father christmas, give us your money
In which Damon & Klaus save Christmas.
Considering how doggedly the hideous red and white floor tiles clawed up the sides of his vision in some funky, yet sufficiently off-putting, Looking Glass mimicry it was a safe assumption to make that Damon Salvatore was drunk.
"Actually, Stefan, I prefer – equilibrium deficient," he slurred, words on ice as they slipped out from the cool mint curve of his mouth and crashed together in some mocking cacophony of actual speech. His brows bent like the trajectory of a rollercoaster, like winter frosted them straight onto his face, left them plastered on his brow bones. He was oftentimes his own caricature.
"Who's Stefan?"
The long cigarette legs of the blondie waitress, who had given him a merciless once-over about an hour ago thankyouverymuch, stretched like taffy straight to the ceiling.
Damon's eyes were more like fishtanks, blurred thoughts swimming aimlessly through the cerulean blue which turned to the originator of the voice.
Her image was wallpapered sideways in his vision, tilted like a whirling carnival mirror, and through several rounds of admirable and overzealous blinking, her expression shifted from amorphous and complete blur – to the pigtail curved smirk of a woman who had been called far too many names that weren't her own.
"Boyfriend?" she asked with equal parts boredom and curiosity.
Her accent – New York? No, had to be Jersey. It pummeled through his ears like a subway train, trembled memories awake with the strident screech of an E-train against the rat-infested tracks. It felt like dirt and streetlights and home.
Damon hiccupped offendedly, slowly realizing his face was cemented against the periwinkle blue diner table, he might as well have been a piece of bacon under the lone hanging red lamp. "Boyfriend?"
"I don't know, I can't even tell anymore," she offered with total blamelessness, using a filthy rag to swab the gummy linoleum table top directly beside his face. At this point, she had just learned to clean around them. "I thought leather jackets went out of style for tough guys."
How ironic, said an all-too familiar voice, but this one lolled through the bones of his skull, spread out like steam from a coffee cup, knew exactly where it was and what it was doing. This sound brought to mind pinched brows, marble-worthy bone structure that could've made Michaelangelo weep, a Harvard education in the set of his shoulders and the hunch of Atlas throughout his back. The criticism pressed into Damon's drunkenness like a pin into a balloon, tapped against the back of his brain like a ping-pong ball.
H o w ironic
"Shut up, Stefan," he said to the waitress, the gravel voice in his head not having any other person to inhabit.
A splintering assault of blue and yellow light ransacked his pupils. His phone vibrated straight into his eyeball, and he came to the revelation that it was in fact pressed directly into his face. He was inebriated to the point where he was more or less not there at all.
"Jesus," he spat, finally sitting up, the world righting and the indentation of phone keys laying like a mosaic into his cheek.
"Are you gonna pay or what?" asked the waitress, chewing gum pressed into her cheek pocket.
Damon narrowed his eyes, they slimmed like scythes in front of something golden. Like he thought before, she was all legs, nowhere to go, nothing to hide in the skirt that licked the tops of her knees. He could feel the chill of the November air viced against the too-clear glass of the diner windows beside him, night sky the cool liquid black of space.
The cold fingered the material of his t-shirt, twisting under his collar of black leather.
He outstretched an arm, closed his fingers around her wrist. "I don't have any money," he confided, coat hanger-wide smile and icebox eyes. The fluorescent lights of the diner skimmed the tips of his inkwell hair like snow.
The woman looked from his grin to the far counter, where her boss was sliding a cup of Joe to another chump in a boxy brown coat, and back again. She had sienna wood bark hair, reddish orange strapped back with an elastic. When she looked back, she slid into the booth across from him, eyes wide as plums.
"I totally get it," she asserted. She had two ear piercings on her left ear, thin eyebrows like tinsel. Her other hand came up to close over the one that seized her wrist and had yet to let go. "My girlfriend's sister, her goddamned boss fired her like two weeks ago, I mean, what an asshole. She'd be workin there for six years, right? And now she's fuckin broke, I'm like girl, it ain't your fault. She deserves the money he owes her. So I tell her, you deserve the money he owes you. And you know what? Season of giving my ass. Trust is like snow, seems nice at first but give it a day and it'll look like someone shit on your front lawn."
