A/N: So I'm just not even going to pretend anymore that these one-shots have a chance of not being horrifically long. It was ok in the beginning(when we didn't have the whole ensemble assembled, and when the plot was still getting off the ground), to tie things up in 13,000- 15,000 words, but there are now just too many themes/perspectives/plots I want to hit on to tell the story the way I envision it. So from now till the end of the series (I intend for it to be fourteen fics total), each entry is going to be more of a novella rather than a one-shot.

So get our your eye drops and curse my name, fair readers, for here is your most recent pile of inexcusable word vomit.

There is a blow to his chest that takes all the breath from his lungs.

He tried so hard to let go and to move beyond. Death lives in such a state of impermanence for a creature like him that grief makes of itself only a very mildewed memory, faded by centuries. Hope forever has its cracks to slip through, when there will always come another year.

But oh, little brother.

You took that from him.

And he was so angry with you.

You didn't carry it to your grave, did you? You saw what happened after he threw himself against those wards and he screamed himself dumb with the only expression of anguish he understands, and then he slid down onto the floor and he put his face into his hands to pour out the one he does not, because he held you when you were very small, you know, and if in later years you did not need him, he was still supposed to put a sword to the throat of any who dared harm your bloody annoying little head.

"Kol," he tries to say to you, but sorry about that, mate, his lips do not work, his tongue has put down roots, and if it seems his first instinct is to keep between you both this distance of staircase and foyer, of elder brother, younger sister, it is only that he no longer has knees, his feet have carried themselves off, his legs have gone to puddles.

"Elijah," Kol says amicably, and breaks off a shard of the staircase.

Elijah takes this thrust half an inch to the side of the heart, and goes to his knees with his mouth open, his hand on Kol's shoulder. "For petting the wounded feelings of my murderer's sister," he says right into their brother's ear, still smiling.

He shoves Elijah face-first down the stairs.

"Bekah!" he calls out with a friendly smile, his arms out to either side, his eyebrows lifted, his hair breaking free its one uncooperative strand to flap down over his brow. "Thank you for your three crocodile tears, sister."

She presses herself out of his path, back into the banister.

Kol's foot finds the final step, his jacket settles with a quiet rustle, his arms drop to either side.

"Nik."

His brother's ashes settled for a very long time.

If you shut eyes sticky with tears and you made of your hand a shield that you might not know differently, you heard in their shifting something like snow coming to earth, and you had so many bloody memories of similar noises, of similar snowfalls, that might this just be another ragged winter upon the plains of Fredericksburg, with the powder-scorched soldiers all round you, the smoke of the cannons, the ash of the generals, because not him, you haven't even a bloody god to pray to, that you might wish him safe and swift passage to this better place the humans yammer on about, and oh, little brother-

Did it hurt?

Did you look up through your death and understand with your last moments that while most man goes alone, he was there to see the end, he would have held you through it, he should have told you sorry?

"Kol," he says just as firmly as he can manage, and if he is to take a bit of banister to the gut, if his brother has returned with only his derision and his detestation, he'll have it all, he'll swallow it whole, give to him whatever you must to balance this wobbly scale that has piled itself up against your favor.

"Nik," his brother replies, and then he smiles, just like a boy who chased him through the woods, and he leans forward to tweak his nose. "Show me to my shrine?"

She is clicking on slippery freaking totally-should-have-stolen-shoes-with-better-traction heels through the rain when her phone blurts her ring tone from the side pocket of her jacket, and she so totally shouldn't answer this, if it's not Stalky Mcmurderton himself she will just eat these stupid slip n' slide soles, but she's not afraid, he tried to kill her twice, you know, it never stuck, she wasn't even wearing makeup the first time, no matter how pissed he is right now fifty twists of him around her manicured little pinkie is not just going to unravel, she has so totally got this-

"Murder your half of the city yet?" she asks brightly. "And by the way, no, I will not come home, if you're calling because Rebekah tattled just like I totally freaking knew she would. Stefan's still out here, and sorry if you were planning some romantic knight-in-shining-genocide heroics, but today it's Caroline to the rescue."

"No; there's no danger anymore," he tells her, and she has never heard such weariness in his voice.

"What do you mean? What happened with Mikael and the witches?"

"Mikael's been taken care of."

"Ok, so what's wrong with you? You sound weird." She stops for a moment to check the street, to dart across it between cars and puddles. "Are you ok? Is…everyone else ok?" she squeezes from her suddenly pinched throat, and she will not ask about Rebekah, it does not matter to her one single teeny bit what Fate has dished out to the Original Bitch, she buried Bonnie, left behind Elena, there is only Stefan, what more friendship does she need-

"Everyone's fine, Caroline."

She takes a breath, and shuts her eyes for just a moment.

She dodges a car, hops up onto the sidewalk, scurries beneath the awning of one of the shops and stands brushing wet curls from her eyes.

"Kol's alive."

Her fingers pause against her curls.

She tucks herself a little farther beneath the awning.

"What? How did that happen?"

"The witches were trying to reach Mikael through your friend Bonnie. To get her to lift the veil, and to free my father. She sent Kol back in his place."

She doesn't need to ask.

She has already understood what fate has given to three friends who used to play house, who shared one another's shoes, who crowded before one mirror to fix their hair, to adjust their dresses, to touch up one last dab of artificial beauty.

"Did she come with him?" she whispers.

"He's alone, Caroline."

Oh.

She knew that.

Put a smile over it, right?

She pastes on her brightest.

"How are you…dealing with that? Did you guys have yourselves a nice little bonding session, or did he, like, string you from the ceiling and play the harp on your guts? He's kind of even more randomly…stabby than you, isn't he?"

"You're getting positively morbid," he says with just a touch of pride in his voice. "I'll have to remember that harp thing."

"Well you better give credit," she scolds him, beginning to move down the sidewalk once more, her shoulders hunched against the rain, her free hand buried in her pocket.

"Oh, you can be sure if I find someone whose guts I fancy in such a state, you will be the first invited to the revelry. And I wouldn't dream of stealing your limelight."

She scoffs. "You steal everyone's limelight. Pluto's probably not a planet anymore because it was outshining you somehow."

The rain lifts itself in a veil from beneath the tires of buses.

The clouds spit out a few tentative confetti of snow.

She brushes her curls once more, checks her reflection in the shop window that passes in one long watery blur, shifts the phone to her other ear.

"Caroline. Will you come home?"

She smiles just a little into the phone. "You didn't ask nicely enough. It's Queen Caroline, to you."

She can hear the smile in his voice. "I could have told you that."

"Well then, why didn't you?"

"Well, we don't want you getting unmanageable, now do we?"

"It's not like you can manage me now. I just disobeyed the direct orders of the evilest hybrid that ever did walk this planet, and you know what he's going to do? Nothing. Because I'm cute."

"You're not doing anything for my reputation, love."

"Please. One blonde baby vampire does not negate a thousand years of the entire supernatural community's urge to change their pants at the merest freaking mention of your name."

"Well, that's true. I am still quite beloved by those who whisper after dark."

"Yeah, Klaus. Beloved by all of them."

"By one at least."

She slips around a woman wrestling her stroller up onto the sidewalk. "That's screaming after dark, Klaus, not whispering. And ok, next time, don't seduce me in Elijah's study, because it really honestly kinda' creeps me out when-"

A man slides out onto the sidewalk from the doorway of Prima Donna's Closet and her heels click to a halt and her mouth leaves itself wordlessly hanging against the phone and in the street everything just continues like this one moment has not tacked her feet to wet winter pavement and glued her where she stands, human in her nose, rain in her hair, the sky cracking itself just a little wider with a rumble that vibrates her down to her very toes.

"Tyler?" she whispers.

There is a long moment of silence on the other end. "Actually, my name is Klaus," he snaps.

"Right," she stutters, and out trips this nervous little laugh, fluttering up her throat, between her lips, into the only daub of white that exists in this gray, gray evening. "I saw this guy who looked like Tyler from the back and it just completely startled me, because what the hell would Tyler be doing here, but he turned around, and it's not him, so, yeah, I know that sort of created a little bit of an awkward moment there for a second, but we weren't in bed, so it's not that kind of an awkward oh-my-God-let-me-just-kill-myself-now moment so it so totally could have been way worse, and I'm just going to go now, because the rain is ruining my hair, and I'm going to duck into one of the shops for a while, because if I'm having a Tresemme crisis in this weather, then there is no way Stefan isn't too, which means he's probably lurking around here somewhere doing exactly the same thing, so I'll talk to you later, bye!"

She hangs up without waiting for an answer.

The rain comes down between them.

"Well, it wasn't on a pedestal, so you lose points for that, but you did keep it- that earns you back at least a few."

Kol whips his Louisville Slugger through the air, holds it out in front of him to give it a squint, weighs its heft with a deft little toss, props it across both his shoulders and drapes his arms over either end. "What did you miss most about me, Nik?" he asks cheerfully. "My smile? The sparkle in my eyes? Or the way you always feel yourself just a bit outshone in my presence, but it's somehow all right, because you are a great appreciator of beauty and to be allowed as many looks as you like is worth a restless night grappling the same green-eyed monster Bekah fights every time someone with better hair slides to rest inside her belly?"

He opens his mouth to reply and with a point of his finger Kol cuts him off, tapping his thumbnail against the handle of his bat. "I like what you've done with the place. Not enough pictures of me, of course, but who could ever possess a collection of this face that could be considered adequate? You just can never have enough, can you?" He takes a step toward the bed of this room they used to share, swinging his bat down off his shoulders and onto the covers, his jacket following, his head twisting itself at an angle to set off a chain of firecrackers down his spine. "Death puts such a crick in your neck, Nik."

His little brother always has owned everything to which he sets foot, and if death still lies between them like something that must be bridged, if where before his brother might have leapt up into his arms, kicked his legs delicately, left behind a damp kiss on his cheek and now barely deigns to even touch him, this at least has not changed.

He sprawls back on this bed he has not set his head to in a very long time with his arms out.

What does he say, how can he throw across the first rope, is there a plank he must set down first, to span this gap that still howls with the abyss?

Do you know-

He's filled himself with the texts of a thousand years, and he still has no words for what it is to kneel on the floor beyond a brother, listening to the ash of this third and final death.

Kol pops back up and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, propping his chin in his hands, and he looks up so mischievously- he never did let the centuries weight down his childhood until all the play went from his years, he always carried with him a quip to soften a blow, a rhyme to clear the air, and if ever he abandoned you for the brother and sister he had to court, he's sorry, little brother.

He never did get the hang of this contriteness thing.

So he left it for too long, he waited until you breathed your last send-off to the tomb, as monsters are not supposed to do, and what had his guilt to do, but to flourish as untended remorse will, to sprout limbs, to grow lungs, to breathe with its own lips and to take up residence until it is no longer merely a tenant but a companion whose resentment of the ignored wields itself like a blade, and buries itself in the guts of innocent girls?

The loss of one love is very often like the loss of all.

He clasps his hands behind his back.

Perhaps you do not know this, little brother, but it's not always a stance to poke a bit of fun at this etiquette of the murderer.

Sometimes he just does not know what to do with his bloody hands.

"Congratulations on Caroline, by the way, Nik. I didn't think you'd ever run her to ground. I mean, she did see me at the bar, remember? I thought she'd never get over it."

He looks down with just a little smile, keeping his hands behind his back. "Well, death certainly hasn't instilled anything in the way of humbleness, now has it?"

"If I came back modest, would you even recognize me? You did shut me away in a coffin for almost a century, after all. The years smudge up memories a bit. Although who can forget a face like this?"

He never did say it, he can to this day hardly work it past his tongue, because what does a monster gain with apologies, not respect, not fear, power, obedience, none of the things which are supposed to be the only fuel by which he makes his way in this world, but you died, little brother, it took him like a shot, he was once peeled open by a cannon that did not hurt half so bloody much.

"I'm sorry," he blurts out.

Kol cocks his head.

"For everything I did to you. For everything…any of us did to you." He darts his tongue out to nervously taste his lips. "It wasn't a send-off befitting a Mikaelson, was it?"

His little brother's face suddenly creases without humor, quite a pained thing, it looks to be, and then he bows his head and he runs one hand over the back of his neck, fingers shaking.

He looks back up with the same smile. "It's ironic, isn't it?" He laces his hands together and points upward, keeping his fingers close to his nose. "You're the one who at least actually put your head over my grave and spit out a little grief. And you're the one apologizing." He wrinkles his nose, works his throat, looks down to the space between his boots.

"Nik," he says in a voice far too small for a clown. "Did the rest of them really hate me that much?"

He lowers himself to eye level with his brother, squatting on his heels.

He touches his fingers very gently to the brow of this boy who always followed along though he sometimes cared not upon what he trod, and he pushes his words as best he can from his thickly-clotted throat. "Of course not."

"Then why didn't they care?"

You will find that there are some things even beyond the words of linguists.

So he leans his forehead against his brother's own, and then he lifts his chin, and he fixes himself a handhold in the shoulders of his brother's shirt, and he pulls him into something that will have to do but is not close enough, and for whom the embrace is meant he is not quite sure, but they both bury themselves in it, Kol's face against his neck, his nose in Kol's hair.

He can't remember the last time Nik hugged him like this.

1045, he thinks.

They were all still somewhat human, he hadn't yet got over Mother, and there was this woman, about her age, soft eyes, softer hair, and as he ate her, he thought, do you have a son?

Does he love you very much?

And then he just bloody lost it.

Bekah and 'Lijah pried the woman gently away and took her quietly off, but it was Nik who sat down in the mud next to him, who put his arms round his shoulders and his chin on his head.

It was sort of surreal, being comforted by his mother's murderer.

But you did a good job, Nik, do you know that?

He understands that kindness was only a bit of a chink for Father to slip his fingers inside, that to show your heart is to flash your heel, but he could have used a bit more of this, just a time or two over the centuries, just when he was most empty of any confidence that if he needed a bit of a post on which to lean his shoulder he had just to tilt himself into his brother.

But it's all right.

He died.

He met a witch.

One day he'll tell you all about the last.

Bitterness is not so easily smoothed over, you don't let go all your resentments in one pious gush, but you would know better than most, Nik, about the shouldering aside of all the paler emotions in the wake of this one very bright beacon of a feeling.

