O World of Many Worlds Chapter 1: Part One, a vampire diaries fanfic

A/N: A quick note about the reference to a Killarney farm as Tim's childhood home, because in the New Orleans flashback that takes place in the eighth one-shot, he tells Kol he's from Kerry: Kerry is a county in Ireland, Killarney one of its towns. It's not a slight retconning of his past; he just gave Kol the county rather than town when talking about where he was from. Also, I mentioned this way back in the fourth one-shot, but as I'm sure no one remembers that far back (or at least specific terminology from it), 'peeler' is a term for a police officer. Also, there are a few references to suicide in this one-shot. Just a warning for anyone who finds that sort of thing triggering. I think I've forgotten to warn for that before, since immortals are always getting bored and finding new, creative ways to kill themselves.

'You might say Man was born, it may be, in God's image, or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated from the old fire of Heaven, still retained some seed of the celestial force which fashioned Gods out of living clay and running water. All other animals look downward; Man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.' This is a (very slightly paraphrased) quote from Rolfe Humphries' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, book one, 'The Creation'.

I've borrowed the title from another of Wilfred Owen's poems.

So January yields its teeth to a soft February, fuzzy round the edges with sun, and him in his cap and work boots, same as the ones the good Lord birthed him for back in 1891 when his da cast the humble die of his future with that bleak Killarney farm.

He takes them to quite a few heads, these good work boots of leather heel and steel toe.

Kol took the play from his second eldest brother when he vanished for lands unknown, and so it's time for the pussy to quit her batting about of the mouse and get on with its death, which is the only thing saving the taxes which must be got on with, so here and he goes with his cap and his recovering heart along the sidewalks busy with peeler and soldier, gun in his pocket, orders still fresh in his ear.

The newest wolf with his end in a circle on his forehead he finds already fled this mortal plane, stepped off a stool and swung himself to death on a rafter, and so he stands looking up at this heavy pendulum swaying there on the southern breeze finding its way in through a window open on a winter's eve, because why the Christ not, in this soggy desert of a land.

Leapt off his own stool in a barn way out the bunghole end of County Cork, 1920.

Nothing tormented about it, sure and he'd lost his friend who showed him the humor rather than the blight of his new station in life, but you can't be following him off down that river of the Greeks, put you on your back with the stupidity of it, not a third decade under your belt and you've given it up, then, Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, and anyway, if he's making an honest man of himself he's to admit that he wanted, like all the lads of his age in all the wars of the world, to live. Oh, he wanted to live.

But the boys dropping dead all round him with their British bullets and him like a statue of the king, untouched by it all?

It was just a curiosity, left him deader than that cat with its fatal curiosity, but he came round with some of his own men whispering underneath him, because oh, wasn't it a shame, quiet thing but with a trigger finger like stone, not a bad sort, and maybe and they regretted those underhanded jokes that cut the poor boyo up, you could tell by his face even if he gave his hands something to do with that cap of his he never did take off and he laughed bright as you pleased.

So he hung there with the noose about him, and how lonely it was, to draw this line in the sand, the brave men with death's jaws open to receive them and they plunging in after their freedom all the same, and the men like himself with no consequences for their cause and no arms waiting to bundle them up into God's embrace where he'd soothe all the bumps and scrapes of this imperfect world He filled with his imperfect creatures.

It wasn't a very hard decision to eat them.

Funny how they drew their own lines between themselves and the English who were themselves still supposedly creations of the Lord, declared their very blood and their bones of a different make, and imagine the shock of them, to find it sure as fuck him up the ass tasted all the same.

He wasn't so lonely then, with the men bloating him to the beltline, a piece of them all carried off into the soft April rains.

That little bit of companionship digests quickly, though, and then off with you into your hayloft where you bed down beside another rebel shivering with night and fear, and this loss of a friend weighing on your shoulders and the bullets somewhere off in the distance coming down but never on you, and the rebel beside you in the hay long enough without woman or warmth that he only freezes and then shudders when you press yourself to him, stiff with memory, and you fetch him off almost to completion, and then it's all clumsy desperation at that point, hands on your hips and prick up your ass like the little queer you are, you get told shakily when the rebel has wiped off his sin and done up his trousers, and so you push him out of the hayloft and you listen to his neck break, not because he's cast something like that at you, queer's just a little pebble in the handful you've got dashed in your face, but rather he didn't kiss your neck or call you something like his 'little Irish cupcake' till you were both sick with laughter-

And there you are, crying in your hayloft, with the bullets still striking all the boys who are not you.

He can't tell you how angry he is, thinking of that wretched man in his hayloft who'd have given anything to have back his friend.

Eejit of the worst order, sending him off like that, and with barely a fucking good-bye, Christ and the goddamn cowardice of him.

But it wasn't him what chased off Kol Mikaelson in the first place, his fucking shitstain of a brother managed that all his own, and don't we all know the stupidity of raw rage, so don't judge his brain on this mild gray day of mid-February, when he turns on one of his own team mates, a pivotal lackey of the boss', and he eats him down to the bone.

Three of them he eats, actually.

And snatch one of the military's trucks, Timmy, never know when it might come in handy, says the handler of his leash, so indeed he gets his hands on one, and he arranges in the driver's seat the remains of one of these lackeys whose face is now a little worse for the wear, and he crashes the whole fucking lot of them into that bloody fucking Hotel Monteleone that started it all.

What a scramble he has to make for the cover-up of it.

Klaus eyes him suspiciously anyway, because there is not much you can put past thousand-year-old eyes, but perhaps he's held his spine straight enough, because he emerges all in one piece.

But he hasn't escaped much unscathed, he finds in the end, for it's little sharp Caroline who is to accompany him on his next outing.

They're to snatch the peelers' armored personnel carrier on this drizzly afternoon, and as he's not so stupid as his temper tantrum of two days previous would suggest, he sets the two of them up on a cautious stake out, to wait for the garage to empty rather than make their frontal assault on a force that might well be armed with ammunition to kill, directly or no, for if Klaus' girlfriend gets the boot from this life, sure and it'll be his stupid Mick ass following right along behind, and then how to reach that far-away Kerry with his friend and that tomb waiting on him?

She keeps up a steady hum of companionship, this slight little thing. Tried to ignore him at first, he could see her wrestle with the struggle of it, but there's some can't help the chatter, so off and away she goes in his ear, and if he'd thought to pinch a larger car, that'd have been just fucking grand of him.

"Ok, you are seriously creeping me out. You're like Evil Henchman Number Two in The Godfather. You know, the one who just stands there not saying a word, which, he doesn't really need to, because you know he's there to be all…evisceratey, so who needs him to talk, cheesy I-shall-be-your-doom monologues are for straight-to-DVD, but it's still really kind of weird, because this isn't a movie, so could you please say something?"

"Something," he says, adjusting his revolver with a grimace; fucker's got its sights into his hip, and it's not at all the sort of poke a man wants after a streak of loneliness not pacified by his hand.

She eyes him from the front seat where she has lain herself down, curls like a halo round her, and if and it wouldn't unman him, he might admit he nearly swallows his tongue, getting the jab as he does from her gaze.

"It does speak. And it jokes."

Ladies should be neither cursed nor ignored his ma taught him, but the nerves the queer delicate little things set to shaking inside him, which maybe is why he settles for a dick up the ass or in the mouth seven times out of ten, because a man at least he knows somewhat how to broach but a woman is quite another island altogether, and him just paddling round the sea lost in its froth, trying to fumble his way to shore.

Also, he hears tale that on the same night of his own almost successful death sentence, this one was nearly shot to death, and still she ripped a man's testicles clean from round his pecker, and perhaps even ate them with a smile, it's whispered among the shadows, and if the Catholic shade of that old Tim still hovering round inside him thinks he uses his own for all the wrong reasons, still the boy wouldn't wish that on even the man who had to make three attempts at one of those strange underground parties of London's sinners with the men in skirts and corsets before he crossed the threshold and let queers more bold than he undo his trousers and have their go at him, two at a time.

She must be waiting for some kind of rejoinder, of course she must, surrounded as she is by those Original siblings who have a retort for all, and so he squints up from beneath his cap, to the rain pearling on the windows, and he tries to think of something.

But with the shyness like a hole in him and the words slipping about like eels, never a one caught up in his hands, he does as he often will, wets his lips, looks away, and how that bastard ever pries up the wit he can hear in his own head but never bring to his tongue he couldn't tell you.

Sheer superiority, he can hear Kol insist clear as though he puts those words right to his ear, and oh he misses the fucker.

It's worse than the pain of his fingers digging those bullets from lung and heart, for the length of it, and the ache of it, bedding down each night with him when he lays his head in a different spot, because what are men like him to do, but keep uprooting themselves when they have just found their place?

"Kol said something like that once," he says long after it's appropriate to respond, the air thick with the awkwardness of his timing, and she looks back to him once more, letting go the fingernail she has been picking at.

She hesitates for three more full moments. "So, do you…like him?"

Mary and Joseph; sure and he'll just be talking prick preferences while he submits to have his nails done up in cosmetic and gives a solemn listen to the attributes of all the celebrity sweethearts she carries round in her wallet and kisses before her bedtime.

"It's ok. My dad was gay. And if Kol's your thing, then that means Klaus isn't.'

He looks up at the roof of the car.

"Do you think he'll come back?" Caroline asks.

Well, now, a regret isn't really something you can get back, now is it? Whole point of it's the slip of it between your fingers, and the flopping round on the bank before it splashes away into the sea, and you standing round cursing your rod and tackle because there's not a cast fast enough in your supernatural fingers to reel it in again.

But your boyfriend's a poisonous sort, he learned that the hard way, and no pun intended for the implication of that, so if Kol has to pursue his happiness somewhere the other fuckin' side of the world, then it's not just biblical love of a man he's added to his sins he supposes, because though his throat tightens with thought of it, he's not about to begrudge the man his better life though he passed up his place in it.

If he had…if he had a friend who didn't shut up his throat with fear of them, he might tell them this.

But you know, they all tiptoe away, time, friends, the wars with their distractions bursting in the grass.

"I think he's gone."

And the thrust of that in his chest- he couldn't tell you.

The rain starts to really bang away at the windows now, maybe demanding to be let in, it's that angry, but it fills the silence between them, because either she's finally stopped up that motor mouth of hers or the nerves have got her too, for she's trying to take careful little peeks over the wheel and toward the garage, her curls sticking out a little haphazardly from where she has lain on them.

"So are we actually going to do anything, or are we just going to sit here all day?"

And we've felled the blow he's been expecting all along.

He's happened upon the organizational skills of this woman a time or two, with his hat pulled down and his shoulders slunk into himself so he might flee a wrath scares even his Lord Fuckhead, if he's not mistaken, and even a peripheral shot is enough to stagger a man, so to have the full force of it turned upon him- Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he knows he's long flouted your favor, but if you could not keep him from temptation, at least deliver him from evil, for his ma was such a good woman, pious to the bone, God bless her, and himself innocent as the first snow, till the brothers Mikaelson got hold of him.

"Well?"

He wets his lips, and darts his eyes nervously toward her. "We're waiting for the garage to clear out; then we'll sneak our way in."

"Why don't we just go now?"

"Ah, I dunno. Just a feeling in me gut, that they're not going to be keen on just handing over their lorries."

"Ok, look. I don't want to be a bitch here, but we're not friends, and having recently gotten in touch with my burgeoning amorality, I might eat you, because I may be blonde, but sarcasm does not go over my head, and hello. We have a little thing called compulsion that says, yes, actually, they will be keen on just handing over their 'lorries' if we want them too."