Damon's eyes lit up, the fake interest in her cloyingly dull story waning, replaced by another type of understanding.
"Ah, so you're on the naughty list this year," he watched her fingers, how they flitted nervously for the lighter she has shoved into the pocket of her apron, the nicotine stains under painted fingernails.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Means you got that money back for your friend, didn't you," his grin is infectious, but the jovial attitude is still as plastic as they come.
"Maybe," the waitress responds, intrigued and put-off by his assertion. "Didn't do nothing illegal if that's what you're asking. Are you a cop?"
The smile on Damon's face is quantum. His is liquid-boned, cigarette ash wan, Cadillac junkie framed, more vintage than you could ever hope to see.
"No," he answers firmly.
"Good. Fuckin cops," says the waitress, leaning back against the booth. She closes her eyes momentarily. The red Christmas lights reflected in the diner windows gleam down the column of her neck and across her bust line. "So who fucked you?"
Damon's eyes travel reluctantly to her face once more. "Excuse me?"
"Who fucked you," she asks again, crossing her legs under the table and opening her eyes. Her forearms rest lazily across the table. "Like, why are you trashed on Thanksgiving, alone in a diner, ordering three fried chickens, dry toast, a coke, and a black coffee," she has his order committed to memory, lays out the desperation like it came straight off a menu.
Damon sighs, exhausted from her question, sliding down further into the seat as if he watched the answer passing by the window inside a car on the street, and was doing his best to evade being seen. But there he was, doing what he always does, finding a listening ear with anyone who'd give it. That's the thing about Damon. He talks to everybody. "My girlfriend split for fuck knows where, my brother ditched me."
He scoffs, jaw sliding out as he finishes the last of the coke, ice jamming into his lip as he tilts the glass. His hair is frayed in the front, his own pale skin a canvas for celebratory green and white, lights strung up along the outside of the diner, forcing the cheer in doors.
"What assholes," the Jersey accent is harsh on the vowels, reminds Damon of when he skidded his '77 Mercedes convertible coup over a snare of ice and into a Birmingham lamppost. The sound grates. That was a damn good car.
He glances up from under his brows, it's like looking through skylines of black buildings in the dark.
"So you've been on a good list," she jokes, the smile twisting her lip like a pinwheel.
Damon grins.
Exactly fourteen minutes later the waitress—Damon squints, looks at her name tag: Amanda—is a heap of frigid bone and blue-lipped protestations around the back of the diner. Steam sprays from a geyser-like pipe in the ground and Damon's black boots crunch against the freezing tar. Her long legs are rigid like birch and her eyes are casket cobalt.
He drags the back of a white hand across his lip, smearing the bright cranberry along his jaw as the blood in his eyes drains and the veins beneath them quit their pulsing.
"Merry Christmas to me," he sing-songs, making a drunken semi-plier with one unsteady knee.
A pair of black-gloved hands curls around the silver handle of the trunk.
It's a black Escalade, parked around the corner of what the Nightwalkers, as of late, are calling Rue Sangue. There is no shortage of dramatic flair in this city, fortunately for the bedtime stories.
On the edge of this street, there are no lampposts. The ramshackle houses are bare as stripped bone, not a soul inside or out. A skeletal neighborhood with flyers stapled to the shells of housing, advertising Season of Giving Services down at the St Charles.
He can smell the murky water, the cold sitting in its depths, the clinking of dinnerware on the riverboats blinking merry and green in the distance. He doesn't pause to take in the view from the crossway of the three different streets where he stands, hooked on the edge of the Mississippi.
The mouth of the trunk opens into the gaping maw of night.
Klaus is all teeth and charm when the eyes of the passenger inside open to the size of cymbals.
The screaming is pleasantly nullified by the gag wrapped around the grubby mouth, and pulled mercilessly taut behind a roadkill swath of greasy black hair.
"Ah, yes. Your forte. Negotiations," he comments, mostly to and for himself, heaving the struggling body to the pavement with one swift and thoughtless swing of his arm. The man thuds solidly, still squirming, tied and burdened.
