Authors note: I had a burst of inspiration for some introspective darker stuff while writing my considerably more fluffy Klaroline fic, and I just had to get this all down. Just a drabble-y oneshot that I felt like sharing. Review if you enjoyed. Thanks!
He wore his eternal face, his amaranthine mask like armour, day-in day-out, for a millennium, and never expected that to change.
Klaus was stagnant. He was delirious in the still water of his life. Floating below the surface, never touching the bottom of the ocean but never quite breaching the air—drowning perpetually in his own paranoia. It was darkness. Loneliness; for what is loneliness but trapping your family members in a comatose state to keep them from leaving you, from betraying you? What is loneliness if not stabbing the inner circle in the back, literally, to ensure its integrity?
Klaus was powerful, the most powerful creature on earth, the loneliest monster, the most merciless of gods. Immortality only made him cruel, made him numb, made him dead. His gift of a thousand lives, only used in pursuit of a thousand more—the endless chase of more power, the cycle, the Ouroboros consuming itself hungrily. Then, once he had it, once the monster became the monster it had always longed to be, when the blood of the shadow—it eluded him for so long, sleeping in the family line—was drained and absorbed, it no longer wished to be lonely.
Klaus wanted family. A pack sired from the blood of the shadow and the bite of the devil, bound to live their life under rule. The bond was unbreakable, or it was meant to be; they were to be a family, a pack, of yellow-eyed slaves, free from the shackles of the moon, only to be chained by another force of nature. Abomination is a better term. Despite a vocabulary filled with a millennium's worth of words and languages, there are only so many ways to say atrocity. The synonyms he'd lived his whole life beneath, along with the weight of being a heartless monster, without feeling, which did not care who he hurt, because the ends justified the means.
Then Klaus met her. She was tiny, and small, and a fraction of his age, but so blindingly bright and unexpected, a shining comet across the dull space of his existence. Blazing so within his atmosphere that she would not be ignored, she would have to be investigated by the curious monster. She'd always dance just out of his reach. The gravity of his previous actions kept her floating above him, looking down at him, eyes like the heart of the ocean. Suddenly, he was bereft. This being had left the monster with a heart that beat red with its own blood. He chased her. Like he had pursued power all those ages ago, it felt like lifetimes really; it felt like nothing at all, but she didn't feel the same.
Oh no, it was like she felt everything, all at once. Through her sheer force of compassion and loyalty, she forced him to feel again. Her sympathy shook him to the core when he realized she wasn't afraid of him, she felt for him, the most powerful creature on the surface of the earth, and her heart bled for him. She spoke to him as no one had spoken to him and lived. The impudence of her youth, the pain of the ways his actions had affected everyone she ever loved, it bubbled out of her, an underwater volcano sizzling through her oceanic blues. She cut away the layers of his deceit like a surgeon, pointed out his deepest fears to him simply, and then sewed his chest back up again. The candour was painful, but a necessary pain, almost cathartic. A thousand years of perfumed words and smoked daggers and this baby monster—that's what she was, really—tore through it like a beacon.
Klaus tried to erode her, but soon realized his error. She would not forget, no, she was too smart for that. She had been bitten by the wolf too many times to fall for its wagging tail, for the sea of blue-green that disguised the burning yellow. It only made her more irresistible. The thought of compelling her, of making her a slave within her own body, never appealed to Klaus. She was fiery, she was intelligent, she was independent and he didn't want it any other way. It would be her choice, always, if she wished to be queen. Her stubborn determination to remain a common beast, to stay with the same people that never took her as seriously as he did—and used her for her most base purpose of distracting him, never mind its effectiveness—that never saw the aching beauty of the blossom that came from the wilting flower at its moment of death, was impressive. It made the monster's heart bleed and swell with pride. Because even at a distant, he had claimed her, waiting for the day she let him in.
For so long, she had avoided the touch of his shadow. The tendrils of his darkness, the tendency they had to slither out and curl around even the purest of souls, and drown them in sin. Like a snake, offering the apple of eternity—never mind the weight of it, how red its skin, how it almost seemed to drip—he would catch the weak and cast them from the garden of life, curse them to his slavery in their death. She was not so easy to tempt. It burned him to be around her. He could all but stand stunned by the power of her will, her ability to accept her own darkness and reflect it outwards as light. But that was her, always growing and always progressing, and compared to the man trapped with the same mask for a thousand years, she was a flower of continuous bloom. The spring to his dead winter.
