When they are young and the flowers come up in the spring, he picks exactly six yellow poppies for his mother. One for each of his brothers and sisters. Delivers them into her lap, watches how they stand so brilliantly against the deep navy of her dressing gown, and waits with hopeful reproach for her reaction.
Esther smiles sweetly down at her middle son, the one with the temper that she is sure he gets from his father, the one with the bottle green eyes set wide upon his skull cut cheekbones (such a handsome thing), the one with the expectations that she is positive will be shattered in this world, as well as the next.
Her fingers find the brittle stems, plucks one bud, places it behind her ear. "They're beautiful, Niklaus," she whispers, before he flushes cherry red and takes off around the trunk of a white oak tree.
Lying in the grass, twirling a poppy in his hands, he thinks that this must be what love feels like.
x
Henrik is only eleven when he is killed, and all Niklaus can see is spat blood upon his tunic in an unfurled blossom that grows larger and larger with each passing second. Any thought of a voice gets caught in his throat and dies on his mouth, suffocated by grief and drowning in shame. If only, if only.
Rebekah holds Henrik close to her chest, the pure white of her gown stained with an irreproachable mark that cannot be undone. Sobs wrack her body, each daisy yellow strand shaking with the shallow breaths that she can barely get in. Elijah, stoic and firm, grasps his younger brother's hand fingers kneading, begging for the pulse that won't come.
Niklaus folds into himself, lies spread eagle next to his brother on the dirt, lavender vervain brushing the crown of his head. The last thought he has before he falls into a sleepless rest is that Henrik's eyes match his own.
x
Tatia is beautiful.
Niklaus believes that he might love her. Her cocoa eyes, mischievous spark threatening to make his heart skip. The coast of her body, each swivel and swish of her sandalwood skin asking to be made into a shrine of his pleasure. Those bee stung lips with sensuous lies and promises stitched in between weaves of golden coral. An ivy plant of amber waves tumbling in a dangerous current down her collarbone.
Yes, he believes he might love her. Or at least he could have were he capable.
x
He hunts down each of his siblings, shoves a dagger through their hearts, watches as the life slowly drains out of their vibrant eyes. He dresses them in their finest attire and lays them to rest in mahogany coffins, all of them gorgeous in stature and exquisiteness. Niklaus lines them up into neat little rows, passes over them every day, assuring that his brothers and sister will never leave him alone, never abandon him, never run away because the world is huge. He knows this because he has had to chase them all over it from Finn in Medieval Europe to Rebekah in her flapper dress in Chicago, beating the times and the cultures into submission as he ravaged their individuality for the sake of something bigger, something better. Family.
What good are the spoils of the universe if he has no one to share them with?
x
Niklaus tracks Katerina Petrova from her stint in the royal court of Marie Antionette to her antebellum blood bath in deep south Virginia. She is still just as clever, just as cunning as she was in the sixteenth century. No doubt in question that she would have made a formidable opponent by his side back when he danced in the ballrooms of ancient Rome and dabbled in the revolutions of Paris, but her volatile streak ran too wide and too deep, far outstretching his in a way that made her impossible to catch.
She was too everything, still is too everything, and he was not going to be another one stuck under the spell of the infamous Petrova doppleganger.
Fall for her once, shame on him. Fall for her twice, well dopplegangers keep coming round again. That is why they're called dopplegangers after all.
x
Stefan Salvatore is a prick. All bravado and charm, easy on the eyes, with his hands so far up Nikalus' sister's skirt that when Nik's bottle green orbs narrow in a death threat that canned most of the Eastern European population, the bastard just grins cheekily and spins his palm at their waitress for another round. His exploits are legendary in their own time, enough of a fuss to be known in another world, on another news page. And still, Stefan romances his sister with an earnest gaze, hanging on her every word, chin falling right off her silk gloved hand.
He's hard to hate. And it has been so very long since Niklaus had a brother.
x
Niklaus becomes Klaus with his hands around the neck of another Petrova doppleganger and his ex-best friend watching with fear dancing in his eyes. Elijah's hand finds its way into the cavity of his chest, clenches upon what might be left of the heart he has long since neglected. And then it all goes black.
He wakes for the first time in many decades not alone and with his older brother by his side.
x
On an evening with not a cloud shadowing the moon, his father stands on the front porch of a mansion with a beautiful young girl in one hand and a glinting spear of silver in the light of the sky. Mikael laughs and laughs, the sound pure menace mixing with the quiet Virginia winds.