So just sit with him a while, brother.

He hasn't the stomach for any solitude right now.

"What are you doing here, Tyler?" she asks, lifting one hand to the pulse beating itself up out of her throat.

He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head lowered against the rain. "I was going to ask you the same thing, but I guess now I don't need to. I came down here to see what you were doing, because what Damon told me when I went back to Mystic Falls for you had to be a bunch of bullshit- Caroline screwing Klaus? That's a load of crap. She would never betray her friends like that. That's what I told him. That's what I was so sure of, Care."

She holds the phone in her very numb hand.

"But I guess I was wrong about you and your standards. And your morals. And any little self-righteous, friends-first bullshit stance you've ever taken," he says bitterly, and then he turns on his heel and he stalks back down the street away from her, shoulders knotted beneath his jacket.

She creeps into the Mikaelson mansion on her tiptoes, but why exactly she sneaks in on an assassin's footsteps she is not sure, because from three freaking blocks down the way you can hear the jangling of the piano and what sounds like the dirge of a cat with its feet put to the blender, and to this chaos all other sounds are lost even to the ears of monsters.

Rebekah is leaning against the shattered banister at the base of the stairs, her head cocked.

"What happened here? And what the hell is that noise?"

"Our brother Kol's back. He's a bit put out with Elijah. And me," she says softly, and then the haughtiness returns to her voice, and she clears her throat to inject it with just the right amount of bitch. "That would be the sound of the two idiots' drunken carousing."

"Is that Klaus singing?"

"If you can call it that. You won't hear it very often, thank God. He has to be very drunk; I've only ever seen Kol stir him up like this. They drink a lot of bourbon, break some things, shout nasty sea shanties at the tops of their lungs, and think they're just absolutely hilarious, while the rest of us pray for sudden deafness."

She feels her face relax just a little from the shock that has frozen her cheeks and her lips, because he curled up next to her so lost, on that bed where he didn't know how to grieve, and if he has committed more than enough sins to justify sorrow, it still gave her a boot to the chest, to watch him wrestle this very human sadness for his brother who was loved and lost too soon, as are all family and friends born to creatures with centuries in anchors around their ankles.

He sounds horrible.

He sounds happy.

She would have told you once upon a time that stories are for heroes, that monsters are to be vanquished, that what counts is not the dragon guarding its tower but the princess locked away in her prison, that beasts are for swords and witches for river barrels.

She would have told you that.

But the glass slipper doesn't fit her anymore, you know?

She grew claws and she sprouted teeth and what lurks beneath the skin of a girl is the kind of hide that does not belong in the archives of happily-ever-afters, but sometimes there are stories to be had in all the spaces between scales.

So what she does, as she stands at the base of these stairs listening to this monster who bore his brother's loss just like any human with his noble mission and his pure white steed, is she folds her hands together and she presses them back against her lips, and she smiles behind this little shield, because maybe she shed her own happily-ever-after when she died alone and gasping beneath her pillow, but she didn't lose everything to bloodlust and birthdays.

She loves him, and he's happy.

You who have glutted yourself on the parables of princes will never believe it of the guarders of the gates, but it's enough, you know?

Even for a monster.

"Are you going to go up there?" Rebekah asks, turning to look over her shoulder.

"No way. I don't want any up-close-and-personal exposure to that," she says with the smile that has always gotten her through, and then she pivots on her heel and she makes her way back out into the rain where she stands for a very long time, staring down at her phone.

Bonnie.

She's not going to say she's not glad for him.

But couldn't you have snuck your way through?

Please?

She's only got one friend left, you know, and God that is so seriously selfish of her, to make your death about her own pain and her sleepless staring nights, because what about all that time you forfeited when she will go on to never age a day in Egyptian sands or Irish fogs, what about the children and the grandchildren you would have loved all the way to their premature demises of carefully-cultivated moss and stone, but she can't help it, Bon.

There's a hole.

She'll probably never fill it.

But up, forward, out, right?

When you have set before you a million, gazillion years, you do not shackle yourself to years past and griefs that are meant to grow stale, you keep your chin up, your feet moving, your head straight, and you just forge onward.

So she stares down at her phone and with a sudden dart of her thumb she deletes your contact with eyes that she is just positive are blinded by rain, and then with a little hiccup she smears mascara across her cheeks with the sleeve of her jacket, and she doesn't mean for it to happen, it's just that she's so lonely, a blood bag is not company, an alleyway cat not a conversationalist, so she sits on a bench next to a man in homeless rags, and she tells him about her friend Bonnie, who made her a charm bracelet in fourth grade, who wore it all through sixth, who loved hard, who deserved more, and then she sets her teeth upon him and she drinks until she forgets and he dies.

She's sorry, afterward.

Is that how it's going to be, Mommy?

She will spend her centuries endlessly apologizing, until one day she does not.

She peeks in on her brothers when the house has at last fallen silent, and for a moment she can only stand in the doorway, watching them.

Kol has got his arm flung over Nik's back, his mouth open on a snore.

Nik is drooling into his hair.

Her brothers: the most feared supernatural creatures in all of creation.

She won't tell you that she feels a pang like a mother's in her very barren body, that Kol's stupid bloody face sets off a spark to burn her throat, to water her eyes, that if she could slide between them both, rest her head on Nik's chest, roll over to burrow her nose against Kol's, she might sleep her first undisturbed slumber in years.

For what would she be, without her denials and her claws?

But she takes the blanket bunched up at their feet, and though they do not need it, she pulls it up over them both, she very carefully smoothes a piece of hair from Kol's eyes and she pats down a wayward curl of Nik's, and for a few moments she just sits at the end of their bed, consoling herself with the movements of their chests.

Tyler's appearance is just one brief blot in this routine she carefully schedules each day, now you see it, now you don't, and so she carries on like it never happened, like he did not shrink her down half a shamed foot with only his eyes, she keeps her smile perky, her demands sharp, she goes from hotel to hotel and shop to shop with her notes organized, her hair perfect, until one day Fate, like the bitch always does just when you are running so freaking smoothly Proactiv commercials could so totally not Photoshop you anymore flawless, rears up to backhand her nasty slut hand across her face.

She is midway through compelling Dan Keats when the door jingles behind her, inhales a blast of southern December, clicks itself shut once more.

"Caroline, right?" a voice calls out behind her.

"And I wasn't here, and you have never heard the name Klaus before, you spent all day balancing your checkbook or counting your receipts or whatever people do when they can't magically sweet talk people into giving them their most expensive and prettiest underwear. Ok?"

She turns around slowly.

"Yeah, that's Klaus' little bitch."

"Excuse me? If anything, he's my little bitch. Who are you? Not that I really care. I just need a name, for the condolences I'm going to have to send to your family." She smiles fakely, and crosses her arms.

The door jingles again, and into the nearly-empty lobby spill three more men in winter jackets, their hearts beating the familiar accelerated tattoo of the monster, and now in her veins her blood goes to ice, her heart flips over and dies a second death, her mean-girl bravado ties itself into knots inside her throat.

"Told you I saw her turn in here. Marcel thought she might be pulling shit like this. Don't kill her; might as well find out what she knows before we take her back to him," the man nearest the door says, and then in an instant he is before her, his hand around her neck, his superior strength bearing her back against the desk Dan cowers behind with a startled cry, wood digging into her spine, papers skittering and slipping beneath her frantically groping hands, the floor leaving her toes, the ceiling going indistinct, everything thundering through her, blood, nerves, adrenaline, oh God, if she could just get a little leverage-

There is a sudden shape behind the man, a smudge of black she does not understand, and then for just a second his fingers loosen, the ceiling clears, she feels beneath her flailing toes the reassuring hint of the floor tiles.

A hand makes its way back out of the man's jacket pocket and with a fancy flourish spins the gun it unearths butt-first toward her. "Oh, look what I found. Do you want it, darling?"

The hand at her throat becomes a vise once more, heaves her up, scatters the papers, blurs the ceiling, lifts her straining toes beyond this one little reassuring anchor of lemon-scented tile, telescopes the gun into this one little teeny dot upon this island of a palm, so freaking far away, but she pushes off the desk, she lurches her hand vaguely in the direction of this gleaming metal she can smell if not quite see, she gets her fingers around the handle, fumbles the barrel into his stomach, pulls the trigger twice.

She drops to the floor wheezing.

"Very good, darling," the voice tells her, and then a pair of hands on her shoulders turns her gently toward the next, and she raises the gun in front of her still-swimming eyes, she fires in that blind panic of the soldier with the machine guns rattling over his head and the bombs raining gas because oh God she can't see her throat is still compressed, her sweat ruins her aim, there is someone still behind her-

An arm loops her throat, a chest presses her back, and she hammers back with her elbow, she thrusts her head into what she hopes is a nose and is only a chin, but it snaps him back anyway, it staggers him just long enough off balance that with her orientation returning in bright white stars she spins, and she puts the barrel to his head, she spreads him in a hot red shower all over the formerly white wall, her breath rattling in her throat.

Kol Mikaelson grabs the outstretched wrist of the man aiming his own gun at her, flips him easily, catches his gun, crushes his head, looks up with a smile that is so totally freakily reminiscent of his brother. "Give me your gun."

"What?"

"Toss me your gun, darling," he says, and holds out his hand.

She lobs it to him as the final two charge him from the sides, and with a wink he crosses one arm over the other, and he fires both pistols simultaneously, his eyes never leaving hers, and now with a bullet to either head both men jerk and topple backward, smoking from the forehead.

"I'm amazing. You just don't see that every day."

She stands for a moment regaining her breath as he lowers the guns, one hand to her chest, the other to her forehead, and does every Mikaelson have to be such a big stupid smug look-at-me-look-at-me jerk?

"Hello!" she snaps. "You couldn't have helped me a little earlier?"

"Now why would I want to do that? Then I'd have to go back home and tell Nik that you need me to step in and sweep you off your damsel feet, and then he'll lock you in a tower because damsels are not supposed to be let out into the light -they're very delicate, you know- which would be quite a shame, because I like you. You're very mean to him. Also, if I'd stepped in earlier, I wouldn't have had two guns, and while you still would have been very impressed with me, you would have missed out on that. Which would have been a shame."

"What are you even doing here? I don't even know you."

"I followed you. The stalker doesn't fall far from the family tree. And I'll introduce myself the same way I do every morning to my looking glass: Mirror, mirror on the wall, Kol is the handsomest of them all. That's the most important place to start, isn't it? Anyway, darling, Kol Mikaelson, the brother you would have fallen for if we'd met first. As it is, you're probably still going to have to put up quite a struggle to resist me, but for both our sakes, I think it's best if you do. Nik doesn't share very well. I'm sure you've noticed." He smiles amicably, and points one of the guns butt-first at her. "You haven't been around the house very much, since I've been back. I think you and I need some time to chat."

He takes Caroline Forbes to a pub down the street, and he smiles as he sets foot inside, because it's not the same one, of course, that one's long cocked up its toes and gone to its dignified death beneath the foundations of sturdier shacks, but it's quite nice, very traditional.

He frequented a pub like this quite a lot, back in 1915.

He wondered, when he first rose from his second death and he shook off the arthritis of a centurial sleep, what happened to the boy he left behind in a church, if ever he made it across the sea to his wet green homeland, if he found himself on the wrong end of a hunter's stake, where he moved on to, who he fell hard for, if in 97 years he managed to brush off that brief dalliance of his early years.

Death takes a bit of the edge off a connection like that, but he took quite a long time, to loosen his hold on his memories of those several long months as he drifted about in his own mind, knocking round in the dark

Then he supposes 'dalliance' isn't quite the right word at all, now is it?

He always has to let go the ones to whom he is most attached.

He's getting rather tired of that.

Caroline smiles her way through the bartender's request for ID, her pupils wide, takes whatever swill it is he slops into her glass, and makes her way toward one of the booths in the back, slapping aside a drunk's too-friendly hand.

He slides in across from her.

"Does Klaus know you're here?" she wants to know, leaving the drink untouched on the table.

"Nik doesn't have anything to do with this. I'm not on his leash."

"So…why did you want to talk to me?"

"What privileged white male of the twenty-first century wouldn't use his imbalanced power dynamic to force his attentions on a pretty young woman?" He smiles and laces his hands on the table. "I've been reading something called 'tumblr' lately."

"So you stalked me for…however long you've been following me, so you could hit on me? Your brother will put you back on the Other Side himself."

"Nik won't do anything permanent to me. He just got me back. You'll learn very quickly that everyone wants to keep me around."

That's not true, of course, darling, but he does a very good impression of it, doesn't he?

He leans intimately forward.

Caroline slides herself just a little bit back.

"Your friend Bonnie got me out. Did Nik tell you that?"

She clears her throat, and looks down for a very long time at the hands she folds between them. "Yeah. He did."

He doesn't know exactly where to start.

He just wanted-

He wanted someone who knew her too.

But now, isn't it funny, he's not even sure what to say.

That doesn't happen to him very often.

"Can I ask you something?" she says, looking up from her hands to train her eyes a bit too steadily on his face. "Was she…was she ok? I mean, I'm not going to ask if she was happy, she's dead, but did she…did you talk to her a lot- did she find Jeremy, or her grams, or anyone? Was she lonely?"

Actually, darling, you might be surprised to know that she had one constant companion, that he rarely left her side, that if she spent most of her time annoyed at least she was not alone.

You wouldn't know it by looking at him, would you?

That he tucks away quite a lot beneath his smirk? That he was dead, he let some of it hang loose, he didn't mind his feelings nearly so well as he should have, because what he forgot to remember is how very permanent he is, and perhaps he thought that was over, perhaps he discovered at last something to strike him down, to crumble him alongside stricken mountains and flood-swept villages, perhaps he was at last to lay his head to rest in that grave he and Nik dug once a very long time ago, for a boy who never got his final rites, but he is forever, darling, truly.

His loves, his laughs, his links.

He will never make them last.

"She wasn't lonely."

Caroline smiles, her eyes shiny. "So she sent you back, in place of Mikael?"

"Not really. Some of the witches here were trying to resurrect Mikael through her, to force her to drop the veil and let him through. She had to seal it off to keep him on the Other Side. She could have sealed it off with me there; I think she just wanted to get rid of me. Your friend has very bad taste," he says with a smile he does not mean.

