Author's Notes:
I have been debating with myself over what rating to give this story. I have settled on T because there is some intense violence and language, but no sex. Please let me know if you think it should be rated M. Also, I just wanted to preface this by saying, this is a story about the loss of a loved one, and it goes to deep and dark places. I'm dealing with a similar thing IRL. And this was really about catharsis for me. TRIGGER WARNINGS ABOUND! Please, if you are somewhere dark your own self proceed with caution. Spoilers for the first three seasons beyond this point. Ye have been warned.
Also, I have not watched beyond the third season of "The Originals." And I refuse to, for me the show ended with the brave bartender. And most of my stories are about playing with her missing backstory and potential.
And finally, I don't own The Originals. I do not own Cami, Kieran, or Sean. They all belong to The CW and Julie Plec. Collin and Mariette were made up by me, and do not reflect the opinions or thoughts of CW or Julie Plec. This was all done in fun and no money was made off it. (Thank you for letting me play with your toys.)
And now on with the show….
The Price We Pay
She felt him die, it was five-thirty on a Tuesday just before evening mass. She felt the biting steel drag through her flesh. She felt his shock and pain, felt it like it was her own. Years later, when she slit her own throat by someone else's hand, she recognized that pain, that shock, it was familiar, almost comforting, a macabre link to her fatal twin.
That night it was anything but comforting. She started screaming and choking in the middle of the dining hall. Her bewildered study group helped her to the campus infirmary, where she was given a clean bill of health, except for low blood pressure. Sean cut so deeply when he left her, she bled out too.
She had known he was suffering for a while, of course, she had known, even across the distance between them, she had known the way only a twin knows. And yet she had been suffering too, she was in the final year of her psychology degree at Cornell. When she had first gone away to college they had spoken everyday sometimes twice a day. After the assault, and their father had managed to make the charges disappear, they had talked less. Not because he had stopped reaching out but because she was too ashamed to face him.
Sean had never said anything about her violence, even when they were younger, he had never criticized her for anything. She had learned quickly not to hit him, because he never hit back. He always chose to take the beating, rather than fight her, and her sense of fairness rebelled against it. Her gentle twin.
Sean was good, in the purest sense of the word. He never had the viciousness she did, and yet he never condemned her for it. Not her willfulness, not her doubt, not for all the times she got him into trouble when he was just trying to keep her out of it. Sean had loved her unconditionally, and he had never known how completely she relied on that love.
The overwrought nurse at the clinic released her; and her dormmate, Christy, tucked her into bed in their tiny off campus apartment.
"You'll feel better in the morning," Christy whispered, patting Cami's arm awkwardly and then she slipped out of the room, running from a grief she couldn't understand.
The wolf came for her that night, out of the dark, on the last night Cami could still lie to herself. It was tall and skeletal, covered in oily black fur, with a maw of twisted yellow fang. It slunk into her room, crawled into her bed and slipped between her ribs to take up residence in her heart.
Her phone rang at 4:27am, but it didn't wake her, she was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the wolf breathing in her chest, it wasn't sleeping either, it was biding its time, waiting to strike. It was an evil, patient monster; dreading its attack was almost worse than the actual attack. Almost.
"Come home, cherie," her mamma sobbed on the other end of the phone. "the worst has happened."
The wolf struck then, sinking its fangs into her, slashing and ripping at her heart. The pain and violence inside her choked off her tears, her voice, her breath. She wished Sean had cut just a bit deeper and had taken them both. In that moment, she knew the wolf could kill her if she let it, she could be with her twin again.
"No, cherie," Her mother's whispered, knowing Cami's thoughts in the soft way she always had, but her voice was distant, miles away and Sean was close, so close; Cami could almost feel his heartbeat again.
"I cannot lose you too, ma petit', you decide for us both."
Cami knew her mamma's words were the truth, losing both of her children would kill Mariette O'Connell. Cami roused herself, she turned her back on her twin and reached for her mother instead. The wolf screamed in rage at the loss of its prey and fought but it was contained within the cage of her ribs. It could have her heart; her body was needed elsewhere.
"I'm coming home, Mamma," Cami whispered quietly.
She told Christy emotionlessly about Sean's passing, deaf to the girl's sympathetic tears. No details, she didn't have any. She robotically dropped every single one of her classes, ignoring her advisor's pleas for second thoughts, and promises of accommodating professors.