"Rather nice touch with the barbed wire, don't you think," he says loftily, brows swinging up and cheekbones catching the shadows off the smiling moon. He's standing casually, a tall form in a warm black overcoat that hits his knees. His prisoner has managed an inch or two, gasping and surging for another, wire around his ankles, cutting through the jeans, rope twisting wrists together. "Mate, come on, it's cold out," he implores. "Are we really going to do the whole running away thing? I know it's a matter of instinct really, but it's quite nearly half past and I have a date with a woman who does not like to be kept waiting. Which allows me, really, all the more reason to instinctually terminate your increasingly useless existence with next to no further conference."
The slug-like form of the prisoner freezes, eyes turning back to the monster in black jeans and heavy shoes.
He grins, "Much better."
In the cool flash of an instant, Klaus is mere inches from the man's face. His knee scrapes the rutted pavement, the other bent up, and his chin tilts as the words barrel through unremitting teeth in terse anger, "You give me the address of that hellborn Haitian necromancer and I will give you one more miserable day on this earth to bid your slovenly goodbyes to all of your wretched, squalid friends and the filth afterbirth of those you call family, have we a deal?"
The man trembles under his grip, feels the heat through the cancerous breath. The legendary hybrid monster is a monolith weight on his lungs and the wet fear of it nearly causes him to lose his bowels, perspiration drenching him.
His prisoner suddenly growls, confused eyes spiraling red like dye dropped in water, fangs piercing through the gag, body making a last-ditch jerk forward in pitiful defense. Klaus dodges it in instantaneously, his chuckle hitting the beams of the abandoned houses across the street.
Inside of the Escalade the radio is still playing, Klaus can hear the distracted holiday voices of The Waitresses clipping through his thorned fury.
"Honestly I'd have expected better from a man of your caliber," Klaus mocks, expression turned long and empty and grave. His eyes are legions colder than the front come down around the city.
He pins the man, wolfish anger in his sinews, one leg on either side of his body, jeans scraping concrete, and hurriedly pulls off the leather glove. Shoving his fingers behind the lip of his prisoner, he grasps the protracted fang with a precise wrench of forefinger and thumb.
Klaus' words are tense and heavy, jumping the edges of one another as if fighting to be first off his tongue, "High Priest, gris-gris Houngan, you make a rather sorry match as an infant vampire. Shame I was forced to turn you into one," his expression is accusingly remorseful, as if those two emotions had been meant to coexist, like he were able to create a new set of them. He lifts the man and shoves him harder into the tar for emphasis. "Had you only agreed to help me before we could have been thick as thieves by now; you with your magic, me with my necromancer, and see where you find yourself when you cross me."
He tears the fang from the newly turned vampire's skull. Rolling his eyes at the screams, Klaus smothers the latter day witch's mouth to muffle the agonizing anguish coming from within, looking up to the sky, so help him this was only supposed to take twelve minutes.
It's a dead end. Rather literally.
He ends up carving his heart out, holding it for that one satisfying split second as it shudders to stillness in his hand.
It's all clean-up work from thereon out, the part he's more or less disinterested in. But no one will ever say he doesn't do his own dirty work, will they. And it's moments only before the witch-vamp falls down six feet deep, crumpled into a heap like an accordion pitched into a closet, heart tossed in as an afterthought. Rest in pieces, as it were.
The firm set of his jaw projects that there will be better luck tomorrow. There is a list a mile long of potential leads and he's checked it twice, as customary of the season.
Now here's the thing, he's pressed for time. He ducks into the driver's side and pulls the door shut. He'll leave the slaughtering of the aforementioned vile familial ties and accompanying vermin for the morrow.
Season of giving, after all.
It takes him another fifteen minutes to make it through the center of the city up towards the Garden District, though there were several incidents involving pedestrians and what some may call narrow misses and others might classify as hit and run.
The main arteries of the streets are lined with rings of white lights snaking around the trunks of trees, cold tourists bundled and drunk as the bars blare out muted trumpet versions of carols and spin an array of themed cocktails meant for profit, not comfort.
The streets around the George Washington Cable House are far quieter, Antebellum houses surrounded by gardens and barriers, some lit up with polite white Victorian glow, candles in the windows, and others remaining as sinister and dark as the long beams used to hold the gaping windows and doors aloft. A quietness within their low porch brows that is silently judging the cheer spreading from window to window in the neighboring houses.