"Wait- she just…sent you back? It wasn't part of the spell?"

"No. Why?"

"Because Bonnie hates vampires! And you are like the absolute worst of them- she wouldn't inflict you on a whole innocent population just to get rid of you." She unhinges her jaw, and he quite sees the appeal of pretty little Caroline, if you know what he means, Nik. "Oh my God! Did you two do something?"

"What kind of something? Be very specific. Maybe draw on an experience or two of your own."

"Eww. But oh my God, you had a thing with her, didn't you? With Bonnie? Oh my God, I have got to tell Elena," she blurts out, and then she stops herself, and a little spasm runs itself through her face, and just that suddenly, her amusements are over.

He swallows down the rather large something that has got itself stuck in his throat. "You don't think she would have sent me back?"

"No. Not just because you annoyed her. Bonnie would have kept you there, you know, where it was safest for the human population at large."

"Do you think she liked me?" Kol asks her with such a stricken look on his face, and seriously just freaking help her, because are you all this human, beneath your hides?

She doesn't need any more of the Original family inching its way underneath her skin.

But she makes her voice into something very gentle, when she replies. "I think she probably must have."

Tim is leaning across Klaus' desk when she barges loudly inside one afternoon, both their eyes on some paper, Klaus barely looking up as he drags his finger through the curve of a road, Tim not even casting a look back over his shoulder, twirling his stupid little hat on one hand, his other just way too seriously close to Klaus' own, his sleeves rolled up to reveal two forearms that might actually be kind of nice, if he weren't a two-faced weasly little slutbag of a man-stealer.

She drops right into Klaus' lap, and hooks one arm around his neck, lowering the other to cup his knee possessively.

"Caroline," he says, and do you want to know who that little so-happy-to-see-you-light-of-my-black-and-shriveled-soul-every-minute-is-just-a-countdown-to-the-next-time-we-touch tone of his is for?

Not you.

Tim stands up.

She cuts him a frosty look.

"He's got three bodyguards; one human, two vampires. Car's not armored."

"Well, even an armored car shouldn't be much of a hindrance, to our kind. Does make it a touch easier, though," Klaus replies.

"Hurts like a fookin'-" Tim shifts his eyes over to her and clears his throat. "Sorry."

"Now, see- isn't that true appreciation for a lady? You just don't get manners like this very often anymore, Caroline." He drops a hand to the one she has clamped around his knee, and laces their fingers together. "If you corner him in this alley behind Big Daddy's-"

"Big Daddy's?" she interrupts, arching an eyebrow.

"It's a strip club, love. A favorite with the mayor of this fair city. We're kidnapping him tonight."

"What?"

"He's under Marcel's control," Tim says quietly.

Klaus lifts her hand to kiss her wrist. "Speaking of Marcel, sweetheart, anymore run-ins with over-friendly minions of his?"

"Nope. Smooth sailing today."

"Good. I wouldn't want to have to get my hands dirty, ripping off heads."

"You love getting your hands dirty."

"Only with certain favorite nubile blonde vampires," he says, flashing his dimples. "Anyway, Tim- you block that alleyway and you ought to be able to take him without much of a fuss. Witnesses should be minimal. And eliminated, of course. He always parks out back of the club; there's a 'No Parking' sign precisely where he leaves his car, because of course politicians are never beholden to their own laws."

"The two vamps he's got with him are supposed to be about two and three hundred years old." Tim rubs his chin, gives another spin of his hat.

"All right. Nothing too difficult for you to overcome, then. Take Jason and Charise with you. I've got Mark on a bit of reconnaissance tonight, so I'm afraid he won't be able to make the party. It should be quite manageable, between the three of you. Use the guns. We wouldn't want Marcel to get any ideas about the werewolves suddenly throwing down their arms. Get him to the Blue Nile. We'll let him stew for a bit, while Marcel turns his eye elsewhere. He's got quite a lot of compulsion to be put through, anyway. It's going to take a while, for me to both extract and to implant information. He's not going to find it terribly pleasant, I'm afraid."

"He'll be there," Tim says, and flips his hat back up onto his head.

"I know he will. Have fun, Tim."

"Yeah," Tim replies shortly, and he cuts one last look to her and then he vanishes into the hall, turning down his sleeves as he goes.

"Does he do that just for you, or something?"

"What?"

"Roll up his sleeves so his rippling, thieving slut forearms are on display for all to enjoy? And by that I mean you."

Klaus presses his lips to her wrist again, laughing against it. "He's just a fidgety little thing, Caroline. They'll be back up before he reaches the door." He leans in to touch his forehead to her own, his dimples deepening. "But if you wanted to do something about perhaps, marking your property…"

"Oh really? Like what?" she asks innocently as he slides a hand up along her thigh, underneath her skirt.

"I'll let your imagination fill in the blanks."

"You don't want to do that."

"Oh don't I?"

"No. Because you'll wake up with 'Property of Caroline Forbes' tattooed on your forehead."

"Why don't you carve it into my back?" he says right into her ear, and then he slams her down onto the desk, and he licks up both her thighs.

He eases the little Honda he has picked up from some lazy owner on the street corner (6:00 at night on Bourbon St., who in their right fuckin' mind leaves their bleedin' keys in the ignition) right in behind the mayor's SUV with its white blaze of governmental plates, and he kills the engine.

In the backseat, Charise and Jason lay themselves down side by side, and set to work screwing their suppressors onto their pistols.

He slams the door.

"You can't park there," the cop approaching at a jog calls out to him, and he halts the man with a pat on his shoulder and a brief look into his eyes, and the officer walks away in a glaze, ticket book creeping back into his pocket.

He exhales one thin white breath into the sky.

Nice night.

The bloodiest ones always are.

Bourbon St. crunches beneath his boots, each of his steps going off like a gunshot, this sandwich of ice and pavement giving beneath his feet at last, he never had that on the Other Side you know, bit of a novelty, and what a jab the sky gives him with its one-two of cold breeze and thin snowflake, it's actually quite nice, he could pass a whole night in it.

But.

Places to be, things to see.

Innocents to murder.

You know how it goes, don't you, darling?

Two humans on his right, just beyond the alleyway, drunk, overly-perfumed, Christ on a cross, have you got to fuckin' bathe in that shit; one vampire, not far behind them, their boots like gunshots, some sort of jacket flapping in the breeze; a surge of techno from the ttity club, the squealing of the dancer's hands round the pole, all right, deep breath, boyo, steady on the gun, you remember Irish fields to the belly, the distant stars of the British artillery, the dust of rattling tenders-

This isn't fuckin' nothing.

He takes a deep breath.

He shuts his eyes, just for a moment, and then he looks over his shoulder from where he has crammed all 6' 3" of himself across passenger and driver's seat, his knees bent, his boots propped against the driver's door, pistol sweaty in his hand, cap lost somewhere down the side of the seat, the breathing of three monsters in this tiny cramped space thunderous as the bass of the club vibrating just three feet away.

Jason lifts his eyebrow.

Charise fiddles with her suppressor.

He flicks his eyes back to the roof of the car.

Big Daddy's.

That's quite a moniker.

He'll have to check it out sometime.

He's sure you haven't the slightest idea of what 'big' truly is, darlings.

He puts his hands in his pockets, and he does not hunch his shoulders against the few bits of snow that land themselves on his back, he actually cozies right up to this wet winter sensation, because you just don't fire off the nerves like that, when you're dead, and he walks past this dazzling house of sin with just a little side glance of his eyes.

Someone's going to have themselves quite the parking ticket on their hands when they're done with all their nightly aberrations.

He clicks the pocket watch open against his chest and cranes his neck down to look at it.

He licks his lips.

His Ma would have him cross himself, but he's pretty sure he long ago forfeited the rights to his Catholic comforts, because what doors are there open to the footsteps of monsters, Ma?

Jason shifts.

Charise gives her magazine a final tap to seat it.

The back door opens.

He slips between a stumbling human couple, cuts through an empty parking garage, blurs himself one block over, another up, all the way to the 700th section of Bourbon, to the shop outlined in festive red lights.

He gives the sign a little tap with his fingers as he lets himself in through the door, and what a skip there is in his step, darling.

He kicks open the door, blurs himself up onto the top of the car, shoots the human, wounds the mayor, flips himself back over the side of the Honda and onto the pavement as Charise sits up, flings open the door, spits two quiet rounds into the chest of the first vampire.

"Shit!" she snaps. "Tim!"

There is another officer across the street, his cruiser drawn to an abrupt halt, his lights going, one hand on his gun as he sprints across the walkway, and with an under-the-breath "Fuck!" he shoots the man between the eyes and watches him taken off his feet by this sudden death, his pistol clattering in the street. "Fuck me. Where's the mayor?"

"Second guard took off with him," Jason says, leaning his hip back against the open back door of the Honda.

He presses the heel of his hand into his eyes. "Fuck. All right, Jason, you stay behind, compel any more officers who show up, make sure they just so happen to mix up our faces with someone else's; Charise, you take that side of the street, cover the rest of the block, I'll go up to the 600 addresses, then hit the 700 block. You finish up here, and if you don't find anything, get down to the 400s."

"Somebody's getting killed for this," she mutters sourly.

"Not if we run him down," he says, and slips his gun into the pocket of his vest.

Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo is quite cozy, if you ask him.

Needs a bit more warmth to it, though. Shame on those little slithers of brisk December air, making their way in through the cracks of the shutters and the maw of the door.

"Are you Christine?" he asks the woman behind the counter, who looks up from her magazine with a polite smile.

"Yeah. Can I help you find something?"

Well it's not really a what, it's a who, but thank you very much, darling, for your good manners. You just don't find those much anymore, do you know what he means?

He bounces the woman's face off the counter, yanks her over it and onto the floor, takes the lighter from his pocket and sets it to the display of voodoo dolls dangling from the wall behind the register.

He thrusts his hand inside her chest to the wrist, and pins her to the floor. "Not a single hint of a spell, darling, or I pop your heart right out of your chest. I need you to put me in touch with a friend from the Other Side."

He catches the scent of spilled blood and human sweat just five buildings up, and he leaps nimbly onto an alleyway dumpster, runs up the wall of the building it lies flushe against, swings himself over the lip of the roof and onto the tile, to track it from above.

"I can't!" she screams.

"Of course you can, darling. It's not like you have a shop to look after anymore, do you? Anyway, this isn't even terribly taxing; you and your friends have already done it once, so all I need you to do is reach across the veil and poke yourselves through to Bonnie Bennett."

"We can't do that anymore!" the woman sobs, trying to control her breaths, to keep her lips down out of the smoke. "Something's wrong with the veil."

"I know. I was there. She sealed it off."

"Well we can't get through anymore. We tried. We've been trying to resurrect Mikael; we can't even talk to our ancestors, any of them. We can't talk to any of the witches on the Other Side."

"You're not telling me I pinched my brother's file on you for nothing, are you?"

"I can't help you. Just let me go," she wails, her tears shining on her cheeks.

"All right. How about I make a deal with you."

He drags her to the doorway, her heart in one hand, his lighter in the other.

He keeps himself at a light jog as he runs, pacing himself just slightly off the mayor and his guard, leaping from one rooftop to the next, timing his footsteps with the streaming of the shoppers, matching breath to step, step to breath, vest flapping around his ribs, snow stinging through his sleeves, gun bouncing in his pocket.

"All right, here we go."

He shoulders open the door of the shop to the left of the Voodoo House, jerks her in behind him to the screams of all the patrons, blood black on her chin and sticky on her breasts, lighter still in his hand, and now he sets fire to the large Christmas tree at the front of the store, topples it with a kick into the backs of stampeding customers, heaves onto this flaming decoration a piece from the wicker patio furniture display to his left, calls through the open door to the man who brakes with screeching tires and hanging mouth in the street outside.

"Could you drive your truck up here? Yes, just bump it up onto the sidewalk and through the door here, thank you, darling. We wouldn't want anyone leaving the party prematurely."

He yanks the screaming witch out of the way.

The man crashes through the entryway with a terrific bang and slumps over at his wheel.

The mayor stops to take a sip from the wrist of his protector.

He leaps the edge of the roof.

"I wonder how much of the French Quarter I'm going to have to destroy? What do you think?"

He kicks in another door. "What shall we do here?"

The owner ducks down behind his counter, comes up holding a shotgun, reels back as this weapon is wrenched from his hands, takes two barrels straight to the face.

Oh well.

He wasn't very handsome anyway.

You go in low first, take him by surprise, put a boot through his escape, a permanent cripple for the human, a temporary set-back for the monster, but for both are they sent to their knees, and now with the bodyguard's leg in shards, he wrenches his head back by the hair, shoves his barrel in hard enough to chip the man's teeth, fires one stifled round through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.

He grabs the mayor by the arm.

"Still nothing, darling? You know how to stop this."

"I can't! Please, just stop! We can't do anything. The veil's gone- we can't even feel it anymore. It's not that we can't just take it down, if we're not from the Bennett line, we can't even sense it anymore. There's no communicating with the spirits. There's no bringing anyone back, not anymore. We're completely shut off from the Other Side."

He feels one sharp pang, but one is all you need, isn't it, when it reaches this far down inside?

Bonnie.

What have you done? Didn't you want to leave for yourself even one small gap?

Couldn't you have told him, before you sealed yourself off to this fate of the tomb, what you were going to do, that it cannot be taken back, that if ever he wants to see you once again, he must lay down in his fourth and final grave and take another stake to the back while on this side of the living there is at least one brother who loves him yet, who will cry to see him go?

"I think you're not trying hard enough," he says thickly as the sirens begin to swell in the streets.

Klaus leaves her in the bed as his phone begins to ring from the dresser, planting three last kisses on her chin, her neck, her shoulder and rising with his jeans still unbuttoned, she in just her panties, both of them slick with satiation.

"What?" he says into the receiver, doing up his pants one-handed. "And did you see who it was? Did you recognize him?"

"No," she hears Tim say as she props herself up against the pillows, pulling her curls down over her breasts.

He flicks his eyes back toward her, and rubs a hand down the three-day growth on his chin. "All right. I'll take care of it."

He hangs up. "Elijah!" he calls into the hall, tossing her his shirt as he turns to block the doorway with his shoulders, stretching himself out to fill the whole thing, the muscles in his back knotting beneath his healing scratches. "Where is Kol, brother?"

