else was he to describe meeting the soulmate he had been waiting for over a millennium to find?
Dimly, he was aware that this was the sort of woman he wouldn’t have given a second glance to had she not been his soulmate, except perhaps as a snack. After all, it wasn’t like she was dressed to the nines – her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, she was wearing sweatpants, and her t-shirt was coated in a mysterious red substance.
There was something almost… undone… about her appearance, as if she were exhausted after a long day of work; and he, the husband waiting for her to come home. There’s a sort of vulnerability in allowing another person to see you in a state of dishabille, an implicit trust it carried. How he longed to have that trust. But he was a legend. A beast. And no one – not even his siblings – could trust a monster. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had turned their back on him without bracing for a blade.
Sure, this human woman may only be so unrestrained because she had no idea who he was or what he was capable of; but in the space of this moment, she trusted. And that was enough.
“What can I do for you, love?”
Her eyes narrowed as she peered at him. “Niklaus Mikaelson?”
“Niklaus is the name my father gave me. Please, call me Klaus.” He offered her his most winsome smile.
“Right,” she replied, clearly unimpressed. “Well, Mr. Mikaelson, you certainly don’t look a hundred and twenty years old.”
“That’s because I’m not.” He was far older.
She snorted. It was hardly an elegant sound, somewhere between a pig’s grunt and a laugh – yet her genuine nature made it all the more charming. “Yeah, I sort of figured. Problem is, your tax records date back to the early 1900s – same SSN and everything. Raised some flags as suspected tax fraud.”
Well, bloody hell.
Honestly, Klaus barely knew anything about taxes. He had only a vague notion of their existence – whenever he wanted to acquire something, be it a business or a building, his go-to plan was compelling some numbers-smart human to deal with all the paperwork. Whenever they asked for information, he simply tossed them a bundle of paperwork that previous humans had completed. And… that’d explain why he was still using the same credentials after a hundred years.
Honestly, the fact that the government had only just now caught on to the fact that he seemingly never aged was rather disappointing. Was there anyone competent working there? Soulmate excluded, of course. Though, it wouldn’t do to keep mentally referring to her as simply his ‘soulmate.’ Come to think of it…
“Don’t think I caught your name, love.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Forgot about that; it’s been a helluva day. Amanda Anderson, IRS agent with the Criminal Investigations Unit.” She dug around in her pocket, pulling out her wallet and flipping it open to display her badge. “Would it be convenient to talk here?” She gestured with her head towards the partially closed door.
Klaus’ eyes darted back to the inside of the apartment, trying to imagine how it would look from an uninformed human’s perspective. There was a semicircle of candles dripping hot wax on the hardwood planks in what looked like the setup for a satanic ritual, which really wasn’t that far off from the truth, come to think of it. A man – Alaric – was passed out on the floor. Shards of glass were scattered against the wall from an alcohol bottle Klaus had tossed at Katerina earlier and never bothered to clean up. And, to top it all off, a suspiciously human-sized trunk stood conspicuously open in the middle of the room.
“No, it really isn’t,” Klaus replied, trying his best to keep his voice calm. He leaned casually against the door, trying his best to block her view through the door crack with his body. “How about I take you to dinner, instead? My treat.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna have to refuse –” she cut herself off abruptly as her stomach let out a loud gurgling noise.
He raised one eyebrow pointedly at her.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up.”
“Did I say one word about your adorable little stomach growling noises?” he exclaimed, lifting his hands in the very picture of innocence – although admittedly, innocence was something nobody who knew Klaus would ever associate with him.
“Maybe not, but you thought it, loudly.” She let out a huff. “Fine. But I’m paying.”
“Excellent,” he purred. “Let me just grab my things, and we’ll be off in a tick.”
He ducked in through the cracked door and shut it gently behind him, the affable smile slipping off his face like a mask stripped away. Jaw set in a manner that suggested he meant business, he flashed over to his witches.
“Change of plans, I’m afraid. You’ll have to acquire the werewolf and vampire without me,” he told Greta and Maddox. “And as for you, Katerina …” He strode up to her, placing one finger under her chin and lifting it upwards, forcing her to look him in the eyes.
She shuddered under his touch, shrinking from him, eyes wide with fear.
He’d fancied himself fond of her, once. Not love – for love is a vampire's greatest weakness – but merely as a plaything to pass the time. Having met his soulmate now, Katerina’s skin grated beneath his touch like a cheap imitation.
His pupils contracted as he compelled her. “You’ll be a good girl, stay right here without causing me any trouble.” Thinking of the wax-covered floors and broken glass, he added, “Oh, and Katerina? Be a doll and tidy this place up, won’t you?”
She stumbled back as soon as he released her, arms clutched around her midsection. “Yes, Klaus,” she bit out through gritted teeth.
Twirling around with a grin, Klaus popped another button on his shirt. “Come now, don’t look so glum. It’s a happy night! I’ve got myself a date with the taxwoman.”
Pausing just before the door, he looked back and added with a wink, “Don’t wait up.”