"And if there's the mechanic and the whole lot of them in there, armed to the fuckin' nuts, you think you can work your way round to all of them before someone opens fire, and some of them probably with their blood full of vervain?" he snaps, and then he realizes his slip, and he rattles off his apology for his language, because if he's a monster it's still no excuse for bad manners.

She sits up. "Do you have a gun?"

"Yeah."

"Give it to me."

"And why would I do that?"

"So that if I'm in the process of eating one person, I can shoot another if they try and rush me, or stake me, or kill me in any other type of manner."

"I don't think so. If you walk in there and get your head shot off, Klaus'll have mine next."

"Ok, but people like me do not just sit around waiting for things to happen. They make plans. They take action. They do not sit in cars with boys who screwed their boyfriends and then tried to come back for seconds while they were already in a relationship, which is a really shitty thing to do, by the way."

"Are you thinking I want another go at him?"

"I'm thinking you've been staring an awful lot at his penis, for someone who's not trying to get in it."

"That's not how gay sex works."

"I meant for someone not trying to get in his pants, ok? I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Just give me your gun, and I'll take care of this." She holds out her hand expectantly.

And for some reason his sanity just flees him, maybe it's his grief and the hole it makes in him, hollowing out a place for all manner of things to grow, but the worst of it this anger eating him away like the rains erasing the landmarks of his home, and in no man did heartache birth such great idiocy, for he swings his legs out of the way and he yanks down one of the cushions so that he can reach back into the dark space of the trunk and unearth the shotgun he has stored there.

And then, stupid fucker he is, he shoves it into the hands of this girl who will earn him a very long death, one curl on her head gets carried off with the winging of the bullets sure to fly, and he pushes past her into the driver's seat.

He flips down the visor and catches the keys that drop with a jingle.

"What are you doing?"

He leans across to roll down her window, giving the handle on the door a crank to nearly tear it from its moorings, his jaw tight.

"What are you doing?" she demands again, and into the ignition go the keys, touch of the pedal and he revs the engine, shifts the stick into first, jerks the wheel away from the curb to jolt them into the street, scraping the bumper of the Datsun he has snugged himself in behind.

"Oh my God!" she shrieks as he short shifts his way up into third and he floors the pedal, aiming the nose of the car for the door of the garage.

Flimsy aluminum thing, the door is, and it crumbles grandly when he hits it, and if her grand Ladyship isn't any first pick of his, she's no idiot, for she flings herself over as there is that sudden chatter of a gun startled into the fight, and then she awkwardly pumps the shotgun in that cramped little space and edges the barrel out the window, to skim a good return shot off the skull of their first assailant.

He brakes abruptly.

Her head puts a star in the windshield.

He opens the door and blurs himself round to the bonnet of the car and its burden of aluminum before she can turn the shotgun on him.

The mechanic gets his wrench to the head.

The officer who unsnaps his holster and draws with shaking hand takes a Long Colt to the throat.

Caroline swings open her own door and crouches behind it as some unseen corner of the garage lets off a long stream of return fire.

He snatches a pipe off the workbench and into the temple of a peeler who gets a lucky shot into his shoulder it goes, all the way through to the other side, the skull yielding like sponge cake, blood spraying, brain spattering, the wet crunch of it a bloody bomb in his ears, Caroline up beside him now, to lend her assistance to him or his attackers, he's not sure, but there she goes, off with those soft hands and sleek hair of hers, and now that unseen corner goes silent as a distant alarm takes up its shriek from within the station.

"Good job!" she snaps.

Must have been a pair lingering somewhere right near the door, because they nudge it open and take the offensive at a crouch, hugging the walls as away with their Glocks up round their ears they go, looking for their shot.

He shoots them both in the head.

"Could you stop!"

And certainly the sickness of asylums has got hold of him, because he puts his boot on the throat of the mechanic still gurgling away at life though that wrench gave him a blow to demolish half his face, and he fires another two rounds into his chest.

"Get in the truck. Now," she says coldly.

Into the APC they go, then.

She seats herself at the wheel.

"The fuck are you doin'?" he blurts out.

"Well, I thought instead of sitting around waiting to be arrested and possibly murdered by the hoard of SWAT team members you brought down on us instead of letting me sweet talk my way into having the thing just handed to us, that we'd be on our way."

"You don't know how to drive this thing!"

"Well, there's a thing here that turns, when I pull on it? And something else, that I can push with my foot? I thought I'd start there," she tells him, and though there's a bit of fumbling round for a moment, something clicks into place, for the thing gives a lurch that flings him across the long cushioned bench on the right.

They shoot backwards across three lanes of traffic, the tires squealing in the damp, horns blaring all around, and him cursing just as his dear departed mother always told him not to round a lady, hanging for his dear undead life onto the back of a seat that takes his nails to the frame.

"Close the back doors, you idiot!"

A blast of wind takes his cap from his head.

Some forgotten rucksack slithers along the floor and tumbles away out the back, into the windshield of a Ferrari that swerves into the backend of an idling Plymouth.

They slew round a corner so hard the momentum shakes him loose from the chair and nearly throws him face first into the opposite seat.

"Do you drive your mother's Lamborghini like this, then?" he snaps, throwing himself into the seat and bracing his boots on the bench across from him.

"Do not talk to me like I'm some spoiled little rich brat. My mom is a cop. She works with people like the ones we just killed. She is like the people we just killed," she yells over her shoulder, and through one of the little side windows he watches a very red traffic light flash past.

It shuts his mouth on this bravery of the battlefield that for one sweeping moment does away with his awkwardness.

He forgets the youth of her, surrounded as she is by old men and women crumbling in spirit if not in bone.

He was but a lad once, full to his brim with blood and tears and the strange sexuality that suffuses a man once he has joined death and is drawn to every aspect of it, the smell and the sight and the taste of it doing horrible things to his prick aching with the throb of it, and no one to let off the steam but a man even worse than the boy called Tim O'Sullivan, who is neither here nor there anymore, but shut away down deep in a place permanent as the tomb they slid his poor mother into, to wait for that summer emancipation of flesh from bone.

He'll just be keeping his mouth shut for all the ride to the old fort where they are to store the lorry, then.

Klaus is amused, if anything, at the drama of their escape, although Elijah will so totally probably get his super expensive silk designer whatever boxers up his ass over it, but that's not for her to worry about, he can take that up with Klaus, who surfaces only rarely from this broody asshole mood Kol cemented when he fled for parts unknown, and anyway, like it's her fault that Klaus employs total whack jobs who kill officers with hair like her mother's.

But she doesn't tell on him.

She doesn't know why, but for some reason she adjusts her story just slightly, she makes her voice just indignant enough to suggest Tim was uppity, she almost ate him, but she can't dig down into the real life-threatening stupidity of it because in his voice was this utter bleakness when he spoke of Kol, and she knows the holes from which voices like that are reeled, and how they feel, and the way they never close.

Isn't that something?

That she would spare a man she doesn't even like from Klaus' wrath, because he's in love, because he's hurting with it?

She can hold onto something like that, can't she?

"And then I was Flower #3 in Johnson Elementary's springtime production of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. Flower #2 was just awful, brought the whole cast down, so I ate him. Little bastard won't be missing his cue to shimmy his stalk round to stage right again, I can assure you that."

The witch seated across from him blinks just a little.

He blinks back, pleasant smile still in place.

"We're going to need some kind of assurance that you won't just turn right around and stab us in the back as soon as you leave here. Your kind's not exactly trustworthy."

"Well, that's a little racist, don't you think? How would you like it if I said that I needed some kind of assurance that you wouldn't make me commute to work on a broom and tarnish my stunning fashion sense with one of those pointy hats you people are always donning?"

"We're not just going to blindly trust you."

"You know, I came out to have a good time, and I am honestly feeling so attacked right now."

She stares blankly at him.

"Well, someone hasn't been keeping up on their internet memes."

"Yeah, I've been busy, trying to keep my sisters and I hidden from your brother," she snaps.

Speaking of.

He broadens his smile. "I can give you the names of Nik's most important players, and where you can be sure to find them. Is that enough to satisfy you, or did you want something else you may have cast your eye on and can't be faulted for coveting?"

Klaus is out more often than not, getting his hands dirty, Rebekah tells her, so, fine, if he wants to murder away his pain, the two of them are just going to sit here and be a couple of girls, which is so totally never something she thought she'd undertake with Rebekah Mikaelson of all people, but she does a mean winged eyeliner, and she has all these utterly fabulous impressions of her brothers she whips out when she is just a little tipsy with the bourbon they steal from the stash Klaus thinks he has cleverly hidden under his bed, and on nights when the house is devoid of boys, they're actually quite idiotic, dancing around to Icona Pop once a little of that stolen bourbon oils some of the head bitch snob from Rebekah's joints, the furniture a little worse the wear for their drunken antics, one of Elijah's favorite couches picking up a hole the size of her fist, courtesy of an enthusiastic heel, and so they giggle their way through a cushion flip that Rebekah points out Elijah will spot in a moment, and then they break into one of the locked rooms that turns out is some weirdo shrine to all these antique pocket watches, Nik has them all arranged alphabetically, by victim name, Rebekah explains in that so-much-posher-than-you accent of hers, and opens one of the cases.

"Let's piss him off!" she declares way too loudly, pumping her fist in the air.

"Would you shut your mouth? He's going to hear you halfway across the city, you twit."

"Sorry!" she screams, and then she giggles like it's the funniest thing she's ever said, and Rebekah gives her two of the watches to stuff down her bra and scoops another few into her hand, and down slams the lid, shivering the remaining watches in their velvet perches.

"I feel like I have these, like…wonder robot boobs."

"What in the hell are you talking about, Caroline?"

"Ok, so one of them has slid down my bra right over my nipple, right? Like, I don't know- it's some kind of futuristic robot gun thingy that no one would ever see coming, because boobs are supposed to be good. Pew pew," she mimes, aiming her left breast at Rebekah.

There is this moment of silence, and then suddenly Rebekah leans her hands onto her knees and lets loose with a laugh that sends tears just freaking gushing down her cheeks.

Klaus is a quick one, give the man a candy, because just two days later he storms into the living room where she and Rebekah are arguing over Jennifer Lawrence's Oscar dress and leans his shoulder against the wall, both his eyebrows raised, little bitch face firmly in place.

"I'm missing an 1897 Elgin, a 1917 Hamilton, a 1927 Hampden, and two Waltham's, an 1860 and an 1895. Care to tell me where they might, perhaps, have walked themselves off to? Rebekah?"

"Pew pew," Caroline says, and they both begin to cry with their own wit.

He throws up his hands. "Perhaps another thousand years will illuminate the mystery that is women," he snaps, and vanishes up the stairs to his studio.

"Why do men always hang the top half of their underwear out their pants? Like I want to know if you're wearing laundry day granny's or I'm-getting-laid silk, unless I make it absolutely explicit that I want to see which it is, by taking off your pants."

"It's because Nik's got a behind like a carrot stick. Nothing to hold them up."

"He does have kind of a flat butt."

"Yeah, he's always been like that. Kol's got the bum, Elijah the legs, Nik the propensity for whining that some women might mistake for sensitivity. Together they're the perfect man."

Somewhere in the house, a door slams.

Rebekah smiles. "Want to hear about the time he tried to break his first horse and got a kick to the testicles, right in front of the girl he fancied?"

"Obviously."

If Time and all its trenches with the boys sunk helplessly in their young graves rolls itself tirelessly onward with no shifting of the backdrop, one must lend the scenery a touch of their own polish now and again.

The youngest Salvatore would of course color it with a bit of that moony woe that is the affliction of heroes everywhere, the chains of the centuries, the dragging of the lusts, we bear our sins as Atlas carried the heavens, etc. etc., but you can't approach it like that, mate.