He throws the witch heartless into the arms of the first responders, his hand glistening with its leftovers.

He crushes it with a smile and pours its sludge between his fingers.

They swarm round behind the open doors of their cars, to take their cover carefully, to prepare their aim, to prime their courage, to make their silent peace.

He wonders-

Is that what she did, while she stood facing him with her smile just a bit brighter than his own, her fingers shaking where they lay, her shoulders set against her fate?

"Put your hands in the air!"

Actually, he doesn't think so.

That's not very interesting, is it?

Who wants the easy resolution, after all, darlings, your stories tied up in pretty ribbons and string? Did you ever clap that book to your heart and watch with lover's eyes it gather dust and time on your shelf?

He didn't think so.

"Niklaus, I will settle this."

"He hasn't been back a bloody week-"

"I said I'll take care of it, brother. Without the complications your presence would likely inflict on the Quarter."

They stare one another down for a very long charged moment, the blood thundering between them all.

She hugs Klaus' shirt around her ribs, rocks nervously up onto her toes, settles back down on her heels.

"Niklaus."

He looks back over his shoulder to find her eyes, to hold them fast, to sigh his reluctant resignation. "Fine, Elijah. Go corral our brother. And then bring him back here for a little chat, about the rules we follow in my city."

They open fire.

He's stood before a lot of onslaughts such as these.

Do you think these little stingers will put him on his knees before you, that like all other dissidents he will fall to your authority, to lie in a puddle of your red superiority?

He smiles.

He walks casually, with his hands in his pockets, his jacket collecting punctures, his chest leaking, his cheeks pockmarked, but do you know, darlings- he's got a lot of holes in him.

He always survives them.

In fact, not long ago, an uppity human like yourselves put him away in the ground for what seemed an eternity, and there he lay pinned by a witch whose eyes sometimes promised him more, and yet here he stands.

Isn't that a nice story?

This one's not going to be quite so pretty.

You will shit yourself as it ends.

You will lie beside your partner with your head in his lap as he was not allowed to seek comfort in his own brother, and you may get a few final words, as he did not, and a community will mourn, as all communities lament their public defenders, but you will shit yourself.

Isn't that a way to close out your one pitiful life, in a puddle of blood and bowel?

He leaps up onto the hood of the first cruiser.

He wrenches the shotgun from the hands of the officer who tips himself onto his back to realign his aim, and he blows the man's face to pieces against his pale-cheeked partner, and now as this man swings his pistol in one last panicked effort, he clubs him with the butt of the shotgun, pins him back against the pavement, bends down to empty his throat in one swift strike.

Someone screams, the sirens or the playthings, he is not sure, everything is merely background noise, he filters it all through his only half-listening ears as he cuts a swathe through New Orleans' finest, one witch dead behind him, another below him (or is it to the side of him- he never was precisely sure of the proportions of this other dimension, up is down, down is up, who cares, darling, you're dead).

You're dead.

And he is not.

He snaps a uniformed arm, spits the forehead of this screaming officer on the shiny hood ornament of his car, takes a bullet to the heart, another to the throat, shrugs these off as he does so many other things you will never be able to flinch so neatly aside, tosses these toys through the air to meet their noisy ends in the windows of nearby shops.

Do you know, he thinks-

He thinks he thought there was always going to come a day when he fostered within himself a bit of hope.

Things just last, Bonnie- not sands or seas or even the shores they beat upon, but when the next crisis of nature wipes from the planet the humans and their ant hives, there will still be him.

And you.

For a while, you were permanent right alongside him.

But these men aren't.

He breaks the spine of one, severs the head of another, dodges the bullet of this last stander with her shaking hands and her fruitless cries for back-up, breaks each of her wrists, kicks her chin so hard it vomits bits of bone and teeth as she flies.

He slams her head in the door of the cruiser she tries to take as her refuge.

All around him the shops empty out and the streets fill with the stumbling panic of beasts, and just listen to their bleating- do you see why he eats them?

Do you drop a bit of damp grief over the stupidity of cows shuffling along to their slaughter?

He hears the screeching of more tires, rising sirens, the crackling of Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo, his blood beating in his ears, the officer's creeping in the streets, and he waits patiently, standing in the lights of the cars, checking the magazine of the Glock he pulls from the holster of the nearest body.

He fires one rapid stream into the windshield of that first white nose flying to the rescue, and the car veers through pedestrians, past a fire hydrant, into the window of the nearest shop.

He blurs himself all the way over to the trunk, hops up onto it, slides himself over the roof and down onto the hood, fires two into the head of the officer who throws wide the passenger door and tries to crawl to safety.

The driver slithers awkwardly from his seat, coughing blood, his hand fumbling with the door, his panic positively delicious.

He tears the door from its hinges.

He drops his fangs, and for a moment he just listens to the man scream and piss and cry.

The noisiest ones are always the most fun.

He picks him up by the collar of his uniform and thrusts his neck down neatly onto the last clinging shards of the shattered window, leaving him to bubble his last breaths and shit his final meals, the patrons screaming from their tables.

There are three toward the front, two men, one woman, isn't that kinky, humans are such hungry things, aren't they, and into each of them he empties the last of his magazine.

Do you want to know why?

Why not?

That's all.

Why not.

You are all whims, you'll never last, do you know who's always still going to be here- him, not you, it will always just be him, that's the always and forever, not brotherhood or bonds or sisters with their claws and sharpened tongues, just some spry old man and his time, he bloody knows that, Bonnie.

He knows that.

He thought he did.

But he felt that one very sharp pang, all the way through him.

"Kol," Elijah says from behind him, and the pang is sharper still, because do you know who wept for him?

Nik.

That's all.

Nik, and maybe a girl who sent him back, who did not pry him free but gently let him go, stinging as she let loose both their fingers?

Maybe?

"What is the reason for this, Kol?" his brother wants to know, and he doesn't turn round.

You can keep the cheek in your voice if not in your face.

"What do you mean, Elijah? Don't you think this is funny?"

"No," he says, and the window crunches beneath his brother's shoes. "And neither do you. I am not Niklaus, Kol. My anger does not blind me."

Do you want to know what else blinded Nik, Elijah?

Grief.

You couldn't relate.

He lets the restaurant drain itself of customers.

"What were you hoping to accomplish? To bring her back?"

He does turn now, gun still in his hand, fangs denting his lip, blood catching in his stubble, and there stands his brother, pillar of morality, isn't he, there on the window sill like the angel alighting his perch, flawless suit, hair, face, not a strand of him out of place, here to brush away the spills of his worst and youngest brother.

"Niklaus and Caroline talk nearly as loudly as they…partake in other activities," he says with just the faintest creasing of his face. "You stole one of Niklaus' files. You left a witch dead in the street. You did not put anything past me as a child, brother; you will not do so now."

He wipes his face.

He lets his fangs retract.

"I don't think you'd understand, actually, Elijah," he says, smiling with just his lips. "So piss off."

"Do you think, Kol, that I don't know what it is, to have loved and lost?"

"I don't think you care what it is, for me to have loved and lost. It's just me, after all, isn't it, Elijah? You had Nik. You had Bekah. What were me and Finn, after all, but a bit of extra baggage?"

There is a very silent moment, for a night full of the screams of machine and human throats alike.

"There is a great responsibility on the shoulders of eldest siblings who do not have parents. Sometimes there is no room for their grief. It doesn't mean they do not feel it."

Nik was right, you know.

Big brothers often are.

This eldest sibling of theirs is a man of unspeakable eloquence.

But he didn't expect this.

He's had a lot of practice, holding himself together.

But Elijah looks down at him from his height of the deity, and he looks very much like he means this very human emotion that leaks through just slightly to his voice, and so he sits down on the carpet of this empty room, and he bursts into tears.

You forget what it feels like, after a while, grief.

But you never forget how to do it.

Don't tell Nik?

He was supposed to take it like a man.

That's how he kept up, you know.

"Kol," his brother says gently, and he forgets, sometimes, that Nik is not the only one who used to make of his voice a caress for all the hurts of his youngest siblings.

"I just wanted her back, Elijah."

"And do you think you could have truly been happy, you and this witch? On this side of the veil, where her morality would not have been sieved through her death? Once she saw you in your true element?"

He looks down at the hands he laces between his knees, and hiccups. "Maybe I just thought she deserved to come back. For her."

He's not Nik.

Not everything is about him.

Most things aren't about him, actually.

But you know that, Elijah. You practiced it quite neatly yourself.

"Kol," his brother says even more gently, and he wipes his eyes and he presses the heel of one hand very hard into the socket of his right eye, and he does not look up.

He must have had a very lot pent up in him, perhaps nine hundred years worth, because he sits here for a long time, coughing up all the things that go with grief, all the soggy little pieces of good-bye.

"Let me take you home," his brother says when he has finished at last, and if Elijah has not always loved him as he needed, still his voice is kind, it strikes right home, it tells him here is somewhere to go.

So he wipes his eyes again, and he gets to his feet with his hands in his pockets and his head down to study for one long last moment his boots smudged in blood and snow and glass.

"You won't tell Nik I sniveled like a baby?" he asks, and looks up with a squint of his eyes.

"You were unapologetic and crude as the brother I remember."

"I told a penis joke."

"You told three."

Judge not a man by his six figure suits, for his smile is so much more.

"Well, congratulations, little brother. Not six days home and already you have broken half the French Quarter, like a toy you did not want the rest of us to have. What the hell is your problem?" Klaus snaps as Elijah leads Kol in through the front door, he absolutely unruffled, his suit perfectly pleated, Kol streaked with blood and brain and cinders, his hands in his pockets, his shoulder just a little slumped. "What makes you think you can run rampant round this city, uprooting everything I have-"

"Niklaus," Elijah interrupts smoothly, giving Klaus the kind of look that probably was the final straw for the members of the prom committee, who broke and scattered before her like little fleeing rabbits. "Leave it."

Klaus tilts his head for one long tense moment she feels in her throat and her stomach.

"Fine. Then onto your leash he goes, Elijah. Do not let him loose in my yard again. Do we all understand?" He flashes his dimples and holds out his hands to either side in his best I-am-douche-hear-me-roar stance. "Welcome home, Kol."

Three days later, Louisiana's governor declares a state of emergency in the city of New Orleans, and in floods the army with its guns and sandbags and razor wire.

They watch this unfold live on the gazillion-inch screen in Rebekah's room, Klaus with his hands behind his back and his lips pursed, Stefan leaning against the door frame, Rebekah perched with legs crossed on her bed, Elijah picking lint from his suit.

Kol sprawls in the chair in front of Rebekah's dressing table, his legs over its arm, his hands behind his head, his body slumped in complete relaxation as he swings one foot lazily over the side of this chair that creaks beneath his weight.

"A flare of recent gang activity that resulted in the deaths of nearly a dozen police officers, 51 bystanders, and the destruction of two blocks of the French Quarter after fires from two separate acts of arson spread to nearby buildings is the final straw for beleaguered law enforcement who have been unable to keep on top of a staggering case load from the recent increase in violence that has continued to rock the city for months now. A local curfew is being implemented from the hours of midnight until five a.m.; anyone out during this time will be subject to questioning and must have valid picture I.D. on them at all times. Governor Jindal asks that all citizens cooperate until the situation has been contained, and to report any suspicious activity immediately to the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, which will function temporarily as military HQ until this state of emergency has been suspended. We will keep you informed as we receive updates."

Klaus drags his eyes very slowly from the screen to his brother, lifting one hand to scrub the scruff of beard just coming in across his chin.

Kol holds his hands out to either side with a smile. "Whoops."

"I should have left him daggered. Everything was under control; I had the mayor, I had half Marcel's own people working against him, I was zeroing in on the police chief, on his top three sergeants- and then Kol happens." Klaus undoes the top button of his shirt with an angry jerk.

"Except that you love him, and you missed him," she points out, turning a page in the copy of Death In Venice she has snagged from his shelf. "I'm sorry, but is this boy going to stay, like, fourteen the whole time some creepy old skeez is perving on him from afar? Didn't they have CPS back then? Or, like, the motherly instincts that ping on any gross old jerk who tries to look up your skirt when you're only thirteen and you haven't yet learned that you always, always aim for the crotch so your mom has to step in because she has a gun? Although I guess she really kind of fumbled the whole thing with you. At least this guy's fifty. You're like the same age as dirt." She turns another page.

"Does he comprehend whatsoever the layer of difficulty he's added to every single little act from here on out? I'll have to go around compelling everyone anew, since they're all going to be twitchy -the ones that are still alive, of course, not that he left many of those- and Tim's already lost two from his team after all that chaos. He's not sure precisely what happened, but it sounds as though werewolves had at them while he was escorting the mayor back to the Blue Nile. They wouldn't have been stirred up at all, if Kol's boredom or temper tantrum or whatever the hell that was hadn't brought every single supernatural creature running to-"

"Do you know what you should do?" she interrupts, arching an eyebrow up at him as she flips another page.

He turns around with his shirt only partially unbuttoned, his jaw tight, his eyes taking on that one particularly murdery squint he gets when he is really pissed. "And what's that?"

"Forgive him."

"You're not telling me you approve of his recent shenanigans."

She burrows her toes into the twisted sheets of his bed and looks up with both her eyebrows lifted, book forgotten in her hands. "Yes, actually. In fact, we planned all of it together. I didn't want to tell you- it was supposed to be a surprise. Sometimes you just have to shake things up with a good mass murder, you know? I was in a rut."

He rolls his eyes.

"I'm serious, Klaus. Instead of going all one supreme douche lord on him, why don't you remember that he is your brother, that until last week he was dead, and that you could barely stand that?"

He blows out a sigh and leans forward to set his hands on the bed, to touch his forehead to her own, to stay like that for just a moment with his eyes shut, his shirt gaping, his breath soft against her lips. "Where's your bit of self-righteousness for him? Hasn't he got a lecture to sit through, about the slaughter of innocents, the families who will wear their mourning through Christmas, all the sons who have been left behind?"

She looks down at the book pinned beneath her hands, and she swallows. "I killed somebody the other night. Because I was alone and I just needed somebody to talk to, and you had your brother, and I didn't know where Stefan was, and I just couldn't get what I needed from a blood bag. And then I was hungry, and I just…didn't stop. And that was it. And I didn't feel as bad about it as I thought I would. And that's how it's going to be, isn't it?" she whispers.

