I become such a monster when I miss you [clementine von radics]
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New Orleans smells like gardenia blossoms and rain and sea water that leaks through the levees. It radiates sex and power, dying magnolia vines spitting on the wrought iron balconies and wide eggshell white porches. Gardens bursting at their boundaries, or lack thereof, with crystallized yellow tulips and sultry crimson roses, scarring wisteria in a purple haze that sobers even the most dilutive alcoholic. The city is a cesspool of mockery and magic and every turn of cobblestone makes him want to wade in the banks of river kissing the boundaries of the quarter.
It is a kingdom ripe for the taking with one firm pluck of fingers tightened around its neck.
[and yet somedays all he can think about is a small civil war stained town on the mouth of the blue ridge parkway with scattered leaves and legends that live and die with the sun.]
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The family mansion is beautifully French antebellum with the creamy pillars and expanse of vibrant grass that screams out golden and bronzed oaks lining in a neat order. Pure and sweet but still decadent with centuries of stories past that creep through each spiny wooden panel. It is lived in and gorgeously virgin, and most days lounging on the porch with a swirl of brandy in that crystal tumbler peaks his desire for an empire, but then he remembers that he already had one once, even if the subjects weren't so loyal. And even more than that, he had a queen.
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That night he slaughters five of Marcel's men in the outer boroughs of the quarter with a half moon sliver of silver dying on the sad grin gracing his features.
He blames it on the sleepless city and crushes the hearts in between his fingers, feeling the warm blood beat down his forearms, tangling thickly in the cords that suffocate his wrists.
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(He doesn't ever find out, but that Friday night at Whitmore College when Caroline goes on a romantic picnic with some guy she met at a mixer, he pours them champagne and Caroline never touches her glass. She hasn't had it in months.)
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Marcel's masquerade party is richly depraved with balconies of blood red desires on each staircase and tuxedoed men and ball gown clung women saunter with sensuality crawl and slide in and out of dark corners. With baby sister on his arm, Klaus smiles irreverently at the ducked faces that dash introductions with calligraphied handshakes and snake bitten lips on sallowed cheekbones. The blackened horns of his mask, coated in raven glitter making waves in the crowds, crowing everyone's disapproval, but he is not here to be loved. No great king was ever loved, and besides, he doesn't love. After all he had recalled that it was a vampire's greatest weakness.
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wait.
Anyone capable of love is capable of being saved, the girl tells him, her buttered whorls of curls wrecked on her collarbone, sweaty porcelain flesh pink with worry and life.
For the first time since he was a [living breathing heavy hearted warm flesh beating fast] human, he remembers what hope feels like.
Nevermind, resume tape.
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Camille is lovely to be sure. He can see why Marcel is so fascinated by her, but she is weak. And his tolerance for weakness flew out the window the moment he was twenty two and his father held a rusty blade to his throat, spat in his face, tossing dirt in his eyes and yelled DISGRACE at the top of his volume.
There is no room for weakness and darkness in a world that is already so plagued by sin and war and death. He no capacity for it, he ran out of space for that a long time ago. Why do you think all those weak eventually end up dead?
[you're strong, beautiful, full of light.]
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(A thousand miles away, a boy with green eyes and cocoa hair and a grin that stumbles over itself is holding her hand, but the moment this boy utters three words, the girl turns and sprints away, night air caressing her lithe form and running its fingers through her golden tumbles of hair.
Three words: all for you.)
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The Louisiana night takes on a soul of its own at sundown with raging in the streets and raving in the cafes, and yet he sits silently still in the bar at the end of Dauphine and sketches for the first time in a long time, bottle of whiskey off to the side, stars flickering in the bottom of his glass through the open curtains of the storefront. A drawing on the page begins to take abstract shape of tulip pink lips and Mediterranean eyes so he halts immediately and slops some amber fluid in his bee stung mouth peering out the weathered panes. A witch dances alone in the streetlights, flailing skirts piled around her legs and with a quickest flash her blood on his hands.
Wiping a finger across his mouth in satisfaction, he abandons her body in a nearby alley, the cobblestones screeching at him in protest, the winding ferns shouting obscenities, the candy colored apartment balconies ripped with baubles and trinkets hoarse from noise all take shape in a catatonically deafening. Klaus presses his hands to his ears and waits, feels the weight of the charcoal under his nails and streaked across the bridge of his nose—no it's impossible but,
(a minute of quiet in a loud shouting world.)
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Unfortunately, the flashbacks are hard to suppress.
Especially when Tyler comes round to check on Hayley and the growing bean of discontent in her stomach. The boy is beaten down slightly and Klaus knows to tread lightly where the subject of the girl is concerned but sometimes he just can't help but goad the boy until one day with the afternoon sun a gorgeously warm and inviting slant on the nursery room tinted lavender, he fucking just lets it ride with the paint brush in his hand and the color (that he can almost smell as her on the column of her neck so many months ago), and he asks Tyler the one thing he's been wanting to know since the mongrel landed on his doorstep.
So why didn't you return to Caroline?
And the asshole even has the indecency to smile when he responds to Klaus' plight with a simple shrug and an answer that doesn't even begin to cover abandonment and recklessness and wait, does he care anymore?