What sort of name does a man make for himself like that?

So here you shall find him, where live all things consigned to the shadows, wearing February's sharp darkness as a king shoulders his mantle, one leg slung over his chair, head tilted casually back against the rest, hand dangling carelessly across the arm.

You might say Man was born, it may be, in God's image, or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated from the old fire of Heaven, still retained some seed of the celestial force which fashioned Gods out of living clay and running water. All other animals look downward; Man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.

But there is none whose face is warmed so closely by these cinders of the civilizations of deities than he who has plummeted from their depths and risen again with his broken wings in ashy smudges round the blades.

You'll forgive him the effrontery.

But if God is to take no hand in these proceedings of years and yearnings, then is it not the task of the monster, this union of animal and man, the one with his gaze to the muck, the other with his eyes kept skinned for the clouds, to straddle his throne of divinity?

Shouldn't have left the children behind to break and to be in turn broken by the things they do not understand, now should you have, mate?

For instance.

The crunching of faraway tires on this winter bed of gravel and ice.

Take those.

Just lend them your ear for a quick moment.

What you hear amidst this swishing of rubber and the pops of these small rocks, bits of ice, unfortunate house pets with their senses not so attuned as his, is the very small keening of what has never been anything other than a very small thing among those great co-conspirators of Time and Death.

Man is not so very unlike his beastly inferiors after all.

But he has evolved beyond this rude union of living clay and running water, and so like a god he waits for them who will take always to bended knee before Creations of his might, and he smiles.

These faraway tires make their transference from pavement to grass, and he keeps his chin down, tapping his fingers along the hand-carved arm.

Tim marches her mute and hobbling along the passageway of mingled dirt and snow to where he sits in the center chamber, and the boy tosses her down before this- he won't venture the conceit of labeling it a 'throne', but if, perhaps, you would go so far…? -chair in which he slouches, like the offering she is.

She is red to her throat with the blood from her mouth.

He deepens his dimples. "My apologies for the bit of rough and tumble, love. Can't have you throwing round spells, though, can we? That wouldn't be safe for my friend here. Tim," he says jovially, not lifting his eyes from the woman. "You did bring an alternative to verbal interrogation, I hope?"

The lad tosses him a notepad and pen.

He catches them one-handed. "Thank you. You're dismissed."

He waits until the woman stops crying and the tires have reversed themselves back onto the pavement.

"Now, sweetheart." He leans forward with his hands laced patiently on the notepad. "I understand you're in a lot of pain at the moment," he tells her sympathetically. "So I want you to just do the best you can, give me information as best you can, foggy though it may be."

She wipes her eyes.

Such a useless thing, these little rivulets of grief meant to stir mercy in the hearts of predators.

But, there, there; he's not heartless, you know.

Bit withered round the edges, perhaps.

"My brother Kol. Where is he?"

He passes her the notepad.

She flips the cover shakily and scratches out a trembly answer.

I HAVE NO IDEA.

"But he's here. That's what I'm driving at, love. He's here, and at least one of you is working with him."

WE'RE NOT.

He loses the smile.

"Come now. Your attacks on my people have increased exponentially in the last few weeks. You know precisely where and who to strike. In fact, just recently, a terribly tragic nightclub fire took ten of them together. My brother's a bit of a fire bug, you know. I'm sure you do. You're telling me that, having slunk round the city with your tail between your legs for the past month, you've suddenly gained yourselves a foothold with no outside help?"

WE DON'T WORK WITH VAMPIRES. YOUR BROTHER ISN'T WITH US.

"That's three times you've lied to my face," he says calmly, and breaks her left elbow.

Interesting, the screams of a mute.

Horrible gurgling sound.

Might be a nice recording to soothe him off to his dreams. Sleep is often a bit of a slippery thing, with so much meandering round in his skull. Not but an eye flutter away from your black peace when up pops Sherrington's findings on split brain phenomena, and off you go with recent representationalist theories on the symbolisms of the brain's little wanderings.

"Let's try that again. Kol is lurking where, precisely?"

HE'S NOT I SWEAR TO GOD PLEASE HE'S NOT WITH US I CAN'T HELP YOU PLEASE

"So you're saying he's just gone."

But he doesn't accept that.

He watched his brother smolder for three days and he wasn't even allowed a touch of his hair as he got to at least stroke poor Henrik's death-soaked locks, and he can't- he hasn't-

You don't understand.

He can't have just left.

He has failed his family in every which way it is possible to disappoint those who always take your letdowns hardest, with every stroke of which love is capable, but Kol- he-

He just-

He bore it differently.

Everything slid away, because how else was this youngest surviving Mikaelson to live outside the circle he had to chalk round his less tolerant siblings, for whose love he always had to strive, noble Elijah, royal Rebekah, always with that thin bit of something between them that Kol never did put up, Kol who in 1102 told him, "It's all right, Nik" when he was still wallowing rather than reveling, and slung his arm round his shoulders and asked with that hint of a smile in his voice whether he ought not to braid his hair and send him round to the village boys to see who preferred his ladies bristly, and if history occasionally carried them off in different directions, he to the New World, Kol at a brisk trot for Africa, always they met up at some confluence of century and country full of smiles and stories.

For a thousand years he has finished what Mother started, and dashed himself to ruin against the love of anything that threatens to hold steady.

"That's unfortunate for you, sweetheart," he says tonelessly.

She tries to gather her feet beneath her, to breathe her exertion in gusty red, to break for the faraway opening that will carry her onto the lawn of the fort where the imprint of Damon Salvatore's broken corpse is not long smoothed over by time.

He lets her struggle up off a knee, scrape together both of her boots, take to her heels in this soggy mud with the color stolen from it by winter, fighting her all the way, one of her shoes left behind in the morass, her heart just frantically going, poor frightened little thing.

He stands.

He crushes the notepad into the mud when he swings that casually arranged leg down from the chair arm.

He takes up no more than a brisk walk, hardly a thing to get the wind up in even the lungs of the young human Niklaus, trading off blows with the stick he took to arms against his young apprentice with dirt all over that little dimple in his chin, until the end of that bout he of course didn't throw, having lost fair and square to his superior opponent, and he must bend over with his hands to his knees, and the sweltering summer in his nose, everything gone thin in his throat, his conqueror swinging from his neck.

You didn't know him.

The either of them, really.

But the elder though he lost touch with everything else carried at least his love into his new life, and then time, neuroses, whatever the bloody hell is wrong with him, it didn't take it from him, you can't have lost it, when you're fair choked on the whole bloody mess of it, but certainly it seems that way to the boy who once fancied him a God, as are all big brothers who sit up scaring away monsters.

He slams the witch's head into one of the walls, and watches that strange transference of insides to outsides, very like a painting or two he has done in his time, with its splatters taken from all over the palette.

So you just left him, brother?

There isn't-

There isn't one last bit of forgiveness to be scooped up from anywhere?

Please?

He takes his lighter to his fag, and shakes the sting from his hand where the flame's taken just a nip from it.

Makes the hair on his fuckin' arms stand up, it does, to listen to Klaus give himself over to fond memories of his Spanish Inquisition days, or whatever it is has taught him to pull the screams from a man like that.

There's the bit of cherry at the end of his fag and not much else this night, with the moon hidden away as she is, and the fog like those wisps of the fey folk he used to watch from the sanctuary of Yeats' dusty old volumes.

Touch wood it isn't him next for those medieval instruments he watched the boss take out with a relish as they cornered some new young thing from Marcel's dwindling numbers.

Caught more than a look or two passed his way, and that smile once would have meant a long night in the sheets, but it's not his prick Klaus is sizing up with that long look of his, it's his throat he's already got his hands round in his mind's eye, you can practically see the fuckin' reflection of it, you can, the fucker's a right goddamn nutter, steeped as he is in his grief.

He puts his hands in his pockets and tongues the fag nervously from one cheek to the other.

Put the poor fuckin' thing down and be done with it, nothing to be got from drawing it out, but of course he doesn't say that, think he's just going to offer himself for the noose like that, better to dust off old Mrs. McClary puttering on away down the damp Sligo roads with her pram and its perpetually enraged pug with the bonnet snug round its ears or one of the boys from the university, right, weren't they a bunch-

Fuck him for a fuckin' shithead and a caffler, stab the fucker through the heart and be god bloody fucking done with it.

Not his soft heart shivering in pity, so and it's clear.

Enough Catholic left in him to know a lie for a sin and to offer it up in confession. In the interest of unburdening his immortal soul, for all the good it'll do him, let the record show that one Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan once ate his way out of an awkward social situation (three pairs of eyes on him and not a beer to his name, tried a joke, bungled it worse than that one little faux pas where he thought the Reverend Colm was hinting round the unsavory part of the 'friendship' between man and man, had his belt half undone before the significance set into them both; ate him too), and twice in one Sunday did he take the Lord's name in vain while on his knees in front of Father Blake, who was in fact talking about a different wick when he suggested the lighting of the votive stand.

It's just the goddamned sound of it.

Puts a man's shoulders up to his ears.

He pulls nervously away at his fag, flicks the ash of it into the grass.

Going to bring the whole lot of the peelers and the soldiers down on them.

Not that his Royal Shitbag has put a thought to that, he's sure.

Time for a change of the nappy, is it, you whingeing fucker? Oughtn't to have chased your brother out like the shitstain on the trousers of this world you are, maybe, do you perhaps think?

Not that he's bitter or anything.

Oh, no, plenty content he is, having just got the man back and all and now him off and away somewhere in the world plying his charms on some Russian ballerina or Chinese copper.

Not jealous either.

He flicks another bit of ash into the grass.

Fuck whoever he likes.

Maybe fall for a few of them, because whatever he wants the world to believe, nothing dead inside about him, can't doubt his capacity for a moment, when you see that smile, not that bit of frill and froth he uses as a sort of wallpaper, but the real one, with the eyes in on the game and everything.

"Perk up, Timmy," Klaus says suddenly in his ear, and he startles and drops his fag in the grass and smudges it out with the toe of his boot, swallowing the knot from his throat.

Klaus claps him on the shoulder. "Consider yourself dismissed for the night. Take yourself out somewhere nice. Pick yourself up something handsome." He leans in close, smiling. "Make sure he's got that little cleft in the chin. You wouldn't want some nice, smooth little thing ruining the illusion."

And fuck yourself sideways over a table without so much as a gob of spit.

He is away at his murder five days out of seven, and on the sixth Caroline steps into his room as he bends over his sketchpad, hands behind her back.

"Ooh- brooding artist. Original."

He flicks a little look up at her, his charcoal pausing for only a moment. "Not in the mood, love."

She takes a step forward anyway, because apparently in her presence it's always himself he's nattering away at, never would any of it, perhaps, be directed at her, so he sets down his charcoal with a sigh and folds his hands with a mockingly attentive lift of his eyebrow. "Do you need my help with something, Caroline?"

"I brought someone for you."

"Blonde or brunette? Or a redhead, perhaps? Got to get a bit of variety into the diet."

"Well, unless you want to eat Stefan, I suggest you keep it in your mouth."

"So you've dragged Stefan round to roust me from-"

"Your hermit hole? Yes."

He spreads his hands. "I'd hardly label it a 'hole', love."

"Well, whatever you want to call it, you're moping in it, and I'm tired of it. I just spent like an hour and three mocha lattes on talking Stefan around to coming over with me, so come downstairs and be boyfriends with him, because he's lonely and still heartbroken, and you're lonely and still heartbroken, and this is like the opening to every romance movie ever, where the protagonists make their way all broken into one another's arms and emerge totally healed by the power of love and the side of cheese with their dialogue."