He opens his eyes.

He brings one hand to her cheek and he runs his thumb so lightly across the curve of the bone beneath it, feeling his way along like this is the first time, like it is still a gift, and she just-

She's going to keep this, isn't she? When everything else falls from her hands like dust will sieve itself through the fingers of the dead, uncontainable, when her mom can no longer look beyond, he will still stand before her, and he will look at her like he will never be done looking, like forever is not quite long enough, like he will always forgive.

"Everything evolves, Caroline. Your morality is not going to duck that, love."

"I know. But that's what you liked about me, isn't it?" she asks in a voice she did not mean to be so small. "I mean, I'm 'full of light' or some crap like that, right? The paragon of virtue, the do-gooder yin to balance your puppy-kicking yang?"

His dimples dig themselves so deep she can tell he is trying not to laugh. "Sweetheart, you tried to strangle Bekah with the little snowflake lights you insisted we hang round the house in recognition of a holiday we don't even celebrate."

"Because she bit me!"

"Because you tossed off orders like Napoleon commanding his troops into Russia. You know she doesn't respond well to anything that isn't the sound of her own voice."

"Well, it's not my fault she was doing it wrong."

He kisses the tip of her nose, and he smiles again, and he has just the most ridiculous freaking pair of googly eyes, for a man who breakfasts on the nests of helpless kittens.

"Can we have, like…a date? Tomorrow? I haven't seen you very much for the last week or so, between your brother coming back, and me working informants, and keeping Stefan on his feet in his current Elena-less slump, and I just think that maybe we should have one day, just to ourselves. I know now's probably not the best time, I know everything just sort of hit the fan in the messiest of ways, but this is how it's pretty much always going to be, isn't it? For a while? There's always going to be something."

He cannot stop smiling. "You want to spend more time with me?"

"Is that how that came across? This is sort of awkward. I'm actually leaving you for another man. He's much richer. And younger."

"But how appealing can he really be, without a head?" Klaus lifts an eyebrow innocently.

"Actually, you'd be surprised how attractive the idea of a man without a mouth is."

"Really," he says, and trails his lips up the side of her neck all the way to her ear lobe.

"Yes."

He kisses the top of her ear, moves to her temple, her forehead, her eyelids.

She pulls him down by the collar of his shirt to make his next kiss a thing of sharp teeth, rough tongues, wandering hands.

He straddles her waist, pins her by the wrists, bites her shoulder with his human teeth, slips his fingers from her right wrist to cradle her cheek in his palm as he moves up her shoulder, onto her neck, her chin, her lips, and now she flips them both and rips his shirt down the middle, buttons scattering over the side of the bed.

He digs his fingers into her curls as she bends down to kiss him, opening his mouth roughly with her tongue, both of them breathless against one another, his hands moving to her ass, hers flashing down to pull his hips against hers as he begins to move, his hand slipping around to graze her thigh, to creep underneath her skirt, to nudge aside her panties with his thumb.

"Don't rip them," she gasps, and then she shudders all the way down to her toes as he slides his thumb against her clit, runs his middle finger down lower, pushes it in to the knuckle.

He sits up to kiss her, his finger pumping languidly, his teeth catching her bottom lip, and then so abruptly she lurches forward to grip the headboard, he lays back down and he jerks her up over his face.

"Oh my God!" she hisses, digging into the wood with her nails as he noses her panties out of the way and he gives her one long stroke with his tongue.

He cups her ass in both hands, sucks her clit between his lips to carefully run his fang along its edge, thrusts his tongue inside so suddenly she jolts forward with her mouth open, her legs trembling, her fingers cracking the headboard underneath them.

He keeps her there until she orgasms so hard she has to lean her head down against the board, wheezing her release, and then he flips her onto her back, pulls her legs up over his shoulders, kisses her calf, the inside of her knee, her clit.

"Oh my God oh my God oh my God! Ok, ok- there!" she gasps, arching into him as he hits just precisely right, swiveling his tongue in little figure eights that go all the way through her, coaxing her through one little ripple and into another that arches her back, that spasms her knees against his head, the sheets twisting beneath her as she pulls up handfuls of them, and then one more noisy shudder, her head thrown back against the pillows, and she hears him fumbling with his belt, his fingers shaking against the buckle.

He shuts his eyes when he slides into her, and she can tell this isn't going to take very long, because he shakes so hard against her, he breathes so noisily into her neck where he keeps his face pressed, his hips making these short little thrusts that jerk her underneath him, his mouth open against her, his necklaces sticking to his damp chest, and three kisses to the side of his neck, one to his cheek, his temple, the top of his sweaty head, and she hears him inhale sharply against her, his entire body tensing as he shivers through his long orgasm.

She relaxes down against the bed with him boneless on top of her.

He sighs into her neck and shifts his head over to tuck it just beneath her chin, running one hand down her side to find the curve of her waist, to slip his arm beneath her back and to hold her close against him.

It takes her a moment to realize there is a steady knocking just above her head, the wall vibrating just slightly against the board with the force of it.

"What the hell?" she whispers as Klaus lifts his head, his hand tightening against her back.

"Hello? Who is that?"

"Bloody-" Klaus snaps, and lurches over her to slam his hand against the wall. "Get away from the bloody wall!"

"Hello? Hello, can you hear me? Oh, thank God- listen, the code word is 'Jack draw me like one of your French girls'. The Eagle is coming."

Klaus rolls off her and yanks up his pants.

"Are you still there? I don't know how long I have, but I must tell you this."

Klaus smoothes her skirt down over her hips. "Get off the bed," he says through his teeth, and for perhaps the first time in their entire acquaintance she scrambles to obey, flashing herself up out of the covers and to the other side of the room, one hand to her throat.

"If you get into any trouble, I need you to say this rhyme: From afar I saw, the light along your jaw."

Klaus sweeps the bed out of the way with one effortless thrust of his arm.

"And in my loin a stirring, to hear your nocturnal purring."

He kicks a hole through the wall.

He shoves his hand in through ruined plaster and swirling dust, and now from the hole Kol emerges headfirst, Klaus' hand twisting the collar of his shirt around his throat, and as she cringes back against the far wall, Kol breaks Klaus' grip, drops to his feet, springs up onto the bed where he crouches for just a moment, brushing white flecks from his hair. "Hello, Caroline. Nik's going to kill me now, so I'll tell you the rest later, but did you know that everyone's favorite hybrid wrote erotic poetry when he was younger? Now aren't you glad you got the slip and dip out of the way before hearing that?"

Klaus jerks Kol up off the bed with one arm around his throat, and a sharp jerk and a sharper crack and he slumps limply in his brother's arms, his neck flopping loosely.

There is stunned silence for just a moment. "Oh my God- do none of you people have a single modicum of understanding of the word 'boundaries'?"she shrieks.

Nik gives him quite a lot of grief for that little stunt, but for a moment he was not on the wrong side of a veil, there was never a dead witch with only eighteen pitiful years to her name, he did not lament his choice.

But then, choices are often lamentable. Up by our bootstraps we go. You may pick through the pity of this graveyard of the bypassed, mourning all the faded testaments to your other options, but what is a life spent haunting? You don't ghost round the edges of years, both your feet still mired in the old.

He tells himself that.

But he keeps most of his days for himself, he stays away for so long from this family to whom he so longed to return that Christmas has touched its pale white light to the tips of the city before he pops back in to make his obligatory quips, to take to task Caroline and her hideous red hat, to poke round Nik's googly-eyed acquiescence to this girl and her human holidays.

He doesn't stay for very long.

It's nice out anyway. Very cold, the wind in mourning, the sleet like grapeshot against his face, his gloveless hands feeling every little prick that death did not give him.

He'd linger on that, 'little prick', he means, because what comedian lets pass an opening like that, but, you know, he doesn't feel like it.

How do you know a clown is sick? You check his nose?

No; that's dogs. Forgive him his little blunder; they are so often alike.

This is how he sees himself from one year into the next:

Nik courts him like he must have gone after pretty Caroline when finally he realized here is not a mere conquest, very awkwardly, trying to wedge his way in to these solitary walks he takes in no particular direction, to seize back the brother who always had a word, who never did not smile, and if he ever wants to talk, Nik assures him, but you don't touch the wound when it's still wet, big brother.

The tourists are no less bland than usual, spiced with the added agitation of the soldiers with their guns, but still nearly flavorless, a little chewy, all like chalk dust in his mouth, but that's most things these days, take no offense, darlings, he means nothing personal.

There is a nice pub. He wouldn't know it personally, he never did get that far, but good authority has it they offer the best Guinness outside Dublin, that you'll not find more traditional music, chattier bartenders, livelier dancing, and so most nights he can be found sometimes snacking on pub patrons, sometimes carousing with them, harassing the Donegal native who makes sure his best heads adorn the Mighty Kol's pints.

He had a friend who would have liked this place. Well, perhaps you wouldn't call him a friend (or at the very least not one without significant 'benefits'), and anyway, what friend spends most of your second death turning about in your head, until him too you must box away with all other things which mean too much, but he doesn't get loves, you can't attach that sort of significance to them, when all things save yourself pass on into the hands of Time or Death, so call him another friend who left just a bit too soon, as they always will.

He left some very nice memories. He thanks you for that, darling.

It's not such a small thing as you might expect.

"What do I say to him, Elijah?" he asks one evening, with one brother beside him and another not, his charcoal forgotten in his hand, Elijah's book laid aside in his lap.

"You be a brother to him, Niklaus. You give him either space or sympathy; whichever he requires."

But he just got him back.

Kol has always made of himself a bit of a gnat, but better him in your ear than beyond- he'll even take that bloody poetry which stalks him from his clumsy human years, little brother, he just wants-

He wants you here.

But if a certain blonde newborn is to be believed, his pain is superseded, he cannot bring his brother to heel, Kol's grief is not to be yoked, it is not always about him.

Apparently, not all things are.

He doesn't buy it either.

But she smiled enough to take the sting out of it, his Caroline with her two front teeth with their slight overlapping imperfection, and she touched his cheek, and he remembers that some things must be coaxed, that he cannot always set his boot to the throat of this world and press until out squeezes whatever it is he desires, and so he sighs and he looks down but he picks up his charcoal and he goes back to his hobby until from the uncharacteristically snowy January his brother emerges with white in his hair, dew in his stubble, and he sits with his two brothers without saying anything, his head back over the arm of the couch, his feet in Elijah's lap.

"Nik," he says into a silence to which has been added only the sounds of rustling pages and scratching charcoal. "Pun-off."

"Don't encourage him," Elijah warns, looking up from his collection of Ovid's erotic poems with a frown.

"I refuse to work with compost; it's degrading." Kol points at him.

"Without geometry, life is pointless," he fires back.

"Is a book on voyeurism a peeping tome?"

"Be kind to your dentist; he has fillings to."

"No," Elijah says tightly.

"Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?" Kol asks.

"The past, present, and future walk into a bar. It was tense."

"Neither one of you wants to come to regret this bonding moment," Elijah warns them both.

"All right- let's switch it up a bit. What did the salad say to the food critic?" Kol lifts an eyebrow at him.

He rolls his eyes. "Lettuce surprise you. Please, Kol. I'm not an amateur. What do you call chandeliers?"

"High lights. Neither am I, Nik. Where do polar bears vote?"

"The North Poll. What do you call a fake noodle?"

"An impasta."

Elijah backhands Kol with the binding of his book, ruining book and cheekbone alike, the former separating loudly in his hand, the latter sending out a gout of blood from which he just barely rescues his sketchbook, his wrist flicking it to safety over the side of his chair.

"Well that was a little overdramatic, Elijah," Kol says.

"You were out of line," he replies coldly, buttoning his suit jacket as he rises. "There will be a copy of James Michie's translation of Ovid's The Art of Love on my bedside table by tomorrow evening."

He exchanges a look with Kol, who wipes the blood from his already-healed face. "I guess we should have gone with "knock knock" jokes," Kol tells him.

"Whoever invented those should get a no-bell prize," he agrees, and ducks the fire poker Elijah javelins straight at his throat, slouching down just enough in his chair that the cushioned back of it takes the full brunt of Elijah's rage.

He dimples.

Kol is smiling at him.

There is a loosening inside his chest, as he looks up from beneath his eyebrows to return this smile almost shyly, and what knows a man who once renounced love and now beds down with it every night, but he thinks, perhaps, they're going to be all right, he and this brother he cherishes more than either of them will ever understand.

He takes Nik to his pub, but you know Nik, always has to put his boot to everything, so he compels the whole place according to his amusements, which today involve the two homophobes in the corner acting on what turn out to be some very gay urges, buried underneath the bigotry, the other patrons all standing round on their heads on pain of death, the bartender perfecting that spot of foam at the top of his beer with downcast eyes, and it's a bit of a shame, he misses the music, and the locals are actually quite entertaining, when you aren't eating them, but they have a nice conversation about Caroline, and he likes seeing his brother like this, nearly bashful, full of self-deprecating laughter and admiration for one who is not himself, half his conversation directed to his beer, which does not judge.

You'd be surprised to know he doesn't either, Nik. It thunders up behind you with its claws unsheathed and takes you down on the run, love.

He gets that.

You'd be surprised how much he gets that.

He's never been Bekah; he has never loved too much, excepting perhaps his family, who never did return it quite satisfactorily enough, but he had a few, Nik. Perhaps he's always tiptoed round them, because who knows, how can you possibly understand when and what to label this churning in your gut, but you don't lie for 97 years, taking your sweet bloody time, getting over a boy and his cap, you do not feel between your hands the texture of life, just beyond your fingertips, and think still of choosing death, for some lingering crush.

But that's over for him. You let go.

It's all you do, in death.

So go on and tell him, Nik, about your happiness, because though it leaves a bit of sourness in his throat, he does not refute your right to it.

He loves you. He'll take your smile.

It'll be enough, to live on the scraps of others' joys.

He'll tell himself that.