The wolf satiated its rage and agony by burrowing a lair into her heart, an empty hollow place the it filled with its pain. Cami used the beast to drive herself forward, forcing herself to keep moving. It was the only way to contain the monster inside her. The fastest ticket home she found was an all-night ride on a greyhound bus.
She blindly watched the already yellow trees in New York, turn into the tall deep green trees of Pennsylvania, which gave way to the low forests of Virginia, the forests melted into the wide golden fields of Tennessee which bled into the red dirt of Alabama. The clouds began to gather as the bus crossed into Mississippi and then finally into Louisiana.
Cami could feel the pull of New Orleans in her veins as the bus approached the muddy waters of Lake Ponchatrain, so close, she could feel her twin's heartbeat again and the wolf dragged its teeth from her soul, lifted its head and sniffed the air.
But then the bus turned, heading for Baton Rouge and her parents' house. That was the only time she felt the prison she had locked herself in crack. The wolf turned its furious disappointment on her already ragged soul, and a single tear escaped the cage. It slid down her cheek and fell on the back of her hand as she watched the lake vanish behind her.
A faceless associate of her father's picked her up at the bus depot. He did not try to speak to her, which Cami was grateful for, it was all she could do to hold the snarling beast of rage and grief inside her quiet.
The three-story plantation house was full of people, yet it was empty. No amount of people in black suits with somber faces could fill the hollow silence that had settled over the house. Collin O'Connell was shouting angry violent words into a phone in the study, Camille by-passed him, knowing that the wolf would gladly rise to meet her father's anger, and she wasn't strong enough to hold it yet.
She found her mother sitting in the formal parlor, ensconced on her violet grey chaise-lounge. For the first time in Camille's life her mother looked old. Mariette's face was lined and pale, her skin seemed too thin, like tracing paper. There were deep red burns beneath her eyes from too much salt, too many tears.
Mariette lifted vacant green eyes at her daughter's entrance and the wolf in Cami's chest retreated in the face of a pain greater than its own.
"Mamma," Camille whispered, her voice rough from lack of use.
Woodenly she crossed the room to kneel at her mother's feet.
"Ma bebe," Mariette breathed through dry cracked lips, her hand lifted as if she would touch her daughter's face, but the effort seemed too much and it fell limply back into her lap.
The reporters descended on the house the same day Cami arrived home, vultures feasting on a fresh kill. They were monstrous, hovering at the enormous wrought iron gate, screaming and howling questions at cars that passed through the black bars. Cami would have hated them if there had been anything left of her to spare. But in the carrion eaters, her father found an outlet for his pain.
"Keep them off my goddamned property," Colin screamed at his security team, "One foot over the fence, you fucking open fire!"
He had even taken a couple of shots at a more brazen reporter, leading to more expletives shouted into cell phones. "No comment," replaced "Hello," as the most common greeting to phone calls.
The Archdiocese arrived the next day accompanied by a cadre of grim faced lawyers. Despite their harsh words for Collin about the pending lawsuit from the families of Sean's victims, they were always extraordinarily gentle with Mariette. Everyone was gentle with Mariette O'Connell, there were no harsh words spoken around her, no crude debates about money and liability, no mentions of crime scenes. There was no discussion at all around her, as she drifted around the house, from her bed to the chaise and back again; the endless loop of an unmoored pirogue caught in a closed current.
The days bled into each other, Cami found she could only function on the most basic level without pain. Eat, sleep, shit, repeat. She and her mother clung to each other like castaways. Each pushing the other to get out of bed for at least an hour each day. Each eating to set a good example for the other.
The house was never quiet, even at night when the lawyers and reporters and lackeys went home and her parents turned to each other, finding the only comfort they had to offer the other. When the house slept, that was when Cami's wolf stirred, when it scraped against the wounds it had carved in her chest, wounds that would never truly heal. In the dark it reminded her that it was waiting, in the dark it grew hungry.
Uncle Kieran came at the end of the week, dark eyed and hollow cheeked. He greeted Mariette with a shamed apology and his twin with violence. It was during this first explosive fight that Cami learned that Sean had been interred in New Orleans instead of in the O'Connell family tomb at the center of the estate. Instead, her twin had been buried among the murderers and criminals, hidden among the city's dirty secrets and forgotten sins, without words or prayers or family present. A quick and silent affair, accomplished with secrecy by her father's business associates.
