She likes to assign fault to time.
Time had trawled the boyish wonder out of him, it had drew out his humanity and crushed it between years of ruminating, years of asking questions he wasn't meant to have the answers to.
His smile was no longer bright, she noted as moonlight spread across his angular features, in fact, he never smiled anymore at all. Smiles were for the human and therefore the weak, she had figured, since most pleasant things were.
She never believed in heavens or higher powers the way he once had, but on nights like these she recited silent prayers to the beings she didn't worship.
Perhaps that is why God never listens to her, she thinks. She's scorned his name for far too many years to ask for mercy. Or forgiveness.
It's nights like these that she counts wrongdoings and injustice. Times like these when she finds a human girl's heart racketing in her dead soul. It's when Klaus' fingers are trapped in her hair and his words are in her face, all around her, anywhere, everywhere; and then when they're gone. When he's gone.
It's when she sees the shadows of his face where he stands in the fourth story window, watching as their elder brother shuffles her further into the courtyard.
She tells Elijah precisely what he doesn't want to hear, exactly what he expects to hear. She says Klaus is no longer within the treacherous man that drags them across countries and over oceans. She screams about lost causes and yells curses at Elijah for not fleeing with her and their daggered siblings.
Her tears are hot on her cheeks as she cries out like a banshee and Elijah consoles her as she tells her lies.
And she lies and lies and lies until she believes her own libretto.
It's when Elijah has ushered her back to her chamber and has stalked off to hunt down the theory of redemption once more that she collapses against her mirror. She stares at her reflection, cold eyes, swollen lips, disheveled hair and she decides that she looks less like a broken-hearted sister and more like a manic murderer.
It's moments like these when she confesses to the night that she is a murderer, guilty of the slaughter of her own blood. Her own brother.
One last prayer leaves her lips to honor the memory of Niklaus Mikaelson as the man she created slips into her room. The way he whispers "I love you" into her neck sounds like an apologetic mantra.
She says nothing because nothing is good enough for him.
Klaus twists until he's pressed tight against her, his head resting in her lap. His heart beats fast against her palm, panicked the way she fashioned it to be. Absently, she wonders if she dug it out of his chest, would her name be branded there.
It's always her. She's the one he loves wholly and completely - because she forced him to.
Years ago she started a war which she emerged from victoriously, bathed in the gore of Niklaus as she had planned. She had no use for the boy in him that was too shy to love her completely, the way she wanted. So she carved out the human. Scrapped the innocence, mocked his patience, abused his tolerance, toyed with his rage and baited his desires until he snapped. He cut himself loose, lit himself aflame and engulfed her as she had wanted all along.
She told him he wasn't the boy their father named, he wasn't their mother's bastard. He was hers. Klaus. Savage. Dangerous. Impulsive.
And thus, on nights like these, she combs through the remains of her victim. Plays with the knots in his golden hair. Sifts through the ruins of her lust.
Truly no longer brother and sister, she thought. The man in her hands wasn't the one she ascended through humanity with. Not even the one she was reborn with.
They had once been a pair. They had once known a form of peace.
Now, they had only cruelty and gore.
"We belong to each other" his eyes flicked to hers. They were no longer two separate beings it seemed. They were one person, the sweat and the ruins were the results of a single entity being forced to live divided into halves.
"Always.."