"Nobody cares about you boy." And for one second with the white oak dagger lodged in his left thigh and the eldest Salvatore breathing down his neck, he halfheartedly wonders if his father might be right.
x
With rage and pent up years of aggression filtered between their conversations, his siblings suddenly take up residence in his living room, critiquing his Persian rugs and setting small fires to his antique maple side tables. He would be incredibly pissed off about their ruining his furniture and drinking the best wine in his cellar if he wasn't so fucking overjoyed that each one of them was sitting in the same room for the first time in over seven centuries.
With that kind of few and far between, he finds it difficult to be so angry at them, but that doesn't mean he's going to tolerate Kol's picking his teeth with the fork of a five hundred dollar piece of antebellum silver plated flatware.
x
You're beautiful, you're strong, you're full of light, he tells the girl with the golden curls and the snarky mouth. She scoffs in reply and storms off, the cornflower blue train of her gown rubbing the dirt from the grass of his lawn. He smiles in spite of her exit and returns to his sketchpad for the first time in months.
x
He offers an escape of wealth and culture that she could have only dreamt of when she was a little girl. Princesses and palaces wouldn't seem far off, just so long as she put her hand in his, closed those watercolored eyes and followed wherever he went.
He can remember being a boy, running through wheat fields, chasing after the girls in the village, their giggles and high pitched shrieks the only indication that he was nearing to his destination. Now he sees her golden curls and honeysuckle skin and watercolored eyes and pomegranate mouth, listens to the lilt in her voice, the steady rhythm in her chest, the way her words sound when directed at him as opposed to the boy that she already loves, would already run away with and follow.
There is no giggle, no shriek, no nothing for him to hold tight for or to.
x
The look of disbelief etched in the present panic and disillusionment should take him aback. Hands are tangled in the mess of her hair, smears of pomegranate on his palms, one slender finger raised to her lips as he feels the vibrations coming off her frame in waves that seem to be collapsing into his arms, onto to his shoulders, begging for support, aching for a savior. Him.
Klaus has been a lot of characters in his many lives, but none of them ever included messiah. Until today. Until her.
x
It's always four thousand steps backwards and ten forwards with Rebekah. You'd think he'd learn after all this time that she isn't going to change, but neither is he. The best he could ever hope for is a draw, and for the time being, he will take what he can get.
x
They walk and talk with her arm woven into the crook of his elbow, the pressure of her thigh against his as they sit upon the cool, stone bench, the simple teasing of her life pre-vampirism with her great big laughs and the way his heart pitches in his stomach when she glances at him out the corner of her watercolored eyes as they watch the world go on around them in peaceful silence.
Would he ever consider being human, she inquires, he sees the veins wrinkle in her forehead, inspects her brow furrow, her lips pinch shut, sparkling fingernails lending to the flute of champagne in her right hand, held loosely there as though she might not even realize it. A late day sun casts over her face, lighting the background of an opulent robin's egg sky and evergreen garden as she comes to life before his very eyes. Klaus commits it to memory: how she looks at the moment, like something so foreign and still familiar to him that he has viewed many times and never tired of its beauty.
I'd never want to be human, he confesses as her faces crumbles delicately, enough not to let away her emotions, taking another drink from his glass. He doesn't add the part he hopes that she cannot see stricken across his face and written on the pupils of his eyes.
I will, if you will, Caroline.
She runs. He continues to chase.
x
He kills Carol Lockwood without looking back, sneers while wiping a bloody hand over his two day stubble, tasting leftover champagne on his breath.
He thinks of her all the way home, when washing his hands in the sink, and breaking every last piece of china in his cabinet.
If she were to die that night, he imagines that she'd come back in the form of his cruelest desire. Something that was strong and necessary in order to live. Smashing the last plate over his dining room table with the mayor's blood splattered across his lapels, he breathes until he forgets how and scrubs his red collar until it turns snow white.
x
Kol dies in the Gilberts' kitchen where the doppleganger and the hunter have their morning coffee. And the part that he hates, hates, the most is that he was so fucking pissed off at his baby brother up until the moment he saw him alight with flame. He couldn't do anything to stop it, to prevent Kol's death, nor can he do anything to avenge it, even though it's what the smarmy bastard would have wanted with a smirk crooked on his smart ass little face.
Klaus' humanity-scratch that- infinite ability to be impulsively ignorant will be his demise one of these days.
When the Bennett witch descends with the migraine from hell, the last thing he remembers before black is his baby brother's face. The way his cheekbones cut so high up into his skin, swallowing him, making Kol look aged, at least until he grinned like a small boy with the world waiting for him with baited breath at his feet.
x
The question comes out like a plea bargain, sounding pained in his own berry lips, and he just hates the way his voice tremors as it exits shakily and trembling. How?