He drops his head and starts to laugh.

"I know. I'm really funny." She flashes across the room to grasp him by the wrist. "Come on."

"I'd prefer to be alone, for the moment."

"Nope, no- not gonna' happen. You're going to come downstairs, and you and Rebekah and Stefan and me are all gonna' get so drunk that Elijah throws out his back, he winces so hard at what complete and total asses we are making of ourselves."

He pulls his wrist out of her hand, but his smile is not unkind.

She lets out a frustrated breath and crosses her arms. "Klaus."

"Caroline." His smile turns just a bit genuine at the look she gives him.

She cocks her hip out to one side and plants a hand on it. "Kol's gone, and that sucks, and I know you're hurt, but you are just going to have to wait for him to forgive you, and next time, you have to do better. You have to give people a reason not to leave. Love is not unconditional, ok? It shouldn't be. There are conditions. You have to treat people like people. Like people you love. You can't bribe them, or threaten them, or…hold the people they care about over their heads like bargaining chips."

"Then how do I get them to stay at all?" he asks, directing the question to his hands.

"But then that's obligation, not love. Is that what you want? Is that the only reason you want them staying?"

"I just want them to stay," he says, and he didn't mean it to leak out of him with quite so much rawness.

He looks up at her.

She sighs but her hand is very gentle as she takes it to his curls and she runs it back through them, and acquainted as he is with time and all its limitations and parameters and strange little illusions, still he thinks to himself that somewhere there must be some great trick of a God he doesn't believe in that can stall this moment just a bit.

"Well, you're not going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself because you're a jerk," she tells him, and he lets her pull him to his feet.

She thunders down the stairs at such a pace she nearly dislodges his arm from its socket, tugging as she does on his wrist, and from Stefan he only gets a helpless lift of the hands and from Bekah a dismissive eye roll, and then the girls set to work fiddling away at the iPod docking station Kol nicked from some store or another, the little device still in its slot.

"Oh my God, he has Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies' on here?" Caroline blurts out.

"Yes; he had a whole dance made up to it. You missed that particular Mikaelson family trauma," Rebekah replies, handing a bottle of bourbon to Stefan and another to him. "Hold these. Don't drink them yet."

"Do you remember the dance?"

"Let's just leave it, shall we, Caroline?" he puts in, uncorking his bottle and tossing back a nice swig though the look his sister cuts him is enough to wither a lesser man where he stands.

He takes another drink without looking away from her.

"What Nik means is Kol compelled himself several back-up dancers, then while they were flailing around in the background, he hopped up on Nik's back and started slapping his behind like he was some sort of pony, whilst yelling, "Ain't no other man, so if you liked it then you shoulda' put a ring on it!" at the top of his lungs. And here's Nik trying to fling him off, because of course Kol's ruining his image in front of these back-up dancers Kol specifically compelled to not forget the most powerful man in the world being ridden across his living room like a common stock horse, and in the end Nik had to break his legs, because Kol had his arms flung out to either side for the finale and his legs round Nik's waist, singing his stupid head off, so then even despite that he's still sort of flapping there, and the back-up dancers are still going, and Elijah walks in and then just walks straight back out. Nik had to eat all the back-up dancers."

"Wait- he opened with 'ain't no other man'? You don't cross-pollinate Christina Aguilera with Beyoncé! That is a complete insult. To Christina, I mean."

"I know, right? The audacity of comparing one electronically-enhanced, Hollywood-generated smokescreen who will always depend upon the gnat whims of the lowest common denominator to another," he points out, and takes another drink.

"Shut up, snob. Besides, Christina Aguilera can actually sing. Have you ever even heard her live?"

"Yes, love. I often troll the pits of common pop artists. The mass thwarting of a thousand bedtimes really streamlines the difficulty of a quick grab-and-go."

That one at least gets a laugh out of Stefan, though for his undeniable wit or the affronted look on Caroline's face, he won't venture a guess, though he does lean heavily to the former, for who doesn't appreciate the turn of a good phrase now and again, even at the expense of maintaining one's heroic gloom?

He doesn't want to brag, of course, but there are some men just too funny to resist.

After all.

Punsters deserve to be drawn and quoted.

He opens his mouth to share this bit of brilliance, smiling already to himself and giving a quick look to Stefan, who if not exactly turned toward him, neither has he shifted away, and Caroline points sternly at him.

"No."

"What? I didn't say anything."

"He was about to tell a pun," she explains to Stefan, who has leaned forward with his hands clasped between his knees and both eyebrows lifted.

"You can't possibly know that, Caroline."

"Oh my God, I can practically smell them on you."

"It's true," Bekah puts in. "You can always tell by the look on his face."

"Yeah; it's kind of this maniacal, twisted combination of 'I'm so creepily enamored of myself you should probably turn away because I'm about to have a moment' and 'God I am so funny and brilliant and just everything here are my feet you may lick them now'."

"So, just his regular face then?" Stefan asks.

"No; there's a subtle difference in the depth of his dimples," Rebekah replies, and jabs him in the cheek.

He makes a face up at her, and always the sweetest smile before the sharpest poke, his sister, and so he should well have anticipated some bit of violence from perhaps the most easily-riled of them all, but still her backhand carries him off the arm of the couch and into the crouch he nearly doesn't land, bottle unharmed in his hand. "What the hell was that for?" he roars.

"That's for chasing off my brother."

He puts himself nose to nose with her. "Well isn't that a bit rich, Bekah, coming from you. Your relationship with Kol was of course so seamless that surely his leaving without you was only some oversight on his part, isn't that right?"

"I'm not the one who welcomed him back from the dead by showing him that he better not love anyone but me, or else. I'd like to stick your head in the toilet right now. And hold it there till your feet stop kicking," she spits, and grabs him by the hair.

"Maybe if you psychos just talked your issues out once in a while, instead of murdering one another into temporary compliance, you'd get a lot farther with each other."

"Nobody asked for your input, Caroline!" Rebekah snaps, giving his head a yank to uproot his scalp.

"Let go of me."

"Make me, Nik."

"Oh my God, would you both stop? You're a thousand. Each. That's two thousand years of experience between the two of you, and I just think that maybe, somewhere in all of that, you can probably conjure up some kind of solution that doesn't involve pulling hair and blowing raspberries."

"Actually, it's about one thousand and nine hundred years or so, between the two of us, if we exclude that little stretch of time where my own dear, sweet brother stuffed me in a coffin and left me to rot for decades."

"I think it's about time we got over that, don't you?"

"Let me work through it myself, Nik," she says cheerfully, and gives him such a jerk he drops his bottle.

Stefan catches it deftly, and puts his feet up on the table before him.

"Get your feet down, Salvatore. We don't conduct ourselves like peasants in this house. Except Nik."

He snaps off the heel of her right shoe with a blinding dart of his boot.

She bends down to remove the other, still clutching him to the roots, and twice she spikes him in the temple with this little javelin, then once more for good measure, he supposes, bloody Salvatore drinking casually, Caroline scowling at them both, and now Bekah twists his arm behind his back and puts him face first into the cushion of Elijah's pristine leather arm chair, the one he's quite fussily particular about, and he feels her knee press itself down with force enough to crack his spine. "Say you're a tit. And you're sorry. And also that I look pretty today."

"And me too," Caroline calls out.

He throws her off.

She gets hold of his hair again, bites his hand, elbows a hairline fracture through his collarbone, and when at last he has her arms bound up behind her, she whips her head back right into his nose, and sends up a plume of blood that paints her hair to the crown.

He just stands for a moment, wrestling his anger back under control, because Kol's absence is quite enough a jab, Rebekah's flight will surely do him in.

Bekah dusts her hands when he releases her.

Caroline taps her heels together just a bit awkwardly, just for a moment, and then she punctures this silence she never could quite stand. "Ok, does anyone want to, like, get a snack or something? Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm really hungry, and there's that really great new-"

"Go find Kol, you ass."

"He doesn't want to be found."

"Like that's ever stopped you before, Nik. In fact, I always thought it was just that much more an impetus for you. The more they want to stray, the tighter he winds his leash."

"Perhaps I've learned a thing or two, in the last century," he says bitterly, and mopping up the last of this fountain coloring him to the chin, he blurs back up the stairs to his room.

Of course he still looks for him, in every face he dissects.

A family like them- they do not merely pass unnoticed into the roil and toil of time, there is nothing unremarkable about these footsteps they sculpt the earth to fit, they will never fade away as so many fall to their nameless white epigraphs.

So of course his brother left impression on some pliable young thing who turned round to watch him pass.

Of course his brother did not put up his hands and wash them clean of ten black lifetimes he let besmirch but never drown him.

Of course there is somewhere in this city a trail of bread crumbs he pretended not to leave.

Of course he fled a very long way, to put between tormentor and tormented the crumbling mold of a thousand bygone eras, to find again what it means to breathe the recycled lives of European ants, to stretch his legs and to throw out his arms as neither Death nor brother would allow him.

Of course.

And, of course, he's coming back.

Isn't he?

Well, mate.

If you haven't an answer to that, of what use are you?

He slits the throat of the werewolf who lies leaking beneath him, tears, snot, blood, the whole lot of him with the tap left open, Tim silently off to the side where he belongs, good lad, and the February air in through his coat like a knife.

He tips his head to one side, watching this last gurgling claw for life. "Why was the werewolf arrested in the butcher's shop?" he asks tonelessly.

"What?"

Kol'd have got that.

Going to have to be faster on the draw, Timmy.

He takes the boy by the throat and slams him down beside this unfortunate man with his bowels slackened for the final journey, pinning him on his back. "Why was the werewolf arrested in the butcher's shop?"

He tries to make himself so small, poor boy, flattening himself into the grass, breath rattling in his throat.

"I don't know."

"Come now, Timothy, give it a guess."

He touches Tim's cheek gently with the back of his finger. Not so soft as Caroline's of course, he's nothing for a razor to turn tail at but still there's a bit of scruff spattered about among all the blood, prickliest he's ever seen him, in fact, melancholy got your shaving kit, mate?

He smiles. "I don't think he's coming back for you. Do you?"

He just breathes, the stiff little thing.

"He won't come back. Not for someone like you. Who he left behind. Who one day he will forget all about. You're a very inconsequential thing. You always have been, Timothy."

He strokes the back of his finger one more time across the slope of the boy's cheek, very gently, and then he punches his hand down into the very meat of him, all the way to his heart.

He was getting tired of him anyway.

Father Kinney's lopsided smile finds him in the back pew, and then he's after snuffing the candles, and devoted he is to the particular task, never a man so given to his chore, which might be on account of last month's communion of robe and flame, as passionate a coupling as ever he did see in all his years, but that's an edge of gossip to it, so he'll just be leaving off with the tidbit about the scandalized parishioner who rushed to the saving of the poor man just a second too late, and found out the hard way about an old man's bits and bobs, which must be left free to air the age from them, as once was explained to him.

Stripped off his whole feckin' robe and stood beating it on the altar, with poor Mrs. Bengley's eyes out farther than her breasts.

And him laughing in the back pew till he nearly put his lunch all over the bench, but begging his pardon, Father, didn't even notice your plight, it was just his reading, you see, Mr. Dickens conspiring to make the ass out of him with this very unfortunate confluence of wit and troubles.

It's the least of his sins, sitting here with David Copperfield open on his knees and his smile bent to the pages, so the poor old fucker won't recognize in it the jaunty little replay of his Jimmy, as one of the IRA boys used to call it, flapping itself about with more energy than it'd probably seen in, oh, must surely be a good hundred years or so.

If God's waiting round to put the lightning bolt to him it won't be so petty a thing as this what puts the final nail in his damnation, so he gives his shoulders over to the shakes for a good couple of minutes.