The streetlights are intact here, the sidewalks clean. He can hear the soft hum of the city trolley on its wires three streets away, and the cheerful wreaths on the silent street corners paint a gentle picture of the dead city. He sees ghosts – Livaidais Plantation and the neighborhoods of Josephine and Carondelet, mannered women in winter dresses nodding to him as he walked the vined pavement hundreds of years in the past.
He parks across from a specific house, great white arches fanning the doorway of the restored Antebellum like wings, a colossal delicacy pushed back from the street behind a fragile black gate, caressed around with curls of garland. The windows are alight, peachy warm with cotton curtains, and a figure emerges from the front door, blonde and bundled, a white cap pulled over curls and a warm fur collar around a bright red jacket.
"Caroline," he hums, pleased to see her as she walks around the gate.
"Klaus," she acknowledges, exasperated. "What are you doing here?"
"I thought we had a date tonight," he answers, leaning up off the car, feet following her of their own accord as she makes a b-line past him and around the Escalade.
"No," she corrects firmly, "I said I have a date tonight."
Caroline huffs silently, eyes scanning the street for the compact car she was expecting, but sees it empty but for the empty vehicles of her neighbors.
"Well now, how was I supposed to infer that it wasn't with me?" he questions good-naturedly, a grin in every nook of his expression save for his saurian teeth.
"You knew that it wasn't with you and now you probably scared him off looking all creepy and murderer-y and undertaker-y," she bursts like a tea kettle, brows climbing under her warm hat and made-up eyes racked with nerves.
"Nary a possibility, Caroline. It was most-likely your penchant for overzealous confines re: dating success."
She looks at him, finally. Her eyes say nothing kind.
"Which I find charming, for the record."
Caroline sighs, absolutely expelling every cubic inch of air in her lungs, head falling back.
"And how astoundingly conveniently," he provides. "That here I am, set for the dating, no bodies in sight, no executions on schedule, come at the sound of alarm," he outstretches an arm, pulling open the passenger seat door to the warm black interior. The scent of leather and musk escapes into the falling violet night.
Caroline's jaw tenses, eyes moving unforgivingly from the car back to the earnest eyes of the monster beside it. He might as well be the pied piper. It takes about a minute more before her expression barely gives, defrosting so minutely. She glances to the side and an inhalation moves through lips that are perhaps willing to talk.
But there it was, the sound of wheels around the streetcorner behind her, and her expression brightens in an instant. Internalized sun even in the cozy cold, cheeks red as holly berry. She spins, smile climbing across her face like a mountaineer, and she jumps, waving happily to the oncoming car.
"You're late!" she chirps excitedly.
Klaus glowers from his position beside the Escalade, weight falling into one leg. He is a scissorsharp black figure against the soft lavender of the darkening twilight over the street.
"Have a pleasant evening with the missus," he calls cheerfully to The Date who hadn't the courtesy to leave the car. The little engine coughs blue smoke into the dimming light.
Caroline levels him with a proverbial dagger to the metaphorical Original heart, staring bullets at him before definitively shutting the compact car door.
He sighs as the vehicle moves past and the house at the end of the street flicks on an array of amateurly arranged Christmas lights. Contemplating catching up to the car and picking it up, shaking the boy's brains out of his skull, Klaus pulls out his phone.
Ah, well.
People to kill, time to meet.
Or perhaps it was the other way around?
Damon shuffles along Dumaine.
The two or three bizarre looks he receives are nothing compared to the sheer terror he should rightfully earn, but this is the drunkest quarter of the most degraded city in the country, so it's not exactly a shock to him that the punchbowl of blood his had spilled over the front of his chest and neck would garner no immediate outcry.
It's actually almost as if some invisible force were dragging him on strings, inching him forward as his boots scuff the sidewalk. He stumbles through a crowd of underage girls, who are giggling madly with red noses and vodka hidden in their water bottles. The scent of pine unlocks his sinuses as he passes the Jardin Gris, which is, for lack of caring to decipher a better term, a Witchy Wal-Mart planted in the middle of several neon bars marketed towards the penniless, desperate, and aroused.