When she killed twelve people to save a single life, Klaus dug the graves. He did the math, he watched the scales tip in her eyes, the petal wilt and fall from her stem. She knew her choice was morally grey, in her world that had been black and white. She knew that the blood could not be washed from her hands the same way it lifted from her clothes, that it stained parts of her that could not withstand the purge. She had killed a dozen people, and she would do it again to save the people she loved. The strength of her loyalty to her friends, comrades was a better term, was more powerful than the guilt. She couldn't always do right, but she could do right by them. She wasn't broken. She didn't need to be fixed. He knew that.
Perhaps Klaus let his temper get the best of him. He was prone to it, over the years of his life. His rage flared white-hot, his pride bruised with ease. He left his light to feel the weight of her choice, just as he had so many times before. Could his sea of red ever compare to the drops she spilt? Yes, he thought, he hoped, because a sea is only as great as the drops within it. The scales are tipped hard in his direction, and even with blood-stained skin, she rises above him.
Even though he left her, he calls her. When the only living being older than the original monsters breaks off a splinter in his back, he calls her. She appears to him easily, that same light radiating from within. When she touches him so sweetly, clasps his face between hands of redemption, faces so close, she is the sun; and what is the moon if not the hopeless mirror forever reflecting her radiance, trapped in the orbit of his pursuit? But the façade is broken quickly, for she would never touch him like that, it's only a silent wish. A beautiful lie. So when she arrives to relieve him of his misery, it's really her, truly her, because in no dream of his does she prattle about the monotonous routines of humans before touching him. She cuts into him with relish, digs through his spine, discovers the heart that has only recently begun to beat with purpose again, makes a fiery remark that he can't appreciate in his current state. All the while the splinter is moving closer to his heart, and she has refused to help him without his promise.
An ultimatum from the baby monster to the monster king brought to his knees before her. She turns her back on him and he summons the strength to explode with the fury of a dying animal at her, to channel his anger at a death not brought by the heat of battle, but a splinter to the heart and a stubborn youth. But she has all the fury of a stolen future inside of her, the anger at being trapped mid-bloom, on the cusp of real life just to have it pulled from beneath her. Their words clash in the air and hang in the silence that follows, because the immortal is no longer dying. His head had been infiltrated, compromised the entire time, leading him to believe impossibility.
The only thing more powerful than his fear of death was his feelings for her. She brought him back. His beacon through the smoke, his lighthouse on the shore. Not him, alone. Alone doesn't quite seem to cut it anymore, after murdering the family he'd sired when they turned against him, after lifetimes of solitude, after her. He realizes this suddenly, like a physical blow to the chest. His light escapes him once again and he is pulled to the south.
Klaus was a king once. He was a king a hundred times, to be true, but he built this city, and now he's prepared to take it back. The only thing he's missing is a queen by his side. And he can think of the strongest, purest monster and little else. When he gets a letter announcing her graduation, he journeys back to the home he left so many lifetimes ago, before cement and electricity and institutional education.
She's radiant, and he'd do anything to protect her, he's come to know. Sever a neck to see her smile, roll a head to save her pain. The scale is always tipped in her favour. Her positivity in the truly negative space that her afterlife has been astounds him. She embraces the pain and moves on, doesn't let it tear her apart. Acknowledges that she has been hurt, will be hurt again, but for now, she can be happy. Her wisdom is budding, but immense.
Klaus catches her alone after the ceremony, when the sun has set and the stars are blinking in a dusk sky. He gives her the wish that he swore he never would, a final mercy on his part. The last of his will, tumbling down; his mask clatters to the floor. He leans forward to press a chaste kiss to her cheek, and he inhales the scent of her and she smells like the warmth of a ray of sun. He memorizes it immediately, tucks it away for future reference. This may be the last time he sees her for a long while. But he's waited all his death to meet her, and he can wait again. All he can do is declare his intentions to be her final love—when it blooms, and it will—her amaranthine love, her eternal flame. She understands. When she's ready, she will come to him. He'll be waiting; for his everlasting light, his infinite flower, his Caroline.