She turned on her father in such a rage, that even the wolf had cowered before her.
"Why?!" she screamed over and over, until she feared she would never stop saying the word.
Her father slapped her, suddenly, almost perfunctorily. And she went at him with her fists, and welcomed his fists return. All her life she had known her violence came from him and for the first time she gave some of it back.
His fingers, turned to claws and twisted in her hair, yanking her head back to so he could scream in her face. The pain brought tears to her eyes even as she scored his knuckles with the fingernails of one hand and buried her other fist deep into his gut. Colin's breath whooshed out over her face spraying her with drops of bourbon scented spittle. He slapped her again, screaming something at her. But adrenaline had clogged her ears and brain. Besides she didn't care what he had to say anymore. She wanted the pain in her body to match the pain in her soul.
They were animals, tearing at each other, at some point she knocked his feet out from under him, and he dragged her down with him by her hair, making her scalp scream. She sank her teeth into the forearm of the hand that was tangled in her hair, biting until blood exploded in her mouth. He cursed and punched her hard. She felt her lip split and begin to bleed. He shoved her away from him ripping his arm from her mouth and her snarled hair from her head.
Colin stared at his only remaining child with rage, and disgust. But Cami saw something else, for an instant, there in her father's eyes and gone in half a breath, he was afraid of her.
Before she could gather her scattered wits and press the advantage, surprisingly strong arms closed around her, and pulled her back, away from her prey.
Cami turned her wrath on her uncle, striking at him with already raw knuckles and brutal accusations. She felt his nose crunch and raked her nails across his cheek, relishing the sight of blood on his passive, pious face. It wasn't until she felt one of his ribs crack the she realized he wasn't fighting back. He was still, holding her against him, taking the beating. The gentle twin.
Her face crumpled, but the wolf refused to allow her the relief of tears. Cami wrenched herself from her uncle's arms. His hands clung to her as he murmured hollow words of faith and forgiveness. Offering comfort for a pain he could not comprehend. He was still a twin, still part of a whole. She turned away from him in horror and disgust. He did not follow her when she fled her father's study.
Cami found her mother, a withered shrunken doll, miniaturized by her opulent bed. Mariette was awake staring blankly at the ceiling. Cami knew her mother had heard the screaming and fighting downstairs. She knew she should feel guilty for causing her mother more pain, but she couldn't. She wanted the world to hurt as she hurt. Instead she asked her question one more time.
"Why did you leave him there?"
Mariette turned blank tearful eyes to her daughter, her head heavy on her thin fragile neck. Her eyes traced the trickle of blood that ran from her daughter's lips down her chin. But she made no reply.
For days after the fight, Cami and her father avoided each other. She began to watch the news obsessively, she searched the internet for the ugly grainy shots of her twin's grave smeared with red paint and vile words. Kieran offered her hollow prayers, that only echoed with the loss of his faith.
She was laying on the floor of the dining room, staring up at the underside of her great-great grandmother's cypress dining table. When she was young she had carved her name there. Claiming the cavern made by a floor length table cloth as her own. Sean had admonished her for defacing the antique wood, but then he had added his own name so that when their mother discovered the transgression Cami would not be alone.
She reached up and traced the two childish scrawls of her fingertip. She was alone now. All alone.
Out of the corner of her eye, Cami watched her mother's unsteady feet lurch through the door and across the cream-colored rug until they reached the wall that was closest to Camille's head. Her mother leaned against the damask wallpaper, and slowly slumped to the floor as her legs gave out from under her. Neither of them spoke for a while, the words between them were too angry, too painful.
"Cherie, he is not there," Mariette whispered, her French accent as deep as her grief.
Cami turned dry, painful, questioning eyes to her mother and waited.
"Your papa had him brought here." Mariette explained softly, sending out a spider web thin life line to her daughter. "his bones are with his ancestors, his soul is with God, his memory is here. Let those boys and their families have his name."
That was it, Cami's anger had bled away leaving a vast howling nothing in its place. Everything was where it should be and nothing was.
The weeks drained into months, the candle light vigils petered off, the wilted flowers blew away, the lawsuit was settled out of court, the reporters moved on, following the scent of blood to other tragedies. People began to find ways to live again.