The place has been cleaned up in the past years, the "Hybrid" recreating some kind of supernatural paradise – paid for by no little amount of death, disaster and savagery. Damon was far from a man of political principle, but so long as there was Bourbon and blood the flag could keep on waving over his head. He considered himself a mercenary for the cause.
His tilts the bag holding the bottle up, draining the remnant of Tennessee's finest, and glances up at the blurred roadway. He can see fake candles in the distant windows, music pouring from doorways as if it swallowed air and devoured as well as smoke.
"Tra la fuckin la," Damon comments to himself, inadvertently hissing at a finger-laced couple that swerves well out of his way.
His phone vibrates.
He fumbles to open it, blinking and not catching the name.
"Hello?" he asks, sounding for all the truth in the world as if he had never answered one before. As if he were on the edge of his own lonely planet, surrounded by endless ravines of smooth, overpriced liquor and a buffet of blood type A, B and Oh yeah. Encapsulated by the resounding and inescapable knowledge that he was, in fact, confessionally alone, and the ticket was won off the wheel of misfortune.
"Damon!" comes the exultant response from the other side of the line. "You sound as if nobody's calling you these days, mate. I find myself concerned. What's your trouble? Doppleganger double-cross you?" the feigned apprehension is as characteristic as it is blatant. Klaus snickers openly from the microphone, "Get it? Rather clever, that."
Damon's nose curls, he stands in the center of the sidewalk. "Klaus. I'm touched about your concern in all the right places," his head tilts, drunken sarcasm swaddling the squinted eyes and cracked-mirror smile. "And yeah, I get it. Thankfully I'm used to the fact that you're so crooked you could swallow nails and spit out screws."
Klaus smiles behind the wheel of the Escalade, speeding down the byway through the Treme.
"Listen, I'm not On-Call for Minion Duty tonight, I'm too drunk and I have a headache," Damon says, tripping into a supportive stop sign. "I have a headache, Klaus. I'm too tired. I'm just not feeling it. I think we need couples counseling. Where are my Miranda Rights? The girls at work were such bitches to me today. I want to speak to my attorney. I plead the fifth. Do not go quietly into the night-"
Klaus is holding the phone apart from his ear. "I'm about to rip someone's eyeballs from their sockets and unless you'd prefer them to be yours, I suggest you reconsider your Miranda Rights."
"Fine," Damon sighs with the dramatics of an eleven year old, eyes closed and lip pulling up at the corner. His brows are shoved together like someone stitched them in the most perfect depiction of teenage angst imaginable. "I'm on Decatur now. I think." He opens his eyes, sees the menagerie of abstract colors and shapes his vision has become, and gives the best description possible, "It's a street. With a road. And lights."
Shutting the call with a distasteful expression towards the screen, Damon shoves the phone into his back pocket, waiting for the Escalade to roll over the packed streets like a tiger bending blades of grass.
The past several years have been a blur, one near to the amount of drunken sightlessness he was experiencing now – the street lingered before him in a heaving mass of reds and greens and laughter. New Orleans was won—and lost. Won for Klaus the Deathless, lost for his siblings. Damon had heard the price of rule had in fact been all, and so loyalty was pledged to the king for his sacrifice, bleeding out on the cross, willing to give and give and give in order to ultimately take.
But Damon knew Klaus—well, knew him well enough to know he didn't earn those scars falling over in a church. And if he were hedging a best, he'd have guess that undoubtedly Rebekah and Elijah slept somewhere entombed, covered in grey dust with daggers merrily embedded into their chests. Maybe Klaus even strung up the coffins and dead, wax paper corpses with Christmas lights when the season rolled around.
On his front, lack of personal attachments and meaningful relationships had gleaned into a sizeable constant, Caroline disappearing into the welcoming arteries of the city after finishing college a year early, Stefan following close behind with a bag over his shoulder and an absent goodbye.