(when Tyler tells him that Caroline is taking a painting course for no damn reason at all, his grin betrays all manner of things to the extent that he almost rips the boy's heart out for sporting that nasty shit eating look on his face.)
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Days and days Klaus will comb the city from the top of the quarter to the cliffs of the river, the trees of the garden district and the smoky bars of uptown, not quite sure what he is searching for in this place that is meant to be home.
He draws and sketches and drinks more on those days. Swears to all things holy that he can taste lavender and honey on his tongue, believes he lays eyes on sunflowers even in the dead of winter, uses cerulean paints obsessively, reads travel books, marking escapes and adventures waiting to be had.
He never writes though. Always thinks but never writes.
(i look for you in everyone, everything.)
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(On the last day of May, she returns home after her first year of college, and stands outside the door of his house noticing that no one has been checking the mail. He hasn't been here in ages.)
(On the first day of August before her second year of college with Elena and Stefan waiting for her in the car behind her, blonde ringlets cascading down her spine, she slides a note written in blue ink under his front door.)
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Elijah will sometimes visit Mystic Falls to check in on the people and the vampires and the werewolves and the witches when he needs a change of pace, not that he will ever tell Klaus until the day that Klaus comes home and heads to kitchen to wash his hands to hold his daughter, how that word sounds foreign in his mouth, and sees an envelope with whirling dervish writing that he recognizes so well.
In an attempt at passive aggressive anger, he ignores the letter and paces around it for the better part of two weeks and then unceremoniously burns it in the fireplace although the New Orleans climate is not quite right for such displays of dramatics.
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That evening with his hand wrapped around Cami's neck, compelling her into oblivion does he lose footing and think of the swoop of the letters and the darling fever that he felt curling upon his name knowing that she had scripted something for him.
(Stefan told me that you had a daughter. She will be beautiful. And that was all she had written because she understood, and knew that he would too, when she was ready.)
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For the first time since leaving Virginia, Klaus cries while he cradles his daughter in his arms, the night stretched out in front of him gasping for release and relinquishment and a fallen kingdom for his heir.
You're safe you're safe you're safe you're safe he whispers in his daughter's slumbering ears, perfectly rose and peony lit with the rising bits of morning.
(it's okay, it's okay. It's me, you're safe.)
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(Caroline graduates college and graduate school and puts her mother in the ground, returns to Mystic Falls and leaves another note under his front door that Elijah will deliver by hand to his younger brother within a week's time. Klaus will stare at it for twelve sleepless nights while his blonde ringlet, blue eyed, porcelain skinned daughter bounds around in the sunflowers in the mansion's backyard and bundles stalks of lavender in her chubby hands.
He will never read the letter, but tuck it in a box in a safe in the room behind the bookshelf on the second story of the house. The box contains every letter, drawing, and thought about this girl that he tried to forget, and then he will do something about it because his daughter gives him the humanity and capacity to love so he needs no other outlet, and then he will lock that box with the combination that he won't remember and go down to the cemetery and have Lucy Deverou pay him a favor back in kind.)
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Caroline takes a trip to New Orleans with Stefan and Elena and Matt many eons later it seems and stumbles over a beautiful young girl in a shop near the edge of Mississippi. The young girl will smile and introduce herself to them as she pours them tea in a courtyard with dangerously vivid cerulean blue window boxes of lavender and buttery daisies.
"I'm the king of the quarter's daughter," she will laugh and say, walking away with a jaunt in her step. "My name is Carolina, at your service." The girl will wink at them with a ferocious glint in her eyes and they will stop and double take at her figure waltzing away into the shade of an archway drizzling with ivy vines and wispy flows of roses.
That is the girl that daddy has locked away maybe she considers to her aunt and uncle. With creased foreheads they will groan and roll their eyes, lips pursed in frustration and amusement. Forever is a long time really on most days and then others it is laughably short.
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Caroline finds Rebekah and makes her drag Caroline to their house, just to see, she promises. Rebekah sighs, insults at the ready on her barbed tongue and hovers in the doorway as Caroline runs her manicured hands over their antebellum French mansion, searching for traces of him in every detail. Rebekah leads her to the room on the second story behind the bookshelf, hidden from sight, and compels her to open her older brother's safe to see what the hell he had kept so safe and far from everyone, those he claimed to love, claimed to care for, but really the story goes like this—
There was a blonde haired vampire, she was young but strong beautiful full of light
i enjoy you i fancy you is that so hard to believe take a chance, caroline come on get to know me i'll take you wherever you want maybe one day it was all for you
i intend to be your last
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He has been desiccating for close to a century, Rebekah informs her, waiting. A witch did it for him, some favor that he was owed, he stayed out of her hair, they stayed out of ours and long live the king but without a queen what good is he really?
So this is how it ends happily ever after.
(Caroline kisses him with ready on her lips and he almost sucks her dry, but smiles against her mouth as if he had just been timing it all down to this moment and this time and missing her had been keeping him awake for too long anyways at any point.
Oh and the lock combination: the date and the time, down to the second, of her eighteenth birthday.
He'd wait forever if he had to, or you know already—
however long it takes.)
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