You might guess he's here to bow his head to the miracle that surely is that last second letting up on his heart, Klaus in him to the elbow and no reason to be otherwise, with his brother gone and a city at his bidding, but let go he did, and left him in that grass with the moonlight and blood in peppermint stripes over a dead man's shit, and his own heart still rattling somehow in his chest.

But actually he comes here three days of the week with some novel or other in his hand, Dickens being a favorite but Hugo with a foothold in his heart nearly as firm, and you wouldn't need the authority of some cheap-inked degree out the back of a van to gather it's the convergence of right side up boyo with the Mass memorialized in his heart and the remnants still right side up, if his friend's any expert in which part of a man ought to be sticking up.

Well and either way he spent quite some time on his knees in this church.

He's pretty sure it still counts.

If he's to find his peace in the memories of some long dusty affair that just so happened to feature a front like his own, it's not for any judgment his ma always said was going to strike him down someday, he didn't chew with his mouth closed.

Didn't create him, but didn't stop the creation of him, either.

Can't turn Your back and then spin round to shake Your finger when it's suiting Your own prejudice.

So anyway.

He thanks You if You'd anything to do with that little reprieve Klaus granted him yesterday.

But he's thinking You're probably gone.

Most things are.

Oh, he could shake his fist at it.

He could point out, he prayed, you bastard, and then he could bar the doors and seal himself inside with news of his friend's death and the teeming of the dozen or so lost souls groping about for their forgiveness, and he could take particular delight in screaming himself hoarse over their bleating, were any of them thinking He was going to tip so much as a divine eye to their fates, then, shriek yourselves blue in the fuckin' faces, he's not listening, don't you understand-

But he's not so young as that anymore.

So Father Kinney finishes the killing off of the candles and slinks back away into wherever it is old men like him sprout from, giving him a wave, and he puts his feet up on the pew in front of him and settles into Davey's miserable little childhood, and ah, well, poor fecker, don't give it a thought, the old man will be dust before you know it, and when the electric lights go the way of that one lingering invention of caveman, he reads on with eyes that aren't bothered a bit.

Dickens could have molded a fair bit from this, the faithless boy with the century-old heart and the twenty-one-year-old cheeks, pulling his friends from his books.

Can't get away from you, those ones.

Always rifle yourself back to a place where they're alive, and happy, and they didn't end, and they never will.

All the readers in all the world, whiling away their loneliness at the end of some other fucker's pen.

And this some other fucker bleeding it down to the nib, and watching it soak away into the margins, and thinking to his poor old self, let him have touched some transatlantic soul in his foreign bed, let all the goddamned soot and stink of him be relieved in this strange companionship of traded isolations.

And him and the other faithless of the far and wide Godless planet, wondering why He chooses not to look.

She is walking alone along one nearly-empty street somewhere over by Bourbon, when suddenly she is just lifted up off her feet, and jerked roughly back into the shadows.

But you know what,last time this ended in two mutilated testicles she likes to think all the king's testicle donors and all the king's surgeons couldn't have possibly put back together again, so she's just going to go for broke, and by that she means your penis.

She kicks her foot up behind her, driving the heel along inseam toward groin, and another rough jerk puts enough space between them to spoil her aim, and then back again she is pressed against a chest that she is so totally going to shred, just as soon as she gets free.

"Ah, ah, ah," someone says in her ear, and two arms slip around her own, pinning them to her sides. "I heard that story. Did you really eat them afterward?"

"What?"

"That man's testicles. The story goes you ripped them off and then ate them, but I feel like that last is the little embellishment that rumor always does pick up somewhere along the way."

"Why don't you let me go so you can find out?"

The arms tighten around her. "I will if you can guess who I am."

"Ok, well, let's see. There's just that right edge of entitled, affected ass in your voice, so I smell a Mikaelson." She rolls her eyes. "Also, I recognize your voice. Kol."

The arms loosen and she is spun gently about by the shoulders, until Kol Mikaelson brings them face to face, his hair tousled, stubble a little thicker than last she saw him, smile just as eternally douchey as his big brother's.

"If you're back, then march straight home, and, I don't know, beat, murder, whatever, your way back into each other's black and shriveled hearts."

He crosses his arms and leans his hip against the wall at his back. "You're very bossy, for someone all alone with a man who was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of the Knights Templar, and who has plenty of reason to do something just terrible to Nik's favorite plaything."

"First of all, not Klaus' 'plaything', and if that's what he's calling me behind my back, I will take him by the nostrils and-"

"Relax, darling. My phrase, not Nik's."

"Fine. Anyway, you're not here to eat me, so let's just drop the vague threats and get to the part where you put something gross in Klaus' shoes, or whatever worldly, experienced, sophisticated people do when they're working out their differences in a way befitting totally mature, really old-ass adults."

"I sense a bit of sarcasm, darling."

"Klaus and Rebekah settled their last fight by pulling each other's hair and biting one another."

He scrunches up his nose a little. "Mostly Bekah, I'm guessing. She likes to pull Nik round by his hair when he gets uppity. Did she put him in the toilet?"

"She threatened to."

"Well, he got off lightly, then. He tends to do that," he says, and there is a jagged edge of bitterness in his voice for just a moment before he smoothes it back over with his way too freakily-focused smile. "Anyway, you're right- I'm not here to eat you. I have a trade to make."

"A trade."

"I know what my brothers are up to. Nik's being a megalomaniacal prick; Elijah's keeping him in line. Sort of. Well, the illusion's nice for him, anyway." He wets his lips, and looks away for just a moment. "But I was wondering if you could just…tell me what my sister's doing with herself."

It hurts to watch him smile his way through this. "We had a bit of a spat before I died. I think she's used up her forgiveness for me. I did stretch it a very long ways, after all."

"Why don't you just…talk to them?"

He runs a hand down his chin, and clears his throat. "That's not how things work in our family, darling. Anyway, if you keep me up-to-date on whatever domestic dramas are afoot in the Mikaelson clan, in exchange for both your information and your silence, I'll tell you nine hundred years worth of embarrassing stories about Nik."

She crosses her arms. "Give me an example."

"Once in Vatican City, Nik and I were having this priest at the same time-"

"Ok, no. I don't want to hear about how creepily comfortable the two of you are with one another. I really just do not want to know what all you've…put in where, or who, especially if, like, maybe you got curious one time and you were bored and you figured you've done a lot of really bad stuff, so it's not like some Caligula/Drusilla relationship was really so much worse-"

"It wasn't like that, darling. I was sucking his cock while Nik was-"

"Still don't want to know!" she yells, bringing a hand to her forehead. "Sometimes people practice this thing called restraint? It's really great."

"Anyway, so I was sucking his cock while Nik was slipping him a-"

"Yes! Yes, I will tell you every little thing they spend each insignificant moment of their day doing, down to the brand of toothpaste they are using, in exchange for nothing, if you just stop. If you stop now, right now, and don't finish that sentence."

"Well, I just feel like that's a little unfair. This is supposed to be a quid pro quo, darling."

"I'll live," she assures him, unfolding her arms to slip both hands into her pockets, her huff going white against the sky.

"I've still got all that horrible erotic poetry Nik wrote when he was a teenager."

She cocks her head. "How bad is it?"

He smiles.

He looks just as young as he is supposed to be, when it reaches his eyes. "Have you ever read Fifty Shades of Grey?"

"Yes."

"She's Tolstoy, in comparison. And not the watered-down, lost-in-translation version foisted off on anyone who doesn't speak Russian. The original Tolstoy, in all his glory."

She knows he can see her wavering, because his smile broadens, and when there's no hint of threat in it, just the slightly overgrown bangs falling a little into his eyes, and the two front teeth overlapping just a bit, and the long soft lashes she could just kill to have, it's actually seriously sort of adorable.

She could tuck him in on the couch and brush the bangs from his eyes and bring him warm milk the way Daddy sometimes did, in those days Before, and if anyone ventures so much as a kind of mean look in just the vaguest direction toward him, well, you heard what she said about all the king's testicle donors and all the king's surgeons.

"Deal," she says.

"Excellent."

"I assume you'll be in touch? I mean, I like to think I have some experience with stalkers, and they usually just pop up whenever I least want them."

"Then that's when you'll see me," he tells her, still smiling.

"Ok," she replies, and it's hard not to return it.

She is almost to the opening of the alleyway into which he dragged her when he calls after her. "Caroline."

She turns with one eyebrow lifted, and the smile is completely gone, and there's nothing he can think to do with his hands, because he's got them in his pockets and then out of them, his heartbeat just freaking deafening in her ears, the scent of his nerves nearly as overwhelming.

"Is Tim still alive? I…heard the witches hit some of Nik's people hard the other day."

She lets out just the softest of smiles. "He's alive. Why don't you go talk to him at least? I think he'd probably like that."

There is a visible easing in his shoulders. "I can't do that. I'm not exactly on Nik's side anymore. Can't get Tim caught up in that. He didn't want to be."

"Well, why don't you ask him? Maybe he's changed his mind."

He flashes right up into her personal space, and lifts her hand to his mouth, smile carefully back in place. "Until I can 'spill my musky pearls in your honor' once more, Caroline," he says, and then he is gone.

Five days later some unknown number rouses her from the stack of files she has immersed herself in for the past three hours, and setting down her wine and snatching up her phone, eyes still to the page in her hand, she barks distractedly into the speaker.

"Hello?"

"Nod once if you're alone."

"I won't even bother asking how you got my number; like I said, I'm pretty well versed in stalkers. And if you can see me, why do you need to ask me if I'm alone?"

"You're right; I'm not actually peeping at the moment. So it's entirely fair for me to guess what you're wearing right now."

"Ok, just because Klaus isn't here, it doesn't mean you can hit on me."

"You're right, darling. That would be immoral. So, what are you wearing?"

"I thought you were going to guess."

"It's probably better for your delicate sensibilities if you just tell me."

"Rebekah spent most of today bringing you into every conversation in the bitchiest way she could possibly manage, which means she misses you; Klaus got really pissed at us both because we pointed out that his fly was open while he was quoting Ovid in his speech to his latest line-up of minions- it wasn't, we just wanted to ruin his mojo; and Elijah took off his suit jacket, his tie, and his shoes just to murder one guy who got uppity and tried to hit Rebekah."

"Yeah, he doesn't like splash-back. Apparently it's just awful to try and dry clean it out. I wouldn't know."

"Oh, and your boyfriend is nuts, by the way. Did you know that?"

"It's most of the reason I slept with him. That, and he has no gag reflex."

She rolls her eyes and sets aside the paper in her hand. "Gross."

"Was it him behind the fire at the Bourbon Orleans?"

"Well, not entirely, but he was the only one who made it out alive."

"He's actually quite wily. I like to think he picked that up from me. Like one of those sexually transmitted diseases, only without weeping members."

"Gross!" she snaps again, flopping back in her chair with one hand in her curls.

"And speaking of weeping members, your payment: 'For there was no maiden so fair, she made me weep from my pair; yet to your face, I set my pace, until I burst with a moan like a bear'."

She is still laughing five minutes after he has hung up and Klaus has let himself in smelling of blood and snow, Tim beside him stomping the winter from his boots, both of them giving her a look that squeezes the tears that much harder from her eyes.

"What's so funny, love?"

She sniffles and takes up the file open across the arm of her chair. "Nothing. I was just thinking about…bears. And…their pairs."

Klaus tilts his head.

"Sweetheart, how much have you had to drink?"

On one particularly shitty Monday he and two of Klaus' newest boys raid one of the lorries, the street a fuckin' rink beneath his feet, the gray sky with her baleful fucking eye of a storm cloud waiting to pass judgment on them all.

