Hayley is gone, or at least he thinks she is gone. He would like to hope she's gone, maybe to Louisiana to search out the origin of that birthmark, but he has learned the hard lesson of the futility of hoping for anything. He doesn't feel her in the mansion but she could, he supposes, be somewhere nosing about. He sighs and rolls over, cocooning himself in the sumptuous silk bedding that he has owned and used since the Tang Dynasty, and feels vaguely nauseous. He squints his eyes shut and tries to re-imagine the hot and heavy coupling with the wolf-girl from a fantastical vantage point in which she isn't her but she is someone else. A very different someone else. Unfortunately, that vision makes his stomach clench and twist even harder and he knows he needs to feed, momentarily regrets not having sunk his fangs into the admittedly tasty Hayley and, well, draining her dry. He groans out loud. He needs, first, to take a hot, achingly scalding, shower. He feels decidedly unclean.
He opens his eyes and thinks back to the long evening. He had plied her with alcohol, the cheap blended whisky not the single malts. This makes him smile in an unpleasant way. He allowed her to abuse him mercilessly in regards to his artwork. Even encouraged her psycho-babbling critiques. There had been a moment, in her rude bantering that he had, actually, considered ripping her heart out and finding Tyler in order to shove it down his throat, but then, as he listened harder, watched her drink herself into whorish abandon, he decided that raw dogging her might be just the perfect antidote to what was ailing him. Now, in the light of the new day, his bed and flesh reeking of her scent, he gets that, okay, his itch had gotten scratched but he is still feverish and so very, very love-sick. Even after a thousand years one can still live and learn, he muses.
He can't, for the life or death of him, truly figure out why he did it. He wonders if it was to shut her up, convince her that he isn't as lonely as he is obviously appearing to be to the unwashed masses but that, instead, he's just really fucking horny.
His self-imposed decades of celibacy had been hard-won, not that he fancied himself anything on the level of Elijah who wears his own denial like a kind of bespoke pashmina robe, a sort of vampiric monk. No, his abstinence had been woven on the loom of protection, protecting himself from himself, from the crazed impulse he seemed to have been born with that insists he dive into the dark waters of love and hold his own head under until he stops thrashing. Elijah, on the other hand, has made a personal religion worshiping the figure of one woman who, for reasons known only to the devil, appears every five hundred years and has no interest in him whatsoever.
And that would be amusing if he were feeling so inclined as to find levity in the trials of his family, he no longer is. At all. Kol dead, Rebekah existentially torturing herself with a longing so child-like that he is wounded by her vulnerability, Mikael, Esther and Finn all returned to ash, and Elijah gone in a disappointed rage of frustrated disgust. He should be gone, too. But instead, he's wandering the streets of an uncultured, dairy-fed yawnfest, holding a candle, wearing his dead heart on his sleeve, mixing up drama as though he were stirring a cauldron, killing for pleasure, and tearing holes into the lives of people who deserve to be left alone.
He opens his eyes and sighs and the sound rips at him. He's unhappy. Violently not happy. He wants to kill someone. Desperately. To keep himself focused and ridiculously on-task in a job that has become pointless, he decides that the someone he wants to destroy entirely is Tyler Lockwood. Perhaps it is time to put Mystic Falls behind him, leave the restless natives to their own pedestrian lives and eventual domestic un-doings, pick up the scent, follow the trail, and feed his inner wolf until he pukes up bone and gristle and his own undigested heart.