Damon Salvatore smirks, and Klaus instantly regrets saying anything at all. The younger vampire's eyes spark something dangerous behind that icy blue, cold and sassy with satisfaction brimming on his grin before he discloses a secret that Klaus already knew, already understood, but hasn't ever thought made that big of a difference.
What's the point of sin if you don't want to be forgiven? Damon chuckles, the noise lolling off his tongue in slow deliberation. Klaus flinches at his words, swills them around in his hands, and tries to remember how to pray.
x
He's in the lock box of witchy wondering, pacing slowly and quietly like a jungle cat stalking its prey. Anger transpires off his skin in hot waves, sick bubbles in his stomach, and that hybrid dickhead watching from the safety of the Gilbert kitchen, aged scotch in his left hand. Death threats live and die on his mouth the moment that she enters the room, lavender and honey perfume infiltrating every pore on Klaus' body.
Tyler slides a hand down Caroline's lower back, leans into her face, places a chaste kiss on her cheek, completely ignoring the thousand year old waiting like a petulant child in the corner. The jealousy rages in Klaus' bottle green eyes before he cannot stand anymore of their quips and retaliates, planting an ugly coat rack in the girl's belly and nibbling on the graceful column of her neck.
His stomach drops out to his feet seeing her form splayed on the floor. She'll not forgive this.
x
Tyler lays Caroline on the floor at his feet several hours later. Golden curls tarnished, watercolored eyes muddled, heartbeat slower and messier out of time as she tries to breathe in and out, and still he wonders how she can still be so beautiful. When she falls into a fitful rest, he carries her like a dethroned prince to the couch and sets her down gently, with care hoping to transfer something, anything from his hands to her honeysuckle skin.
He allows himself to mourn silently for the life draining out of her, the light dimming with each passing second. She coughs, voice hoarse, pomegranate lips chapped and bloodied as she about faces and examines him. Klaus is wringing his fingers together in a nervous tick, his eyes wired and murky green like moss rimmed red and swollen, his heart is erratic and unstable.
Caroline talks to him, tells him stories he doesn't want to hear. Never would have believed. Still kind of can't consider to be truth. Her letters garble in her throat when she says that he still has his humanity. A surge of rage flares up and extinguishes quick like lightning when their eyes lock together. She knows he's been crying, and still, he cannot bear not to look at her. Caroline, so strong, so beautiful, so full of light.
"I know that you're in love with me," she whispers, the confession he thought he had hidden so well gouged out before his very eyes lying in wait at his feet. He could deny, deny, deny because he is Niklaus and he has never felt love nor has he ever had the desire to do so because that would make him so grossly human. But he neglects to remember what the eldest Salvatore had taught, although the girl has not forgotten.
"And anybody capable of love is capable of being saved."
x
She gasps down his blood, with his fingers softly pulling at her golden curls. Gorgeous yellow waves tumbling down her collarbone and resting on her shoulders. He makes sighs of contentment at the feel of her body upon his chest and finds peace when she lolls to sleep on his torso, the time of his heart not so erratic and out of tune, but merely beating in accordance with hers. The dead weight of dread no longer clenches him, release swiftly as he gazes down at her in equal amounts of admiration and terror for what will come. Oh how much he lets his humanity show when she forgives his sin.
x
"Somewhere along the line you decided I was worth saving," Damon tells him in the Salvatore basement with dirt under his fingernails and assurance in his voice. "That's what I said to her. And she gave a stiff nod of acknowledgement. That's how I knew."
Klaus purses his lips in question. He is one hundred percent sure he will regret even asking. "Knew what?"
Damon laughs and laughs, rolling his icy blue eyes and placing a pale hand on Klaus' shoulder. He ducks his head and lies back on the floor. "Knew what?" Klaus inquires yet again, exasperation falling out of his lips.
x
Caroline moans a little in her sleep, her long legs twitch, and her hands ball up into baby fists that pound on his chest. She parts her pomegranate mouth, song lyrics finding their way out, spiraling up to his ear drums, laying to rest on the dimples in his cheeks. In spite of how she got there, nuzzled and cuddled into his arms, he allows himself to smile.
His heart is a secret garden and the walls are very high. Except for the beauty with the golden curls and hummingbird giggle. She climbed the stones, toppled over the ivy, and fell into his palace courtyard.
And he has kept her there everyday since.