A pretty boy in uniform stops him somewhere round 1:00 on a Tuesday evening, who can tell, when you're this sloshed, and he sends him on his way with a pinch to the ass and a reassurance that of course he doesn't need any identification, darling, he practically ran this town, nearly a century ago, you don't have that many homosexual relations in all the best churches, unless you have the neck of the city slotted neatly in your hand, and you wouldn't happen to know, would you, where he could get some more, because he used to get pissed just exactly like this with a friend of his and then grope him right upon God's altar itself, and what a laugh that was, waking up plastered to a pew with sweat and sex as in streamed the morning ceremony with Tim still half-asleep in his arms, both their trousers only half-assedly done up.

Do you know what he's probably doing right now?

Someone else.

They always move on. Bonnie will have returned herself to the clutches of Jeremy Gilbert, because perhaps he was a bit of a bump in the road, but apparently his jokes are not meant for lasting impressions, because everything just rolls itself right on by him, friend, family, foe, just like time, all of them, slick as the centuries.

But he won't sink himself to his neck in his own self-pity.

That is not for the fates of funnymen.

So he does find himself a man, two of them, actually, a couple 300 years committed that enjoys themselves an interloper from time to time, and what he does with them all morning and into the afternoon he won't tell you, but neither of them are in walking condition by the time he's done, and the bite marks across his shoulders and down his chest take nearly ten minutes to heal, and a bit of haze clings still to his eyes, because do you know what's funny-

Someone is wearing Tim's hat.

Just across the street.

Just exactly the same one, with the little kick of hair at the back, and the tufts of overgrowth down the ears.

He steps off the curb, and the hat is gone.

He sends Tim off with two new recruits for the head of the Robinson pack, and halfway through his memorization of one of Caroline's newest additions to his filing cabinet, the boy puts a shaky call through to his phone.

"The soldiers have got wooden bullets."

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Wonderful. Well, you're still in one piece, or at least enough of one to pass this along, so what about your cohorts?"

"They're both dead. One of them- he didn't notice one of the soldiers. He said he was feeling a little off, needed to feed before we took on any wolves. They caught him at it, and unloaded into us all. I compelled who I could. Had to talk a couple of people back into bed, after they heard the gunshots."

"Tim," he says with a smile in his voice. "If you keep losing minions at this rate, I might have to get upset. You don't want me to give you to Caroline, do you?"

There is a long silence on the other end.

He leans back with another smile and puts his boots up on his desk.

Tim returns alone with Denny Robinson's head, and slops it wordlessly onto the floor of his study.

"I don't want to get shot at for you anymore."

He leans back and he steeples his fingers as the boy strands his ground, quite impressively, he has to say, for a lad of Tim's rather timid disposition, but then he never was exactly a coward, simply that useful type of subordinate who sets himself to bended knee because he does not understand how to thunder his refusals.

He smiles. "You don't get to vote yourself off the island, Tim."

The boy swallows. "You're kind of busy, to chase me to the other side of the world, if that's where I want to take meself."

"I don't have to. Every continent belongs to me, Tim. There is nowhere I cannot reach. You see, you made the unfortunate misstep of being good at your job. Now, if you hadn't, you'd be dead, so bit of a rock and a hard place, I know, but it is what it is. I am, not, however, entirely without sympathy, and I would never take a man's choice from him. That's what makes us the writers of our own stories, isn't it? You don't want to dance round like a puppet at the mercy of some other author. So. Continue to perform little tasks for me, and to perform them well, certainly more flawlessly than your last couple of outings, or I rip off your head. It'll be fast. You've been useful; I won't draw it out."

"Well, fook me. You can't expect me to choose, with that sort of variety."

"You're lucky I've become more tolerant of late to sarcasm. You have Caroline to thank for that." He leans forward just a little. "You can see yourself out. Oh, and Tim. If you need a reason to stay a bit longer, either in this city or on this particular side of the veil, I suggest you pop round The Kerry Irish Pub. Now keep in mind he's still stinging a bit from recent events, so tread lightly. Or I'll eat your heart from your chest with a spoon."

He's not in a particularly chatty mood tonight, so he takes his beer to the corner where the music is loudest, swallows it with just a couple tosses of his head, picks out his snack for the night from among the tables nearest him.

He'll probably fuck her first. She's very pale, blue eyes, colorless lips, blonde hair to her ass- remind you of anyone?

Him either.

Do humans wander in solitude among trees you cannot touch, when they bid their farewell to one life and pass on to the next? Do they find another death and cling to its very soft hand, and walk beside it for all the time they are allotted, which may be a very long time among minutes that do not bend themselves quite correctly round the clock, but like all things that end was still not quite long enough?

He picks up another Guinness from the bartender and sits back down with it, just savoring it this time, rolling it very slowly round his mouth, keeping his foot in time with the fiddle, one arm draped round the back of his chair as he flicks his eyes from victim to band.

"Jesus Christ," someone blurts from the front of the pub, and he takes another drink. Is there going to be another fight? He likes those. Last night a woman came in to retrieve her husband and his girlfriend, and not a one of them made it out without something smudged from its original place. He finished the husband off in the alley, quite tasty, flush with adrenaline and illicit bathroom sex.

The wife didn't seem to mind watching very much at all, but who can tell for sure.

They're always so complimentary, right before the final bite.

There is only this one startled expletive, though, and when he glances casually toward the front of the pub, craving his bit of drama, he sees only the regulars and their pints, laughing over some witticism, beer heads foaming round their lips.

The band finishes their song with a flourish, takes their applause with a bow, bursts into their next reel with a hearty, "And a one, two, three!"

His victim is still going quite strong, immersed in a contest with her wobbly-breasted companion, who shakes everywhere when she laughs, and so he knocks off his second beer and he slips himself in at the counter to put in an order for his third, leaning both elbows against the sticky bar, snapping his fingers for Pat. "Yeah, oh Mighty Kol?" he asks seriously, dabbing his hands down with a bit of damp cloth.

That never fails to amuse him. You could live to a million, darling, and never grow tired of all your little compelled nicknames, spat out so solemnly.

Last week he was King Dong, to the officer he let pat him down (he was quite pretty) after he drove a stolen squad car into the back of the NOPD's armored personnel carrier.

"Another Guinness, darling."

"You know a guy in a hat, Mighty Kol?"

He rocks himself just slightly back on his elbows. "What?"

"A Donegal cap- you know, really traditional, sort of old-fashioned, looks like, uh- looks like one of those newsboy caps? Some guy wearing one of those busted in here a few minutes ago, looked straight at you and then turned right back round. Looked like he was going to puke. Sent someone out to check on him; found him sittin' on the curb with his head between his knees. Said he was all right."

He straightens up very slowly. "Is he still there?" he asks, and there is no answer fast enough to reach him, as he shoulders his way through the regulars and out onto Decatur, where the January air has begun to solidify into patches of white between puddles.

He isn't.

But when he reaches Clinton and he saunters his way toward N. Clay with both hands in his jacket pockets, there is the subtle echo of furtive footsteps somewhere behind him.

He crosses N. Clay, loops around to make his way back onto Decatur, past the French Market and down onto N. Peters, those footsteps behind him all the while, this meandering route carrying them both onto the nearly empty Elysian Fields, the snow beginning to squeeze itself from the clouds with some fury now, his boots sinking in to the tread.

He waits for a lone woman to make her way past him, to reach the car parked in dusty wait along the curb and to ease her cautious way up the street and into the intersection.

He listens to the thick silence of the falling snow all round him.

He exhales a long white cloud that is more tremulous than he wanted it to be.

"Unless you're 6' 3", your dick is big enough to choke my brother, and you have a birthmark on your right knee, you're going to have a very bad night," he calls out, still walking, keeping his hands in his pockets and his eyes straight ahead.

"It's me left knee, you fuck," Tim says from behind him, and he stops with his cheeks in pain, his smile stretches itself that wide.

"Very good, darling; that was a test."

He turns slowly round.

Tim is exactly the same boy he abandoned for his grave in 1915.

His twenty-one-year-old forehead will never know a line, of course, his hair not one silver strand, his knees will forever endure church flagstones without an arthritic protest, but if time does not leave its stain in the creases left behind by sun and experience, it at least gets its hand on the eternally shuffling styles of clothing and hair.

But here he stands in his suspenders and his cap, vest buttoned to the top, sleeves rolled to his elbows.

He bursts out laughing. "Are you still wearing that hat?"

Tim spins partially round to put his hand to his forehead, pushing his cap up out of his eyes. "Christ on a bleedin' cross, you fucker."

"You got more Irish," he says, letting his mirth soften into this smile he cannot seem to drop, hands shifting in his pockets. "Your accent's heavier. You must have gone back."

"For forty years. And then I crossed over into Russia, and then I spent a while in France." He lets go of the bridge of his nose and clears his throat, tipping his head back to look up into the snow.

"They do taste better, don't they? The French?" He watches Tim's shoulders tense, his throat flex, and he drops the smile from his voice and his face at last. "How long did you wait?"

"A lot longer than I'd like to say. Lot of rumors goin' round back then. I hung around the city until I heard the one about the youngest Mikaelson dying, and then I left for Kerry."

Tim drops his head and cuts a side glance toward him.

"I got better." He shrugs with his hands still in his pockets. "I'm very durable like that. You remember. You broke a church pew underneath me." Tim merely keeps looking at him, one hand in the pocket of his vest, the other dangling down his side. "A hand job for your thoughts?"

The boy wets his lips, looks away, rubs the bridge of his nose. "Christ," he says, and when he turns back, he is laughing, just a touch of mirth, more of a smile than anything, those crinkles round his eyes and across the bridge of his nose, and he remembers the freckles on the bridge of that nose, and lazily kissing them with more tenderness than he wanted to admit as they lay sated in Tim's hotel room, playfully punching and wrestling till their lips got more serious.

"What are you even still doing here?"

"Working for your brother."

"Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, you're old enough to know better."

"When Ma gave me the full name, it was because I was about to get the belt."

"Do you want it? That's kinky; I like it."

Tim rolls his eyes.

"You wouldn't have brought it up if you weren't hinting, darling. Besides, you look very good for your age. I like a man who carries his years well."

"123, and you wouldn't take me for a day over 122 and a half."

They have both got a bit of that stupid smile of the irrepressible on their faces, Tim's hand slipping from vest pocket to trouser, where he gets his fingers round something that clicks inside his palm.

"Are you still carrying that same pocket watch?"

"Yeah. Broke it, though, when I was in Ireland. It's just something for me to fiddle with now."

"I can give you something else to play with," he suggests, lifting his eyebrows innocently. Tim stifles the little smirk that flares up round his lips. "Do you want to do the scene where we run into one another's arms in slow motion now?"

"I'm taken, actually."

"Really? What's his/her name? And precise address. No reason."

"I've taken our savior the lord Jesus Christ for my husband."

"So you're a nun."

"You'd be surprised how good me legs look in one of those habits."

"I wouldn't be at all surprised, actually. They're very nice legs."

Tim coughs some of the embarrassment from his throat. "I did actually stay in a convent for a while. I took the habit as a bit of a prank. They wouldn't let me in at first, on account of me penis and all, but I blustered until they finally actually believed I was just a very ugly woman. I thought…it was something you might have thought was funny."

He leans forward just a bit, hands still in his pockets. "I would have. Although it would have been funnier if we'd led the entire convent astray with our wanton ways. I think we'd have had them all underneath each other's skirts within a week."

"Most of them were anyway."

"Yes, but were there any orgies? You can't have sin without an orgy."

"Not that I got to participate in."

"Well that's unfortunate. But you were still new, and without a guiding hand, so that's all right."

"You forgive me?"

"I forgive anyone who sucks cock like you, darling."

Tim looks down with a little laugh that puts another layer of pink in his cheeks.

He smiles to see it. You always could draw out his bashfulness with just a bit of crudeness or ingenuity, both of them naked under the sheets with their cocks in the other's hand, Tim sucking on his neck, he pinching the boy's nipples, and a carefully-placed comment and he'd let loose with that slew of Irish expletives to blister the most vulgar of ears and duck his head down into the pillow, to laugh out his embarrassment in private. "What do you do for Nik?"

Tim clicks the watch in his pocket. "I break things. People, mostly. Werewolves. Some of Marcel's men. Whoever he points me toward, really. I went to your house tonight to quit, actually."

"And he gave you the 'quitters are dead to me, literally' speech, did he?"

"Yeah. And then he told me to check the Kerry, for something that might make me want to stay. Which is the only option aside from getting my head ripped off anyway."

They look at one another for a long moment, the snow piling itself between them. "I'd hold him back, you know, if you wanted to make a run for it."

A faint smile flickers across the boy's lips. "I think I'll probably stick round for a bit. Just to see the legendary 'King Dong' in action."

"You heard about that, did you?"

"I should have fuckin' known it was you."

"What did he say about me? Did he mention that I'm hung like a stallion? He lingered there during the pat-down, I swear he did."

"He did. He's gayer than one of our trips to the confessional booth. He's an informant of ours. I'm surprised Klaus didn't jump your ass for that little stunt."

"Nik's trying to be nice to me right now. He's not very good at it, but he's trying. He's not always as mean as he wants everyone to think." He stirs a bit of the snow with his boot, both their hands still in their pockets, the silence putting on bulk, Tim's hand busy with his watch, January gathering its final few breaths into this one white exhalation that begins to fill with ice.

Tim shrugs sleet from his shoulder.

He clears his throat, and it's not at all like him, Tim is the fumbler to whom words do not always come, but he supposes he's still reeling, he's got to tentatively toe his way back into anything that might hook itself too deep, you don't thrust yourself belly-first into the sea.

"Do you want company, on your next little outing?"

"Because it's a sucky code!" Caroline snaps, crossing her arms over her chest, that particularly stubborn face of hers making its way across her brow, her lips, her eyes.

"Excuse me, who's been around for a thousand years?"

"Excuse me, who organized the 10th grade Snowflake Ball in two days and pulled it off without one single hitch? That's like invading Russia in the middle of the winter- and winning."

"It is not, love."

"Excuse me, but have you invaded Russia in the winter?"

"Yes, actually."

"Oh my God- you did not. You just have to try and show me up, because you are such an incredible freaking egoist about everything-"

"Who threw my bloody write-up in the rubbish bin and said, "We don't need this", and then slapped down her own proposal like it was the tablet of Moses?"

"It was a sucky code!"

"It was based off the bloody Irish intelligence network I worked with for years- the ones who slipped the English noose because of a code just like this one, sweetheart, so unless you have any experience dodging British counterintelligence squads, I think perhaps you should-"

"What? Shut my dumb, newborn mouth? Go ahead. Say that. I dare you."

