"Elijah."
For a brief second she forgot. For a brief second there was relief, despite the excruciating pain of Greta's fingers gripping around her heart and snapping one vessel at a time as she threatened to murder her.
His eyes met hers for the first time in seven years and he looked at her quizzically... as if he knew he should know her. But there was no recognition at all. She had never known a moment when his eyes were so devoid of emotion. He had never looked upon her as a stranger like he did now, not even during their first meeting in the cemetery. He looked at her now... and he just didn't care.
Hayley knew then that it was over. He wouldn't save Hope... the little girl he had long doted upon as if she were his own. He didn't know her, either. And he had incapacitated his brother. The brother he had committed atrocities for, just to save Klaus from himself... Elijah was threatening to destroy Klaus in that moment by leaving Hope in harm's way.
She never imagined it would end like this. She always thought that they would find a way back to each other, once Hope was grown... once they'd found a way to drive out the Hollow. Her mind was turning itself inside out as it tried to register what was happening. Her fate rested in his hands - he could have saved her by staking Greta. But instead... he did nothing. He didn't know her, didn't know what they had meant to each other.
And the realization settled in that this would be the battle that she didn't walk away from. The bitter irony rose up in her throat, practically choking her. The person she had trusted for so long - above all others - was going to just let her die.
Yet she still loved him. She had never stopped. She almost wished she could have died without seeing this side of him. She would have rather gone on naively imagining that somewhere under the surface the recognition of her would be enough to snap Elijah back into himself. But reality was cruel, and it was sparing her no pleasantries as she faced death's door.
And so when she saw her window of opportunity to save her daughter and her father, she made a silent wish to save Elijah too. She hoped he would find himself again and reunite with his family that was broken without him - even if it meant she could never be by his side again. She knew she was a fool for believing it might be any different.
The fates had been against them from the start... all of them. She had just hoped it would have been decades before she left her family, not a meager handful of years. She was going to miss them all terribly.
She shed a silent tear before her flesh started to burn.
The pain was intolerable.
The memories came rushing back, clear as day, engulfing him and drowning him. It was all he could do not to collapse... though succumbing to an unconscious state would be preferable to the nightmare he was currently suspended in. This was a nightmare he would never escape.
Her last living moments were on a continuous high definition loop in his brain and he could not turn it off. He kept watching the hope extinguishing in Hayley's eyes as she realized he was not there to save her as he should have been. He could feel the heat against his face as he just stood and watched her burn...
He cried out in anguish unlike any he had ever felt. Even when Tatia died at his hand, he'd attempted to save her. But he'd murdered Hayley with his deliberate inaction, his hatred for his brother, his poisonous selfish amnesia... his farce of a romance with Antoinette and misguided loyalty to the wrong family.
He'd learned nothing in a thousand years.
He was beyond ashamed. He couldn't face his siblings. Not one of them offered comfort, and he couldn't blame them for standing back. What he had done was unforgivable, horrifying... he'd become a monster in turning away from them. The irony was that he'd refused to remember them so he could escape the monster he thought he once was. But his past self couldn't hold a candle to this gruesome new entity.
And she was gone, for eternity. His niece - his family's Hope - she was motherless, because her once-beloved uncle Elijah had just let her mother perish. Hayley had sacrificed herself to save Hope because she realized Elijah wouldn't. She saw him at his absolute worst and then she died.
And he would never be able to apologize, or make it right. There was no chance for redemption.
His heart twisted in his chest, the heaving sobs threatening to rob him of breath. He wanted to die, and yet he couldn't. Marcel was the only one who possessed that power. But Elijah knew he would never bestow upon him the sweet mercy of death.
It may have been hours or even days later when the mourning fog finally lifted and he was cognizant of this time and place. He was completely numb to emotion except for the dull ache of the gaping wound in his chest. There were no more tears, no more sobs to spare. His throat was raw, his knuckles sore from battering against the floor, as if his pleas could bring her back. Everyone else had left him alone, unable to bear witness his uncomfortable grief. Except Klaus.
His brother stood over him with the vial of his blood, the werewolf bite antidote. Elijah had completely forgotten about Antoinette's affliction in the avalanche of mental anguish. Klaus said nothing more, offered no reassurance. It wasn't a peace offering. Instead, his brother recognized that Elijah's fragile psyche couldn't handle the death of another he'd professed to love, someone who was relatively innocent in all of these circumstances.
Still, he could not go back to Antoinette. Not permanently. He was eternally broken, and he had loved her when he was someone else, free of obligation and his devotion to his family... and Hayley. He respected that she navigated and loved him through a difficult situation. He supposed there was no right answer in how she should have approached him and his lack of knowledge of his history. But he could no longer hide from who he was. His plan had backfired spectacularly.
As he left Antoinette, the pain in her eyes barely registered within him. She would be forced to live without him. His final act of mercy may have in fact been an act of torture. Perhaps she would have rather died. But he had nothing left within him to care. She was not Hayley.
No, Hayley was gone.