"Don't use your gun, you fookin' gom!" he hisses at the blonde one might have been called Troy or Trev or Constantinople. Something like that. "You'll bring the rest of them right down on top of us!"

"The hell's a 'gom'?" the blonde asks the other, and with a pinch of his bridge, Lord deliver him from the eejits and the fuckers, he rips open the door of the lorry, yanks the soldier from his seat, opens his head against the window, throws him down onto the sleet, and now on the other side of the truck the boys do the same to the driver, except of course with the guns he just told the little shites not to use, the rounds echoing in the street.

The back opens.

He takes a bullet from the rifle edges its nose through the doors, shoulder spouting with the hit, and now round the front of the lorry he goes, onto the bonnet, the roof, slithering on his belly over this thin sheet of iced-over metal, burning the fucking bejaysus out of his bloody gut where his shirt has ridden up, a whole fecking storm opening its throat with a roar underneath him, and the boys who knows where, dead if God never abandoned him after all.

He shoots his hand down over the roof, snatches the helmet of the next soldier down and out of the back, pulls until the neck tendons give way and the head comes loose in his hand.

He draws his revolver.

He shoots the one aiming at him from the street through the head.

Three more of them scrambling round inside, each with their own little giveaways, the rabbits of their hearts and that thunderstorm whish whish whish of the breathing and one of them with shit in his pants, reeking of the sewer.

He slithers himself over the one with the shitty trousers, and punches his hand down through the roof.

The serrated edges of the hole he has opened take care of the lad's scream and his head.

The others make a break for it, and round the sides of the lorry come the boys, blonde Troy or Trev or Fergus with his fangs already out and into the throat of the first of them, so down onto the second he drops, the man's gun scattering rounds into the air, his bladder leaking terror out the ends of his trousers.

"Take their guns, their ammunition, and any grenades you find."

They blink the bloodlust from their eyes.

"Can you handle that, then?" he snaps.

"'In your orbs, I search for morbs; for there is so little, it must be a riddle; but if my torpid snake, shall never again take, the salty tears of your dew, then I shall take the cue; and nevermore, will we couple with a roar'."

"Ok, seriously 'morbs' is not a word!"

"Nik has this thing about rhyming."

"Also, who the hell is he having sex with, that there's all this roaring and bear moaning and whatever? Oh my God, please don't tell me bestiality was, like, a thing back then."

"No worries, darling. Just some poorly-chosen descriptions."

"Ok, so, which do you think was the worst one he ever wrote?"

"No, no, no, darling- I'm not just giving that away. That's classified. If you want it, you have to tell me which knickers Tim's wearing today."

"I'm not looking at his underwear!"

"Just a peek."

"No."

"Do you think he's wearing any?"

"How in the hell should I know?"

"Just ask him. 'Timothy, would you say you're free, you're free ballin'!"

"You did not just pervert Tom Petty!"

"Go on and ask him, darling. Just like that. But record his reaction on your phone, and then send it to me. I'm going to auction it off at this charity that provides blankets to the poor."

"Right. I think it's called 'youtube'."

"I see you're a real philanthropist, just like me. I think we have a lot in common, actually. For instance, do you remember that one time I was sucking a priest's cock while Nik was-"

"Stop trying to tell me that story!"

"My silence in exchange for a picture of Tim's ass."

"Shh, shut up! Today Klaus and Elijah debated some old Greek philosopher for like three hours and I think the end result was that they each think the other one is stupid and wrong, and Rebekah and I ate this total creepo jerk face who tried to roofie her and I hear Klaus coming so okay bye!"

"I really need to talk with Mr. Jacobs," he tells the poor fucker's wife with all the earnestness of this face Ma used to tell him got put on by the angels.

She lets him straight in, course the husband would be happy to see him, just remember their daughter is sleeping, up all last night with a fever, little Meg and her teddy bear, so he makes an orphan of this little Meg with the teddy bear quietly, and he steps back out into the world red to the elbow, wondering does he at least get a nod for the girl still intact in her bed.

She parts the curtains on the first cubicle of the dressing room and up go her whole freaking armful of clothes, her throat just barely stalling on her scream.

"Hello," Kol says.

"This is the girl's dressing room!" she hisses. "Where I am about to be naked!"

"I'm perfectly all right with that."

"Get out! Besides, I thought this was supposed to be a clandestine thing!"

"It is. I checked to make sure no one was watching. Bekah's not with you today. Neither is Stefan. Nik won't come, because he's tired of picking wrong every time you ask him which material best suits your ass." He taps the end of her nose. "It's that sort of stretchy denim, by the way."

"Get out, you creep!"

"Once I pantsed Nik in front of the Queen of England. Bekah reports that he just stood there for a moment with his dignity and his trousers both in a puddle; I don't know. I ran very fast. Your turn, darling."

"Get out."

"I believe what you meant was, 'Nik can hardly function without you; Bekah is so despondent she only changes her toe nail polish twice a day now; and Elijah has become so scatterbrained in his grief that yesterday he actually left the house with a smudge on his cuff link. Also, Tim will never meet another man as virile and has been ruined for the sweatier sex for life'."

She yanks him into the hall by the collar of his shirt.

"I like a little manhandling, darling. Now tell me how bad I've been."

"Leave," she snaps, and jerks the curtains closed.

His hand slips in under the curtain. "Did you want the lacey white ones first, or the black ones? I think the white might wash you out a bit with your coloring, darling, although black might be just a little dark. Also, are they really charging you thirty dollars for this?" He snaps the band of the thong he is holding. "You should probably eat them for that."

He doesn't think it's a thing to be alone for, the killing.

Supposes he isn't, for the whole of it, with his arms round the man like he might cradle a lover and the struggle of it grinding the man's ass back into his cock so that he's the blood up in more than just his cheeks with their fat black veins.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe he draws it out.

Nips almost like he might have played round with the neck of his friend, curls his hands round the hard points of the hips, throws in a bit more lip than teeth, and the man just squirming, squirming away against him, till all the wriggle's gone out of him.

So he's a fair bit worked up, by the time he makes his unsteady way back to his hotel.

Used to be they'd kiss in between drinks, and he'd feel his way down Kol's trousers while his friend tilted his head back to just savor the taste of his last bite, the both of them breathing raggedly into one another's mouths, Kol nipping playfully at his chin, and the fucking smile of him.

Just push it on out the door without yourself, fucker.

And he was offering.

He was offering.

You can guess how many heads he's even lifted, slogging his way as he does through awkwardness and years, and men understanding least of all the creatures with the tongues same as their own that it's chosen for them to save rather than wag.

But that man, be all right.

Charming little shit, he thinks, and cries alone in his shower with the tap cranked to fuckin' Antarctica.

"So why aren't you seeing Nik much lately?" Kol asks her one night as she is lounging in her hotel room, Stefan out on a blood bag run, phone to her ear, nail brush to her big toe.

"Why are you pestering me for obscene pictures of some guy I don't even like, let alone want to spy on in the shower instead of just, I don't know, stopping by his hotel like, "Hey, guess what, still in town, play a round of Seven Minutes In Heaven'?"

"It wouldn't be just seven minutes, darling. Also, you don't have to like someone to want to see them naked. I'm sure you had Nik pretty well mapped out in your head long before you were friends."

"Well, I don't want to see Tim naked."

"You didn't answer my question."

She dips the brush, slicks a tentative stripe down the right edge of her nail. "You didn't answer mine."

"I went first."

"Klaus is all caught up in being broody and murdery and he's hardly ever around the house anymore, and when he is, he's kind of creepily quiet, and I don't know how to bring him out of it. I know you think he doesn't care, and I don't blame you for thinking that, but he does. A lot. He just has this extremely weird, asshat way of showing it, but I feel like…I feel like maybe he's finally coming to terms with something. With how he has to act just a little bit less jerky, if he wants anyone to ever stay with him. So, if that's what's happening, and he needs to work it out himself, then I will just give him some space, and just concentrate on bringing Stefan out of his Elena funk." She switches the phone to her other ear. "Why am I always surrounded by moody men?"

"Maybe you ought to keep better company."

"Present company excluded, I'm guessing." She smirks into the phone, and tucks her tongue into the corner of her mouth as she edges another cautious stripe along the center of her nail. "Your turn."

"I already told you, Tim doesn't need to be caught up in any of this."

"Well, he's a big boy, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is, actually. Very big. And not one of those annoying ones with nothing but length, and the girth of a bloody pencil-"

"Ok, no penis talk. I'm putting a prohibition on penis talk."

"We can talk about Nik's, too. It's not like I don't know what it looks like. Cold, sweaty, mid-coitus- there just aren't any surprises left anymore, darling."

"And again with that complete and utter obliteration of boundaries- is that what happens after a thousand years? Ten centuries from now, am I going to walk in on Rebekah while she's, like, mid-orgy, and just stand there recounting what Angelina Jolie's trillion greats granddaughter wore to the twelve millionth oscars?"

"Or you might be participating in the orgy with her. Sexual identity gets a bit fuzzy after a few centuries."

She dips the brush once more, moves on to her next toe. "So, you weren't gay, a thousand years ago?"

"I'm not gay now. I'm all-inclusive."

She moves her tongue a little higher, babying the brush around the cuticle, careful, careful, careful- aaaand…danger zone cleared. "Is Tim gay?"

"Tim's had both. He's just more inclined toward men."

"So, do you, like, go through a phase? Like, for forty years, you're really gay, and then for the next forty, it's all hetero, all the time? Or is it just, like, whatever you pull out of the hat?"

"Sometimes you're in the mood for one over the other. Sometimes you have both at the same time."

"So…did you and Tim ever do that?"

She can hear him fighting the smile out of his voice. "I thought you didn't want to talk about my sex life, darling?"

"I don't want to talk about your sex life with Klaus. So whatever, whoever the two of you did at the same time, whether you crossed swords or not, I don't want to know."

"We didn't have sex with anyone else while we were together."

"So…do you love him?"

He pauses for just a moment. "Next question."

"Ok…do you have strong feelings of devotion and tingly stuff going on in the special region aimed in his general direction?"

"Why don't we talk about your 'special region' now, darling?"

"Bye!" she sings out, and hits 'end call'.

A murder and a meal and back to the church with him, Dickens in tow, banged up round the edges, the old man, been through a lot, he has, though none so much as the antique toting him round through the wars and the years.

He wonders sometimes, is it just him feels the years in his bones?

They press away at his eyelids, too, off to the Big Sleep with you, Timothy, had your stretch, outlived the best, and isn't as though in the next hundred, two hundred, thousand years man will have changed, and stopped making war on himself or put to bed his old hates rather than handing them off to the next generation, seen everything this great human mess has to offer, and most of it barely lifting its shoe to glance at you anyway.

Ah, no, he won't be sticking this revolver in his mouth and blowing the lid clean off him.

Tried that too.

He woke up with his gun and his blood in his lap and thereabouts in his skull a faint mention of the pain, and then he just went out into the sun had its nose poking out from behind a cloud for once and sat for a while with the old retriever didn't like him much till he started leaving out the bowls with the leftover scraps of his own meals, the conniving fecker.

What else to do, when you have died and woken up anyway?

He strokes the edge of Bleak House with his thumb.

So we tell the stories to keep us alive, we tell the stories to brand our words and all the messy insides of us into the compliant brains of all the readers all the world over, but what for a man who will have nothing but this timeless cycle of paper friends and naught else?

But, ah, then.

Gets in a right fuckin' mood, sometimes, he does.

Dust himself off sooner or later.

Think of something his grand old fucker of a friend would have said.

Fuck it, Timothy.