"I'm not a bloody idiot!" he snaps.

"Well, that's not what this code would suggest."

Why on earth did he not bloody sink his teeth in to the vein, drain her dry, toss her aside, go on about his myriad centuries with his heart still untouched, his pride intact, his patience not tried beyond his bloody murdering point-

He looks up at the ceiling, works his jaw, blinks aside the last of these rich red fantasies, returns his eyes to Caroline's unyielding own with a little pleasant smile he does not mean at all. "I've indulged you far beyond what I have ever allowed an amateur, Caroline. You have a hand in every aspect of this little war-"

"And have I dropped the ball on anything, or are they all still in the air?"

He licks his lips. "That's not the point, love."

"The point is that Klaus knows best because everything has to be his way, we all have to prostrate ourselves before his genius, every little detail needs to be fine-tuned by the only capable freaking hands in the entire freaking world, which just so happen to be his own."

"Look who's talking!" he thunders, and she does not have the common courtesy to so much as blink.

"Well, I'm sorry if I like things done correctly."

"You mean your way."

"It's the same thing!"

"I'd have your spleen in my hand for this, Caroline, if you were anyone else!" he hisses, leaning both his hands down on his desk to tilt himself toward her, his necklaces swinging out to chime themselves off one another, his fingers digging down into the wood, his shoulders hunching up round his ears.

"Don't touch my spleen! It's mine!" she snaps, and she looks so genuinely affronted, her head lowered, her eyes with their touch of fire, those two overlapping teeth just barely visible beyond her parted lips, that for a moment his anger clears, his shoulders relax themselves just a touch from this posture of the slighted, he bursts out laughing.

"It's not funny!"

"You're pretty when you're angry." He dimples.

"Well, you're not."

"That was petty, love."

"I'm in a petty mood. I thought we should match." She tosses her curls over her shoulder.

"It's petty to place my thousand years of strategic experience over your little high school organizations whose primary functions served to determine whether the masses should consume berry punch or mango guava?"

"I'm just saying, maybe you should consider a different perspective."

"So if Stefan were to saunter in here, and drop off his own proposal, you would of course give it a proper looking-over and not relegate it to the rubbish bin, where fall all ideas not your own?"

She cocks her hip out to one side. "I'd at least make him feel like his ideas were valued."

"Before you threw them in the rubbish bin."

She throws her hands up in the air. "Ok, oh mighty seer- now look into my future and tell me which item of yours I'm going to dip in the toilet when you're not looking!"

"I don't have to be a seer to predict your irrational need to control every little aspect of everything you have ever touched, to the exclusion of all ideas not your own, love."

"Do you understand how freaking ironic that is, coming from you?"

"Thank you for your time and your filing cabinets, now get out of my bloody office!" he snaps, slamming himself back into his chair and putting his feet up on his desk so hard he kicks the stack of papers from the edge to flutter themselves in a noisy snowfall about Caroline.

"Who wants to be in here anyway! Egomaniacs only need apply!"

She storms into the hallway.

He jerks his feet down and flashes after her. "Where are you going?"

"None of your business!"

"Might I remind you that there are soldiers out there, armed with large guns and vampire-specific ammunition?"

"Oh, good! You did pick up that by 'none of your business' I meant, 'bye, honey, out to run straight into the arms of my enemies with 'Surprise, bitch!' and a pair of fangs tattooed on my freaking forehead!'"

"Caroline!" he spits.

"Klaus!"

"Fine! Get yourself bloody shot! I could use the quiet!" he roars, and he whisks back into his office, slams the door behind him, lets her take out her own enraged exit on the front door, snatches his jacket from the back of his chair and tears down the stairs after her, three steps at a time.

He storms all the way down Chartres in pursuit of her, the recent storm springy beneath his feet, his breath white as the ground, midnight touching her stark black contrast to Caroline's curls, the cars made rare by this military-enforced curfew sending up their infrequent gouts of exhaust-softened winter.

"Caroline!"

She does not turn round.

He lets her make it all the way to St. Louis Cathedral before he closes the distance in one supernatural stride, and grabs her by the elbow.

"Excuse you!"

"Temper tantrum's over, love."

"This is not a temper tantrum, Klaus; it's a jerk boycott, and you do not get to declare when it's done." She jerks her arm from his fingers.

He grabs her roughly by the other arm. "I said, let's go."

"And I'm saying bite me!"

"You're making a scene."

"Sorry! Am I embarrassing you in front of your lord and savior's holy house of worship? I know how much Jesus means to you." She tries to jerk herself from his grasp again, and he clamps down with his fingers and yanks her back toward him, her heels skidding just a touch on the sidewalk with its January mantle, her curls whipping, her eyes flaring. "I know I am a thousand years weaker than you, but let go of my arm. Now."

He throws her arm back in her face when he releases it, and holds both his hands out to the sides with his nastiest smirk.

"Now leave."

"I'll stay as long as I please, I will walk wherever I like, and I will not be bloody managed by some bossy little thing who forgets her station. Half this city is under my control, Caroline. I will tear it to the ground if I please. I will not be ordered out of any section of it."

"Oh my God you are so annoying. We get it, Klaus. You're the overlord of freaking everything. Actual kings licked your so-much-more-divine-than-the-rest-of-us feet. I don't care. I'm telling you, get off this sidewalk. It's mine."

"There seems to be a plethora of that going round. This sidewalk is yours. My house is yours. Every portion of this war which ought to rest in the hands of centuries-old generals, who fought among the greats- all yours."

"Just- God! I could kill you sometimes! Just…leave, Klaus. I need three seconds to myself to think," she says, and in her voice there is a sudden fatigue that puts his fear up higher than his back.

If clocks hold him in no thrall with their meaningless minutes, he feels still the pressure of their fleeing hands, draining away the fragile hours of this relationship he cannot possibly sustain.

Nothing gives with both hands to the lives of creatures like him, not God, Fate, Mother Nature, and so what hope he has held, that he may keep both his brother and this girl who somehow looked beyond, he has nurtured very carefully, coddling it along like he has done nothing else, and now with her disappointed eyes and her defeated shoulders, she puts her fingers to this feeble dream, and she pinches it out.

He links his hands behind his back, working his throat round his terror.

He has a point to make, something eloquent, he's sure, he's dug round in all the tomes of the most gilded tongues, you know, bent his ear to only the greatest of poets, the most learned of philosophers, he has circled this planet more times than he can count, and of India's spices and Santorini's waters he can paint you the most flattering of images, with only his vast vocabulary, but what bit of flattery, wheedling, coercion he has to reel her back in, he couldn't tell you.

She sighs. "Don't look at me like that, Klaus. I don't have to like you all the time, to be in love with you. Ok? So just go back to your place, and leave me alone for a little while, so I can have a much-needed and much-deserved break from you." She smiles just a touch. "And then in a few days, when I can both love and like you, we can have really dirty makeup sex. Me on top, of course," she tells him, and then she just leaves him bloody standing there, and what damage she's inflicted on his pride, this precocious little thing.

He doesn't even go after her.

Nik crawls into bed with him one night after some tiff with Caroline, still smelling of whatever murder he has recently committed.

He has feigned sleep often enough to know precisely how to breathe to lure Nik into tentatively brushing the hair from his eyes, his fingers callused with war but careful with tenderness.

He could say, Nik, I thought you'd never come.

He could say, quickly, my loins ache for no other, and put his hand on Nik's knee with a wink, so that he may be knocked aside of his own accord.

But Nik watches him with the eyes of a mother whose infant failed to take one of his breaths, who stuttered just slightly in his normal rhythms, and he rather likes it.

So he keeps his mouth shut, and he lets his brother burrow down beside him, nearly on top of him, because aside from being a general tit, his brother is also a bed-hogger of the first order, and after some minutes, Nik drops off that precipice into sleep with his usual flair, puddling his slumber down onto his pillow, and he stifles his laugh in his own, and he lies there for a long time, just smiling at this brother he was not supposed to get.

Caroline keeps true to her word, stubborn little thing, and does not set foot to his home for days.

Kol at least has got some of the quickness back to him, his smile not a thing to be unearthed from beneath layers he does not know how to probe (murder always did cheer the poor thing up), so he sets the rest of his little murder squad to other tasks, and ships Kol off with Tim, into the heart of the soldiers, to ferret free Marcel's men right beneath the noses of these humans who are no match for his little brother.

"They're only escalating the violence with their presence," Elijah observes one afternoon, staring from the window of his office down onto the street.

"No one likes an occupying force," he says distractedly, twirling his pen round his fingers.

"We'll need to do something about them, Niklaus."

"We will. But let them sit on their thumbs a bit, while we run round beneath their noses. If our agents are at greater risk, so also are Marcel's. They've already done a couple of my jobs for me. Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we, Elijah?"

"And Caroline, Niklaus?"

He leans back with his pen still in his hand, angling his feet up onto his desk. "Caroline's actually quite capable."

There is a slight smile in his brother's voice, when he responds. "You sound disappointed."

"Yes. It's a bit annoying."

"What does she need with the arm of the most powerful man in the world, if she can wield her own sword?"

"Don't psychoanalyze me, Elijah, you know I don't like it," he says, but he doesn't have the heart to put his usual snarl into it.

"And Kol, brother?"

"Doing much better. You know unadulterated violence always perks him right up. And Tim. Credit where it's due, I suppose. If Bekah would put in an appearance once in a while, I'm sure he'd be back to his full, irritating potential in no time at all. He's still occasionally half-hearted about his little tricks."

"They'll sort it out between them. She's angry with him for their little fall-out right before he died, but most of all, for dying in the first place. Kol is still hurt. You know he holds onto it perhaps longer than any of us, whatever face he may put forward."

He looks down at his pen with a little purse of his lips.

Elijah turns from the window to rest the tips of his fingers very lightly on his shoulder, just for a moment, just long enough that he understand the warmth behind it, and then he vanishes into the hall.

They belly out in the snow behind the dumpster of Antoine's, Tim with his revolver already in hand, he with chin set casually upon his palms, his feet swinging behind him, the night trickling a few bits of rain down the back of his neck.

Tim keeps darting little side looks at him, shoes shifting about behind him, the revolver fogging over with each little blast of his breath, his cap pulled low enough to nearly hide his eyes, that piece of hair at the nape of his neck coiling itself up with the confusion of this damp night that is unsure whether to be winter or spring.

Tim touches his tongue to his lips.

He looks away again.

He sneaks another glance.

"For fuck's sake, Kol," he whispers, his voice strained with laughter. "Would you put either your hands or your fuckin' feet down? You look like you're waiting for your tenth grade crush to give you a ring."

"You're just jealous you can't pull off this pose with the same style."

"Donnolly's going to be pissed, getting taken out by a fruitcake."

"Which one? You, or me?"

"I was talking about you."

"That's very rich, coming from you, darling. Who's been checking out my ass all night?"

"You."

"Well, can you blame me?"

Tim shakes his head and looks down with a little smile, tightening his hand round his revolver, setting his feet back into the little niches he has kicked himself in the snow, squinting his eyes off toward the door to the kitchen.

"Let's crash their dinner."

"He's got almost four hundred years on me- I'm taking him by surprise. I happen to like me head where it is."

"So do I- well, it's a bit better facedown in my lap, but I'll take what I can get. The point is, I wouldn't let it get marred. You've got a face to rival mine." He drops his hands and pushes off them, getting onto his feet with a little hop. "Well, not to rival mine, of course -nothing does that- but no one would spot us mid-coitus and wonder why I hadn't tied a bag round your head. Or why I was having coitus with you in the first place." He inclines his head toward the door. "What's the verdict? Am I to have all the fun by myself?"

Tim flops over onto his back to give the sky one long appraisal, jerking his hat up out of his eyes and pocketing his revolver. "Fuck me."

"Are you offering?"

Tim kicks at the back of his leg; he dodges it with a laugh.

"I won't let you come out missing anything. I promise." He reaches down for Tim's hand, hefts him easily back onto his feet, dusts the snow from the boy's back. "If I can eat three of them in under a minute, let's say forty seconds, you have to slap four of the soldier's asses and get one of them to like it without any compulsion."

"I'm not doing that."

"All right. One of them doesn't necessarily have to like it, but he has to experience at least a bit of homoerotic confusion, enough to make him angry that he looks at his friends' penises when they shower together, which he always thought was just something men do, to compare length and girth, but which it turns out is actually just something he does, because apparently if he lets himself get too lax with his morals, he gets a stirring in his trousers when pretty Irishmen manhandle him."

"Do you really think I'm pretty?"

"You know I do."

"You're just saying that."

"If I promise you I'm not, will it get me under your skirt?"

"If you can eat three of them in twenty seconds."

He kicks open the door to the kitchen.

"Greetings!" he calls out cheerfully, and takes a running start onto the most crowded of the tables, upsetting dishes every which way he puts his foot. "Sir, do you have a watch?" he asks the diner closest to him. "No?"

He punches his hand through the man's throat, and rips free what he finds. "Tim! Put your fingers to his carotid; there you are, darling. It takes about a minute after death to lose the pulse, so start counting."

"I said you had twenty seconds."

"A minute, and I clear this entire room, and you let me take liberties with whatever I want for thirty seconds."

He leaps to the next table, kicks Donnolly in the head as the man flashes to his feet, jerks one of his companions over the table and straight into his teeth, empties him with one rip of his fangs, discards his heart, sends the body after it in a wet red heap, thrusts his boot heel through all the bones in the hand Donnolly curls round the table, yanks him forward, gives him a chop to the throat that sends his head ten feet through the air (he learned that one from Elijah), silences the screaming woman beside this still-spurting corpse, turns himself in a neat back flip that carries him off the edge of the table and into the pathway of a fleeing waiter.

He pins the man one-handed on his back, tears into his face, lets fly with the blood he cannot swallow fast enough to keep from his chin, spins himself into a backfist that ruins the temple of another scrambling staff member.

Tim's veins show faintly round his eyes, his fingers still to the diner's neck.

He drops them with a shake of his head. "Sorry. He's gone."

A waiter breaks from behind the table where he has tucked himself, pissing himself as he goes.

Tim clotheslines him. "And there's another one, behind the table in the corner. That's two less than the entire room."