Collin O'Connell appeared unexpectedly at meetings that had nothing to do with the massacre. His eyes sharp and gleaming, ready to strike at anyone who looked askance, anyone who even whispered his son's name. Mariette's friends descended on the house, a fluttering pastel mass of soft tender women with powdery cheeks and southern manners. They gently led her, first to church, and then to brunch at Mansur's on the Boulevard for poached eggs, crab cakes and citrus cheesecake. Kieran volunteered at the Bishop Ott homeless shelter, finding his faith and purpose again in helping others.
But Camille couldn't find a way back to life, half of her had died, and she still didn't know why. She spent hours beside the great O'Connell mausoleum, where countless generations of her family slept. Over and over she ran her fingers across the blank marble slab, where her mother promised one day, when no one would notice, they would put Sean's name. She lay in the grass beside her brother's grave, trying to feel his heartbeat one more time. But it wasn't there, he wasn't there. Whatever her father had brought back it wasn't her twin. He was in the city on the other side of Lake Ponchatrain.
She had to go there. She realized that the day that Uncle Kieran went back to New Orleans, she needed to go back too, she needed to lay her hands on the cold stones Sean had baptized with his blood. She needed to scrub the vile words off the only stone that would bear his name. She needed to light a candle for each of his victims, she needed to understand what had happened, and why. She needed to feed the wolf in her heart.
"There is no fucking way you will go back there, young lady" Her father declared angrily, when she brought it up at the dinner table. "It's bad enough your idiot uncle went back. Stirring up all that shit again, just when it's finally beginning to die down."
Mariette said nothing but she had looked stricken. Fear filled her eyes, and spilled out in silent painful tears.
"Damn it look at what you've done," Collin snarled, throwing his napkin down and storming out of the room, fleeing the only thing in his life that frightened him, his wife tears.
"You are NOT going back there," He declared from the doorway pointing an angry finger at his daughter. "I won't lose another child to that damned city."
Cami stood and went to her mother, "Shh Mamma," she whispered stroking her mother's hair. "Don't cry, I won't go, I promise. I'll go back to school."
Her mother had retired and Cami had gone up to her room to pack and email her old professors. But instead she found herself staring blankly at the dusty mute textbooks she had carried with her from New York. They didn't belong to her anymore. They belonged to the girl who had been one half of a set, the girl who was willing to fight monsters to save innocents, the girl who had died in a puddle of blood beside her twin.
That night the wolf returned, sensing its prey was almost out of its reach. It was huge and hungry and cruel, made even more vicious by its long denial. It tore into her mercilessly, ravaged the last remaining shreds of her heart and tore into empty walls. Then it turned on the rest of her, gnawing on her ribs, chewing its way into her stomach until she vomited up black bile. It was still there in the morning, devouring the last ragged shreds of her soul.
For the first time, it turned on her mother when Mariette came to coax her daughter out of bed. It snarled brutal horrible things using Cami's mouth. It drove everyone away, matched her father shout for shout, spat nasty punishing words, that slipped between the ribs and pierced the soul. The cage Camille had built for it was broken and her wolf was finally loose.
It wasn't until three days later when she crawled into Sean's bedroom, and curled up on the rumpled dusty sheets. Burying her face in her brother's old pillow, inhaling the last faint remnants of his familiar scent, Cami was finally able to lock the wolf away once more. She lay on her brother's bed, unable to get up again, unable to move. The wolf was savage having tasted freedom it wanted it again.
Some amount of time later, Cami became aware that Mariette was standing in the dark silhouetted by the doorway. Cami closed her eyes again, she could smell her mother's light powdery perfume and knew that Mariette had finally gathered the courage to enter her son's room.
Camille felt her mother press a soft dry kiss to her hairline.
"Bon chance, Cherie," She whispered.
When Cami opened her eyes again her mother was gone. And there was a pristine white envelope on the pillow beside her head. She closed her eyes and drifted back into her own personal hell again. The next time she woke up the room was bathed in the dim light of early morning. The envelope was still there.
It took her twenty minutes to push her hand across the coverlet to grasp the heavy white vellum, and it took even longer for her stiff fingers to pull it open. Inside was five thousand dollars and a bus ticket to New Orleans.