Literally, darling.

Solution to all life's ails and ills, according to the horny little shit.

"'And in the light of morn, I feel myself torn; your engorged petals so close, where I miss them most. For they are not yet but far, but somehow they are'."

"Do you think there's a way for me to subtly sneak these into conversations, so that he doesn't know I know, but there's that little hint of oh-my-God-what-if-she's-so-smart-and-powerful-and-pretty-she's-literally-absorbing-them-from-my-mind paranoia? I like to watch him sweat a little."

"I'm sure you do."

"You don't have to turn everything into a sexual innuendo."

"Pretty sure I do."

"I have to go. I'll call you later tonight."

"I'll hold my breath till I hear the sound of your voice again."

"You do that. Someone'll appreciate it."

"Yes he will."

"Gross."

"You!" Caroline barks at him one afternoon when he swings by to see if Klaus has anything for him, and he freezes against the wall, wondering can he make a bolt for the door before she's got him by the boys- by fecking God, she looks pissed-

"Hold this!" she demands, and heaps into his arms a stack of some frill and flutter that slithers round his biceps, paper tassels swinging with the momentum of her throw. "And if Rebekah asks, you moved them."

"What?"

"It's Elijah's birthday, and she wanted to do something for it, only she's doing it all wrong, so I'm fixing it for her." She takes the pencil she's got tucked behind her ear and marks off something on the clipboard she's carrying. "They were in your way or whatever. It's fine; you're not here that often anyway. Just stay away for a few days until she's cooled down. But she already got pissed at me this morning for something that was not even my fault, and I just don't want to listen to anything else, so you moved them, I didn't see anything, they're better off where they are now anyway, ok?"

She makes another mark on her board.

"Uh, actually, I was-"

"Shhjt! I'm thinking!" she snaps, holding up a hand. "How tall are you?"

"6'3"," he blurts out, shifting the whole mess in his arms.

"Great. If you stand on Elijah's chair, the leather one right over there? You'll be just tall enough to reach the corner where she should have hung them in the first place."

"I think Klaus probably has something for me to do-"

"Did I stutter?"

No, ma'am, he didn't hear anything of the like.

Should he-

Is it a salute or a click of the heels or a tip of the hat she's expecting of him?

"Move!"

Well, that settles that then, he supposes, and gets the chair underneath him and the first of the streamers properly looped in a single breath.

"I know it's going to be a lie…but can you tell me that Bonnie was happy?" she whispers into her phone one night, and she curls herself more tightly into the sheets where Klaus' scent lingers but he does not.

Kol pauses for a very long time.

He clears his throat. "Of course she was, darling. She had me, didn't she?"

Nice night.

He forgets about those sometimes.

Just the moon on your shoulders, and the touch of dampness like that eternal wet smog of Ireland.

He flashes round behind the fucker's been following him for a good two blocks, sinks his teeth into the fattest vein, shoots the friend that comes at him from the side.

He pulls back, wiping his mouth.

His bullet found the kid's eye, and has left him incomprehensible but still with the one good eye blinking, blinking, so he squats while he waits for it to finish, taking out his packet of fags and tapping one into his hand.

Death hasn't anywhere to go, lad.

Got to just bend over and take him, you know?

Ah, but the poor fucker.

Just rolling his one good eye round and round, breathing like something beached, lying in his own mess of indignity, maybe thinking with his poor scrambled brain of his wife or the little baby asleep in his warm contentment of unknowing.

Well, go on and figure him for a softy.

He presses the muzzle of his revolver between the kid's eyes, and fires the finishing round, fag dangling unlit from the corner of his mouth.

He licks the thin trickle of blood that seeps out of the wound, and squints up into the sky.

Yeah.

The moon's a real beauty tonight, she is.

Coming up slowly in all her gentle glory, with the bright and merciful face of Heaven shining gratefully upon her, as Mr. Dickens would say.

"At the alley down just past the Monteleone, where fate first intertwined our star-crossed paths."

"Ok, well, one, it wasn't the first place. Two, stop talking like we're playing the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to Klaus' Jennifer Aniston. I have Klaus, and you are doing the exact opposite of 'no homo' with Tim."

"Come on, darling. Come and meet me. Is Nik going to be home tonight?"

She gives one last quick peek to all the carefully-arranged tabs of the folders and closes the drawer of the filing cabinet with her hip. "Probably not."

"Then come out into the world and play. A small town girl like you- I bet you've never been to a drag show, let alone a vampire drag show?"

"No, and what's the difference?"

"Come and see."

"Ok, is there going to be some massive blood orgy or something, because I don't need to go back to my hotel stinking of sex and blood. Stefan is sort of on and off the bandwagon as it is, and I don't think that's going to be helpful."

"Well, I'd take you to one of Emma Johnson's sex circuses, but those went out ages ago, unfortunately."

"What?"

"One of the madams of a brothel that was part of New Orleans' red light district used to run these 'sex circuses', back in the day. All the sexual acts you could want, hetero or homo, men dressed like ponies, sex toys you've never even seen before, trapeze acts to put the Cirque du Soleil to shame. Lots of nudity. Also, once I saw the smallest cock I've ever seen there, which was sort of interesting, in a P.T. Barnum kind of way."

She coughs back her laugh, and with the phone cradled between shoulder and cheek, she makes her way over to Klaus' desk, shifting one hip back against it and leaning her weight into the edge, careful to keep herself free of the papers she has fastidiously tidied in the center. "Ok, fine; I'll come meet you. But no sex circuses!"

"What about the drag show?"

"Maybe."

"I can't let you go till you say yes to something scandalous. The blonde hair and big baby blues just scream for me to corrupt them."

"I am not exactly Mary Poppins, you know. Sometimes I eat people, Kol."

"But not nearly often enough, my little Honey Sprinkles."

"Where the hell did you get that?"

"From a 'My Little Pony' random name generator on the internet. I get bored," he says, and she hears the smile in his voice as she bursts out with this laugh she can no longer smother.

"All right; I'll see you in twenty minutes," she says, and hangs up.

She turns.

In the doorway is Tim with his hands in his pockets, and a startled shriek and three minor heart attacks and she presses one hand to her forehead, because where exactly in the holy freaking hell did he come from, and on what sort of little creepy Casper tiptoes does he tread, because she didn't hear even one single freaking peep from those trillion-old stairs, sighing their burdens into nights she would very much appreciate sleeping through, if it's not too much trouble.

"Oh my God, you're like a freaking cat! You scared me."

"Can you tell me where he is? Please?" he asks, his throat working around these ragged, ragged questions.

"I actually am not sure exactly what you're talking about, but I have somewhere to be, so…if you don't mind." She makes a shooing motion at him.

"I just heard you fucking talkin' to him!" he snaps, and then he looks down with his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, letting his throat clear take the edge from this outburst she never would have expected from him. "I'm sorry. I, uh…I heard you…fudging talking to him? Fuck me. I don't know what to say."

He lifts his head.

"Just…would you tell me where he is?"

She pockets her phone with a sigh. "Look, he's made it sort of clear that he's not really interested in seeing you," she tells him, and every single part of him just crumples, his face so utterly wrecked that for just a moment she feels this tiny pang somewhere down deep in herself, where slumbers the Caroline who knows no vicious little manslut sniffing around her relationship, who sees only this tiny freaking kicked puppy of a thing in front of her, shoulders slumped.

"Is he mad at me, then?"

She sighs. "No. He's protecting you. He's…well, I don't exactly know the whole deal, but he's not exactly playing for our team at the moment. He's afraid Klaus will hurt you if he finds out Kol's still in town, and that he's probably working with…whoever it is he's working with. The witches, I'm guessing."

"Well, that's not for him to decide, is it?" He swallows thickly. "I can choose for myself, what's worth risking."

She leaves her hand in her pocket, drumming away at her phone with her nails.

"Please. I just want to see him."

He gives her the full force of this kicked puppy look of his, and, just, God, would you stop looking at her like she hates all things love, and sunshine, and joy- in second grade she harassed twenty seconds of embarrassed kissing out of Macie Greenwood and Devon Archer because they were seriously just the cutest, and their outfits didn't even clash, and last she checked they were still together, they'll probably be married, and go on to birth the generations she will never spawn, and so if you think she is immune to yearning, if you think she has never been pierced by just a name, and left crying in the dark-

Look.

It's not her call to make.

So she sends you away to the arms of a man who tries so hard not to let his loneliness through into his jokes, and you live, and you love, just for a while.

And then her boyfriend with the tender smile and the way he brushes her hair so gently from her cheek, he takes his hand, and he punches it through to your heart, and maybe she could have stopped it.

Maybe she could have stopped it.

"Please," he says in his soft little accent, and she shuts her eyes.

He juggles the phones of dead men while he waits.

There are naked pictures on the first (small cock, though, rather unfortunate-looking over all, really), quite a steamy text exchange between the owner of the phone and who he gathers to be the girlfriend's brother on the second, and the third disappointingly basic, which, fair enough, the man well made up for with his enthusiasm for 'alternative love' (the assortment of household items he craved in various orifices- quite fascinating, actually), but evidence is to be discarded, and so he tosses them small penis, gay affair, spatula asshole, into the skip, and claps his empty hands briskly together.

He'll pick up another somewhere down the lonely streets of this city empty of the innocent, here as the clock ticks her way round to one a.m.

Not that Nik's tracking her incoming calls (probably; perhaps; maybe), but no need to tie himself down to any one single number.

He checks his watch.

Late by five minutes, Caroline; going to get a mark for that one.

The priest story for sure, darling.

And here now are her footsteps (it's not so bad, darling; that priest gave as good as he got, with the repression built in him like a sickness) chipping away at the ice on the sidewalks, the breath high and strained in her throat-

No, too heavy.

Some man wearing his nerves like a cologne.

He leans against the wall at his back to delve his pockets for anything else that might be of interest while he waits, feeling all about the pea coat he stole from Nik to replace the one gone stiff and discolored with Tim's blood, giving his pecs a nice grope.

It's no wonder he hasn't got a 'no thanks' in his life.

The footsteps stop outside the alley, someone looking for a rob or a roll, he assumes, and he glances up with his most wicked smile.

It dies on his face.

Got what little beard he can conjure coming in, Tim does, and the stupid hat low on his eyebrows.

Not a jacket on him, of course, vest done up to the last button, pocket watch noisy in his hand.

He is not often surprised.

900 years will do that to you.

But when Tim closes the distance in two supernaturally quick steps and a hand on either cheek brings their mouths frantically against one another, he loses three stunned seconds of response.

And then he clutches the back of Tim's shirt in his hands and squeezes his eyes tightly shut -can't let the belief leak out of them with something so ill-advised as opening them- and he pulls the boy into him till they have taken care of the space between them, kissing the breath from them both.

They part for just a second, their lips still grazing, and then Tim presses a frenzied kiss to each part of his face he can get at, the dimple of his chin, tip of the nose, forehead, temple, back down the cheekbone, to the jaw line and the lips once more.

He pulls Tim's hips into him.

Up to the back of Tim's neck go his hands, to get him some leverage in this kiss that is all teeth and tongue and ragged gulps of air, and if these breaths are nearly sobs from relief or grief or lust, he couldn't tell you.

Tim breaks from him to kiss the dimple in his chin again, and they lean their foreheads against one another for a moment, smiling round their gasps.

"Hello; I'm Kol. And who are you?" he asks breathlessly, sifting his fingers through the hair at the nape of Tim's neck.

Tim pulls him in by the collar for another lingering kiss. "Gone to Europe have you, ya' fucker?"