And Elena? Elena or, Apocalypse Now, as Caroline had come to nickname her, had been dragged by her brother into the "open arms of reality" with only a note left behind saying: Time for a stay on the moon. Listen like spring and talk like June, remember? I will love you always. Her brother Jeremy had turned her into a longhaired hippie and all his leads were dead, only one postcard in two years with her handwriting: Made it to the Milky Way it read, one singular line sent from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But when he arrived there wasn't a trace to be found. That's when he ditched the run around, the whole situation stenching of a time when he'd been Pierce'd for the better part of a century.
He may be a desperate fool but he wasn't a desperate idiot.
It was a point of pride.
Damon hears the tsunami sound of a car horn directly beside his body.
Alongside the rest of the pedestrians , Damon jerked about six inches sideways, but miraculously managed not to keel over into the gloriously obese woman to his right. He has earned commodore ranking on the high seas of drunkenness at this stage in his career. Pawing his way around the car, he crawls into the passenger seat.
"Shouldn't you, I don't know, be more kingly about your entrances," he slinks into resting position along the leather, shutting the door behind him.
"Where's the fun in that?" the hybrid asks sincerely.
"Ah yes, neither better to be feared nor loved, but to be a big dick. That is the solution," Damon philosophizes with his eyes shut, liquefied against the seat. "You just gave Machiavelli a hard on from across the grave."
"Mate, I was Machiavelli," Klaus corrects, pen names disposable over the centuries. He pulls back out onto the street.
"So who are we shanking?" he reaches up to fool with the radio, holiday music a low din under the engine of the car and the honking of traffic on the roads. "Mother Theresa? Box of puppies? The person who fucked up your order at Bojangles?"
"Actually it's a request," Klaus reveals, breaking at the last minute for a pair of tourists hauling four shopping bags in each arm, faces paled by the headlights.
"Oh you have a request line?" Damon is silent for a moment, as if thinking. "Dear Santa Klaus, I really really really want someone to bash my uncle's head in this year. I promise I've been really awful. Yours UnSincerely—"
"Caroline asked it," his counterpart says, no emotion one way or the other.
Damon rolls his eyes back into his head, thin lip pulled to the side like by a crab hook. "When are you gonna give up already," he squints at the lights through the windshield, watching the people in the street disperse as they reach the edges of the quarter. "Isn't there an expiration date on desperation? Doesn't it go sour like milk?"
"You being the majority stockholder of said emotion I was hoping you'd enlighten me yourself," Klaus comments, barely listening to the vampire beside him as he makes a particular right through a small street flanked by boarded up three-story buildings.
"I'm just saying Caroline is—"
"A friend," Klaus growls definitively, taking the car around another right which brings them again to a street warmed by wreathed lamppost. The roadway is clean. Friendly darkened storefronts sleeping with shuttered eyes, a quiet street frequented by locals rather than tourists. "And as her friend I agreed to a favor in which only you would be appropriate, how did you phrase it? Minion Duty."
"Oh yeah, how'd I win that lottery?" Damon scoffs, second nature.
"Because mate, I'm afraid, it was your brother's livelihood which suffered the damage," Klaus reveals, bringing the Escalade to a standstill outside the shadowed window of mauled storefront that could have blended in as any other ramshackle, destitute hovel that are commonly thrown in like patchwork amongst the city's well-kept establishments.
But on this particular building, the glass is plowed in like teeth on the face of a man beaten outside a bar, the wood around the window casing splinted to harried pieces, the hollowed insides plundered and gutted, leaving the remnants of entrails crashed on the sidewalk.
The words Salvatore Apothecary read clearly in rich maroon font over the door that has been busted in, hanging off one miserable hook like a drunk against a wall.
Damon's eyes drain of the inebriated aimlessness, blue burning like alcohol does when set alight. He stares at the assaulted storefront through Klaus' driver's side window, and steps out of the door, making his way to the damage.
Klaus' shoes hit the pavement behind him, and he can hear the voice of the hybrid tall above him as he's bent to the sidewalk, fingering a piece of glass which had before read ALL WELCOME in uninterrupted continuance. The glass spires his skin, smearing the edges with blood.
"So who are we shanking?" Damon repeats, jovial attitude entirely replaced.
Klaus grins behind him, eyes splintering yellow in one prismatic angle of amber streetlight.
"Finally," he breathes, all sharp teeth and diminishing soul. "A little Christmas spirit."