Mariette silently watched Camille pull herself out of her stolen twin's bed. Mariette had finally come to understand how deep the hex on her son had been. It had been a soul-deep curse and the shadow of it lay on the soul of his twin. Whether this had been intentional by the stupid, cruel witch that had laid it on her innocent son or just collateral damage, Mariette didn't particularly care. In her blood, she could feel vengeance was stalking the hateful woman. The witch's actions would lead to the end of, not only, her own bloodstained life, but her murderous coven, as well.
And yet, Mariette knew that though, she had thrown her daughter a life line today. She was pulling Camille, not to safety, but into the path of the vengeance coming for the stupid witches of New Orleans. Whether it would see the innocence of her brave daughter and pass over her, or pull her into the war between monsters and worse, remained to be seen. But regardless, Mariette knew, in her blood, that her daughter would never come home again.
Mariette whispered an old French prayer to the old bayou god of her people. Then turned her back on her daughter unable to watch her daughter happily rush toward her death any longer.
Cami threw everything she had brought with her from school back into the enormous black duffle. Clothes both clean and dirty, books without looking at the spines, cosmetics and toiletries were swept into a plastic shopping bag and stowed haphazardly on the side of the large pile of laundry. Shoes were shoved into any available cranny. She had to lay on it to get the zipper closed and even so she knew she was forgetting things.
The bag thumped loudly as she dragged it down the stairs behind her, and it almost toppled her when she stopped suddenly midway down to the first floor and it didn't. Colin O'Connell stood at the foot of the stairs looking up at her from beneath angry black eyebrows.
Cami could see the faint scars she had put on his cheek with her fingernails, or perhaps she was only imagining she could see them at that distance.
The silence stretched between them, turning the tension potent with violence. He broke first.
"What do you think you're doing, Camille?"
The words were strangled in his throat and ground out between his teeth, turning into dead scraps of their former meaning that fell to the floor between them.
"I'm leaving," Cami answered, her words were stone.
"If you leave this house, you're dead to us, do you understand?" He said the words with cruel calculation, they were meant to hurt and force compliance.
Cami tilted her head thoughtfully, the words themselves were not painful, a few months ago, they might have been. Now only the vague sense of betrayal echoed over her nerve endings. Tightening her grip on her bag she thumped down the stairs, and as she passed her father on her way out the door she smiled.
The bus was full of people, tourists mostly, all excited to get to New Orleans. Cami sat quietly, staring out the window and ignoring the old voodoo woman in the seat beside her, covertly feeding a rather large opossum she had hidden in her oversized purse.
As the bus drew closer to New Orleans she could feel the wolf in her chest begin to stir again. It stretched its long boney legs, snapped its loathsome jaws and lifted its head to scent the wind. There was blood on the air and it salivated at the coming feast.
Her boots hit the pavement with a satisfying thud, it felt like she was on solid ground for the first time since the world shattered.
A heavy-set man in flip-flops pushed angrily passed her, muttering something unflattering about tourists. Cami watched him hurry away, with a secret bemused smile on her lips. To her right the handlers violently yanked bags out of the belly of the bus, and tossed them carelessly on the curb, to be picked over like carrion by the passengers.
She waited, patient, enjoying the sensation of breathing. The air smelled of wet earth, rotten vegetation and the sweetest flowers. It was the first breath after a long climb from the grave.
This was what she had been craving, this was home.
When the rest of the passengers had taken their bags, and hurried off to their various adventures, her large duffle lay haphazardly on the curb, half in the gutter. A chill roughened her skin. It was a black body bag left in the street. She was a modern-day casket girl, bringing her own shroud with her.
In her ribcage, the wolf shuddered, stretching, scraping her newest scars with its coarse fur. But, for the first time, it didn't hurt. For the first time, she was tired of it. For the first time, she hated it. For the first time, she spoke to it.
Wait. Tomorrow. I promise.
Tomorrow, she would find Sean's grave and scrub the vile paint from his name. Tomorrow she would seek out her uncle and demand answers to her questions. Tomorrow she would whisper tear drenched prayers for the sweet innocent victims of her twin. Tomorrow she would feed the wolf.
But today she was in the city that care forgot, today she could hear a second line band and smell gumbo in the air. Today she was where she was supposed to be. Today she was home.
Le bon temps roule