"I don't think that was a minute."

"Sorry; you said till there's no more pulse. You can feel it for yourself."

"There's so much connotation in that last sentence I won't touch it with the ten foot pole I could also make a crack about, but I won't, because I'm behaving myself."

"This is what behaving yourself looks like?"

"Yes. Look, I'll even let this one go," he says, and helps the man Tim has got pinned effortlessly beneath his shoe to both feet, setting his hands on his shoulders. "Strangest thing you've ever seen, darling- some rabid wolf helped himself to the faces of all your friends here. Run along and warn people, would you?" He slaps the man's ass hard enough to jolt him through several steps of a head start, and cracks his neck with a little smile.

"What about the one in the corner?"

"Do you want him?"

"No."

"Well, I was just being polite anyway," he tells Tim, and in a blink he crosses the room, kicks the table aside, lifts the gibbering little thing up by the throat to draw himself a long draught.

He crumples the neck up in his hand and tosses the whole limp thing into the wall.

"Drinks at the Kerry?"

It's odd, how quickly he sinks back into companionable silence with this boy, two deaths and nearly a century between them, surely a few of Tim's own trysts floating round somewhere in either heart or homeland, but neither of them have to force their laughter, it comes out quite easily, they both smile when a shift puts them accidentally knee to knee.

"So two deaths. And I thought I was accomplishing things, cutting up English tenders with a rifle I had to get off a dead peeler."

"Don't feel too badly; I just naturally one-up everyone." He takes a sip from his Guinness, swivels himself round on his stool to press his knees more deliberately against Tim's. "Did you have a good time? For your first century? It's the hardest one."

He should have seen you through it. He should have stretched himself out belly to dirt in one of those ditches, adrenaline up, rifle steady, fog collecting round his heels, his toe giving an occasional poke to the leg you always tense too much, when nerves have got you by the throat, his hand swatting down into your eyes that bloody cap which must have seen so much without him.

But. Dirt over the coffin and all that.

You didn't forget him.

That's the thing.

Tim runs a hand down the hair at the nape of his neck, giving his nearly-empty mug a little shake. "It was fine."

"Fine? That's all you have to say about it? I killed a king, fought in the crusades, rode into England with the Normans, and had my first homosexual experience in my first century alone."

Tim smiles just a little, looking down at the hands he has still got wrapped round his mug. "I spent a lot of my time in Ireland moping. I wasn't supposed to be there by meself."

You know, he never would have expected that. He is so often mourner and not mourned.

So he whiled away his 97 years not alone as he thought, sunk in his own brain where existed only blackness and blame, but carried through many an Irish afternoon on the shoulders of a boy who could well have set his burden down and lost himself in the lust of war?

He likes the sound of that.

Did he keep up a little streaming commentary in your head? When you packed your gelignite into sticks for the feet of unsuspecting soldiers, did he point out how aptly you handled something with such a phallic suggestion to its shape? Did you reach over in the midst of a brutal Galtee night for a shoulder you forgot was no longer there?

And your hat? Did you let anyone else wear it?

He touches his glass to his lips, but he takes just a tiny sip. "Did you get over that little bump of the conscience everyone has to stumble over?"

"Yeah. That I did get over. Well, I mean, I'm not your brother, but I can go to bed and sleep like the dead after a meal."

"You always did that anyway. If you remember, I used to draw things on you while you were sleeping."

"You put lipstick and a dress on me, you fucker."

He bends forward to touch his forehead to the rim of his mug, sending out a laugh to startle the nearby customers. "I did that to Nik once, too. Well, I put lipstick on him. I couldn't manage the dress. And Bekah had to help me with it; he's not nearly as heavy a sleeper as you."

The door lets in a gust of air that's settled it's mind at last on winter. You never can be sure, with these southern seasons.

The body that slips through is carrying quite a noisy heart, blood surging all round it, sweat bringing out the scent of the gun inside the man's pocket, his heels each their own little shot against the floor, he moves that jerkily.

Tim is smiling at him.

He likes that. He'll keep it, if you don't mind, as he was not allowed to hold onto another smile that was just beginning to come round to him, so he tips himself casually back on his stool, keeping himself upright with one hand round the edge of the bar, and he knocks this gun the man draws from his pocket so hard across the room he takes the man's hand with it.

The gun discharges.

The bartender sinks with a cry to his knees, the general chaos following a bullet breaks out behind him, the band throws down its instruments to join the charge for the door.

"Jesus Christ!" Tim snaps, on his feet before the man and his stump even hit the floor, and now down onto four legs thuds his barstool as Tim kicks the man in the head, puts a heel to his neck, flashes down to plunge one hand into his chest.

He throws the heart onto the floor beside his attacker's peeling gray face.

"That bullet was for you, darling. One of Marcel's?"

"I think so; he looks familiar, anyway."

"Somebody gave you up as one of Nik's, then." He pulls the boy's hat down over his eyes. "Let's get you off the streets for tonight."

"I'll have to switch me hotel."

"We'll get you settled into one under Nik's control. You'll be all right," he says, and slings his arm round Tim's shoulders when the boy's heart takes a sudden leap, his hat coming down a little lower, his hands slipping nervously into his pockets, the color in his cheeks just a bit higher.

The air has got a touch of snow to it, when they exit the pub.

He puts his hand to the back of Tim's head and pushes it down with a playful smile, just messing about, darlings, but how bloody fast both their hearts are going, as they saunter along much too nonchalantly to the tune of these hummingbird pulses.

Up ahead, the Bienville House opens itself with a bang, and onto the sidewalk are marched four men in employee uniform, three humans and a vampire, the former blubbering, the latter thrashing against the superior hands restraining him, his fangs out, his face black with vein, and now onto their knees they are all forced, and four swift rounds puts them facedown in leftover snow, one still kicking about just a bit until another to the back of his head halts his flailing feet at last.

He turns Tim round and begins to walk briskly back the way they've come.

"You're fine," he says quietly under his breath, putting both his hands casually in his own pockets, leaning his elbow out just a bit to knock it reassuringly against Tim's own. "Is Decatur St. mostly owned by Nik?"

"Yeah," Tim replies tightly.

Ginger Lime empties itself onto the street, to the sounds of gunshots and screams.

Against the wall of Club Decatur another three of Nik's allies are lined up and shot through the chest.

They cut down an alley, behind them a set of footsteps on business, sounding its paces briskly, matching itself to the rhythm of Tim's heart, the late sky going white before them both, Tim cutting him a look, he pushing the boy on in front of him, his hands returning once more to their assumed indifference, the melted snow underneath them wetting their shoes to the laces, the clouds overhead beginning to gather together a new layer to lay down beneath their treads.

He's very fast, but he's got only one of him.

He takes the two shots fired from the mouth of the alley with barely a flinch and turns round to give the man a boot to the face that breaks his jaw and shoots him ten feet out into the street, his shoulder crunching when he hits.

An automatic (that's quite illegal, you know, darling) coughs one long stream into the alley and he hears someone come down on top of the dumpster out back of whatever businesses they have funneled themselves between, and round he whips in time to see Tim throw himself over the lid and slide down behind it, cracking off two shots of his own as he goes.

The automatic goes the way of the man's heart, both of them sliding in ruins down the wall, and then two more leap from the roof of the building to his right and another shoots himself gracefully off the ledge of the left, his boots echoing off dumpster, touching down onto pavement, his head disappearing over the side of the rubbish bin where Tim still lurks with that bloody old-fashioned six-shooter, the eccentric wank, and then one of the two men still milling about the alley hits him like a freight train, and he loses his feet.

He's got some years behind him, because the blow carries them both into the wall at his back, and in the man sneaks two punches to the gut that rupture something inside him, blood spattering across his tongue and over his bottom lip, his brain for just a moment fuzzy with this crippling blow, and then he breaks the man's nose, punches his throat, takes his heart.

He takes one long stride that puts him chest to back with the second man as he skirts round the dumpster to aid his friend, who has had quite the fight put to him by Tim, and off the metal edge of the lid he bounces the man's face, until the corner catches his eye and he sticks there, impaled through the socket, screaming to wake the dead.

Tim gets hold of his attacker's hair, slams the man's temple down onto the dumpster, once, twice, three more times, until he has painted himself in blood and brain alike, and then still holding onto this slick red mane, he turns and shoots the screamer in the head.

He gives his last round to the teeth of the man he clutches in his white-knuckled fingers.

"You all right?"

Tim has got two holes through his vest, both of them seeping, but they're to either side of his heart, and if he's a bit knock-kneed on his feet, they've not got the time to pause and dig round for however many bits of shrapnel he's managed to collect.

He fucked Nik.

He's a trooper.

"Can you run with them in you?" he asks.

"Yeah." He puts his revolver back in his pocket. "I'm fine. You?"

He clicks the shoulder he doesn't even remember dislocating back into place. "They haven't got any white oak; I'm indestructible. Where's the nearest hotel of Nik's?"

"Not on Decatur? The Quarter House."

"All right." He yanks Tim's shirt from his trousers to briefly check his wounds, frowning down at either bullet hole, a few more superficial splinters bristling down his ribs, the whole of his stomach tinted red. "Let's see if it's clear, get you settled there, then I'll dig these out."

Another series of shots rings out from the street.

Tim flinches.

He drops the boy's shirt.

It's not exactly inconspicuous, emerging from this death-scented alleyway, both of them smeared in blood, Tim coughing up the bits of froth the bullet in his lung sends forth to his lips, but for now Marcel's groups have moved on, the sky squeezes down snow in peace, their steps are only occasionally halted by Tim bending himself at the waist to take a few careful breaths, his cheeks white.

"You're doing fantastic, darling," he soothes him along, keeping his smile playful, his voice cheerful, but it's a transparent sham, his heart puts the dupe to neither of their ears, but if Tim doesn't believe it, he at least finds some comfort in the pretense, because he smiles through the blood on his lips, and they get a nice moment to themselves, the shots and the shouts dying away somewhere behind them, this smile passed back and forth between them, his thumb coming out to very gently wipe some of the blood which has made its way in a trickle from Tim's mouth to his chin.

"Shit," Tim says, and he looks away, up the road and to the scurrying about ahead of them, distance still making an ant hive of this activity.

They both stop.

He takes his hand from Tim's chin.

The soldiers have blockaded the end of the street.

"You're such a child about these things," Rebekah scoffs beside her, smoothing a strand of hair back behind her ear.

"They're adorable, and you're a grump," she replies, leaning herself through the open window of the St. Charles streetcar and flashing her best Miss Mystic smile to the nearly-empty sidewalks, her hand spiraling its graceful parade wave, just one smooth turn of the wrist, nothing spastic, you're a goddamn princess, not a tourist, Miss Baker beat through her crown and into her skull, and if Rebekah is too freaking up her own original butt to spread a little post-holiday cheer to a city down in the sucks, well, that's what she's here for.

She grabs Rebekah's hand and flaps it awkwardly at the people they pass.

"Would you knock it off, you twit?" she snaps, yanking her hand back.

"You are a bigger Grinch than Klaus."

"It's not even Christmas anymore."

"That doesn't mean you're not still a dinky-hearted shrew whose only redeeming quality is her fabulous nails."

"It's funny how my nails are only worthy of compliments when you do them."

"I know, isn't it?" She scrunches her nose.

Rebekah rolls her eyes and looks away, but there is the faintest touch of a smile, she totally saw that, Original Bitch, don't think you have snuck past her the little handful of human you have held onto all these years.

"Ok, so, since I have a whole night free to do whatever I want, and Stefan says I am on my own, because it's either going to involve shopping or shopping, I thought we could start at Adler's and just work our way down maybe to the Chateau Tao- ooh, look, it's snowing again!"

"You have got to be kidding me, Caroline."

"I hardly ever get to see snow down here, ok? I've never been out of the south. We haven't had a winter like this in years. I know you've been, like, everywhere, and probably spent a whole year eating poor defenseless little penguins in Antarctica, but some of us are not quite so well-traveled, and we happen to get excited at any little change in the usual oh-it's-March-time-to-tackle-the-usual-to-bra-or-not-to-bra-debate-because-yeah-girls-I-get-you-need-the-support-but-ugh-boob-sweat-is-just-the-worst routine."

"Why are you so cheerful? Aren't you still fighting with Nik?"

She sticks her head out the window, turns it toward the sky, catches three snowflakes on her tongue, touches one hand to the ridiculous red poof ball on her hat with a smile.

"Yes," she says, pulling her head back inside. "But I've come to that part of the fight where I miss him more than I'm annoyed with him, so tonight when we're done shopping, I'm going to go home with you instead of back to my hotel. We just needed a break from each other for a while."

"Nik didn't. I'm pretty sure he spent your whole separation doing moody sketches of your face from every angle he can accurately remember. Which is all of them."

"Good."

"The two of you make me want to induce vomiting."

"Don't worry, one day you too will meet a murdery, egomaniacal jackass who will sweep you off your feet and carry you away to your murder-literally-forever-after."

"If the murdery, egomaniacal jackass' sister doesn't eat your vocal cords out in the midst of one of those shrill diatribes you call 'talking' but which I just refer to as justifiable homicide, and have it with a side of your heart."

"Please," she scoffs. "If you were going to eat me, you would have done it a long time ago. You kind of like me." She smiles to herself.

Rebekah sneaks a peek at her.

They exchange this little flurry of side glances that are not nearly as hostile as Rebekah's elbow in her side and her nails in Rebekah's thigh would suggest, and then they both swivel their heads around toward the street as from farther up the road there is the sudden revving of an engine, pistons screaming from the chassis, tires shrieking for purchase, smoke joining snow, Rebekah's hand shooting out to grab her wrist, her heart taking a sudden leap into her throat, the streetcar gaining the sudden perfume of nervous sweat.

"Holy crap, he is going really fast-"

"Caroline, get away from the window!" Rebekah hisses, and a yank on her arm that nearly dislocates her shoulder flings her toward the opposite side of the car half a second before the entire thing folds inward upon itself with a bang, severing the heads of riders less durable than she, the track vanishing, the limbs of nearby trees punching the windows to stars, the street firing off white sparks beneath them as streetcar and truck skid the ten feet from roadway to nearby hotel.

A/N: Yes, Tyler's crossover is still in play. Yes, I had to leave it there.