"I was going to." He pushes the Donegal farther up Tim's forehead and kisses the slight mark its band has left behind. "But you know how it is, trying to escape my family. Till death never do us part." He puts himself nose to nose with Tim. "Caroline tattled on me?"

"Walked in on her talking to you. Well, I snuck up the stairs and spied on her soon as I heard your voice."

He kisses the corner of Tim's mouth. "I don't blame you. It would take a much stronger man than any of us to resist that particular voice." He pulls Tim's head down to get at the bridge of his nose with his lips. "You haven't seen me, though, darling. Nik will throw a fit. Go cool off at one of the pubs, and I'll see you…I don't know when I'll see you." He shuts his eyes again and draws out the three pecks he presses to Tim's lips.

"What's wrong with now?"

"I'm not sneaking round underneath the parents' noses, Tim. I think we're both a bit old to play Romeo and Juliet."

Tim grabs him by the cheeks once more, and squishes them nose to nose, his eyes shut, that little crinkle he just hates to see between his brows. "I'll decide when and if I want protection, you eejit."

"You didn't want to cross Nik. I don't want to cross Nik. Not in a way that puts you in between us, anyway."

"I changed me mind. I'll tiptoe round the fuckin' city, if that's what I need to do."

He strokes his hands down Tim's cheeks. "Nik will find out, Tim. He always does."

"Well, I realized five minutes after you left I'd have rather just gone with you, and risked the fucker anyway. And I'm a grown fucking man, and I'll decide what I get to risk."

"Tim." He moves his face from the boy's hands, and lowers his cheek to press it against his collarbones, getting himself fistfuls of Tim's vest.

"You don't want to?" Tim asks roughly, but the hand that comes up to touch his hair is very gentle.

"I'm pressed right against you. I think it's pretty obvious what I want to do."

"Fuck that fucker, Kol."

"You already did that, darling."

"I mean it. Fuck him. Fuck Klaus and all his fucking goddamned rules and fuck him for dictatin' your whole bleeding fucking life and who you can or you fucking can't-"

He lifts his head, and presses his finger to Tim's lips. "Shh, shh, shh. You're going to work yourself up into a heart attack. And then what will I say to the homeless I feed every second Tuesday, when they happen past and find me standing over a dead man with my hand down my trousers because he got me all worked up, and it's taking him too long to come round?"

Tim's got the color quite up in his cheeks, chest heaving with his anger.

He kisses his neck, and leaves his lips there. "Where are you staying?"

"The Omni Royal."

He takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes for just a moment, drags his nose up the boy's neck until he finds his jaw, where he presses another kiss. "All right. I'll meet you there in twenty minutes. Make sure no one's following you. If you're not careful, I'll eat you myself."

He has his moment of terror, standing before the door with the vampire heart behind it, and the scent of Tim's soap, and the nervous click click clicking of that bloody pocket watch.

It's just-

Time or death or Nik-

They're interchangeable.

If not the one then the other, and always him left holding nothing.

But he knocks on the door.

He knocks on the door and he listens to the pocket watch stop clicking and the nervous stutter of the heart and then the footsteps, bare of their boots, cautious as they come, everything just as turbulent in Tim as his own fluttering anxiety.

Tim opens the door and steps back.

He nudges it shut behind him with his heel.

And then don't ask him why he does it, but he stands here for just a moment looking up the four inches to Tim's face, the bright blue eyes beneath their dark lashes and the tongue nervously out to wet his lips and the color still in his cheeks from wind or February or rage, who knows, and then he just leans forward, and he puts his cheek to Tim's chest and his arms round his waist.

And Tim-

He cups the back of his head in one hand and lets him just stay here as long as he likes.

He can't-

He can't tell you what that means to him.

It's just been quite a few weeks.

You know?

He swallows and readjusts his cheek just a little, slides his hands a bit farther up Tim's back, squeezes handfuls of his shirt.

He has often enough been a burden towed round through the centuries, and so he won't unload anything, darling, he's just felt so terribly fucking heavy, wondering is Nik really gone for good and has Bekah truly wiped him clean off her shoe as she always meant to do, and has Elijah- has Elijah-

He turns his face so it's his eyes pressed to Tim's chest.

"I know, you bastard. Shh. Shh," Tim tells him softly, and kisses the top of his head.

For a while he just listens to the beating of Tim's heart and the roughness of his own breath, and somewhere in the hotel a clock ticking, and beyond the window all the night owls up and flitting about, laughing with the lightness of their insignificant years.

He kisses the hollow of Tim's throat, just once, and then he leaves his lips parted against it, breathing into his skin as the boy strokes the back of his head.

Tim kisses his forehead.

He moves his mouth to the crook of his neck, kisses this almost tentatively, tastes it again, slowly lets go that fistful of shirt to grip Tim by the hips.

Tim kisses from his temple down to the line of his jaw, round to his dimple, the corner of his mouth, works his way back up to that temple again as his hands fumble up to find the first button of his coat.

They both pull back just a little.

He kisses Tim gently.

Tim gets the first button undone, and another kiss, a bit longer this time, and there goes the second button, the third.

He pulls Tim's shirt from his trousers and sneaks his fingertips under the hem, smoothing with his thumb that line of hair that vanishes down under his waistband.

Tim undoes his last three buttons and opens the coat.

Their tongues are in on the act now, everything still languid, his hands untangling themselves from where they have crept just beneath Tim's waistband to set off a series of shivers down the boy's back, his fingers beginning to pick at the buttons on Tim's vest as Tim tries to push the coat from his shoulders.

He drops his arms long enough for Tim to slide it off.

It sails away somewhere into the corner.

Tim's hands thrust in under his shirt to find the ridges of his abs.

He snatches the cap from his head and flings it after the coat.

He seizes Tim by both cheeks and kisses a moan out of him, their teeth coming together now, Tim hard against him, both of them beginning to grind a little, Tim's hand stumbling down to get a handful of his ass as they open their mouths.

He rips Tim' vest the rest of the way open, hooks his ankle round Tim's, trips him down onto the bed.

They grapple with Tim's shirt for a moment until with an expletive he pants into the side of Tim's neck he just rips the whole bloody thing down the middle, and helps him wriggle out of the scraps, his own shirt mussing his hair as Tim gives it a tug round the collar that sharply parts the stitching and yanks it over his head.

He settles down skin to skin against Tim, breathing shortly through his nose as Tim sneaks a hand down between them and strokes his cock through his jeans, bucking himself into Tim's hand as he kisses Tim's neck and shoulder, putting out his tongue to taste both his nipples, Tim arching underneath him, both of them breathing in rattly little gasps.

Tim trails his lips tenderly down his neck and onto his shoulder, his fingers sliding round to his belt.

He unbuttons Tim's trousers, and lifts himself just slightly so that he can work his trousers and boxers down just low enough to free his cock, Tim's fingers busy with his belt and then with his button, his own cock bobbing free as Tim slides down his trousers.

He presses himself down so that they are cock to cock and begins to thrust slowly with his hips, Tim's head dropping back against the sheets, his hands coming up to grip his ass, to guide his thrusts as he chokes off the little noise in the back of his throat, his eyes fluttering.

"Tim," he breathes, and kisses the tip of his nose.

Tim moves his hands off his ass, up his back, wraps his arms round his neck, pulls him down so that they are forehead to forehead as they slowly work their cocks against one another, breathing roughly into the other's mouth, the friction tangling all the words in his throat, Tim angling his head just slightly down to kiss just beneath his bottom lip, one hand separating out from the tangle round his neck to rasp a tender little brush along his stubble.

He nips Tim's ear. "Roll me over," he says breathlessly, and in a blink Tim is suddenly no longer beneath him.

A hand on the small of his back pushes him down onto his stomach.

Tim untangles his trousers from his legs, and then he's draped along his back, his lips busy at his neck, his palms sliding over the backs of his own hands, their fingers tangling, the strangled breath he lets out muffled into the sheets as Tim presses his first slow shallow thrust into him.

"Jesus," Tim chokes out, and kisses the first knot of his spine, turning his face to put himself cheek first against the nape of his neck.

He claws up handfuls of sheet and pushes his hips back into Tim.

Tim slips both arms under his chest and kisses the nape of his neck, giving another languid thrust of his cock, and another muffled cry and a squeeze of his eyes and he unearths his mouth from the sheets to gasp, "Angle up just a bit", and a slight shifting of his hips and Tim does just that, hugging him more tightly.

He feels Tim kiss his neck again, and shuts his eyes.

Tim pumps away like this for a while, pulling nearly out and then easing himself back in one excruciating inch at a time, exploring the slopes of his back and shoulder muscles with lips and tongue, kissing his jaw line and his cheek and the tip of his nose when he works his way back up, pressing them cheek to cheek as he begins to pick up his pace just a bit.

He puts himself up onto his forearms for leverage, clenching his jaw as he shoves his hips back, Tim's fingers digging into his ribs as he gives a little gasp, and now a hand slips round underneath him and finds his slick cock, Tim's thumb caressing the head.

He struggles up onto his knees.

Tim wraps his hand round his cock and begins to stroke him roughly, pounding away now, their breathing jagged, Tim's cock hitting him just exactly right, and with an, "Oh fuck; oh shit" he spurts all over Tim's fingers, but up and down the shaft his fingers keep up their friction, and he drops his head and he chokes on each breath he tries to take, and then Tim gasps, "Fuck; fuck" and he feels the warm surge of Tim's orgasm as a second one pulls a garbled expletive from his throat and coats Tim's fingers in another slick layer.

He collapses onto his stomach with Tim boneless on top of him.

They lie like that for a few moments, fighting the air back into them, and then Tim takes a few more shaky recovery breaths and pulls out of him, pressing a kiss to the center of his spine.

He ought to do up his trousers and go, with Nik lurking always in the periphery.

But Tim slinks up next to him and puts the hair out of his eyes, and he's got very gentle hands, the smiling little idiot, with his happiness so bloody raw on his face, so he decides instead to keep this moment for himself, to evict the entire lot of his family and the old shades of them that love him, love him not, and perhaps he puts a bit too much of himself in this return smile, but once or twice or thrice, however many times you've lived, darling, no sense in wasting it.

She lets herself be picked up and jerked back into the nearest alley with a sigh.

This is so totally not going to become a thing, because a thousand years of freaky man biceps aside, she does not just have to take your manhandling, which, speaking of, should so totally about right now be getting applied toward certain other 'handling' if you know what she means, and if you think for a second-

She takes a deeper pull of this rain-scented air, one long drink of February frost, and she understands suddenly that these are not the arms of Kol Mikaelson with their faint whiff of Ambre Topkapi cologne, and into her assailant's foot sinks her heel and around his neck go her pretty pink-gloved fingers, and a heave of her arm and a thrust of her hips and over her shoulder he sails, his spine breaking on the pavement.

"Caroline, stop! Caroline, it's me!" Tyler chokes out, and she freezes with her hand to his chest, fingers partway in.

A/N: This graphically family-inappropriate gay sex scene brought to you by champagnekiss. All right, obviously it's brought to you by me, but I dedicate it to champagnekiss/champagnekissedbitch (as we know her on tumblr) for being so super enthusiastic about Kol and Tim's sweaty man love.

I know there isn't actually much Klaroline in this update, but they'll get theirs. Meanwhile, I did give you lots of Caroline, and Caroline/Kol bromance on top of that. Klaus is trying to put on his big boy pants and work on his issues (in his own super disturbed, murdery way), and he needs a bit of a breather for that. BUT GOOD THINGS COMING UP FOR THEM AND CAROLINE IN PARTICULAR. *Ominous villain laughter*

Also, did you guys reeeeally think I'd get rid of Kol for good, having just brought him back? Of course not. This family has so much shit to still work out.